How Quintus Andradi Hid Sri Lanka’s Former Navy Commander, Rear Admiral Royce de Mel, in Borella Cemetery

The failed coup of 1962 placed Rear Admiral Royce de Mel in hiding. An old promise led Quintus Andradi to the one place in Colombo he knew could conceal a man.

By AngryPages Editorial

Long before a former commander of the Royal Ceylon Navy needed somewhere to disappear, Quintus Andradi had learned how to be alone in Borella cemetery.

He was a schoolboy then, nominally preparing for his Senior School Certificate. In practice, he often cut class, watched ships from the Galle Face wall and walked to the cemetery to sit beneath a tree. He thought about life, God and religion. It was quiet, and the people who worked there came to know him.

Years later, that familiarity became useful in circumstances no schoolboy could have imagined.

On 27 January 1962, a group of senior military, police and civil officials planned to overthrow the government of Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. The operation was designed to seize Colombo quickly, detain political leaders and take control of key institutions. The conspirators abandoned it after learning that the government had been warned.

Rear Admiral Gerard Royce Maxwell de Mel, the former head of the Royal Ceylon Navy, was identified as one of the principal figures behind the plot. Arrests began. Public historical accounts record that de Mel went into hiding.

Andradi’s memoir supplies the startling additional detail: he helped conceal de Mel inside Borella cemetery.

The episode begins with a promise made earlier to another officer.

Andradi had served aboard H.M.Cy.S. Parakrama, a former Royal Navy minesweeper transferred to Ceylon as the fleet expanded at the end of the 1950s. Among the officers he admired was Lieutenant Babu Jacobs, whom he remembered as the flag officer to de Mel and “a gentleman of the highest order.”

After the Far Eastern cruise, de Mel, Jacobs and other officers were sent out of the Navy. Andradi wrote to Jacobs with an extraordinary offer: he would be there for him even at the risk of his own life. The promise extended to de Mel, although the former commander had spoken to him only twice.

Then came the coup investigation.

“I was able to help him hide in the cemetery,” Andradi writes, explaining that the curator and others there were friendly with him. The boy who once went to Borella to think had become a signalman with access to a place the police might not immediately associate with a naval commander.

It is the most dramatic episode in the memoir, and it tells us exactly what kind of document this is.

Official histories record institutions: appointments, ships, operations, prosecutions and changes of command. Personal histories preserve the smaller links between those events—the letter sent to a disgraced officer, a schoolboy’s friendship with a cemetery curator, the private understanding that a promise still applied after uniforms and ranks had been removed.

Andradi was not a powerful man. He held no senior command and left the Navy as a signalman. In his telling, that was precisely why the promise mattered. He had no office to defend and no rank to trade. Loyalty was personal or it was nothing.

The same pattern repeats across his life. He trusted business partners without adequate protection and lost money. He crossed ethnic and religious lines easily, remembering a Tamil sailor, a Burgher electrician and a Sinhalese signalman as “the three musketeers.” Decades later, old comrades overseas would trust his appeals and send money for veterans they had never met.

The cemetery episode therefore does more than add danger to a naval memoir. It establishes the rule by which Andradi understood himself: institutions might expel, punish, obstruct or betray; a promise between two people remained binding.

The fact that this episode survived in the memory of a signalman, rather than in an official history, is exactly why the memoir matters. History records the coup. Quintus Andradi records what loyalty required from one ordinary sailor when it happened.

Read the source

The Borella account appears in Chapter 3 of Quintus Andradi’s Story of a Signalman in the Royal Ceylon Navy. The full memoir gives the relationships, naval memories and later consequences surrounding the episode. Read the complete digital edition.

Source note