Homecoming the Musical: Honouring our Pioneers & Alumni

I had an invitation from Mrs Joyce Lee, head of National Education at Princess Elizabeth Primary School (PEPS) to attend a musical which the school was putting up in conjunction with SG50 and the theme was Honouring our Pioneers and Alumni.

I went with a bit of trepidation knowing that I probably wouldn't know anyone from the school after all these years. Joyce had invited me as I had let them use some of my blog material and photos for their celebration. My fears were unfounded as meeting Joyce, the Principal Mdm Moliah and the Vice Principal Kok Keong, really put me at ease immediately.

I realised there that the function was actually a gathering in celebration of the former PEPS educators and staff from the previous years, which I must frankly say that I don't know any of them as they were all after my years at PEES. The only one I could still recognise was Mrs Kannan, whom I had first met at their Diamond Jubilee Dinner a few years ago. Mrs Kannan never taught me but she had taught my siblings though.

The highlight of the evening was the musical put up by the staff and students. It was colourful and performed to an excellent level. You can see the tremendous effort put into the production. Kudos to all the staff and children.

Here are some photo highlights of the evening.

Guest of Honour was Mr Ramesh Kannan, Judicial Commissioner at the Supreme Court of Singapore.
Ramesh Kannan was an old boy of PEES and is also the son of former teacher Mrs Kannan.
Mdm Moliah, the current Principal, is showing Mr Kannan  the Alumni Wall, a new plaque created to acknowledge prominent alumni of the school.

A rousing standing ovation from guests and parents for the performers!

More football teams of the 60s.

Football was the one sport that galvanised our estate back in the 60s and 70s.
Blessed with a free and open regulation size football pitch within the estate, several teams were formed from ad-hoc to almost semi-pro status. In those days it was all amateur football but then our estate teams had managed to make a name for themselves winning national and constituency competitions.

Unfortunately for me, football was not in my blood and my only contacts with it was as an evening spectator when all the 'small boys' would gather around the field to watch and pick balls that roll to our sidelines.

But I can recall the Union Carbide team who had their regular training on the pitch after work.
My dad worked at Union Carbide and thus I came to meet people like Quah Kim Choon (one of the Quah family) and Mahat Ambu, Singapore's centre-forward at that time. These two big names were enough to draw crowds to watch their training.

I am at a loss with the number of teams formed or even the team names they call themselves by, so if anyone remembers, please drop me a line in the comments below.

Aswan, whose family lived beside the football pitch, had just sent me 2 photos of some teams that played back in the 60s.
In the first photo, I can identify Glen Hogan in the striped jersey. This would then date the photo to the mid-60s. If you can identify anyone else, please share with us here.

Thanks to Udin Anwar for identifying all the footballers.
This team was called the ASAS FOOTBALL CLUB.

Links to other articles about our estate footballers:

1. Photos from ex-residents (#21) - Estate footballers.

2. The Estate Footballers.

The lost hills around Hillview.

I was just sharing with a nostalgia group on Facebook on the topic of lost hills in the Singapore city. Right in the city long ago were some small hills named Mount Wallich, Mount Erskine and Mount Palmer. These hills are no longer there, having been levelled and the earth dumped into the sea for land reclamation.

While sharing my thoughts about those lost hills, I recalled recently the incredulous looks from some young school children who had invited me to take them on a tour of the Jurong and Bukit Batok areas as part of their National Education programme.

I had done four tours with four different primary schools and each time the kids all had that same unbelieving look. They just can't visualise the area being full of hills in the past!

Since Singapore's Independence, the routine construction method seemed to be 'level everything and begin anew'. The country now seems to be so flat and connected that a whole generation has now grown up not knowing the difficulties of moving around these hills to get from place to place.

When I was growing up in Princess Elizabeth Estate in the 1960s, the furthest we could go along Hillview Ave was just beyond today's Hillview Villas where the track ended. Beyond this was the hills into Jurong and the farm area. It was not only hilly but forested in many parts.

Recently I came across this photo on the net and remembered I had the same copy from my days working at the Church of St Mary of the Angels.

This is a picture of the hill top, where today the Church of St Mary of the Angels is located. It was taken in 1957. The man is Fr Virgil Mennon who built the original church.
Right at the back on the top right is Bukit Gombak. Gombak II was another hill that was part of Bukit Gombak. The private housing estates of Chu Lin and Jalan Remaja would be later built on this smaller hill.

What is interesting to note is that between Gombak II and the church foreground, the hills have all been levelled and today the flats of Bukit Batok New Town are built there. The hills are completely gone !

The old Jurong Road (9m.s.) ran across the picture just beyond the church boundary 10m below the clump of large trees in the valley.
It would be only later around 1960 that Hillview Avenue would be connected to Jurong Road here (somewhere to the right of the picture).

So when I was telling the children about how the soldiers during the war had to climb over hills after hills to escape the Japanese army advancing through Jurong, I usually can see bewildered faces.
They just can't imagine that it took hours to cross Bukit Gombak to get to Bukit Batok, today a 5 minute drive by car.

From this aerial photo map of the Bukit Batok battle area, you can actually see how hilly the area used to be; the lumps and bumps in the photo.

Bukit Gombak - The oldest region of Singapore Island.

There has been a lot of new developments around the old Hillview area these few years past. There's the upcoming Hillview MRT Station, the new HillV2 mall and of course more condominiums. Apart from the old primary school building, now reincarnated as the United Medicare Nursing Home, nothing structural was left of our old Princess Elizabeth Estate. The land where it once sat on is now flattened and levelled and presumably waiting for new developments.

But did you know that our old estate sat on land that is the oldest piece of rock found in Singapore geologically? Surprised? It sat on what is called the Gombak Norite which is between 250 to 500 million years old.

If you look up Google Earth and see the continental shelf of South East Asia, you can see a flat area out at sea running from China near Hainan Island going down south along the Vietnam coast, across to Borneo and then south to Java and then following the coast up along Sumatra toward Myanmar.

Eons ago, it was believed that this entire region (excluding the Philippines, Suluwesi and the islands west) was all above sea level and the region was called in geology/geography as Sundaland.

Over the ages, tectonic and other geological forces created the mountains and countries and the melting ice age water made the sea level rise within Sundaland.

Five hundred million years ago, in the area which was to become Singapore Island, a small bulge known as the Gombak Norite arose.
(Norite is a type of rock like granite and is also found at Ponggol end and on Pulau Ubin.)

Another 250 million years would pass again before geological forces pushed up what is now known as the Bukit Timah Granite. Together these 2 rock formations would form the backbone of what would become Singapore Island.

Surrounding this central core, alluvial soil accumulated over the millennia and eventually shaped the island. Alluvial soil meant it was deposited by rivers and it is believed by geologists that the rivers that created the land was what is now the Straits of Malacca and the Singapore Straits before the sea level rose as a result of the melting ice. Interesting theory.

Princess Elizabeth Estate was built directly over this dome of norite rock and many ex-residents will remember the block of flats that they used to live in was built mostly with little foundation as it sat on the bedrock itself.

Photo of the old SIT Princess Elizabeth Estate with Bukit Gombak at its rear.

Addendum: August 2015.

I found this Youtube presentation which is an excellent explanation of the Sundaland flooding.
This was extracted from the blog "Atlantis in Java Sea" by Dhani Irwanto.

Photos from ex-residents - Chew Wah Meng (#22)

Regular contributor Wah Meng has again sent me 2 wonderful old photos taken in the old estate.

The first is one of Wah Meng with his brothers as well as with some friends and neighbourhood kids. This was taken in front of the Sin Wah Hin Provision Shop (block 16 Prince Charles Rise)

 











The second is of the PEE Youth Group organised by the estate community centre.
The CC Organising Secretary is Mr Ronald Lim who is pictured in the front row extreme right.
Ronald Lim was also a PEE resident and lived at the 7-storey block ground floor (Blk 23).

Back Row: XX, Kim Huat, Szeto Fun Hio, XX, XX Johar Anuar, Balbir Singh, XX, XX, Aswan Suri, XX
.
Middle Row: Chok Kor (Sin Wah Hin eldest son), Jumain Bakri, Binhan, Wong Par (No13 Provision shop son), Ang Beng Kong - Ang Beng Huat's youngest brother(?), XX, Woo Eng Lee(with watch), John Sim, Cheng Wee, Ang Beng Huat .

Front Row: XX, Sulaiman, Yao Hung, XX, Kampong Boy, Johnny Tan, Ronald Lim

 The pictures were taken around 1957. This would make most of them in their 60s today.
Can you recognise anyone in the photos? I'd love to hear your comments.

Photos from ex-residents (#21) - Estate Footballers

Chew Wah Meng, who contributes regularly to my blog, has sent me another photo he found stashed among his hidden treasures.
This is of our estate footballers taken during a competition at Boys Town school field in 1978.

Chew Wah Meng is standing at the back row 4th from right. However, he is unable to identify most of the other players in the photo now. Perhaps, some of you can identify them. They would probably be in their fifties now and we would like to credit them even now for their representation of our football-crazy estate residents then.

Click on photo to view full size.

For a full story of how football crazy our estate was those days, you can read an earlier article about our footballers here.

Update: Thanks to friends and readers from the PEES facebook group, a good number of the footballers have been identified as follows:-

Standing Back Row (L-R)
1.
2. Zainnuddin Abdul Samad
3. Dino Pereira
4. James Yeo
5. Abdul Rahim
6. Chew Wah Meng
7. Buang Rawi
8. Roger Bulner
9. Mr Choo (PEES PE teacher)

Front Row (Squatting L-R)
1. Tan wee Long
2. Yang Lee ?
3. Arriffin Selamat
4. Nasir Hj Ali
5. Sithamby
6. Yunos
7. Salim
8.
9. Tan Wee Koon

Tien Tor Long

A documentary series was recently broadcasted on Channel New Asia called Days of Disaster.
Last Sunday, March 8, there was an episode titled Megafloods which covered the floods of Singapore over the past few decades.

I was asked to watch this episode by my blogger friend, ex-schooltecher Mr Yeo Hong Eng.
 Yeo Hong Eng is the author of The Little Red Cliff, a book in which he tells of his young days living in rural Bedok.  Hong Eng was featured in the episode in an interview about his days when Bedok was severely flooded in 1954.

During the show, a picture flashed on the screen for about one second but it immediately caught my eye! It had nothing to do with floods but it was shown as an example of industrialisation in Singapore.

The picture they used was the Union Carbide factory at Hillview Road.

Screen capture from Channel News Asia.

Many of the early residents of Princess Elizabeth Estate would be closely associated with this factory as many of them worked there. These include both my father and my mother who were once employed by Union Carbide. I have previously blogged about the factory in an earlier posting here.

People living in the vicinity of Hillview will know the factory as the Eveready battery factory or Tien Tor Long in the local dialect. Tien Tor means battery and Long is factory in Hokkien.

It was a landmark at Upper Bukit Timah in those days because of its tower which can be seen from far away.
At the top of the tower was a huge model of an Eveready Silver battery which was lit up at night and acted as a beacon. It could be seen from far off coming up or down Upper Bukit Timah Road.

In the picture you can spot Princess Elizabeth Estate in the background at the base of Bukit Gombak. The private estate beside it does not seem to have been built yet so I surmise that this picture was taken before 1965. If so, then the factory would have been known as National Carbon and not renamed as Union Carbide yet.

From the angle of this picture, I reckon that it was shot from the top of Fuyong Estate which lies across the main Upper Bukit Timah Road. Most probably from the slope where today the St Francis Methodist School lies.

It is one of the clearest picture I have yet seen of Tien Tor Long.

Photos from ex-resident & ex-PEES teacher (#20)

Through the kind effort of James Chan from Canada, I received a set of old PEES photos that belonged to Ms Rosy Fernando. Known by all as Teacher Rosy, she was also known as "Akela" by her cubs being the scoutmaster during her teaching days there. Rosy lived at Blk 21 which was just beside the school

I have not gotten full details of the photographs yet but am very eager to share it immediately.
I will update the details once I have them but am guessing that the photos were taken in the late 1960s.
Do look carefully and see if you can recognise anyone. I found two of my old senior schoolmates and some of the teachers and of course Mr George Catherasoo, the Principal.
You may even recognise some as your siblings or even parents when they attended PEES in those days.

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