Malaya's Prewar Tennis Greats

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past: some unfamiliar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

Hi, everyone. My name is Jimmy Yap and I’m the editor-in-chief of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore. In this episode of BiblioAsia+, we’re going to talk about tennis in Singapore. You’re also going to learn about the Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal of prewar Malaya: Khoo Hooi Hye and Lim Bong Soo. How great were these guys? Well, to give you an idea, Hooi Hye actually played at Wimbledon, while Bong Soo had a line of tennis rackets named after him. The two men were good friends, but extremely fierce rivals. One match in 1929 left them so drained they both ended up collapsing. They had to do a rematch a few days later. Few people today would have heard of these two titans of Malayan tennis. But one person who does know all about them is Abhishek Mehrotra, a researcher, former sports journalist and avid tennis fan. When he’s not practising his backhand, he does research on media and society in colonial Singapore, urban toponymy and post-independence India. Welcome to BiblioAsia+, Abhishek.

Abhishek
Thank you, Jimmy. Pleasure to be here.

Jimmy
So tell us about that gruelling match in April 1929.Is it very common that two players end up collapsing in a match?

Abhishek
No, it was not common, I would say. I think that is sort of an indication of how, like you said, gruelling those matches were between these two guys. Also you have to remember this is April. April in Singapore can be brutally hot.

Jimmy
Yeah, a bit hot.

Abhishek
For outdoor sports. So what happened was that this was the final of the Singapore Chinese Recreation Club tennis championship. These guys met in the third week of April 1, and both basically after a couple of sets collapsed from cramp. So clearly they were not very well hydrated, I suppose.

Jimmy
I suppose.

Abhishek
And then in those times you had to have a rematch. And what do you do anyway? Because if both people have collapsed…

Jimmy
Actually if one person collapses, do they then…

Abhishek
Interestingly, I mean, that’s not to do with this match, but in general now that person would retire and the opponent would win. But at that time, you would usually have rematches even if one player collapses.

Jimmy
Very gentlemanly.

Abhishek
Exactly. Yes, because there wasn’t that much at stake in terms of money. So people were much more accommodating, I suppose. Coming back to this match. This was a replay. And it started off quite disappointingly, one could say, because Hooi Hye, who was the senior of the two, just basically ran away with this first set. He won 6–love. And I suppose there would have been a lot of disappointed spectators, because these matches were really looked forward to. But luckily, I suppose from an audience perspective, Bong Soo came back and he won the second set after saving a match point. Your listeners who follow tennis would know that there weren’t tie-breaks at the time. There were no tie-breaks. So the second set went 8–6 to Lim Bong Soo. And then subsequently in the third set, Bong Soo was the younger one, so he was a little fitter. He basically ended up winning the third set and hence the championship. If I’m not mistaken, this was one of the first times that he managed to beat his senior rival. So it was quite a big deal.

Jimmy
Was this like a changing of the guard?

Abhishek
You could potentially say that, yes. On hindsight, also what happened subsequently was Hooi Hye left for Shanghai a couple of years later, so he never really played at the SCRC championships again. He did compete in a few Singapore opens if I’m not mistaken. But, yeah, I would consider this a very obvious changing of the guard.

Jimmy
All right. What can you tell us about Hooi Hye and Bong Soo? Can you give a little bit of an idea of where they came from and whether they had a signature style or something?

Abhishek
The challenge with exploring Singapore’s early sports history is that it’s not very well documented. So what we have are basically scraps of information, which I’ve gathered by going through old newspapers. We know very little about Hooi Hye, if I’m being honest. We know that he was born in Penang. He was a bit of a prodigy, a tennis prodigy. So by his early teens, he was already being spoken about as one of the most talented ethnically Chinese players to have emerged out of the Straits Settlements. By 1916, ‘17, when World War I was still ongoing, he was actually playing with some of the biggest players of that time, and raising money for the veterans who were returning from the front. He lives up to his potential, his youthful potential. By the early ’20s, ‘21, he had established himself as [a prodigy].

Jimmy
How old was he at this time?

Abhishek
He was born in 1900. Or 1901. So he would be in his late teens.

Jimmy
In his late teens he was already really seen as a [prodigy].

Abhishek
Yes. Which, as we’ll see, is quite a contrast with Lim Bong Soo. Anyway, Hooi Hye, after becoming established as the best player in Penang and across the Straits, he realised that Singapore has a bigger tennis community, better facilities. So he became a Singapore resident in 1923. Then he starteds to sort of represent Singapore in the various regional competitions that were happening at the time. So he was in Singapore for the next seven years or so. Then he moved to Shanghai because he got an offer from the Chinese government to represent them at what used to be called the Far East Asian Games, if I’m not mistaken. He did that for about four or five years. Unfortunately, he died very early. He died in 1936, when he would have been 35 or 36.

Jimmy
Okay, that is very young.

Abhishek
Yeah, he had some kidney issues.

Jimmy
What about Bong Soo? You were saying that Hooi Hye was very different from Bong Soo in that Hooi Hye was a teen prodigy. What about Bong Soo?

Abhishek
Bong Soo actually took up tennis very late, even by the standards of that era. There are records of him actually going to

Jimmy
Give me an idea. I mean, five feet is obviously not very watch a match featuring Hooi Hye. And apparently he got inspired by that. This would have been in 1921, by which time, again, Bong Soo was just a couple of years younger than Hooi Hye. So he would have been 18, 19. So it is quite late to pick up a sport at that age. But he did. And by the mid ’20s, by this time, he is a civil servant in the colonial treasury, he starts to become more and more prominent on the tennis scene. So ‘26, ‘27 is when you first read about him in various newspaper reports. As he starts making it to the later stages of various tournaments, he starts to have a lot more matches against Hooi Hye. The thing that really stood out with Bong Soo was that he was very short. He was only five feet, which is very short for a tennis player, even for tall. Are modern tennis players much taller?

Abhishek
Yes, modern tennis players are absolutely [taller]. Right now, if you average the height of the top 10 male tennis players, it would be 6’2″, or 6’3″. Yeah.

Jimmy
I mean, obviously, the additional height gives you wider reach, I guess.

Abhishek
Not just wider reach, it gives you more power on your serve. The serve is how you start a point, so it is, in a way, one of the most important shots in the game. So he did sort of have those restrictions. But again if we go back to the reports of matches at that time, they keep coming back to his incredible stamina, his reserves of energy. And his unrelenting accuracy: he just would not miss.

Jimmy
Wow, that sounds pretty amazing. I wish I could play tennis like that. Actually, I wish I could play tennis. We know that Bong Soo was known for his stamina. Now, what about Hooi Hye? What was he known for, beyond being a child prodigy? Did he have a particular stroke? Did he have an amazing backhand?

Abhishek
Unfortunately, that’s something that I’ve not been able to unearth. Like I said, information on Hooi Hye is very sparse. Which is a pity. I think he was one of the prewar heroes, sports heroes in Singapore. Pre-Second World War, of course. So honestly I can’t say.

Jimmy
We take professional sports for granted these days, right? These athletes, you know, earn pots and pots of money. But this wasn’t quite so common back in the day. And in fact was it Hooi Hye? Who decided that he wanted to make some money from tennis and became a coach, he couldn’t play on the circuit anymore. What was all that about?

Abhishek
Well, it’s very simple. At that time, sports was considered to be a gentlemanly pursuit. Money had no role to play in it. And, you know, players were just expected to sort of have the day jobs and or the side jobs, which is what would bring, you know, food to the table. And sport was just for entertainment and building character. So Bong Soo sort of followed what had become a bit of a trend by then. So Bong Soo announced that he was turning professional in 1936. By turning professional, like you said, it meant that he was going to make money from the sport and he was going to do that by coaching. He coached at the Tanglin club. And also by appearing in various exhibition matches, across the region. And immediately that invited a ban from the Singapore Tennis Association, which basically meant that titles that he had won over and over again in the past few years, he could no longer defend them. But like I said, it was a trend. And some of the top players in the world had actually gone pro, as they called it. And they had all been banned from competitive tennis. So they just basically toured around wherever they were invited, wherever they were wanted. By various companies, various governments.

Jimmy
Right. So in fact one of them is Fred Perry, right? Who gave up tennis and started making t-shirts.

Abhishek
Yes. I think, the year Bong Soo turned professional was the year Fred Perry won Wimbledon – in 1936. And then, yes, he did turn professional. Also at the same time [he] launched a line of clothing, which till today continues to be very successful.

Jimmy
Yeah. Do you have a Fred Perry shirt?

Abhishek
I do not. They’re too expensive for me.

Jimmy
Alright. Tell us a little bit about the history of tennis in Singapore. When did it all start? When did tennis first come to Singapore?

Abhishek
Tennis first came to Singapore in the 1870s. It’s quite a remarkable story because tennis itself, its roots, its origins go back to, I think, the 16th century in France. But by the 19th century it was not really very popular. And it was a very complex sport at the time. They had various projections on the court which you had to avoid. And the rules were very complicated. Basically, it was looked upon as a sport for royalty and not really a sport for the masses. But then in the late 19th century, around the late 1860s, was when you have this former army officer. It would have been the East India Company at the time. No, in the British army. Who basically came up with a simplified set of rules. And he actually started boxing up the equipment. He came up with a box set, which was two tennis net poles, the net, two rackets and a few balls. And chalk for you to chalk out your own court, and he would ship it with the rules and dimensions of the court as well. So you could literally just buy it off.

Jimmy
Oh, right. He was quite an entrepreneur as well.

Abhishek
Very entrepreneurial, yes. This was happening in the UK in the late 1860s. Remarkably, by the mid-1870s, already, the SCC was already hosting its first tennis championship.

Jimmy
The SCC means Singapore Cricket Club?

Abhishek
Yes, the Singapore Cricket Club. Which was where it first took root in Singapore. From there, it just kept going from strength to strength. So you have the SCC and then a bunch of other clubs: SCRC – the Straits Chinese Recreation Club – was also among them.

Jimmy
So it was brought in by the colonial officials, presumably. But did it spread among the Asian community?

Abhishek
Yes, it did, among a very specific section of the Asian community, which is the Straits Chinese. So the Straits Chinese, as I’m sure you know, were the more wealthy merchants who sort of acted as mediators between the colonial government and the Chinese labourers who were coming into Singapore at that time. They basically really took to it very quickly and very passionately, one could say. Like I said, the Straits Chinese Recreation Club was specifically set up in 1884 with a view to playing two colonial sports, which were tennis and cricket. By the 1890s, the SCRC tennis championship was already a fixture of the tennis season. And you had some very prominent personalities from that time who were competing in this tournament, including someone like Song Ong Siang.

Jimmy
SCRC is the Singapore…

Abhishek
At that time it was called the Straits Chinese Recreation Club.

Jimmy
Right. Was it at the Padang as well?

Abhishek
No, interestingly, it was located at Hong Lim Green.

Jimmy
Okay, so you have all these clubs in Singapore – the Straits Chinese Recreation Club, the Singapore Cricket Club. Was this how tennis matches or the tennis championships were organised in Singapore and Malaya?

Abhishek
Yes, so I think the club tournament was sort of the basis of the entire tennis season calendar. What would happen would be that the Straits Chinese Recreation Club, the Singapore Cricket Club, the Singapore Recreation Club, which of course was Eurasians-only, they would all have their intra-club championships, then there would be inter-club championships among these various clubs. Then you would have, by the 1920s, 1921, the first Singapore Open, which was basically clubs sending their best players to compete in it and it was open to all Singapore residents only at the time. On top of that, in the same year, you have what came to be known as the Malaya Cup, which was the same year as the Singapore Cup. So 1921 was when you had the first Singapore Open, Singapore Cup – it went by a variety of names. That same year was when you had the first Malaya Cup, which was basically the top players from the three Straits Settlements – Penang, Melaka, Singapore – as well as three of the four Federated states. I think it was Negeri Sembilan and a couple more: Selangor and Perak.

Jimmy
When Loh Kean Yew won the Badminton World Federation Championships in 2021, badminton academies and retailers saw an enormous surge of interest in Singapore. Did the same thing happened with Khoo and Lim? Did their success actually help make tennis more popular in this region?

Abhishek
With Khoo, I would assume yes. Because, again, there is not that much information about him. But with Lim Bong Soo, definitely. In fact, as you mentioned in the introduction to the podcast, the English racket manufacturing company, Sykes, came out with a line of rackets called the Lim Bong Soo Special. There was a demand for it. Also, I think he suddenly had some sort of a hold on popular culture, because Mr SR Nathan in his autobiography actually mentioned having been a ball boy for Lim Bong Soo.

Jimmy
He was so important that SR Nathan had to mention in his autobiography. Something to be proud of.

Abhishek
And the way it’s mentioned. It’s mentioned very casually as if he expected that everyone would know Lim Bong Soo, because he was such a popular person from that time. You also had a lot of philanthropists who were actually using these tennis players to drum up publicity – in a way, I suppose, like a modern-day sponsorship. One of the scions of the Tiger Balm company actually organised a tour on which he took Lim Bong Soo, and they went across Shanghai, Hong Kong, other parts of China just playing in various exhibition matches. So, yes, they certainly were the celebrities of their time.

Jimmy
It really sounds like tennis before the Second World War was a pretty big thing in Malaya.

Abhishek
Yes. In fact, you have reports in the mid-‘90s, where there were these visitors who came to Singapore and were just amazed by the sheer amount of tennis being played on the island. In fact, one of them said that it does look like tennis is the national sport of Singapore.

Jimmy
When was this?

Abhishek
This was the mid-1920s.

Jimmy
That’s very interesting because nowadays everybody’s playing football. And of course, you know, Singapore is doing so well in the World Cup, right? And naturally we are very interested. But yeah, tennis seems to have fallen off the radar. Why do you think that is?

Abhishek
That’s a good question. I’m not sure. But I think tennis, like I said, even at its peak in the early 20th century, it was a sport of the rich. You see all these elite clubs that are hosting these competitions. And then of course the Straits Chinese themselves in a way…That particular culture is no longer as dominant as it was in Singapore at one point in time. After the Second World War, people are just, I think they were looking to move away from what could be considered elitism and elite sports at the time. But these are just my conjectures. I need to do more in-depth study to actually figure out what happened.

Jimmy
Tell me what you’re working on. You’ve got a very interesting background. You used to be a journalist, and you’re interested in urban toponymy. Tell me a little bit about urban toponymy and why you’re interested in urban toponymy. Tell us what urban toponymy is. I like saying it, but I’m not really sure what it means.

Abhishek
To be honest, it sounds nice so I mentioned it. On a more serious note, it’s a study of place names. I am just fascinated by various road names and building names that exist in Singapore. A lot of them have become part of our vocabulary, but no one really knows why they’ve been named the way they were.

Jimmy
I’m constantly fascinated. We have all these names that reflect our history, but we don’t connect the names to the history. It’s just a road and we don’t even think about whose name has been assigned to this road.

Abhishek
Exactly. That’s what fascinates me: to figure out who were these people, what were these things that they did that deserved a road being named after them.

Jimmy
Some day it will be you I’m sure.

Abhishek
Fingers crossed, Jimmy.

Jimmy
You’re working on a book, I understand.

Abhishek
I am, yes.

Jimmy
What is it about?

Abhishek
It’s a biography of this gentleman called Mr T.N. Seshan, who was one of India’s most legendary bureaucrats, and he was superb.

Jimmy
Why was he legendary?

Abhishek
He is credited with having cleaned up Indian elections. Indian elections used to be pretty bloody affairs.

Jimmy
Literally bloody.

Abhishek
Literally bloody, yes. And, a lot of fixing. Basically a lot of shady stuff would happen until he came along. And he sort of, I suppose, by sheer strength of personality, and making every use of whatever constitution powers he had, he cleaned up the system such that… I wouldn’t say it’s perfect today. Far from it, in fact, but it is way better than it used to be before he came along. So I’m working on his story.

Jimmy
And that’s due to come out in 2023 or 2024. Everything going, okay? Your publisher asked me to ask you this question, Abhishek.

Abhishek
Well, then I have to give the contractually agreed-upon answer, which is January 2024.

Jimmy
All right. Hopefully, it’ll come out before that. I’m sure it will. It sounds like a fascinating book. Abhishek, thank you for for answering those questions for us. We’ve come to this part of the podcast where we ask you questions and then we want to hear your spontaneous answers. So, first question: who is the coolest person in Singapore history?

Abhishek
Lim Chin Siong.

Jimmy
Why Lim Chin Siong? Why do you think he’s so cool?

Abhishek
I just think that all the politics aside as well, just purely because of the fact that he got such a huge number of people to follow him in the ’50s and ’60s, and I think people…We don’t know enough about him and I feel that’s a pity. He was a fascinating character.

Jimmy
Well, which historical figure would you like to have dinner with?

Abhishek
Jawaharlal Nehru.

Jimmy
Okay. It’s an obvious question, but why Nehru?

Abhishek
I’ve read a lot of his work. In fact, I’ve read a lot of his correspondence, and I think the quality of his thoughts was just at such a high level. And it would be fascinating to have a dinner conversation with him. And just quiz him on various things.

Jimmy
What do you think is the most underrated period in history or under-examined period in history?

Abhishek
Well, for me, it is the late 19th century in Singapore.

Jimmy
Okay, why?

Abhishek
Because I think the Singapore we know today is just such worlds apart from the Singapore that existed at that time. Again, I think it is not really talked about or written about enough. You have waves upon waves of these new migrants pouring in from China and India. There’s opium, there’s alcohol, there’s politics, and there are these business rivalries. And there are gangs.

Jimmy
A very exciting period.

Abhishek
It was a very exciting period, and purely from a historian’s perspective, there’s just so much to dig through and find out.

Jimmy
Right. I want you to answer without thinking again. I will just say a word to you. I say to you: Agra.

Abhishek
Not just the Taj Mahal.

Jimmy
Okay, why? What else is that? What else is there in Agra to do?

Abhishek
Well, Agra actually has, I think, more monuments than you can count on both hands. I think the Taj Mahal, amazing as it is, has sort of overshadowed literally every single one of them. So I wish that more people knew about the amazing Mughal-era architecture that exists in Agra, and I wish the authorities did a better job of publicising it.

Jimmy
Do most people fly in to Agra, see the Taj Mahal and then fly out?

Abhishek
Well, bizarrely, Jimmy, Agra barely has an airport. It has an airport that has, I think, now, very recently, it has five flights a week.

Jimmy
Which is one every day.

Abhishek
Yeah. Less than one a day on average. It is not an international airport, so it’s only connected to, I think, Mumbai and Bangalore, and maybe one or two other cities. So people usually fly in to Delhi, take the morning train to Agra – it’s two and a half hours away by train – see the Taj Mahal. Some of them see the Agra Fort, which is again one of the oldest forts in the city and built by Akbar, and take the evening train back. They barely get to spend any time beyond these two monuments.

Jimmy
And you grew up in Agra.

Abhishek
I did, yes. I finished my schooling in Agra and then I came to NUS to do civil engineering,

Jimmy
Right. This is very different from…

Abhishek
This is what we were taught in NUS: the history of tennis in Singapore.

Jimmy
Okay, I will have to have to relook this, the syllabus. Okay, what are you reading now? What’s on your nightstand?

Abhishek
Well, I’m on a biography reading spree just to pick up tips for my own book. So right now I’m reading a biography of Cleopatra.

Jimmy
Complete the sentence: history is…

Abhishek
Everywhere.

Jimmy
And BiblioAsia is…

Abhishek
Fascinating.

Jimmy
I’d like to think so. Thank you very much for joining me on this show, Abhishek. If you want to know more about tennis in Singapore, you have to read Abhishek’s piece on Khoo Hooi Hye and Lim Bong Soo. His piece can be found on the BiblioAsia website, which is BiblioAsia.nlb.gov.sg.

Abhishek
Thanks, Jimmy. It was lovely to be here.

Jimmy
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the podcast and the BiblioAsia newsletter. Thank you for joining me BiblioAsia+.

Abhishek Mehrotra, “Khoo Hooi Hye, Lim Bong Soo and the Heyday of Malayan Tennis,” BiblioAsia 19, no. 1, 2023.

T.B.G., “Physical Religion,” Straits Chinese Magazine: A Quarterly Journal of Oriental and Occidental Culture 1, no. 1 (March 1897): 9. (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RRARE 959.5 STR)

Song Ong Siang, One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984), 247. (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RSING 959.57 SON-[HIS])

Nick Aplin, Sport in Singapore: The Colonial Legacy (Singapore : Straits Times Press, 2019). (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RSING 796.095957 APL)

This episode of BiblioAsia Podcast was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Gibson Analytics. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Abhishek for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.