Memories of Malaya - 9. School Days

My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with stories of his school days at Victoria Institution.

He writes:

So one early January morning, being the beginning of the school year I found myself seated in the classroom of Form One of the Victoria Institution. I was one of forty boys seated in five rows each with a desk in front of him facing the class blackboard. The form teacher was a late middle age male Chinese. All the teachers were male until a few years later when we had the first female teacher, a Chinese, a graduate from Raffles College in Singapore in her early thirties.

This male form teacher was very conscientious. He was a typical minor civil servant type who did not want to be involved in anything which may cause him any trouble. But he was a kind man. He did not aspire to teach any higher forms and he was, I guessed, happy to have his untroubled sleep at night. It was he who introduced the class to the mysteries of geometry and algebra which I took to very easily.

We were also introduced to general science which was a combination of very elementary chemistry, physics and biology. The science labs were amongst the best equipped of all the schools in the town if not in the country. We looked with awe and fascination at the rows of chemicals and the glass utensils in the labs and fancied ourselves as scientist decanting, bubbling and smoking chemicals from one test-tube into another. We used a textbook written by a former headmaster, the late Mr F. Daniel. He had written textbooks on the subject for use up to form five and these textbooks were used by all schools in Malaya whether government or non-government.

Mr Daniel had just retired before I entered the school. He was known to have been a very strict disciplinarian and the school had the reputation of producing students with a strong science background. There was no school uniform. Mr Daniel had required that boys wore white shorts or white pants, and white shirts tailored so that they were worn hanging over the top of the trousers and not tucked in. This was a very sensible wear in the tropics. After he retired this form of dressing gradually stopped.

Each period was of 45 minute duration. The most painful period for me was the one for art. The art teacher was very good at his work but he had a loud voice which he used to chastise boys who did not draw well. I received a great deal of his shouting and threats to throw away my eraser because I was using it so often. In the examinations I managed to obtain only enough marks to pass this subject.

At that time using the radio to broadcast lessons to elementary classes was in vogue. The teacher in charge would bring a radio and a loud speaker attached to it and plug it on and tune it to the correct station and someone will read out whatever the subject is, with some sound effects to make it more interesting. The subject for our class was “hygiene”.

Then there were the physical training periods. There were two periods in a week - each one on a different day. One was held in the school field and the other in the school hall. For the one in the hall we used the usual gymnastic equipment.

Once a week on a Friday the whole school assembled in the school hall. The school had a stage where all the teachers sat and the students sat on the floor of the hall. Notices of the main school activities were announced by the headmaster, awards were presented to athletes and scholars and one award was given to the classroom that was adjudged by the prefects to be the cleanest for that week.

All the boys took turns daily to sweep the floor of their classroom and shine the hinges and doorknobs. The prefects went around during the interval awarding points on each aspect of cleanliness. The award consisted of a framed picture of the school crest. There was one class whose monitor was so dedicated to these tasks that he would do most of the cleaning himself to ensure that his class won the award every week. In a recent visit to the school for an Old Boys gathering I was told that they had discontinued requiring the boys to do this kind of cleaning because, the school authorities were of the opinion that, the students should not be doing this kind of work. This gives an indication of the changing values. Instead they want classes to teach civic behaviour and responsibilities and how citizens must keep their environment clean.

So amongst the forty boys in the best class in Form 1 there were boys from the Pasar Road School and boys from the Batu Road School, both feeder schools of the V.I. the number from each school was not equal. According to my present recollection there were more boys from Batu Road School than boys from Pasar Road School in the proportion of about 30 to 10. It would be interesting to know what the past records were like. Were there always more Batu Road boys than Pasar Road boys and if so were there any social reasons for this?

Those 10 Pasar Road boys in the class came mainly from families of the junior civil servants, clerks and the like and there were a few Indians and Malays; this can be expected because the school was situated in the midst of government quarters where there were families of different races which the government employed. Also the boys were more studious and were quite unused to going out of the house for their amusements e.g. to the cinema or loitering in the shops because they could not afford to. All those in my year from Batu Road School were Chinese because the school was in the midst of a busy street in the town which had a predominantly Chinese population. Most of these boys were not very studious but they appeared to be sharp, with a little cunning, what one, I suppose, would consider as street-smart. Most of them were very good at mathematics. This I do not know if it is because they are Chinese or because they live in the town with the necessity for quick calculation of all kinds or a combination of both. They came mostly from families of small businessmen and were generally better off than the salaried minor civil servants.

memmlya