POW’s humorous sketches, S$88 child bride contract among S’pore’s most historically significant artefacts
This contract dated Sept 8, 1939 documented a social practice of buying and selling young girls in Singapore.
SINGAPORE — Among Singapore’s 50 most historically significant archives are not just plans and maps drawn by Sir Stamford Raffles’ men and speeches by former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, but also items inconspicuous during their day.
A postcard from the 1890s, sketches of Changi Prison, an agreement to sell a daughter, and a music record are among 50 items featured in a book launched by the National Archives of Singapore (NAS) on Sunday (April 7) as it celebrates its 50th anniversary.
They were picked from more than 10 million records that NAS keeps.
The postcard bears the words “Greetings from Singapore” and features five photographs from the Republic that survived the turn of the 20th century.
The photos are of what European travellers regarded as exotic about the country at that time: A “Chinese woman”, “Chinese merchant”, “Chinese hawker”, “Tamil man and woman” and “Chitty”.
Meanwhile, the sketches are by a British police inspector named William R M Haxworth who was imprisoned during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore between 1942 and 1945.
His more than 300 illustrations are mostly light-hearted sketches of what he saw around him as a prisoner-of-war: The Changi Prison grounds, and what he deemed as “Changi comforts” — local fruit like bananas, coconuts and papayas as well as wooden chairs and makeshift furniture.
The child bride contract dated Sept 8, 1939 was an agreement to sell a 12-year-old named Tay Ai Lan for a dowry of S$88. It chronicles the common practice among impoverished Chinese parents before the 1950s, especially when they have too many children to feed.
The chosen music record was created in 1903 — the year that marked the beginnings of Singapore as a regional centre for commercial sound recordings in the early 20th century.
The gramophone record has inscribed on its disc label the Jawi language, the Arabic alphabet used for expressing written Malay and widely used in the Malay archipelago at the time.
The book’s other highlights include an 1819 chart by Captain Daniel Ross, the lead marine surveyor in Sir Stamford Raffles’ mission to find a suitable trading post at the southern end of the Malay Peninsula, who noted the island’s “favourable” position for “commanding trade passing through the Straits of Malacca”.
There is also a video recording of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s final National Day Rally speech in 1990 on the nation’s 25th birthday. NAS archivist Kevin Khoo wrote that it encapsulated the hallmarks of the founding prime minister’s “trenchant and incisive language”, “irrefutable logic” and “trademark use of facts and figures”.
ARCHIVES’ ROLE IN SINGAPORE
At the book’s launch on Sunday, Minister for Communications and Information S Iswaran said that the 50 archives listed in it would allow Singaporeans to “better appreciate how far we have come as a country”.
He quoted former Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee, who had said archives are intended for records to remind citizens of Singapore’s “riotous episodes” and outline the challenges “we experienced, in our quest for a decent living in a not-too-hospitable environment”.
“Indeed, since its inception in 1968 as the National Archives and Record Centre, NAS has been quietly and meticulously recording these riotous episodes — collecting, documenting, archiving, remembering, promoting and educating Singaporeans on the Singapore story,” he added.
This would not change in the years ahead, even as NAS enters a new era in a rejuvenated building that was reopened on Sunday after being closed for one-and-a-half years for upgrading.
Mr Iswaran said NAS is working to declassify many government records and policies relevant to the general public, and making them accessible under the Singapore Policy History Project, which was launched in 2016.
Also, NAS will continue its public calls for historical materials and volunteers to transcribe and translate old documents under its Citizen Archivist Project, which was introduced in 2015, he added. To date, more than 28,000 pages have been transcribed and 1,800 photos have been described by some 460 volunteers.
Meanwhile, NAS’ rejuvenated building features conservation laboratories with equipment that can better restore old records, some predating 1819, said Mr Iswaran.
There is also a 134-seater theatre, which will hold regular screenings of Asian films curated by the Asian Film Archive, and three oral history recording studios.
