Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  Meanwhile, by 1914 modernization had made life more pleasant and comfortable for the well-to-do. While the small townships and the east-coast states had an unchanging air, public works – hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, law courts, hotels and all other indicators of modern civilization – changed the appearance of the major towns in the Edwardian era. By 1905 the luxury of fresh meat, fruit and dairy produce had arrived in Singapore – courtesy of the Cold Storage Company – and by 1914 the same service had reached Penang, Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Taiping, Telok Anson and Klang. Large new stores increased the choice of high-class goods for European customers. Whiteaway Laidlaw & Co., drapers, had a showpiece store in Singapore from 1900, selling household goods, shoes and crockery. Branches were opened in Penang and Kuala Lumpur soon after. Pritchard’s of Penang, starting as tailors and outfitters, diversified into other lines and became rivals of Robinson’s and John Little’s of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. With twelve large bottles of Heidsieck champagne at $54, 1/4 lb of pâté de foie gras at $2.25, cashmere socks at $7.50 a dozen, and gentlemen’s dress shoes at $5.00 a pair, the cost of living may have seemed high, but the expanding retail trade was a sign that planters, middlemen, business people, anyone outside the official sector, now had money to spare.77

  Captain Brown of the Pilot Service admitted that his profit-related salary rose dramatically during Penang’s boom years, from $600 a month in 1906 to $2,500 a month by 1912. Boxwallahs had learned from the Chinese how to negotiate perks and bonuses for services rendered. ‘Everybody was everybody else’s confederate in the great business of handing out discounts and tips’ as the investment of capital was caught up in ‘the long traditional kumshaw [kick back] usage of the Orient’.78 Profits soared when the demand for Malayan tin and rubber rocketed after 1908. When rubber boomed at the equivalent of 62p a pound in April 1910, shares bought originally for £25,000 reached the unheard of sum of £500,000. One man retired as the head of his firm at the age of thirty-nine with personal shares worth £90,000. Like many of the pioneers, ‘till he came to Singapore he had never earned more than twenty-five shillings a week’.79

  ‘Trade boom came on trade boom, ports grew overnight, plantations pushed the jungle back and flourished like the jungle. It was almost an impossibility not to make money.’80 The last generation of eager young pioneers to come with £10 in their pockets were heirs to a decade of rampant change, and for the vast majority change was equated with material progress. By general consent the years between 1900 and 1914 were the great high noon of the Europeans in the East.

  3

  Private Lives, Public Values

  On 21 January 1901 a Malay ayah escorted her young charge on their customary walk to the grounds of St Andrew’s Cathedral in Singapore. Lillian Newton was six years old. ‘I was aware that my dress was made of black dotted material and I had a black ribbon in my hair. “Why?” I asked. “Because Queen Victoria is dead,” was the reply.’1 For a brief while, Singapore was like a city struck by plague. Business was halted, and the crowds moved noiselessly through the streets. But in many ways Victoria lived on in British Malaya. When the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall (the future King George V and Queen Mary) visited the colony three months later to the day, everyone turned out to celebrate. Rich Chinese merchants sponsored a brilliant street procession in their honour, a swaying stream of coloured lanterns, tumblers, monster stiltwalkers and a gigantic Chinese dragon. Little changed in the Edwardian Empire. Behind the enduring public face, private individuals wrestled with the same preoccupations, the same anxieties and personal constraints, overlaid by traditional Victorian values.

  Between the old Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and the outbreak of the Great War, Singapore became a cosmopolitan city of around a quarter of a million people and the seventh greatest port in the world. As the principal entrepôt for South-East Asia’s raw materials and Europe’s products, the town held out the prospect of ever rising profits to the thrusting entrepreneurs of Collyer Quay and Raffles Place, the commercial centre which, like Venice, had been built on reclaimed land. Singapore harbour sheltered every conceivable craft, from sampans, junks, schooners, launches and tramp steamers to stately warships, great cargo ships and ocean liners. It was obvious why the port was dubbed ‘the Clapham Junction of the Eastern Seas’.2 In the town itself the main streets were well maintained and lit. The people enjoyed a stable currency and improved docks, communications and municipal utilities. Three symbols of civic pride – the Anderson Bridge and the new Memorial Hall and Theatre, named after Victoria – were opened in Edward VII’s reign. Only the occasional economic blip was detected on this graph of confidence, prosperity and success.

  Beyond the urban crescent of old Singapore, new residential suburbs had appeared by this time, with wide, tree-lined roads and bungalows, villas and mansions hidden by leafy greenery. Behind this screen were tennis courts, croquet lawns, and fruit and flower gardens. Orange Grove, the home of the Newton family, was a typical rambling property in the fashionable district of Tanglin. In 1902 a beautiful flame-of-the-forest tree sheltered the front ‘like a giant red parasol’. ‘In the garden grew beds of cannas, various colours; a row of Vanda Joachim orchids … stephanotis, white clematis and pink honolulu grew in clusters on a sort of trellis table; yellow alamandas were creeping up a pillar of the portico. There were also pale pink lilies which bloomed … either side of the drive.’3 From Singapore town a network of roads radiated outwards. There were hints of rural England and Scotland in their names: Orchard Road, Scotts Road, Balmoral Road, Grange Road, Tanglin Road. Havelock Road, Neil Road and Outram Road were named after heroes of the Indian Mutiny. Stamford Road, a stately thoroughfare beginning at the Esplanade, turned at its other end into a country way. River Valley Road recalled ‘the quiet beauty of a Devonshire lane’, and it scarcely altered in the next three decades.4 ‘It would have been difficult to find a better place wherein to spend one’s youth,’ remarked Marjorie Binnie long afterwards, recalling the Edwardian years when she lived there with a widowed aunt.

  It was an adventure to cross the Island on Sunday, picnicking at Woodlands or crossing over to Johore Bahru. Expeditions to one of the seaside Government bungalows were very popular. Changi, the loveliest, with its garden to the sea, the traveller palms and great shady trees, was often filled to overflowing and lucky the tenant staying there for a fortnight or longer, for it seemed the most perfect journey’s end in those days. To escape from the turmoil … to this shady verandah, these lofty cool rooms, looking over calm waters to green islands, was indeed – journey’s end.5

  All around the Singapore coastline Europeans found sandy playgrounds where the government rest houses were located – Seletar, Ponggol (‘which was almost tumbling down but provided shelter enough for happiness – and honeymoons’), Tanah Merah (‘a few brown wooden bungalows standing on a sort of cliff’) and Pasir Ris, facing the island of Pulau Ubin, where there were crocodile shooting, wild-pig hunts, fishing, bathing in the pagar, and dancing on the pier in the moonlight.6 In her formative years Lillian Newton went on holiday with the Drysdale family to the island’s most accessible resort, Tanjong Katong or Turtle Point, where she learned the delights of underwater swimming, diving and agar-agar, an edible seaweed jelly. Later, as a young woman, she sometimes visited friends, the Youngs, on Pulau Bukum. Despite the oil storage tanks for which the island was known, there were still unspoilt niches, including a coral reef with first-class bathing.

  In the years before the First World War, pleasure was unpretentious. Singapore’s Europeans enjoyed a variety of sports – even shooting parties to eliminate flying foxes and the occasional prowling tiger – and there was a good deal of home entertaining (in which the hard work was done by servants), besides intermittent special events to liven the social calendar. Lillian Newton recalled her mother’s At Home days, when the tennis and croquet courts were thrown open. ‘They were always jolly and friendly affairs. Tea was served outside in the garden and at six o’clock at sunset
, when the light suddenly faded, cold drinks were served – stengahs (whisky and soda), lime squash, ginger beer and ginger ale.’7 From their long family association with Singapore, the Newtons had many friends in club and cathedral circles.

  Mother was a member of the Ladies’ Lawn Tennis Club, situated in Dhoby Ghaut, opposite the Scots Kirk in Stamford Road … After tennis the members would play bridge in the pavilion – it was very popular at that time, having superseded the more dull whist … Mother loved playing cards, she was a bit of a gambler, a very good loser and popular with all the players … We went to the club quite often.’8

  Elizabeth Newton and her older daughters, Maud and Edie, used to attend the monthly dance at Tanglin Club in Stevens Road. They danced the waltz, lancers and gallop, and young Lillian loved seeing them dress up for these occasions. All the ladies ‘looked very pretty in their evening dresses in bright colours in muslin, voile, chiffon, silk or satin; full, frilly and very décolleté. Their hair in knots on the top of the head and a curled fringe in front over the forehead.’ After 1911 it would be her turn, too, to put her hair up and go to club dances. The introduction at Tanglin Club of ‘a wonderful new dance, the foxtrot’ was something she would not forget, and there were other highlights, such as dancing the reels at the St Andrew’s Society Caledonian Ball on 30 November, and trying out the tango, which the Governor’s aide-de-camp had taught her.9

  But ‘At Home’ days in Malaya were not all tea and stengahs. Perak Ladies’ Rifle Association, for instance, organized periodic ‘At Homes’ where pair-shooting, surprise-target and vanishing-target competitions were held. Upcountry in the tin-mining and planting areas, where the close proximity of wild life in the jungle created a social culture accepting of danger and the need to hunt and kill, some women were evidently as enthusiastic as European men about handling guns. The Malay States Guides allowed the Perak Ladies to practise on their rifle range, and, of the twenty or so who did, some became experts with a.303 service rifle at a distance of 150 to 200 yards and held their own in competition with the men’s teams.

  Sport and pleasure were important for morale, but life in a tropical colony had its drawbacks and discomforts too. A comfortable lifestyle depended on seniority, a sufficient income or inherited resources, and even in the European community there were clear variations of wealth. Salaried officials with dependants could find themselves worse off than those in business. As Assistant Municipal Engineer of Singapore municipality (rather than of the colonial government), Howard Newton did not have a large salary, but he was scrupulous in resisting the bribes that greased the palms of a number of commercial men. To pay for his family’s passages on their last home leave he had been forced to sell the house near Government House which he had built for his bride, and they travelled second class on a P. & O. ship. It was not uncommon for married men with large families to feel the pinch: the Newtons’ friends the Lloyds (Mr Lloyd was a well-known auctioneer) had eleven children and could never afford to go home on leave or send the children to English schools. Despite her respectability and colonial connections, widowhood forced Elizabeth Newton to swallow her pride and make economies. As the proud owner of a Wilcox & Gibbs sewing machine, she made clothes for her daughters, including ‘twelve of everything, petticoats, nightdresses, drawers, camisoles, all white calico trimmed with lace, tucks and frills’ for Maud’s trousseau in 1906.10 Even her widowed mother, old Mrs Robertson, born a Governor’s daughter yet a practical person and a fine needlewoman, took knitting orders for pregnant mothers in Singapore society to make extra pocket money. Elizabeth Newton also made a tough but necessary decision. To supplement her income, she decided to take boarders in her home in Tank Road from among the numerous unmarried male assistants in mercantile firms looking for accommodation. It was the first of a series of boarding houses she ran.

  Among the social constraints were conventions of dress which took little account of a tropical climate. Ladies wore white gloves for their afternoon drive and other functions; both men and women wore gloves for dancing. On Sundays, at her mother’s insistence, Lillian wore black cotton stockings and high boots, and at Raffles Girls’ School she had to endure starched Eton collars and cotton bow ties. It was still an age of chemises, tight stays, camisoles, voluminous drawers trimmed with lace or Swiss embroidery, and full petticoats tied round the waist with tapes and trimmed with frills, lace-edged and tucked; and over all a white drill skirt and blouse with starched or boned collar. Lillian’s contemporary Marjorie Binnie was living with her aunt, Mrs Howell, a long-standing resident of Singapore and an expert horsewoman, when she received a sharp lesson in matters of dress and decorum. Marjorie recalled a Saturday afternoon when she visited Abrams’ riding stables alone and the trainer

  hailed me with an offer to go with him on his extraordinary chariot which he used when breaking in horses to carriage use. It was the queerest looking affair, and we sat perched on high on a very tiny seat, side by side, behind four galloping steeds that tore down Orchard Road. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed our wild gallop round the Padang, back up Orchard Road, everything hastily getting out of our way … I clinging half to him and half to my very small seat (I was a buxom wench in those days). My hair was flying over my head, hairpins having long since been lost in the wind … and my hat had been blown off into the sea. We slowed down to turn into the stable yard and thanking the old chap very heartily I walked home to give my Aunt a tremendously vivid account of my adventure. I do not want to remember her icy reception … Suffice it to say that I was in future extremely careful about ‘behaving in such an extraordinary manner, so unfitting to a decently brought up girl’ …

  Oh dear! But we must remember that in those days a young girl was very much in the public eye, and the unwritten law was that she must NEVER let herself be talked about. That was sheer lunacy, and death to the hopes of ever making a good marriage.11

  Any suggestion, however, that the small British Malayan community was preoccupied with form over substance gives an inaccurate picture. The charge of philistinism levelled against those who went out to the colonies grew from the brief impressions of outsiders, visitors passing through, rather than from those with knowledge of Malayan life. A glimpse inside the Residency at Sungei Ujong in 1879, for instance, revealed that ‘The drawing room has a good piano, and many tasteful ornaments, books and china’; the dining room had ‘exquisite crystal, menu cards with holders of Dresden china [and] four classical statuettes in Parian’, all belonging to Captain Murray, the Resident.12 Moreover, there was apparently quite a market for pianos with brass fittings made expressly for a tropical climate. The planter Robert Munro (referred to in his family as ‘Coconut Munro’ for co-writing a definitive Guide to Coconut Planting) was a talented musician whose ‘singing of a comic song to his own accompaniment was almost professional. He had, in fact, intended to be a professional pianist, and would have been but for a shooting accident to his finger.’13 The civil servant Andrew Caldecott was ‘a good Malay scholar with literary tastes … had a piano and played it well. More wonderful still, his bungalow was decorated with attractive water-colours of his own painting.’14

  In particular, Singapore was alive with musical talent and interests in the years 1880 to 1914. A dominant influence was Edward Salzmann, once of the Royal Italian Opera Company in London, who held the position of organist at St Andrew’s Cathedral from 1874 to 1917. As choirmaster, C. B. Buckley was his right-hand man until Edwin Brown took over the post. ‘C. B.’ was a natural impresario and the originator of the brilliant Christmas musical and theatrical ‘treats’ laid on for thousands of Singapore’s children. These men gathered round themselves a duster of fine amateur musicians, singers and instrumentalists, led by A. P. Ager of the Straits Times, a gifted violinist, the lawyer Ambrose Cross, who acted and wrote plays as well as being a proficient accompanist, Mr Whitefield, manager of the Robinson Piano Company, an accomplished pianist, Howard Newton, Lillian’s father, a fine tenor and an experienced performer, and
Mrs Salzmann, a distinguished contralto. In March 1891 the Singapore Philharmonic Society was founded on the initiative of Major St Clair (who later produced a popular series of children’s concerts), and from that time its soloists doubled for performances of serious works such as Rossini’s Stabat Mater and productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, then newly in vogue. Both Penang and Singapore boasted flourishing amateur dramatic societies, but professionals of the musical and theatrical world also came to perform. Matheson Lang and his company played Shakespearian plays.

  Marie Tempest played to crowded houses; Maud Allen danced her Salome dance! Musicians like Marie Hall visited Singapore … The Bandmann Company played all the musical comedies of the day, Belle of New York, Our Miss Gibbs, Dollar Princess, Pink Lady, Chocolate Soldier, Arcadians, Quaker Girl. We had all the musical scores and would sing the various favourite numbers round the piano when we had the singsongs of those happy days.15

  The Newtons were very much involved in the amateur musical and theatrical activities. All three daughters had inherited artistic talent, and Maud and Edie attended the Guildhall School of Music in London. Lillian’s interest grew during her years at Raffles School. On Saturday mornings Maud ran a dancing class, for which her mother played the piano. She was tall and graceful and was called ‘The Gibson Girl’ because of her likeness to Camille Clifford, the original Gibson girl on the London stage. ‘We all learnt among other items the skirt dance as danced by Lois Fuller and Isadora Duncan,’ Lillian wrote. Gilbert and Sullivan became a family passion too. Both Maud and Edie, who had made their stage debuts in 1903 and 1906 respectively, took part in the production of The Pirates of Penzance at the opening of the new Victoria Theatre in 1909.16