Southeast Asian Studies, Vol.
, No. , June
Records and Voices of Social History: The Case of the Great Depression in Singapore
LD= Kah Seng
Abstract This paper discusses the roles of written and oral records in the writing of the social history of Singapore. It takes the case of the early s Great Depression, which has hitherto been treated as a subject of economic history, written from the colonial records. This paper examines how using in conjunction colonial, newspaper, coroner, biographical, and oral records provides a window into the social history of the slump, enabling fresh perspectives into how people were affected by the crisis and how they sought to negotiate it. While a global economic slump might be thought to have severe effects on the residents of a colonial city reliant on entrepot trade, evidence drawn from the wider range of sources suggests that the slump’s impact was not uniformly harsh and that people in Singapore were not hapless victims. Many of them actively negotiated the Depression’s worst effects, utilising family and kinship ties which had developed among the island’s migrant communities. Keywords: Singapore history, Great Depression, social history, oral records, coroner’s records
The writing of social history in Singapore has undergone considerable development in recent years. Much published social history between the popular history. s and the present was influenced by the politics of nation-building and belonged to the realm of public and Such works, which tended to focus on the island-state’s migrant communities, their customs and associations, and the places where they stayed, were conceived typically in ethnic and subethnic terms and framed within the matrix of the multiracialism ethos of the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) government [see Archives and oral history Department ; Siddique and Shotam-Go ; Tang ]. While fleshing out the lives of ordinary people vividly in photographs and oral history interviews, these histories focussed not on the people per se but their supposed “entrepreneurial spirit, values and adaptability” [Singapore an important adjunct to nation-building:
The Essay on The History of the Aztec People of Central America
Location: The South Central region of present-day Mexico was once the home of the Aztec. They lived in the highlands of Mesoamerica in an area of basins separated by eroded volcanic peaks and dissected mountain ranges.History: The Aztecs came from the remote north, probably around the early 13th century. They were migratory at first, wandering around the Mexican Valley struggling to survive. They ...
The time period since . . . was what made the country and its people today. And this would
:
], which were held to be
I am grateful to Erik Holmberg, Hong Lysa, Albert Lau, and Jim Warren for their comments on drafts of this article. ** Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Murdoch WA , Australia e-mail: K.Loh murdoch.edu.au 31
*
be what will shape its future and furnish the ingredients of a national identity [Rajaratnam ].
)
Only in the late
s did a more sophisticated social history emerge that attempted a; b] provided the impetus with two and on Chinese
to examine the communities of Singapore on their own terms and independently of the nation-building programme. James Warren [ bold, striking works of “people’s history” and Japanese prostitutes in . on rickshaw pullers in
Both books represented an important advance in
focussing on occupational group and gender rather than ethnicity and showing a critical view of the colonial system. Warren also introduced an exciting new source for the history of the “underclass”: coroner’s records. Katherine Yeo’s M. A. thesis [ ] on hawkers also emphasised occupational group and utilised the coroner’s records and police court notebooks. The endeavour to write history from below continued with The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes, Plantation Workers, which sought to “reconstruct the everyday lives of the people” in Malaya and Singapore [Rimmer and Allen : ], and Stephen Dobbs’ book [ ] on the Singapore River, which drew upon the interviews of lightermen operating on the river. The Second World War, an important episode in Singapore’s political and military history, has also come under the lens of social history. Paul Kratoska’s social and economic history of the Japanese : ], while the late Henry Frei [ ] retraced Occupation in Malaya and Singapore examined the event from a Malayan perspective by drawing from official and oral records [ the Malayan campaign from the perspective of the Japanese attackers, utilising the memoirs and oral recollections of six Japanese soldiers.
The Research paper on History Of Social Psychology
Introduction “What social psychology has given to an understanding of human nature is the discovery that forces larger than ourselves determine our mental life and our actions – chief among these forces [is] the power of the social situation” ― Mahrzarin Banaji The Banaji quote is the perfect description of social psychology and the intellectual forces behind the journey of its discovery. ...
Around the same time, social history also began to attract scholars from other disciplines at the National University of Singapore. The field of historical geography has engaged human geographers such as Lily Kong, Victor Savage and Brenda Yeoh [Kong and Savage : ; also Yeoh and Kong ]. Noting that space has been portrayed merely as a “backdrop” in most historical narratives of Singapore, Yeoh argued that to “reclaim ordinary people’s historical trajectories through their own experiences, it also becomes necessary to reconstruct their spatial mappings through their own eyes” [ a: ]. Yeoh’s book on the efforts, both violent and subtle, of the Chinese community in contesting space in colonial Singapore, is an important work in showing the intimate world-view of the Chinese, as shaped by their traditional culture and religion [ b: ]. Due to the scarcity of materials on ordinary people, Yeoh utilised a critical ]. Sociologists have also turned to reading of colonial and municipal records [ibid.:
social history as a way of critically re-evaluating Singapore’s present. Chua Beng Huat has studied the history of housing to discern the politics of control in the PAP’s public housing programme [Yee and Chua : , ; also Chua ]. The multi-
S. Rajaratnam was then Singapore’s Senior Minister. 32
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History
disciplinary approach can also be seen in the
The Essay on Recent Singapore History
Singapore, since it attained its independence on June 3, 1959, has been a thriving, trading nation. It had been controlled by the British, but after negotiations, was relinquished to self-autonomy with the understanding that it would remain a republic. Since then, it has reaffirmed its non-Communist stance and continued with progressive economic policies to the delight of the free world. ...
coffee-table book on social and cultural
change in Singapore, Past Times: A Social History of Singapore. Its reader-friendly style with short, photograph-laced chapters belies its theoretical sophistication. Contributors to the book were told to “write a think piece with sociological and anthropological insights, and interweave it with archival photographs.” The editors stated that:
[w]e do not wish to reify the past but by drawing on the sociological imagination and the anthropological vision, to present it as a living culture, always mindful of its inherent contradictions and tensions. [Chan and Tong : , ]
The recent social history, consequently, is marked by a diversity of methodologies and sources. This essay examines how the experiences of ordinary people might be better understood by examining sources on life in Singapore during the Great Depression. The paper is admittedly based on a single case study and how far its conclusions are generalisable is a matter of debate. However the challenge of writing about how ordinary people coped with change and crisis applies to many areas of Singapore’s history. The paper is also a preliminary discussion: due to the time constraints imposed on the research on which this paper is based, I have not been able to look at Chinese-language sources, or conduct interviews with people of Chinese-speaking backgrounds. tion in [Vlieland : ].
)
These
materials are important, for the Chinese made up three-quarters of Singapore’s populaThis paper is concerned with two important questions in social history: what was the slump’s impact on ordinary people, and how did they endeavour to negotiate it ? It will argue that using different sources in combination helps us to understand the slump’s impact more fully than merely using one type of source alone. Colonial records, an indispensable resource in social history, are invaluable in charting the impersonal macroeconomic developments during the slump, which Bernard Bailyn called the “latent events that is, events that contemporaries were not fully or clearly aware of” [ : ]. On the other hand, oral, autobiographical, newspaper, and coroner’s records, which are still under-utilised in much local history, provide a window into the “inside” of the past [Collingwood : ]. They enable us to recreate the past as it was experienced by ordinary people and to understand how they attempted to negotiate change and crisis.
The Essay on Films As Primary Sources For History
Films as primary sources for history If a picture is worth a thousand words than how much is a moving picture, or movie, worth In the study of history, the usage of movies as primary sources is controversial. Motion pictures are more commonly well-known as sources and created for entertainment purposes. Film is a creation of a reality. This has some valuable resources for the study of history in ...
I have, however, conducted interviews in Mandarin and Hokkien with former leprosy patients for a paper on the history of leprosy in Singapore. The paper, which is partly based on the experiences of those with leprosy, is in preparation; “They Called Us Thai-ko: Leprosy Sufferers in Singapore, .” 33
Colonial Records
Hitherto, the Depression has been studied within the confines of economic history, primary of which is the heavy reliance of Singapore’s economy in the late s on entrepot trade. The trade involved the collection of primary commodities from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies for export to the West, such as rubber (the most important item of trade), tin, tropical produce, and petroleum, and the import of Western manufactures and consumer goods to be distributed regionally [see Wong “Roaring Twenties” in the United States ever, the Wall Street crash in late October of consumer goods such as automobiles and radios ; Huff ]. The a period of boom marked by overproduction lifted Singapore’s economy. How, which precipitated the Depression, led to
Table
Rubber Prices and Exports in Singapore,
Price cents/pound Price change Vol. exports ’ tons Volume change Value exports $m
Source: Compiled from SSAR [ 34
: Vols.
,
].
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History Table Foreign Trade in Singapore,
Value of foreign trade $m Source: Compiled from SSAR [ : Vols. , ].
a heavy contraction of demand for the primary commodities and severe, protracted falls in their prices. Worst affected was rubber, which was badly hit by the downsizing of the American automobile industry (see Table ).
Both smallholders and the European estates in Malaya and the Dutch Indies continued to tap rubber despite the low prices, the former to make up for dwindling incomes, the latter to keep unit costs down [Dunlop Rubber ; Drabble : ]. This, in turn, further depressed rubber prices and and (see Table ).
caused a massive plunge in Singapore’s trade between late
Only when commodity prices were substantially lifted by government intervention to curb production, improved business confidence and smallholders shifting from cash crops to subsistence agriculture, did the vicious cycle of overproduction and price collapses come to a halt. In , the Governor of the Straits Settlements, Cecil Clementi, :B ]. declared that “the worst is now over, so far as we are concerned, and I pray that we may soon be once more in smooth waters” [SSLCP In this framework, as might be apparent from the preceding discussion, colonial records are the chief source of information. On the basis of the evidence on trade, business and employment, the customary view has been that early “a depressing place for all communities” [Turnbull Huff [ : s Singapore was ]. A recent study by W. G.
The Term Paper on Crime and Individual Choice
Crime is a common phenomenon. Huge investments of any government go towards the containment and apprehension of crime offenders. The more crime acquires various forms and becomes prevalent, the more studies and theories are brought out to analyze the causes and motivations. A look at Australia in the recent past indicates public outcry over increased incidences of crime, although incidences of ...
], an economic historian, utilised official records and assessed the Depression
using the concept of “entitlements” (factors that help to cushion economic shocks).
Huff’s detailed paper concludes that people in Singapore, with little savings and no land ownership, possessed few entitlements and were badly struck by the slump. This paper, on the other hand, argues that its net impact must be measured by looking at both economic and social aspects of life, including colonial policy, the macroeconomic forces and how people responded to the crisis within their social circles. The records of the British government of the Straits Settlements represent the most readily-available source for social history. The amount and scope of information in the colonial records is impressive. The Straits Settlements annual departmental series on health, wages, immigration, cost of living, and crime, its monthly review of Chinese affairs, the annual reports of the Singapore Municipality, the minutes of the Legislative Council proceedings, special reports commissioned by the government on retrenchment, hawking, education, and various matters of trade, and the broad range of matters pertinent to life in the early Malayan census cover a s. Colonial records, as Albert Lau
noted, are indispensable for many areas of Singapore’s history, particularly since the majority of people were illiterate and often left behind no written records of their own [ : ]. In the Census of British Malaya, only of Singapore’s population
35
were literate in a language, and for literacy in English, only the Malays, and of the Indians [Vlieland b: : ]. ,
of the Chinese,
of
]. James Warren in
Rickshaw Coolie observed that, despite their biases, there is “buried in the colonial sources a wealth of information on the rickshawmen” [ The colonial records contain official statistics which are valuable in both charting and explaining crucial developments at the societal level. On the one hand, statistics pertaining to trade, employment and wages naturally highlight the distressful side of life. As Table and Chinese and Chinese between and . However colonial records also contain other quantitative evidence which, by measuring the mean, allow us to construct indices on the quality of life, such as mortality and crime. During the Depression, Singapore’s mortality figures were particularly high in , but fell significantly in the next three years before rising again in on non-seizable and seizable crime
The Term Paper on Singapore
1 (a) This cartoon was drawn to show that medisave, medifund and medishield is insufficient in Singapore. It is shown in the picture that a broken boat representing healthcare in Singapore was overload with things such as the increase of hospitalization cost, limited use of medisave and the increase in GST with 7% and three workers which reprint medisave, medifund and medishield that claims that ...
Table
)
shows, the wages of Indian estate workers (the de facto standard wage for for males and and , for females between of the of the . The Labour Department’s records also reveal heavy retrenchment, of the Javanese, of the Indians, and among labourers in mercantile firms, and , and of Indians and
labourers in Singapore) fell most heavily, by affecting, among estate workers between
of the Javanese between
the worst period of the Depression and ).
Statistics
, when the slump was ending (see Tables
show a similar trend, with little evidence of the
Wages of Indian Labourers in Singapore, cents per day
Male estate workers Female estate workers Government employees Miscellaneous employees
*
Source: Compiled from Labour Department, SSADR [ * The lower figure denotes wages for morning work. Table
].
Mortality and Reports of Crime in Singapore,
Death rate per thousand Non-seizable crime Seizable crime Source: Compiled from Registration of Birth and Deaths, SSADR [ ]. Organisation and the Administration of the Straits Settlements Police, SSADR [ ].
Non-seizable crime refers to minor punishable offences such as street indiscipline, while seizable crime refers to more serious offences such as murder and robbery. 36
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History Table Foreign Trade, Mortality, and Reports of Crime Indices in Singapore,
Value of foreign trade Death rate Non-seizable crime Seizable crime
Sources: See the sources of Table , , .
Depression driving impoverished people to crimes of material want or passion [SSP . Indeed the cost of living and the mortality and crime rates gradually rose from
:
]. The mortality and crime figures suggest that life was tolerable for most people after as the economy recovered, contributing to the outbreak of strikes against the high cost of living and low wages in Malaya and Singapore in for it. From August [Yeo ]. Besides assessing the quality of life, colonial records also offer a partial explanation , the British implemented and in some cases assisted mass emigration and repatriation of unemployed Indians and decrepit and derelict Chinese from Singapore to China and India, as the settlement was facing serious overcrowding due to the “invasion” of unemployed Chinese from the Malay peninsula [SSLCP family and social support in Singapore. From October :B ]. This led to the departure of many foreign-born to their home countries who lacked , the administration also set immigration quotas, preventing unskilled workers from entering and easing the problem of unemployment. These policies are duly covered in the Straits Settlements Legislative Council Proceedings and have been studied by Paul Kratoska and W. G. Huff, who
37
Table
Adult Male Chinese Arrivals in the Straits Settlements,
Number of arrivals Source: Compiled from SSAR : Vols. , .
Table
Cost of Living Index in Singapore,
Asian Eurasian European Source: Compiled from Labour Wages and Cost of Living, SSBB [ ].
Table
Real Wages Index for Male Indian Labourers in Singapore,
Municipal Estate Rubber factory Manufacturing Source: Compiled from Labour Wages and Cost of Living, SSBB .
concluded that “only mass emigration prevented the depression from turning into a disaster” [Huff (see Table : ; also Kratoska ]. The effect of the immigration policies was and to significantly reduce the number of male adult Chinese arrivals between mortality and crime rates fell between attributed the fall of the death rate in unfits” [HD : and (see Table
).
Following the outflow of unemployables, particularly the foreign-born, the ).
An official report to the “weeding” of “most of the decrepits and
D]. From a larger perspective, the mass emigration, as Paul Kratoska
noted, had the positive effect of making Malaya more autonomous and less dependent on foreign labour supply; it prompted the British government to accept that “Malaya should abandon the practise of importing labour and instead develop permanently domiciled Indian and Chinese workforces” [Kratoska substantially from labourers. Table : ]. ).
The second factor affecting life during the slump was the cost of living, which fell and helped ease the problem of unemployment (see Table The colonial records allow us to calculate real wages for different groups of Indian shows that while estate and rubber factory workers suffered a loss in purchasing power, labourers employed in the Municipality and manufacturing industries enjoyed an increase in real wages. Although the statistics are available only for Indian labourers, the positive effects of the low cost of living for other ethnic and employment groups can be seen in other sources like newspapers, oral records and autobiographies.
38
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History
Gwee Peng Kwee, a rubber broker, remembered because “[t]hings were cheap in those days,” “in spite of that slump, although we felt the pinch, we managed to carry on” [OHI : ]. Government employees, who formed of the active workforce in a pair, suits at $ , and enjoyed an increase in real wages. Soh Wah Seng, a civil servant on a stable salary, recalled the affordability of leather shoes from England at $ silk socks at cents a pair [OHI ].
Recent scholarship on the Depression’s impact on Southeast Asia has substantiated the usefulness of the official record. A group of economic historians led by Ian Brown have carefully studied statistics on commodity prices, trade, income, taxes, food consumption, crime, and infant and adult mortality in the official records to discern the slump’s impact on the region’s cities and rural areas. On the basis of these studies, they have overturned the old perception that the crisis was a disaster for all. Brown has argued that “the economic crisis of the early appears to have had a more severe impact” [ s may have brought only a relatively : ]. Brown [ ] found that modest deterioration in material conditions, even in those districts where the depression Burmese farmers spent increasing portions of their incomes on imported cotton piecegoods during the Depression, while Daniel Doeppers [ on households in different regions. Nevertheless colonial records can also err, confuse or are incomplete. A strength of official records is customarily seen to be impartiality, ensured by in-built checks within the administrative apparatus. Such rigour, however, might be less than usually supposed amid the Depression, an economic crisis which in its severity had no precedent. The government’s qualitative evaluations of the slump’s impact were sometimes hazardous and subsequently proven to the contrary. The health authorities, for instance, having claimed in that the rise in mortality that year was due to the lower standard of living Vol. ( ): ], noted apologetically the lower death : ]. In addition, not all relevant induced by the slump [SSAR ], by examining the payment of the cedula (the head tax) in the Philippines, surmised that the slump had a varied impact
rate the following year as “remarkable” [MR crisis, the Colonial Secretary stated in July
information can be found in the colonial records. Not anticipating the severity of the that “to collect detailed statistics . . . is not : B ]. As noted, the necessary: the time for that has not yet arrived” [SSLCP Javanese labourers [LD June and September ]. [SSLCP
statistics on wages and employment cover only Indian and to some extent Chinese and Sometimes the information is piecemeal. The auChinese shops closed down in Singapore between : B ], but how significant this number was is thorities, for instance, recorded that
difficult to say without a quantitative survey of business before the Depression. The greatest problem with colonial records, however, lies in the danger of writing what Anthony Milner called “colonial records history.” Milner warned of a “circular process at work” in relying on colonial records, when the “disputes, preoccupations and even the system of classification encountered in these records set the agenda for research
39
and often determine the structure of the historical account itself” [ are indispensable to the writing of history of the colonial period [ :
:
]. Yeo Kim ]. While this is
Wah has counterpoised that colonial records, if “critically read, analysed and assessed,” generally sensible, my work suggests that the limits of colonial records are also the limits of their authors’ interests and preoccupations. During the crisis, the British were chiefly concerned with Singapore’s economic mainstay international trade. They kept systematic information on the local economy only occasionally, such as when it was feared that the police campaign to persecute itinerant hawkers would deprive the poor of their livelihood and force them into crime; a commission was subsequently appointed to investigate the problem of itinerant hawkers [HQ ]. Yet the local economy was an important source of temporary, non-salaried employment for the jobless, a study of which will show how ordinary people responded to the Depression. This underscores a fundamental failing of the colonial records: from their vantage point as alien rulers, the authorities generally viewed their Asian subjects as passive non-entities. The British officials believed that ordinary people “simply had to tighten up their belts” during the Depression [HD : -D], and the “charity of friends” was grossly : B ]. However Asian migrant inadequate to help them tide the crisis [SSLCP
communities in Singapore, particularly the Chinese, had a notable tradition of mutual help based on family and kinship ties. Mutual help was important at the individual level, allowing sinkehs (newly-arrived immigrants) to find work through local contacts, typically a family member or fellow villager. Chew Choo Keng, who arrived in Singapore a penniless migrant in , recalled that “[a]s soon as I stepped out of the Immigration Office, I was received and taken away by a relative to the first floor of a house in Jalan Besar which he rented.” The relative was a maternal uncle from his home village in China and a nephew of the prominent businessman Tan Kah Kee, who, based on the uncle’s recommendation, gave Chew a job at his Khiam Aik biscuit factory [Chan and Chiang : ]. As records “from above,” the colonial records stumble at the individual level of life. The revisionist literature on the Depression in Southeast Asia has “stressed the sharp responsiveness of the Southeast Asian cultivator to rapidly expanding market opportunities” [Brown : ]. Brown has, for instance, observed that many Burmese peasants increased rice production during the slump, and successfully resisted tax and rent payments to the government and loan payments to moneylenders and banks [ibid.: ; also Brown ]. These claims are sound and based on statistics in the colonial records. But what if no such statistics exist, if the authors of the records did not think them relevant to compile ? We need to go beyond inferring about life at the individual level from the statistics, to examine directly the non-official sources which contain the perspectives of people who lived and struggled through the crisis. This allows us to recreate life at the individual level with a depth of detail not usually possible in the colonial records.
40
There are four types of records which contain ordinary people’s
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History
perspectives, defined by the nature of the source and the profile of the author: letters to the press, coroner’s inquests, biographical accounts, and oral records.
Newspaper Correspondence
Like colonial records, newspapers are an easily-accessible source of information for social history. Of much value are the letters to the press, which are often, although not always, motivated by an unhappiness with the existing state of affairs. The Malayan Tribune (MT) represented the views of the English-educated Asian elite in Singapore. closely associated with the British regime, and in the early “The People’s Paper: Independent and Progressive” [MT MT’s letters in the early s. . . The Tribune was a better gauge of public sentiment than the Straits Times (ST), which was s, it was hailing itself as : ]. Public distress
with various aspects of life during the slump was a major thread running through the Some of this discontent corroborates what is noted in the colonial records, such as complaints over retrenchment, reduction of salaries and the difficulty of finding employment. Remarks such as “educated Europeans and Eurasians, shabbily dressed[,] . . . . . hanging around eating-houses and coffee-shops, and walking about the streets for unemployment and unable to find it” reflect the severity of the Depression [MT : ]. Letters lamenting the high cost of rent, school fees and transport provide useful
reminders that although quantitative evidence calculate the typical, they do not apply to every socio-economic group. Some people were caught on the wrong side of the cost of living index, such as the “very poor people” staying in the Singapore Improvement Trust’s two-room houses at Henderson Road, where the monthly rent was raised from $ to $ in [MT . . : ]. However newspaper correspondence also offer fresh perspectives. They can disclose the mentality of ordinary people caught in a slump. Although some letters commented how some able-bodied unemployed men who missed the emigration net were turning to begging, others observed that many showed a remarkable resilience to their plight. “A silent sufferer”, for instance, a family man with five children, wrote: “We want any job, Sir, if we can get one at a living salary” [MT happier times” [MT . . : ]. . . : ]. Indeed many white-collar workers during the slump were reportedly willing to take on jobs “considered de classe in The letters to the press also show that the struggle to find employment in an unfavourable job market drove wedges between various sections of the public. Many people viewed other social groups with distrust, such as unemployed men who had misgivings towards working women and accused them of a vain pursuit of jewellery, luxury and finery [MT . . : ]. Such correspondence revealed an important if , the
41
irrational distinction between Self and Other during the slump. Some locally-born Asians had a similar complaint against Europeans and foreign-born Asians. In June
dismissal of over a hundred Malay and Chinese employees, many with families to support, from Keppel Harbour led one individual to charge the Harbour Board of retaining Europeans on “fat pensions” [MT . . . : . ]. Others wrote angrily that “[m] : ]. ost of the people employed appear to be from India and Ceylon, while our educated Straits-born young men are unemployed” [MT The MT also contained considerable evidence that, despite the generally falling cost of living, families with multiple dependents suffered during the Depression. A father of three, for instance, found the fare of cents for a two-way trip from Serangoon village . . : ]. The burden of supporting children, where the father had (north-east of town) to the city prohibitive [MT
a large family can also be seen in the case of a family of
passed away, the oldest child, a fresh school graduate and the family’s sole breadwinner, had no luck finding a clerical position, and the family relied on a $ -monthly allowance provided by the Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund [MT . . : ]. Nonetheless the researcher ought to be mindful of the nature of the source. Because of the overwhelmingly critical nature of newspaper correspondence, the other side of family and social ties when they enabled people to cope with the Depression, is often difficult to uncover. Rare is the occasion when a salesman with a large family, whose youngest son had died from illness, wrote to the MT, thanking the child’s principal for a gift of $ to pay for the funeral expenses [MT . . : ]. It must also not be . The forgotten that both the English and vernacular newspapers are the domain of the literate, who, as already noted, constituted less than a third of Singapore’s population in minority in s Singapore. MT’s letters were the expressions of English-educated, middle-class Asians, a small Not surprisingly the paper focussed on the plight of of the active work , ]. businessmen, clerks, Europeans, and Eurasians, touching only on the lower-income group as part of the general evil of unemployment. Clerks formed merely force in (although the percentage was reduced by heavy retrenchment), while , hawkers , and rickshaw pullers [Vlieland :
labourers, including general coolies, lightermen and dock labourers, made up domestic servants
Coroner’s Records
To delve into the lives of the lower-income members of society, the Coroner’s Inquests and Inquiries, used first by James Warren in his studies of rickshaw pullers, are useful. Warren is quite right to say that the records represented the “living testimony of Chinese people who did not know how to express themselves in print and who did not have access to people in power” [ : ]. Although the subjects in the coroner’s records used in my of the cases belong to the lower-income research included businessmen and clerks,
group, mostly labourers, unskilled workers or the unemployed. The importance of the coroner’s records lies in the light they throw on life at the
42
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History
individual life.
While they are a category of the colonial records, as the coroner
interrogated the deceased’s family, friends and business and work associates to ascertain the cause of death, the inquests gathered a great store of valuable information on the “demographic, social and economic opportunities and hazards” which shaped life in colonial Singapore [ibid.: ]. I found in the records indicators such as age and health, These sources provide insights into the occupation and income level, and one’s relations with family, kin and friends to be particularly significant during the slump. connection between economic conditions and suicide, which reflects the worst consequences of the crisis, and less frequently between economic conditions and crime. The coroner’s records help to explain why, in a situation characterised by mass unemployment, mass emigration and a reduced cost of living, life broke down at the individual level in certain cases. The information which enriches our understanding of the slump’s impact, present in many cases of suicide, was the strain or collapse of family bonds prior to the suicide. population in People with young dependents (who formed of the ) to care for often suffered the heaviest burden. An example was the , when rubber prices were plummeting. One : ].
case of Ong Kok, a kindly village headman who gambled badly on a loan from a chettiar to purchase a plot of rubber land in night, in a fit of madness, he killed his wife, attacked his seven young children, two of whom survived, and set his house on fire before slitting his own throat [SCII Despair could also become unbearable when individuals turned away from the family, choosing to keep their inner torment to themselves, such as Narain Singh, a watchman who supported his love of drink by lending money. When he cut his throat in the cause of his suicide: Narain’s debtors had gone bankrupt, and he owed $ man, a big sum in those times [SCII : , it was to another from the promisory notes and bankruptcy documents in his room that his family found ]. The coroner’s records show that familial
obligations could also become unbearable burdens amid poor economic circumstances. Foo Ah Hai, an unemployed coffee-maker, was berated by his father in China for having “forgotten your responsibility in the family”, since while “[y]our elder brother Liam remits home every two months; whereas you for half a year I have not even heard from you and you did not even care to inquire about us.” After receiving the message, Foo jumped to his death from a hotel window [SCII : ]. Just as There is, however, a danger in over-relying on the coroner’s records.
newspapers present the view of the literate who had cause in life to complain, the coroner’s records are essentially a collective biography of poor people who found life too difficult to continue. Based on cases of suicides of rickshaw pullers, Warren ventured that the Depression revealed “the dark side of urbanisation in Singapore” and that families of rickshaw pullers in the early twentieth century were “elemental in structure, small-scale in size, low in status, and therefore weak” [ : b: ]. There is some truth behind criticisms that Warren has painted an excessively “grim picture” of the poor [Lian ], and reduced them to “helpless victims of circumstances, with little wherewithal
43
to understand their own situation” [Hong
:
]. It is natural that, in the death While the
records of the poor, the evidence refers to the breakdown of their lives.
coroner’s records highlight the collapse of family ties during the slump, this is largely due to the nature of the source. To achieve a balanced view, we need sources which reveal more positive experiences.
Autobiographies and Biographies
Insights into the more positive side of life can be found in two types of sources by people who lived through the difficult times of the past. publications in my research. discussed later. The first is autobiographies and s I used such biographies, the number of which has been growing since the
The second type includes oral records, which will be
There are admittedly problems in using autobiographies and biobusinessmen, professionals, public officials, and community : ]. : ].
graphies. The first is of representation: the subjects, like the contributors to the press, usually belong to the elite leaders. It has been noted that “leadership,” both political and business, has preoccupied most biographies of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia [Lim There is also the issue of intent; A. J. P. Taylor commented that “[w]ritten memoirs are a form of oral history set down to mislead historians” [Cited in Thompson To some extent, autobiographies and biographies (insofar as the biographer was influenced by the subject) are a way for their authors to project their interpretations of the past. The author’s motivation might be personal. Rajabali Jumabhoy, an Indian trader, stated in the preface to his autobiography [ ] that “[m]y main purpose in writing this personal story is to provide a guide to my descendents, so that they may follow in my footsteps.” More seriously, autobiographies can also be influenced by political or ideological considerations: as they mirror Singapore’s “success story,” they have been seen to have an important relevance to its national history. For instance, Tommy Koh, a public official, enthused about how Victor Seah’s life, as “the story of a boy from a poor family who fulfilled Singapore’s dream,” “is also the story of Singapore” and the “Singapore miracle” [Seah : , ]. Consequently, written by those who were successful in with titles like Destined to Survive [Yeo ] portray an elitist and overly triumphantist life, it is plausible that certain accounts and Memories of a Golden Era [Koh n.d.] perspective of history. Despite these difficulties, autobiographies, like the coroner’s records, can provide insights into the collective biography of a specific, while not majority, section of the population. They pertain plausibly to an aspect of the past, just as newspaper correspondence and the coroner’s records refer to other facets. Autobiographies are more plausibly reliable than biographies because they are “personal narratives” rather than that of the biographer: “[s]ince the narrator describes his own life as he sees it and in his own terms,
44
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History
they provide the most intimate view of the individual’s life and times and form primary sources of history” [Lim : ]. One should, for instance, treat Aw Boon Haw’s biography more carefully: although it shows the ability of the “Tiger Balm King” to succeed in business during the Depression, the biographer suspiciously “recreated” conversations between Haw and his family word for word [King : ]. Most of the accounts suggest that life during the Depression was far from bleak, with one major exception. The business empire of Tan Kah Kee, Singapore’s most successful businessman in the s, folded in due to the low prices of rubber [Tan : ]. Elsewhere, there is a strong sense of people actively rising above the circumstances. Rajabali Jumabhoy was troubled by debts but found inner strength from the Jainist religion which became his “soul force” : to set aside thoughts of despair and confront ].
)
his financial problems [Jumabhoy during the early
Some enterprising individuals did well
s. Lien Ying Chow, owner of the modest Wah Hin, which sold : : ], while Yeo Tiam Siew reaped healthy profits from his ]. The narratives also tell us the reasons why these business acumen and networks, a more stable demand
foodstuffs to the military, was able to sustain his business with “good service” and “competitive prices” [Lien English-educated [Yeo English-Chinese telephone directory, which was popular with Chinese who were not businessmen did relatively well
in the local economy, which was more insulated from the world slump, and lower overheads owing to the smaller size of the businesses. This suggests that autobiographies and biographies have an explanatory role in social history at the individual level of life. This is true too of non-business accounts and is important in qualifying the views afforded by newspapers and coroner’s records. At the individual level, we also find evidence of friends, kin and particularly the family helping ordinary people to negotiate the trials of the slump. Life in the early s was often a daunting but enriching experience for many women and young people bearing the responsibility of finding work to support their families. T. C. Koh, who as a year-old began work as a clerk at the Land Office in , remembered his “fear and ].
trembling” as he undertook the management of a team of five adults and his handling of “the issue of rubber coupons worth millions of dollars” [Koh n.d.: Used in conjunction with other sources, biographical accounts also suggest significant changes in the lives of women during the Depression, so offering fresh perspectives into an oft-neglected area of Singapore history. Tan Liok Ee has used biographies and oral history in conjunction with official censuses to chart important changes affecting Chinese women in Malaya and Singapore in the s, such as the increased numbers of a: ; b: ]. local-born women and their changing marriage patterns, greater involvement in work and enhanced literacy and educational opportunities [
Jumabhoy’s autobiography was based on his oral history interview by the Oral History Centre in . 45
During the Depression, biographies, newspapers and official reports point to a period of social change for females. The Malayan Tribune reported that many women, who had typically been home-makers or had merely worked to supplement the family’s income prior to the slump, took on new roles as breadwinners when their husbands, fathers or brothers lost their jobs [MT . . : ]. A Chinese newspaper observed that saleswo: ]. Other women sewed, men were working in shops and female barbers were “commanding fair wages” in cities in Malaya, including Singapore [Cited in MRCA August early s. , through the efforts of his mother, who started to sell mended clothes, washed laundry, did domestic work, and worked in factories during the In his biography, Lee Khoon Choy recalled how his family overcame the passing of his father, a coolie headman, in sarongs and jewellery and also worked as a mistress of ceremony for Peranakan weddings. This was despite the fact that, Lee recalled, “[s]he had never stepped out of the house during Father’s lifetime” [Lee : ]. Similarly, Elizabeth Choy, the eldest of six children in a middle-class family, had wanted to study at Raffles College, but had to work so that her siblings could study. She became a teacher at St. Margaret School where, despite lacking formal training as normal classes for teachers were suspended during the Depression, she gained a reputation for being able to handle difficult boys. Choy went on to become a principal and the first female member of the Singapore legislature in [Zhou : ]. Of course the question of representation remains: Koh, Lee and Choy were English-educated, and their families belonged to the middle-income group. The field of women’s history will require more substantial research, particularly in the area of oral history, to uncover the experiences of working-class women during the Depression.
Oral Records
The positive side of life can also be found, much more substantially, in the oral record. Social historians may expect more from oral records than autobiographies because, in recent years, there has been much enthusiasm about using oral records to write history from below, alternative histories, or to take the words of Paul Thompson, to “give history back to the people in their own words” [ Archives of Singapore. The : ]. This is, unfortunately, not true of the existing records on the Depression years, found at the Oral History Centre of the National records pertinent to the slump can be broken down by spoke English, while were Indians, with were businessmen or in the were Chinese, and language, ethnicity, occupation, and sex: of the interviewees, used Mandarin or a Chinese dialect; Eurasians, Peranakan, and self-employed, and
46
European (there were no Malays);
were white-collar workers in the middle-income group, females [Loh
blue-collar, lower-income group, while were male, with
were unemployed or of unknown occupation; ]. This shows the dominant voice among the
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History
records to be Chinese, male and fairly well-off Singapore’s economically-active population in
in other words, not as socially representof .
ative as we would have liked, particularly of women, and labourers, who made up
For the lives of coolies, rubber tappers and others in the lower-income group during the slump, I often had to rely on the words of their economically better-off contemporaries. This can be seen in the interview of Ng Lee Kar, a shop proprietor, who explained how the low prices of rice and vegetables allowed rubber tappers to support their families despite the reduction of their monthly incomes from $ : ]. Some interviews are “passably” of the lower-income group to $ [OHI some were poor
when young but went on to make good, such as Tang Choon Keng, the future founder of the departmental store CK Tang [ibid.: by persons truly poor and unskilled ]. There are only two first-person oral accounts both rickshaw pullers interviewed in the “Chinese : ].
Dialect Groups” series. One of them, Quek Mui Khia, recalled that he earned less during the Depression and supplemented his income by finding casual work [OHI due to the There are several reasons for the problem of representation. Part of the imbalance is interviews on business during the slump, drawn from the “Pioneers of Singapore” series; in other words, the imbalance might be topic-related. Moreover, while the voices of coolies are lacking, those of more modest profiles than in the autobiographies and newspapers are present, such as barbers, tailors, shop assistants, and clerks. Finally, with oral history, one has the advantage of conducting interviews with surviving members of the lower-income group. Another problem of oral history is that interviews, like autobiographies, are reflections, rather than records, of the past [Morrison : ]. Although even official memoranda and correspondence contain some reflection (and presumably, bias) before the experience is committed to paper, oral history reminiscences are more likely to be influenced by the interviewee’s experiences in the long stretch of time between the events of recollection and the occasion of the interview. This is particularly so for events which have been much publicised by the government or media, where the interviewee’s memory runs a greater risk of being distorted such that the purported recollections might be merely repetitions of publicised material on the event [Seldon and Pappworth : ]. This seems to have occurred in the recollections of the much-covered July race riots, which the PAP government has deemed important for the policy of multiracialism in Singapore [Low ]. Fortunately the Depression period has not received the same sort of emphasis from above. We might then have reason to believe that reminiscences of the “unique event,” which made a strong impression on the interviewee, are fairly reliable [Seldon and Pappworth business “was a little affected but not much” [OHI : : ]. ]. Indeed Fidahusein Tyebally, a humble rattan exporter, had to insist to a sceptical interviewer that his If the interviewee is reliable, the interviewer may not be so. Singapore’s oral history programme originated from the PAP (People’s Action Party) government’s concern about
47
the lack of rootedness among younger Singaporeans in the early
s. A sense of the :
“lessons of history” derived from oral history, the authorities believed, would provide younger Singaporeans with the cultural ballast to withstand future crises [Lee ]. In short, the interest in oral history was and remains politically-motivated. This has serious historiographical ramifications, because the interviewer structures the interviews and can shape them into narratives which flesh out the “lessons of history.” During the interview, as Hong Lysa warned,
a “default” ideology is automatically switched on and it is that of the status quo, which proceeds to decide on questions such as who qualifies as society’s pioneers, whose spirit and memories should be preserved as oral history. These tapes thus privilege the present over the future . . . and even the past. [Hong : , ]
Oral history then becomes synonymous with the success story of Singapore. This is despite the insistence of the officials and former officials of the Oral History Centre of the National Archives of Singapore, the country’s primary oral history institution, that “[t]here is no attempt on the part of the OHC to impose a unitary national history on the accounts of the participants” [Chew : , ]. This problem can be tackled in several ways. It is less of an issue in interviews which followed the life-story approach, in which interviewees could talk freely about their everyday experiences [Chew : ]. This was the case for many interviews bearing on the Depression. The problem can also be reduced if we are not looking for revelations on the macroeconomic or political aspects of history, which can be more easily reshaped to fit the state’s version of history. The main contribution of oral, autobiographical, newspaper, and coroner’s records is to allow the investigator to piece together experiences at the individual level and establish a collective biography of various socioeconomic groups. Indeed oral records have been useful in qualifying the official portrayal of the slump. The PAP government has conceived the event in public speeches and school textbooks as a disaster which caused serious retrenchment and hardship locally and which, on a global scale, led to economic nationalism and then World War [Singapore CPDD : ; Lee : ]. Oral history, however, suggests that many people were able to utilise family and kinship ties to cope with the Depression. This is corroborated by demographic trends in s Singapore derived from official statistics. The sex ratio among the Chinese, with the result that an important component of life in Singapore. In and young dependency burden (children under the old dependency burden (people aged
48
census reveals a more balanced of Singapore’s total population and , out of persons were between , although :
of its Chinese population were locally-born. The nuclear family increasingly became years of age, indicating a healthy proportion of people of working age. The ) was considerably heavy at and over) was light at [Vlieland
LD= Kah Seng : Records and Voices of Social History
,
,
]. The severity of the Depression’s impact at the individual life depends on
whether a family was assisted by members of working age or burdened by elderly or, more likely, young dependents. The oral records illustrate the role of mutual help in mediating the worst effects of the slump amid Singapore’s transition to a more settled society. Natesan Palanivelu, for instance, remembered how, six months after his arrival in Singapore, he finally obtained a job as a ticketing clerk with the Singapore Traction Company. Natesan attributed his success to having the right contacts him [OHI : a friend working at the company recommended ]. The importance of family ties is recounted by young Tay Meng
Hock, who was unable to find an accounting job for nearly a year despite his accounting degree. Although depressed, Tay laboured as a cutter in a pineapple factory to support his widowed mother, and also collected gate fees for football matches at the Anson Road stadium, earning cents daily. Tay’s sister washed clothes for $ a month, while his uneducated brother worked as a coolie [OHI observed, with the use of oral records,
[t]he history of the family shifts from the statistical analysis of birth intervals to focus on child, mother, and father in the household economy and the family life cycle. Both the focus, and the texture, of history are changed in a way that only oral evidence could bring about. [ : ]
]. The insight into mutual help at the As Paul Thompson
family and social levels is the strongest asset of oral records.
Conclusion
Collectively the sources discussed enable us to understand more fully the varied impact of the slump. On the one hand, colonial records, newspaper correspondence and the coroner’s records show that unemployment and reduced incomes caused stress and despair, social tension and, in the worst cases, suicide, particularly for those with many dependents to support or no one to turn to for help. On the other hand, a study of the colonial records shows that immigration policies and the falling cost of living at the societal level eased the distress for many people. This is corroborated by the satisfactory trends in mortality and crime rates after , found also in the colonial records. These developments had a positive effect on mutual help at the individual level. Oral records, autobiographies and biographies provide evidence of how family and kinship ties, important before the Depression as a means of doing business and finding employment, were equally vital during the crisis as a source of emotional and social support. Mutual support, arguably, represents the entitlements for the people of Singapore, particularly the domiciled and locally-born. Life for most people was more difficult than in the preceding years, but they did not despair but were able to turn to family, friends and kin to obtain jobs, or to procure some pocket money or temporary lodging and food. Oral and
49
biographical accounts allow the history of the slump to be written from both the economic and social perspectives. There are considerable problems in the sources discussed, such as authorial bias, the state’s influence on the evidence and the difficulty of capturing the experiences of the illiterate, lower-income group. However, to a large extent, they are outweighed by the usefulness of the sources in providing fresh perspectives into the past. Social historians seeking to study Singapore’s past on its own terms can also better manage these difficulties by utilising other sources not discussed here. The records of religious organisations show how spiritual solace helped people come to terms with the reality of crumbling material conditions. ) Also useful are the vernacular newspapers and sources of voluntary organisations such as Chinese huiguans, which highlight the concerns of the communities they represented. A recent work on social change among the Chinese in postwar Singapore has drawn usefully from Chinese newspapers and huiguan records to capture the perspectives and experiences of Chinese students, businessmen and workers [Liu and Wong ]. The police court notebooks, like the coroner’s records, are : ]. enlightening with regards to the lives of lower-income people, particularly on the occupational hazards they faced and their interactions with the police [Yeo into the lives and physical environments of the “underclass” [ : James Warren has suggested that a careful analysis of photographs can provide insights ]. Finally, for information on members of the lower-income group coping with change and crisis, perhaps the richest and most-untapped source for social history are the memories of the present-day survivors belonging to that group. Their reminiscences can provide rewarding perspectives into marginalised aspects of life in the past.
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