Exploring Accounts of the Lifestyles of Colonial Administrators and Their Families in Singapore

By Emma Harper

Introduction

In 1900, British traveller and sometime political activist Ethel Colquhoun visited Singapore during a tour of the Pacific with her husband, an imperial administrator and explorer. During a stay of several days, she recorded her views on the landscape and society that she observed. One of the most striking and critical passages of her account deals with Singapore’s European residents:

  They live in the baleful atmosphere of a hothouse. They are exiles
  and prisoners on a cramped little island, from which they cannot
  even escape for a short holiday at times, only to go “home”. They
  naturally get to regard Singapore as the hub of the universe, and
  to feel as if the whole creation centred round their tiny world of
  small civil, military and mercantile duties. They can’t exercise
  charity to their poorer neighbours – for neither Chinese nor Malays
  are exactly subjects for my Lady Bountiful – so that it is not
  perhaps wonderful that that much-abused virtue gets rusty in their
  intercourse with social equals.¹

Throughout the period 1870–1920, during which Singapore was administered as part of the Crown Colony of the Straits Settlements within the British Empire, visitors and residents were keen to record their thoughts on the island’s European community. While some accounts were written by travellers passing through, others recorded the experiences of men and women who had spent longer periods living and working in British Malaya.

Colquhoun’s comments reflect several key themes that appear throughout many contemporary accounts. Discussions of the nature of society are rooted in ideas of separation and isolation, the relationship with Britain as “home”, and interactions between racial and occupational groups. While many accounts follow Colquhoun’s lead and criticise the way of life they observe among the European population, others present a more favourable view, highlighting the perceived benefits of a tropical lifestyle, the strengths of the small European community in Singapore and what they believed were improvements to the outlook and living conditions of Chinese, Malays and Indians as a result of “the presence of English law and…the protection of the British flag”.² While an individual’s views are to an extent attributable to personal experience, position and perspective, there are wider themes and ideas relating to the ideologies that structured late 19th- and early 20th-century colonial society, which are important to consider when exploring these accounts and the views their authors express.

Source Material

The Lee Kong Chian Reference Library and the National Archives of Singapore hold an array of English-language material recounting the experiences and attitudes of British colonial administrators and their families during time spent in Singapore, and the Straits Settlements and British Malaya more widely. The material held in Singapore institutions takes a variety of forms, from published travellers’ accounts and semiautobiographical prose produced by members of the island’s European community, to original and facsimile copies of letters and diaries. Newspapers and magazines – ranging from broadsheets such as The Straits Times to the satirical Straits Produce – record the activities and concerns of Europeans who lived on the island and their relationship to wider regional and international affairs, while official records including census data, the Civil Service List and the Blue Book further outline the structure and boundaries placed upon the administrative community.³ These texts provide a valuable supplement to existing work on the peopling of the British Empire and the creation of settler communities and identities, much of which focuses on British India, and is interested in governors at the top of the imperial hierarchy, or relies upon official documents held in archives in the United Kingdom.

The Colonial Administration in Singapore c. 1870–1920

  It is an article of popular belief that Englishmen are born sailors;
   probably it would be more true to say that they are born administrators.
  – Frank Swettenham, 1907⁴

British colonial administrators and their families were one small yet significant part of the European population that resided Singapore in the 19th and 20th centuries and were frequently the subject of accounts by residents and visitors. The 1881 census indicates 2,769 European men, women and children as residents in Singapore, of whom 862 were described as “British”. By 1910, the number of British inhabitants had increased to 1,870. However, in a total population of over 228,000, this category still represented less than one percent.

Within this category, an even smaller number made up the “administrative class”, those who were employed as civil servants within government departments. The 1881 Straits Settlement Census gives a figure of 84 Europeans and Americans serving in the civil service in Singapore, out of a total population of 139,208.⁵

While it remained common for those in the upper ranks of the administration to enter from roles elsewhere in the British Empire, the armyor, less commonly, the home administration, a professional colonial civil service ethos and local identity developed within Malaya in the aftermath of the establishment of the Straits Settlements as a Crown Colony in 1867. Young cadets were recruited through an increasingly formalised system of examination. The nature of this appointment system and the general esprit de corps that permeated the colonial civil service meant that many of the men fit a similar profile, having been raised in the British middle class and educated in British public schools and leading universities.⁶

In 1904, the introduction of a colour bar restricted recruitment to the Malayan Civil Service to those of “pure European descent”, although the number of non-whites who had held positions in the civil service or commissioned roles in the police before that date had always been small.⁷

While women were not appointed to positions within the colonial administration during this period, the white female presence in Singapore grew slowly both as a result of an increasing number of nurses and teachers sent into the imperial sphere, and an acknowledgement that it was acceptable and indeed desirable for wives to accompany their administrator husbands to the Empire.⁸ Although they continued to be outnumbered considerably by men, there were 1,620 white women recorded in Singapore in the 1911 census, in contrast to 495 European and American women and girls recorded in 1881.⁹

Although a small population, the nature of imperial power vested these women with significance and the ability to shape society. While valuable work has been done to highlight the voices of other groups in colonial Singapore who have historically been silenced,¹⁰ the archival footprint of the men, women and children whose presence in Singapore was tied to the administration of the imperial state allows their lives to be subject to continued analysis.

Imperial Careering

The concept of “imperial careering” is a useful analytical framework that can be used to explore the time administrators spent in Singapore and how their occupations shaped the way they saw their lives there. It highlights how individuals’ lives and careers were influenced by their movement within and across imperial space, and how these movements formed part of the interwoven networks and stories that invested these spaces and the people who occupied them with specific identities.¹¹

Framing lifestyles with reference to careers is particularly relevant to colonial Singapore due to the belief expressed in contemporary sources that no man should move to the island without a job, both for their own sake and to preserve the prestige of the wider white community.¹² For new arrivals, colleagues replaced the networks of friends and family they had left behind in the United Kingdom or elsewhere. The close link between occupation and European presence in Singapore is underscored by the fact that it was rare for administrators to remain in Malaya after their careers had ended, even if they had spent the bulk of their lives there. In 1881, the total number of British residents over the age of 60 in Singapore was no more than 22.¹³

The Straits Settlements Civil Service List, produced annually from the 1880s, presents the names, educational backgrounds and career paths of every individual who joined the administrative service, from newly recruited cadets to the governor. These texts enabled residents and visitors to gain an understanding of the individuals who made up administrative society and to relate themselves into the hierarchy outlined.¹⁴ They can also be used to track the experiences that created individuals’ imperial careers and cross-referenced with other sources, such as newspapers or private correspondence.

Lives Within and Across Imperial Space

Two case studies highlight how the source material can be used to reconstruct the role that Singapore played within an individual’s career and allow us to attempt to reconstruct how this may have impacted the sense of place and the networks in which they were situated.

Frank Kershaw Wilson came to Singapore in 1914 as an administrative cadet. From January 1915 to December 1916, he wrote regularly to his parents in the United Kingdom – copies of these letters are held as microfilm in the collection of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, Singapore.¹⁵ Cross-referencing these letters with Kershaw Wilson’s career recorded in the annual Civil Service List creates a picture of his career and the part that Singapore played within this. Over a period of more than 25 years in British Malaya, he was posted to eight different locations, spanning the Straits Settlements and the Federated and Unfederated Malay States with no clear regional “base” to which he returned over the course of his career.

In his letters, Kershaw Wilson appears to view his time and early career in Singapore with a sense of frustration. He expresses eagerness for the day that he is relocated upcountry and given the increased workload and responsibility that he yearns for, and laments the costs associated with maintaining the lifestyle required to participate within Singapore’s particular urban society.¹⁶

Map outlining the career of Frank Kershaw Wilson across Malaya between 1914 and 1939, marking periods spent living and working in a series of locations. His relocations were interspersed with return trips “home” to the United Kingdom. Compiled using data from The Malayan Civil List for 1939.

Mapping his career also highlights that alongside his conception of himself within a broader Malayan imperial space, his career is firmly rooted in relation to Britain as “home”. Though his visits to the United Kingdom were infrequent, they were associated with significant events such as promotions, relocations and even his marriage in the late 1920s, as well as being the site of his eventual retirement. It is possible thus to view his career in Malaya as developing within a specific local context framed by movement and the development of particular skills and knowledge, but also mediated by this continued relationship with and dependence on networks of connection to the United Kingdom.

A comparable example of a life spent within imperial space can be seen in an examination of the career of Walter Cecil Michell, who was recruited as a cadet in the Straits Settlements Civil Service in 1887, after completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford. Michell was based in Malaya until his retirement in 1919. His obituary, published in Singapore newspapers in 1939, provides several interesting elements that can be related to considerations of his life and career.¹⁷ As with Kershaw Wilson, Michell was posted to a range of locations within Malaya during his career, spending only a short period in Singapore. Despite this, and the fact that he had retired from the Malayan administration two decades earlier, his death was reported in the Singapore press, suggesting he remained part of the community there in some way, despite a gap across space and time. Indeed, that Michell and his wife were living in the south of France when he died rather than in the British metropole acts as a reminder that not all networks tied an individual back to the country that they had originally come from.

The next generation of the Michell family also continued to operate within multiple networks across space and community. Michell’s daughter Stella, who was born in Singapore in 1902, features in a two-page spread in the 1907–8 edition of The Straits Times Annual, which showcased the offspring of some of Singapore’s European residents under the heading “Children of the Empire”. By the age of eight, Stella had been sent back to Britain for schooling and never again lived in Singapore.¹⁸ Despite this, however, her identity remained tied to the place she was born and the imperial project that her family contributed to. Several episodes in her life, including her 1937 marriage in France and subsequent commitment to public service as the wife of a colonel in the British army, were reported in the Singapore press. Stella remained a child of this imperial community despite her family’s residence in Singapore having ceased several decades earlier.¹⁹

The mobility associated with an imperial career outlined in the above examples appears at odds with Colquhoun’s view of Europeans in Singapore as existing within “a cramped little island”. However, this is an idea that prevails in several accounts of both residents and visitors. The lethargy often presented as a defining feature of life for white inhabitants is frequently linked to references to the position of these men and women far from their friends and families, struggling against the climate and lacking intellectual pursuits.²⁰ An obsession with the coming and going of the mail is a motif often evoked to demonstrate the dependence upon any interaction with the wider world to infuse the community with vitality.²¹ A contrast thus appears to exist between the long-term, career-spanning movement and networks, and shorter-term feelings of isolation and stagnation.

Studying the sources highlights the existence of networks within and across imperial space that were more complex than simply ties linking points on the periphery back to the metropole and invested Singapore with a particular regional as well as global identity. An 1898 description of Singapore as the “capital of a little Empire” has implications for how we can understand Singapore within a system that did not require constant links to the metropole for its identity and place in the world.²² While there were significant differences between the institutions and norms that governed life in Malaya’s urban centres and the rural upcountry, the nature of imperial careering as presented earlier ensured that it was unheard of for an administrator to spend the entirety of his life in Malaya within one of these social formations.²³ The ways that individuals related to Singapore specifically and as part of a wider British Malayan space were often complex and contradictory, illustrating the idea that there were multiple identities and imagined communities that could be drawn upon at particular times.²⁴

It has already been mentioned that Kershaw Wilson perceived his time in Singapore as a precursor to his career proper in upcountry Malaya, while when reflecting back on his time in Malaya, former planter Robert Bruce Lockhart stated that “to me, Singapore has never been more than an exotic island. I was an FMS man”.²⁵ However, for others, Singapore functioned as an important reference point and mediatory that anchored their lives and careers. Emily Innes, the wife of a colonial administrator who spent time in Malaya during the 1870s and 80s, took joy in the opportunities presented to her to escape the isolation of her life with trips to vibrant, busy Singapore.²⁶ Similarly, three decades later, Margaret Birch escaped from her life in Perak to visit Singapore to shop, visit friends and attend social events such as balls and the races.²⁷ Singapore was often the place where administrators first landed to take up posts elsewhere in British Malaya, greeted by recognisable institutions under the protection of the Union Jack; it may have been a place where men and women were sent to temporarily recuperate or prepare to leave the tropics for health reasons; it was frequently the site of significant life events such as marriages and births; and it was where British administrators and their wives were sent for dealings with senior judicial or administrative powers.²⁸

For those who spent longer periods residing in Singapore, improved communications over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries ensured that at times, the settlement felt more like a British town than an island thousands of miles from London.²⁹ It was possible to receive weekly letters and business papers from home even in the midst of the disruption of the First World War, while advice given in guidebooks aimed at British men and women relocating to tropical parts of the Empire stress that it was possible, and indeed important, to keep up with the latest British fashions and styles.³⁰ Not only letters, but goods and people were constantly sent across the world, connecting Singapore to elsewhere in Malaya, the United Kingdom and beyond. The fact that many of the middle-class travellers, whose accounts are preserved in the collections of the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library, were able to call on and interact with existing friends, families and social networks upon their arrival in Singapore highlights how the feelings both of isolation and connection to “home” were frequently tested and reinforced by ongoing patterns of movement.³¹

A Structured and Controlled Social World

The “tiny world” of European society in Singapore created a particular social milieu which was frequently commented upon in the writings of those who observed or participated within it. In his account of an 1899 visit to Singapore, Walter del Mar laid out some of the tensions that existed within such a society:

  In small communities of Europeans, settled in the midst of
   another race with which there is practically no social intercourse,
   the individuals become closely united by ties of friendship and
   intimacy as well as by interest and for mutual protection…[they]
   assume with little friction the rank in the social scale to which they
   are entitled…everybody is “somebody” down to the club inebriate
   who is drinking himself to death….³²

The club acted as a key institution for socialisation, and the interactions between colonial residents and visitors were structured with reference to sport, amateur dramatics, the custom of calling cards and formal dinners in the homes of administrators and commercial tuan besar. Recreation and leisure time followed specific, prescribed forms and played an important part in both demonstrating the status of white residents through their competitive mindsets and physical prowess, and in building bonds and creating familiar environments in which new arrivals could easily find their place.³³ Writing in 1878, William Temple Hornaday described Singapore as “like a big desk, full of drawers and pigeon holes, where everything has its place and you can always be found in it”, encapsulating a sense of both the structured nature of interactions, and the central role that work played in defining these relations.³⁴

The source material also conveys an awareness of how the fluidity and transience of the lives and careers of many members of colonial society impacted the community’s social and intellectual vitality. At various points over the 50-year period from the 1870s to the 1920s, visitors and residents reflected upon the changes they observed in both the physical layout of Singapore, and the social norms and practices that governed society, often nostalgically evoking a friendlier, less formal past and lamenting the loss of particular practices and individuals.³⁵ One Hundred Years of Singapore, published to mark the centenary of Raffles’ landing on the island, regretfully records the demise of cycling and debating societies, and short-lived journals covering topics such as athletics and motor cars.³⁶ The short-lived and transitory nature of many initiatives in Singapore impacted the community memory of Singapore’s European society. When the satirical Straits Produce magazine was revived in 1922 after a 24-year hiatus, the editors stressed that “there are very few in Singapore to-day who remember the Nineties nor are there many sufficiently versed in its past history to understand the topics”

Cartoon from the satirical publication Straits Produce , vol. 1, no. 3 (1893), satirising the fast-changing and peculiar habits and customs that governed the social lives of Singapore’s European community. The caption reads: “Mrs. Woodbie-Smart, who has just returned from a trip home, nearly startles the life out of poor little Snooks by shaking hands with him in the manner adopted by Society about five years’ ago, and now affected by second-rate people.”

that appeared in earlier issues.³⁷ A similar impression is given by Thomas Keaughran, writing in The Straits Times in 1887. He laments the lack of care paid to the Christian cemetery at Bukit Timah, stating:

  Perhaps the mobile nature of our European population may in
   some measure account for this, as there are few connecting links
   of attachment reposing here to endear them to the spot. Still, the
   same apparent disregard seems to pervade the permanently resident
   inhabitants, many of whose progenitors here repose; even them
  youth…here shun the locality.³⁸

“Singapore Is for the Singaporean: To Him Only It Has Its Attraction.”

Despite the mobile population,³⁹ however, some sources demonstrate how, at particular moments and for particular individuals, Singapore and an identity as “British Malayans” or even “Singaporeans” came to possess a significance and relevance not only for the men who worked as administrators, but for their wives and children. Practical and ideological shifts meant that it became increasingly common for men to marry and start families during the time they were employed as administrators in British Malaya, impacting both the nature of the society that existed in Singapore and the relationship between colonial outpost and British metropole.⁴⁰

The wives of administrators loom large in primary accounts and secondary literature, often framed as the ignorant mem, transplanted to an alien land, struggling with climate and disease, her presence ultimately responsible for the deterioration of relations between white men and the races they governed, and the eventual decline of the British Empire.⁴¹ However, to view the lifestyles of colonial wives solely in this way would be to neglect both the active role many women played in shaping their own lives and that of their families, and the ideological role that they played in the construction of the colonial project.

In her work on British India, Mary Procida argues that as members of the official community, colonial wives had a material, psychological and ideological stake in the continued success of the British Empire.⁴² Seizing upon their “incorporated” status, they were able to draw on their positions within the hierarchy of imperial administration to place a significance upon their lifestyles that did not exist for their counterparts “at home”. Procida’s work highlights the way that the sharp divide between public and private spheres existing in British homes did not translate to the imperial context, with even so-called “private” and traditionally feminine domestic spaces required to serve the demands of empire.⁴³ Wives of governors were required to set an example for wives lower down the hierarchy through their behaviour and hospitality. Even those married to more junior administrators were expected to participate in the management of household tasks and servants to reinforce the authority of the colonising power, and sustain structured habits of socialisation that were intrinsic to the success of their husbands within the hierarchy of the imperial civil service and in turn the British Empire at the broader level.⁴⁴

Writing to his fiancée Kips in England in 1916, Richard Myrddin Williams, a junior employee of commercial firm Paterson and Simons, outlines the particular significance given to women in maintaining a household and entertaining their husbands’ colleagues, both tasks which held an important role in structuring relations with other races and the development of business relationships. Over a series of letters, he prepares her for the responsibilities associated with these tasks, explaining how, although she might find it overwhelming, running a household was a particularly important role held by women in Singapore.⁴⁵ Within the administrative sphere, a similar picture is presented by the diaries of Margaret Birch. Birch, who followed her husband to a range of localities within Malaya including Perak, Negeri Sembilan and Borneo, describes her busy life, which required her to take on roles including overseeing the work of prisoners employed as domestic staff, entertaining visitors and dinner guests, and travelling within and beyond Malaya independently of her husband.⁴⁶

Written testimonies by women demonstrate that within Malaya, for some women at least, it was possible both to actively participate in the networks and processes of their husbands’ imperial careers, and to conceptualise and construct how the process of colonialism was structured and implemented. Dorothy Cator drew on her own experiences of life in Borneo to address an assembled crowd at the Royal Colonial Institute in London in 1909. In her speech, she expressed her opinions on a range of aspects of British colonialism, from commenting on the way that those in Britain perceived of “our Colonies”, to making suggestions relating to the education of colonial administrators.⁴⁷ Several decades earlier, Emily Innes had spent time living with her husband as he served in the colonial administration of the Malay States. Her The Chersonese with the Gilding Off, published in 1885, provides an example of a woman championing her husband and his career in the face of perceived injustices, criticising both the nature of the system of imperial administration and the life that it forced her and her husband to live.⁴⁸

Children, too, could be vested with a role within the process of imperialism that gave them and their lives a significance to both Singapore’s European community and the colonial government. As in the case of Stella Michell, the white sons and daughters of British administrators could be celebrated as “children of empire” and their activities were often recorded in the Singapore press long after they and their parents had permanently relocated elsewhere. However, it was a frequently expressed view that it was unsuitable for these children to remain in a tropical climate beyond the age of six or seven.⁴⁹ The impact that this had on the demographics of Singapore is

Photograph of a European family with baby taken in Singapore in the late 19th century. Women and children played an important symbolic and ideological role in the maintenance of British imperial power. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore, National Heritage Board.

illustrated by census data from 1881, which demonstrates that there were more than double the number of two- and three-year-olds as 13- and 14-year-olds among the British population.⁵⁰ The presence of children in colonial contexts was closely tied to both ideologies of Empire rooted in pseudo-scientific notions of racial superiority and the dangers of hostile climates upon white bodies, and shifts in how childhood was perceived within society in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, with an increasing state interest in processes of child rearing.⁵¹

In his semi-autobiographical short story Rachel, Hugh Clifford focuses on the impact that the practice of sending children back to Britain at a young age had on both children and adults. The future governor of the Straits Settlements highlights how administrators and their wives were forced to decide between their role as parents responsible for raising the next generation of national and imperial citizens, and their position as imperial servants.⁵² The decision to send children home to attend British public schools acted to reinforce a particular middle-class ethos, and to frame their fragility with reference to claims for racial authority and hierarchy rooted in nature and biology.⁵³

Children who were educated in Singapore or unable to return to the United Kingdom at the expected time were limited in the positions they could hold within the administrative hierarchy. A 19th-century example of such a scenario is found in Dill Ross’ semi-autobiographical publication Sixty Years: Life and Adventure in the Far East. The author recounts the fate of a son of a penniless skipper. Financial troubles meant that he had to remain in Singapore for school, where the author states he received a poor standard of education “amidst half-castes and native boys”. Upon graduation he sought employment in the government service, but was unable to advance beyond clerk level due to the “odium of being what is called a ‘country’ born”. It was only when he moved to employment in the commercial sector that he was able to flourish, drawing on his specific local knowledge and behaviour to the advantage of his career.⁵⁴ Decades later, writing under the name Clive Dalton, Frederick Clark explains in his account of his childhood on Pulau Brani that as a result of his family’s prolonged stay on the island due to the First World War, his education was irreversibly disrupted and he was thus unable to attend Sandhurst and pursue the career expected of him.⁵⁵

After visiting Singapore in 1879, Andrew Carnegie stated that permanent occupation of the island by Western races is “of course out of the question. An Englishman would cease to be an Englishman in a few, a very few generations”.⁵⁶ However, in the 1921 centenary publication One Hundred Years of Singapore, the author proudly boasts of the longevity of several Singapore “dynasties”, including familiar names such as Braddell and Maxwell.⁵⁷ The work lists the achievements of particular individuals in creating a flourishing European colonial society, proudly recounting the long-term associations between generations of these “Empire Families” and the development of Singapore and its institutions, acknowledging the exceptional nature of their commitment to the island and the status that this gave them.⁵⁸

The year 1882 saw the marriage of Ernest Woodford Birch and Margaret Niven, representing the union of two individuals and families with personal histories rooted in a specifically Malayan context – Birch was a member of the Straits Settlements Civil Service and the son of J. W. W. Birch, the British Resident of Perak assassinated in 1875, while the aforementioned Margaret was the daughter of Lawrence Niven, the proprietor of a nutmeg plantation and later manager of the Botanic Gardens.⁵⁹ Similarly, a year later, Edward Merewether, a Straits Settlement cadet and son of a member of the Indian Civil Service, married the daughter of Thomas Braddell, Singapore’s first Attorney-General, at St Andrew’s Cathedral in a wedding attended by leading members of European society.⁶⁰ Despite moving to Malta and Sierra Leone later in life, the activities and affairs of the couple – including visits to the Association of British Malaya in London – continued to be reported in the Singapore press.⁶¹

What is clear, however, is that the Singaporean identity claimed by long-term white residents in One Hundred Years of Singapore was ideologically separate and distinct from a wider notion of shared nationhood and

Four generations of the Braddell family and their identity as “Singaporeans” were celebrated as an important part of the history of the island’s European community in One Hundred Years of Singapore (Vol. 2). Image retrieved from Internet Archive.

citizenship. Instead, it related to identification with a specific “imagined community” based on occupation, race and nationality and a self-assurance that they would be free to be welcomed back into British society at the end of their careers. By sending children back to Britain for education, they were able to access domestic middle-class identities and undertake professional occupations and maintain the “English” identity that Carnegie feared would be lost. It was by no means certain that the sons of administrators would follow in their fathers’ footsteps and pursue a career in the Malayan administration. Members of the dynasties outlined in One Hundred Years of Singapore were not confined to the administrative sphere or to Singapore, with many pursuing commercial activities or moving elsewhere in the Empire.⁶²

The impression given by the sources is that the particular “Singaporean” society celebrated in the centenary publication was predominantly white, with only a few Chinese or Malays with whom it was deemed acceptable to interact. A visit to the garden of leading Chinese businessman Whampoa Hoo Ah Kay featured on the itinerary of any well-informed visitor to Singapore, while dinner with the Sultan of Johor was not uncommon for travellers passing through Singapore as well as those residing there for longer periods.⁶³ Based on a visit to Singapore in 1905, George Morant stated that “as a rule, the European residents took little or no interest in the manners and customs of the native inhabitants”,⁶⁴ and those who developed close personal relations with members of other races, particularly Eurasians, saw their position in Singapore suffer.⁶⁵

Interactions with non-European residents were clearly structured and regulated. Cadets often engaged closely with Malays as teachers, rooted in the belief that a successful administrator needed to acquire a knowledge of the language and culture of the native inhabitants of the country he was to govern, while it was possible to interact with English-educated Chinese as part of the imperial system of divide and rule.⁶⁶ Despite rhetorical justifications of Empire rooted in references to late Victorian liberalism, a “civilising mission” and a perception of the inherent suitability of the British to rule as a result of their benevolence and justice, philanthropic activities appear to have fallen outside the remit of administrators, being left to missionaries, professionals such as doctors or teachers from outside the administrative hierarchy, or wealthy members of other races.⁶⁷ A 1917 article in the Malaya Tribune claimed Singapore possessed the poorest standard of education among the British Crown Colonies, attributing it to the fact that:

  the European population here is a floating one. Nine out of ten
  have not the slightest intention of making this their permanent
  home, with the result that there is not very much interest
  evinced in a question which is of the greatest importance to the
  permanent population.⁶⁸

While it was therefore possible for those who lived in Singapore to perceive themselves and others as holding a family or individual identity rooted in their particular local context, it is important to remember that when required, administrators were able to draw upon a coexisting set of identities and connections that bound them to Britain and marked them out from the bulk of the island’s population.

Conclusion

Exploring the rich body of evidence documenting the lifestyles of colonial administrators and their families is valuable in reinforcing the idea that colonialism and the British imperial project should best be understood not as an abstract, inevitable force of history, but a collection of actions carried out by individuals and the consequences that these actions had and continue to have upon society.

Colquhoun’s critique highlights some of the key tensions witnessed and experienced by white British, American and European visitors and residents in Singapore, but fails to reflect the variations in experience that appear to have been influenced by a range of factors, the nuances of which are fundamental in any attempt to understand the complexities and contradictions involved in the implementation of the British imperial project. Singapore in the 19th century was complex and diverse, with individuals and communities isolated and connected in multiple ways, possessing identities that could be selectively drawn upon in different contexts. Robert Bickers encapsulates these multiplicities with reference to European communities within the imperial diaspora when he states that “the overseas Briton was a Rhodesian, or a Shanghailander, but she was also a colonial, a ‘citizen of the empire’…set aside from the British mainstream by self-perception and the perception of home Britons”.⁶⁹

While on the one hand the record of these variations are shaped by individual experiences – such as how long the author of an account spent in Singapore, their position within the administrative hierarchy and their family backgrounds – they should also be framed within a wider ideological context of imperialism and the conflicts implicit in the way that colonial power was implemented. Those interacting with society from a European or American viewpoint were observing norms that had been adapted and reworked to fit an imperial purpose and support an ideology of rule. From the way that women were both invested with important roles as “the mothers of empire” and yet separated from their children as they grew up, to the framing of privileged white men who chose to pursue careers in the Empire as “exiles”, the construction of identities and ideologies within the context of Empire was complex and often contradictory. Highlighting these tensions and multiplicities allows us to better understand how we should situate colonial administrators in Singapore both within their local and regional contexts, as well as within the broader British imperial system.

Further study of the ideas, topics and issues touched upon in this work will be valuable for continuing to develop our understanding of colonial Singapore. Archives are not neutral repositories of information, and it is important to acknowledge that the materials that are available for consultation represent but a small part of the total body of information, reflecting prevailing ideologies and power structures. An analysis of non-English language sources or a focus on those who interacted with white administrators in roles as clerks or even cadets pre-1900 would add an important dimension to understanding how administrators were perceived and the wider social context in which they were situated. Focused individual case studies of careers and lives spent within a specifically Malayan context would be valuable should source material that makes such a detailed analysis possible be found. There is also scope for an analysis which focuses in greater detail on both the divergences and similarities between Singapore and the other localities in British Malaya. Overall, therefore, the collections held by NLB and NAS present a valuable source through which the lifestyles of administrators can be considered, and provide the tools that can be used to go beyond accounts of colonial pioneers and governors to interrogate existing stereotypes and perceptions, and the ideologies and power structures through which they were historically created and upheld.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Dr Donna Brunero for her comments and guidance during the duration of my Fellowship, and the staff at NLB and NAS, particularly Joanna Tan, for their recommendations and help with accessing materials. Thanks also to Hubert for all his advice relating to Singapore and its history. This work would not have been possible without their support.

About the Author
Emma Harper is a researcher and museum professional, currently based in Beijing. Her research interests broadly include the history of childhood, the development of museum collections and their management, and the construction and display of identity in the past, in particular how this has been preserved in the material record. Originally from the United Kingdom, she holds a BA in History and an MSt in Archaeology from the University of Oxford.