In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

  ‘Then perhaps you will help me with my English essay. I have to write a story about my favourite toy.’

  I think of the story of Bung Karno and the spinning top, or maybe Harsono and Bung Karno’s crashed bicycle. It will pass easily into Malay cultural terms. Tomorrow. But now it is time for the big programme to start.

  * * *

  The founding of Singapore mobilized all the factions within the Company’s orbit in totally predictable ways. The Dutch rattled sabres and shrieked of perfidy and the danger to the general peace in Europe. Raffles bombarded all and sundry with letters expressing wide-eyed surprise that any doubts should be entertained about either the legality or desirability of what he had done. The government and Company were engulfed in an initial wave of blind rage and foot-stamping that gradually weakened and gave way to dithering as they began to smell a profit. Lord Hastings maintained a blandly shifty facade, a series of non-committal ‘Oh reallys?’ like a man woken from a deep sleep with shocking news. It looked as if his promissory notes of protection for Raffles would go unredeemed. Also slow to rouse was British national chauvinism in the Eastern seas, having been preoccupied throughout living memory with drubbing the French. Now, in newspaper reports, it began to make itself heard like the irritable trumpetings of some monster stirring offstage. Raffles knew that the first few months were vital. If he could only hang on to the colony and show some black figures in his accounts, it would survive.

  Curiously, it was the Penang government who forced Hastings into active support of Raffles. They were delighted that the Golden Sword had really gone too far this time and settled back comfily to watch his downfall with undisguised glee. Bannerman, the Governor, wrote letters of shocked sympathy to the Dutch, sneeringly refused troops and money to the Singapore garrison and addressed Hastings in the smug terms of the school sneak, confiding that he had limited assistance to advising them how best to evacuate the settlement.

  Hastings rapped him furiously over the knuckles, threatening to hold him responsible for any harm that might befall the infant colony, and Bannerman collapsed. ‘I have received a lesson which shall teach me how I again presume to offer opinions as long as I live.’ His words were prophetic. He dispatched money and troops to support Singapore and – shortly after – died.

  * * *

  The achievements of Singapore were not to be detailed, merely celebrated. The New Year programme was utterly slick. West Coast American hype – the theme a funky song ‘Stand Up for Singapore!’ presented by Chinese bump-and-grind dancers rotating their groins in strobe lights and pink smoke. The history of the nation was presented in a pageant, but history began about 1960 with the rampant disorder of the late colonial period – the British, it must be admitted, could never run Singapore. Clenched fists and waving banners – the gestures of imperial seediness – were the signs of that time, now firmly allocated to the past. Then the present age dawned. A sort of rosy glow and warbling heavenly host ushered in poly-ethnic progress and harmony as the voice of Lee Kuan Yew, Minister Mentor and architect of the Singapore state, descended from on high to intone a blessing and gently urge the young to work even harder.

  We switched to the Malaysian channel. The old cricket ground in front of the Royal Selangor Club had been temporarily cleansed of its patrolling transvestites and equipped with an only capriciously functioning laser display. A promotional pop video extolled the government. Not funk here but West Coast warbling, every note bent and breathy with its weight of sincerity. Plenty of photo opportunities for the Prime Minister to be viewed, smiling, against the backdrop of the year’s successes, in the company of triumphant sportsmen and deferential foreign politicians. ‘A year of economic development extends before us,’ must be one of the all-time hard lines to warble like a love lyric. But they managed it.

  * * *

  ‘Here all is life and activity; it would be difficult to name a place on the face of the globe with brighter prospects or more pleasant satisfaction. In little more than three years it has risen from an insignificant fishing village to a large and prosperous town, containing at least ten thousand inhabitants of all nations actively engaged in commercial pursuits which afford to each and all a handsome livelihood and abundant profit. There are no complaints here of want of employment, no deficiency of rents, or dissatisfaction at taxes. Land is rapidly rising in value and in respect of the present number of inhabitants we have reason to expect that we shall have at least ten times as many before many years have passed. This may be considered as the simple but almost magic result of that perfect freedom of Trade which it has been my good fortune to establish …

  I am at present engaged in establishing a constitution for Singapore, the principles of which will I hope ensure its prosperity … In Java I had to remodel and in doing so to remove the rubbish and encumbrances of two centuries of Dutch maladministration. Here I have an easier task and the task is new. In Java, I had to look principally to the agricultural interests, and the commercial only so far as they were concerned with them; here on the contrary commerce is everything, agriculture only in its infancy. The people are different as well as their pursuits.’

  – T. S. Raffles

  * * *

  Singapore is depicted as rising clean and pure from the blood and ashes of the failed Malaysian Federation of the sixties, when the British tried to unite all their former colonies into a single state. But the Malays and the Chinese had warred on each other and the Chinese had been unwilling to be mere managers of another’s emporium. To found your own shop is the Chinese way. So Singapore had been cut adrift and expected to founder. Instead it had floated ever higher.

  In the streets was one vast party, amplified pop music throbbing like a huge heart. Singapore was young, esculently clean and wholesome, well-behaved and – yes – happy. In the main business area, amongst the teetering towers of Singapore’s new prosperity, a crowd of some half a million were forgathered for this huge event of dancing and chaste frolic. They pursued each other in conga lines up and down Orchard Road, singing along with a song, ‘I want to be rich/I feel sexy.’

  In Britain there would have been drunkenness, muggings, deaths. Here the worst that happened was an outbreak of exuberant bottom-pinching and an overflowing of litter bins. Everywhere were Malay policemen, tokens of control, their Malayness the sign that they too were subject to a higher power. It is one of the Malay jokes of Singapore that all males have to report for military service. ‘It just happens,’ they explain, ‘that the Chinese get taught to fly fighters, bombers and drive tanks, while all the Malays end up sitting in the local police station. There is no policy. It just happens.’

  I wandered down to the government area, bottom unpinched, where Raffles is supposed to have first landed. The façade of the Raffles Hotel stood off to one side, interior ripped out by Japanese machines, a metaphor for the new profitable and sanitized nation that was emerging – a tropical Switzerland. A gleaming shopping-centre of teetering glass and brass, Raffles City comes complete with artificial waterfall and Chinese millionaires in white Rolls-Royces. The top floor is called Bengkulu and has copious pot plants. One of the windows has Muslim paraphernalia, Koranic texts etched on glass with a saccharine image of Mecca surrounding a clock. A Chinese girl was using her reflection in the Koran to frizz out her hair.

  A towering temple to Mothercare and Habitat has been built on the sea bed, and traffic swoops out over the waves around it to be fed back through the new, efficient highways. On the Esplanade, a young Chinese sat eating a hamburger in the dark, crooning the latest political jingle and tapping his be-trainered foot, ‘One people, one nation, wu-hu-u-n Si-i-ingapore! Boom! Boom!’

  * * *

  Farquar, British Resident at Malacca, had been chosen to nurse the infant Singapore. Raffles was quite often a poor judge of men and Farquar would prove himself arrogant, unconscientious, oversensitive to insult, in fact a reincarnation of Gillespie in Java. And as with Gillespie, there could be no compromise, but rather pet
tiness, peevishness and pique while Raffles demolished Farquar’s Singapore and rebuilt it according to his own ideas, tipping hills into the sea, building a botanical garden, drawing the lines between the races, framing laws and ideology and finally dismissing Farquar – which he had no power to do. The administration of the colony became a thing of high farce, a rainshower of petulant memoranda as Farquar, his withdrawal often announced, doggedly refused to budge. Their disputes were sometimes on matters of weight, slavery for example, but more often about minor courtesies and quibbles of dress and protocol. In the end, Raffles had him marched off under escort.

  In all this Raffles was no angel. Throughout his career he had been incapable of handling opposition. His authority with Europeans was tentative, as though it had no depth of root. They must love him or leave him. He was not above sneering at Farquar’s Malay wife and the children by her he had acknowledged. ‘The Malay connexion’, he termed them archly. And throughout it all he still found time to correspond with the experts of the world about squirrels, mermaids and giant yams.

  * * *

  Levels beneath levels. By the harbour, buildings of colonial pomp cowered under the skyscraper offices of banks. Javanese migrant workers, with only a toe-hold in Singapore’s prosperity, hung around under the pillars, looking like urban degenerates but really only behaving as harmlessly as in an Indonesian village square. They had come to build the Japanese-designed underground railway, and spoke of military structures secreted under the stations.

  Across the road stood Raffles, a wallflower at the party, in duplicate. Two identical statues, one white, one black, milk and chocolate, a Manichaean universe. Take your choice, sir, madam. He was thin, urgent, reflective. Knee-breeches and a frock coat. As in Westminster Abbey, he trampled on papers, this time interpreted as the map of Singapore. The face was that of a decent schoolmaster with a certain simplicity of beliefs. The sculptor, of course, had never seen Raffles.

  * * *

  Singapore mushroomed. It rocketed with tropical exuberance, swiftly eclipsing Penang and Malacca. Its land was snapped up, warehouses built, labour flocked to the city even before the Company announced it would retain the settlement. That did not happen for another five years. Important in this was its status as a port of India. This meant that merchants could transship material from China at Singapore and so evade the Company’s monopoly on direct trade between China and Europe. For once Raffles was able to take genuine delight in the figures he amassed, the hundreds of ships, the thousands of tons, the millions of dollars. Raffles termed it pathetically, ‘almost my only child’. Yet there is an irony that spelt the end of this form of commercial imperialism. For all the fortunes Singapore would make and regardless of its net value to Britain, it seems that it still cost the Company money.

  * * *

  ‘We have lately built a small bungalow on Singapore Hill, where, though the height is inconsiderable, we find a great difference of climate. Nothing can be more interesting and beautiful than the view from this spot. I am happy to say the change has had a very beneficial effect on my health, which has been better the last fortnight than I have known it for two years before. The tombs of the Malay kings are however close at hand; and I have settled that if it is my fate to die here, I shall take my place among them; this will, at any rate, be better than leaving one’s bones at Bencoolen.’

  – T. S. Raffles

  There is a plan to rebuild that bungalow to mark the nation’s anniversary. It will not, of course, be the same, but enhanced, a thing of solid mahogany floorboards with countersunk brass screws. Memorials were much in Raffles’ mind at this time when he felt himself so near to death and the only reality was the pounding pain in his head, the slow growth of the hungry tumour that would ultimately kill him. So is Singapore that memorial? It does, after all, embody the spirit of free trade, the search for excellence, the faith that commerce is ennobling, the composite creed that Raffles held to. But is that enough? Raffles gives us the answer himself, in what is far and away the finest piece of writing he ever produced, a 10,000-word memoir on the founding of the Singapore Institution.

  ‘If commerce brings wealth to our shores, it is the spirit of literature and philanthropy that teaches us how to employ it for the noblest purposes. It is this that has made Britain go forth among nations, strong in her native light, to dispense blessings to all around her. If the time shall come when her Empire shall have passed away, these monuments of her virtue will endure, when her triumphs shall have become an empty name. Let it still be the boast of Britain to write her name in characters of light; let her not be remembered as the tempest whose course was desolation, but as the gale of spring, reviving the slumbering seeds of mind, and calling them to life from the winter of ignorance and oppression. Let the Sun of Britain arise on these Islands, not to wither and scorch them in its fierceness but like that of her own genial skies whose mild and benignant influence is hailed and blessed by all who feel its beams.’

  The Institution was to be the redemption of a pledge taken by Raffles, many years ago, when he visited a Koranic school in Malacca with Munshi Abdullah. The boys were screaming out their lesson in Arabic, as they still do today. Did no one teach them their own native Malay, asked Raffles, their own history and literature? The teacher testily said no one did. Raffles determined that one day this would be put right. It was the confrontation of two different definitions of education, the Islamic and the Western, and Raffles held that it was Western education that would lead the local people forward to a higher state of civilization, ‘towards the light’, and justify the British presence.

  Nothing shows the admirable optimism of Raffles more than the local reaction to his purple prose. Munshi Abdullah gives us an account of the founding of the noble Institution at which the address was read:

  ‘Now when Mr Raffles had announced that the East India Company would subscribe $4,000 and that he himself would give $2,000 on his own account he asked with a smile what the Sultan would give: shall it be $2,000 also? But he replied with a loud exclamation and a laugh that he was a poor man, so where would he get $2,000? To this Mr Raffles argued that he should give more than he gave, as the undertaking was of immediate utility to the Malays, and greatly more so than to the English; but let it be a thousand dollars.’

  Within a very few years, Raffles’ Institution was defunct, its building collapsing, its land and funding clawed back. Those who succeeded him lacked his sacerdotal awe of education. It is said that Crawfurd, the next Resident, revenged himself on Raffles’ project for a bad review Raffles gave his book. There is no end to the malevolence of authors.

  The Institution was not, it should be noted, an original idea. It was clearly based on the Fort William College founded by Lord Minto in India, an institution dedicated to the study of Indian language and culture. Raffles even published reports of its Speech Day in his Government Java Gazette. But original or not it survives, relaunched, rethought, transformed into – of all things – an English public school. The nobility of its purpose has somehow tunnelled through the vicissitudes of history and it stands now in a brand new building on Raffles Road – The Raffles Institution.

  The first thing you see is Raffles’ coat of arms, fifteen feet high, patinated with age, clearly moved from the old site. As you look at it, a polite schoolboy appears magically at your side.

  ‘You are looking at the Raffles arms, sir? We wear it by our hearts.’ He taps the pocket of his crisp white shirt. He glows with limpid Chinese youthfulness in a way that makes me feel seedy and dog-eared.

  ‘See. That is the Eastern crown. That medallion and chain is the Order of the Golden Sword given him by the Sultan of Aceh.’

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘The Golden Sword. That is the Golden Sword, sir.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And that …’ he points, ‘… is the Founder’s bust.’ A new, modern bust, Raffles beetle-browed and granitic. ‘We carry it into Hall on Founder’s day and sing our Fo
under’s song. Excuse me, sir. I must go to my duties.’

  He bows in a courtly gesture and goes to the gate where very small boys with skinny arms and legs and one enormous Indian child with a pot belly are staggering in from a cross-country run in a state of collapse. He congratulates them, assists the weary off to the changing room, asks anxiously about stragglers and goes off to look for them. A model of responsibility. A prefect.

  There is an office to one side. I go in.

  ‘Excuse me. Could you tell me where to find the headmaster?’

  The Eurasian woman shoots me a glance of disapproval.

  ‘You must mean the principal, isn’i’?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  The principal is enthusiastic, a believer in his school. The boys, it was immediately clear, would call him VJ. There would be sniggering in history lessons when the third form got to VJ-day. The Institution, he tells me, has just been privatized. This means freedom to run things better, freedom to pursue excellence and cultivate leadership.

  ‘Raffles would have understood that.’ He points to a sketch on the wall, Raffles in Bengkulu, hedgehog-haired and hunched. ‘Raffles’ men may not own Singapore,’ he quips, ‘but they run it. Our Minister Mentor is an old boy, most of our ministers and intellectuals. He gives us his support and contributes personally to R.I.’s funds. We have an endowment so poor but clever boys can come here. There is a competitive examination for entrance, then we allow some foreign boys in – Thais, Indonesians, that sort of thing.’

  I am taken on a tour, whitewashed walls, red quarry tiles. Everything new and respected. The school has squash courts, laboratories, music rooms.

  ‘All the English traditions,’ says the principal with relish, ‘we have them all. House spirit, army cadets, prefects, the brass band, scouts, rugby, cricket …’, a litany of the foreigner’s view of England. ‘It is a pity you have come on a Saturday.’ He worries at his glasses. ‘The boys are not fully operational.’