In Chennai, a former Commissioner’s name lives on, in different forms

There is honest error. And there is something called persisting in an honest error either out of ignorance or maverick indifference. One assumes, and fervently hopes, ignorance is the reason Sir Eric Conran-Smith is assuming a nom de guerre at the drop of a quintessentially British bowler hat.  On a Greater Chennai Corporation name board for a famous road in Gopalapuram, he goes under “Conron Smith”. If disguise is the objective, that is a weak attempt at it. A few paces into this road and a turn later, he gets better at the game, morphing into Kandran Smith, a name board for a lane off Conran Smith Road hilariously carrying ‘Kandran Smith Lane’. 

There is honest error. And there is something called persisting in an honest error either out of ignorance or maverick indifference. One assumes, and fervently hopes, ignorance is the reason Sir Eric Conran-Smith is assuming a nom de guerre at the drop of a quintessentially British bowler hat. 

On a Greater Chennai Corporation name board for a famous road in Gopalapuram, he goes under “Conron Smith”. If disguise is the objective, that is a weak attempt at it. A few paces into this road and a turn later, he gets better at the game, morphing into Kandran Smith, a name board for a lane off Conran Smith Road hilariously carrying ‘Kandran Smith Lane’. 

It should be Conran Smith Lane, not Kandran Smith Lane | Photo Credit: PRINCE FREDERICK

The images of these two name boards were clicked as recently as February 27, 2026 (and at the time of this article going to press on March 7, 2026 these name boards continued unchanged). And nearly ten years before this “photo shoot”, in the column Hidden Histories in The Hindu (September 23, 2016), historian V. Sriram had drawn attention to how a worthy’s name is being taken in vain, twice and within the distance of a few hundred metres.

The statue of Sir Eric Conran-Smith at Ripon Building, GCC’s headquarters. | Photo Credit: R. Ragu

And this worthy is not just any worthy. In the column, Sriram points out, surely his tongue wedged in cheek while his surprised fingers were jabbing at the keyboard, Sir Eric Conran-Smith served as Commissioner of the Corporation of Madras; the city had been this Briton’s stomping ground. Sriram twists the knife by adding that the statue of this worthy adorns a prominent section of Ripon Buildings, GCC’s headquarters, which does justice to his memory and more thankfully, to his name. Those snippets of information upgrade Sir Eric Conran-Smith’s status from Worthy to Worthy Plus, and the shoddy name board job from an error to a grave error.