Memories of Malaya - 7. Victoria Institution

My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with an account of the renowned Victoria Institution.

He writes:

So the years came and went without any major mishaps: no illness or injuries to the body. However when I was in Standard two I had to be away from school for six months to have my right eye taken out because there was a growth inside it. I felt a little disorientated when I came back but I soon caught up with the work.

This school where I was is called the Pasar Road School together with another school called the Batu Road School in another part of the town were the feeder schools of the grand secondary school called the Victoria Institution which had boys from form one to form five and later to form six, lower and upper. These three schools in the town of Kuala Lumpur were government schools which meant that they were built, maintained and had teachers all paid for by the colonial government administering Malaya and the boys had to pay only a token fee per month and one could be exempted if the school was satisfied that one’s family could not afford it and if a family had two boys in the school, one was automatically exempted. Eventually our family had 3 boys in the school but because father was a medical doctor we did not claim this privilege. Although Pasar Road School and Batu Road School were feeder schools it did not mean that all the boys were automatically fed into the V.I. Form one of the V.I. could take only 200 boys; the total number of boys in the class before Form one in both the feeder schools amounted to 400. So this meant that fifty percent had to be eliminated by means of a common entrance examination set for both schools. Those who did not make it to the V.I. had to find either jobs or join trade schools. The common entrance examination was a vigorous one but I was extremely happy to have been placed fourth in the combined results of 400 boys.

So I had realized one of the aspirations of every school boy to be a student of the Victoria Institution (V.I.). The V.I. is set in the town of Kuala Lumpur which is the capital city of the state of Selangor as well as of Malaya. The school is a solid building of two storeys standing on a slight hill. It has a playing field the size of six football fields and it has a swimming pool which is unique for a school. It also had science laboratories and other schools would send their students there when they had to do sixth form science.

The British Colonial Administration in the 1850s found the educational facilities inadequate for a regular supply of junior grade administrative and clerical officers who had hitherto been recruited from India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). The founding of a school was mooted. With the lead provided by a British Resident donations were collected from magnates of the three races to build the school. Most of them are still remembered by the names of the school houses.

The school was ready to take in students in July 1884. It was then in another location and being near a river it was continually flooded during the monsoon seasons. Eventually it was moved to the present location where it stands till today.

Photo: thanks to kelvolution from flickr.com (CCL)

memmlya