Michael Batson

Singapore is a sea-level blip barely north of the Equator. Once upon a time it was sparsely populated, disease-infested island ringed by mangrove swamps. Needless to say it had one of the unhealthiest climates in the world and was the kind of graveyard that killed off people in their droves.

Until the early 1800s it was a backwater, a bit part in various empires. By the 19th and early 20th centuries it had been transformed into one of the jewels of the British Empire.

Stamford Raffles was once a star of the British East India Company. When he arrived in 1819, with instructions to establish a “factory”, a trading settlement, on the tip of the Malay Peninsula, the island’s population was about 500 souls. Previously, he’d been the Company’s man in Penang, and latterly as governor of Java, where he had committed the cardinal sin of putting sound administration before profits.

Economically, Singapore was slow to bloom. The East India Company lost its monopoly on the China trade and the company’s bureaucrats in Calcutta mismanaged the island’s affairs. It also had to compete with the Dutch in Sumatra, the new “factory” in Hong Kong, and also the French in Indo-China.

The British invested heavily in their property. South of the city at Kallang, they opened a new grass airport opened in 1938. Imperial Airways flying boats operated from a slip on the edge of the airport, landing and taking-off from Keppel Harbour. “The Empire’s Greatest Airport” declared Jane’s Aviation Guide of 1938.

The naval base opened in February 1938 at a cost of £60m and provided 22 square miles of deep-sea anchorage, huge fuel tanks and an enormous floating dock, war booty from Germany which could accommodate the biggest battleship afloat. About this time Fleet Street started to refer to the island as “Fortress Singapore”.

A Sydney Morning Herald correspondent had once described Singapore as “the Gibraltar of the East”. Trouble is most of the artillery that mattered had the wrong shells weighing 2000 lbs when it counted – huge 15-inch guns capable of carving out holes the size of swimming pools only deeper had 250 shells – bar one of which was designed for disembowelling battleships, not advancing Japanese infantry.

At this time rubber was king. Malaya was the biggest exporter of natural rubber on the planet. Half of its crop went to the US for the car giants, most of it through Singapore. Keppel Harbour boasted three miles of wharves and warehouses.

Despite being outgunned and outnumbered, the Japanese captured Singapore in 1942, in what Winston Churchill called “The worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”. The Japanese took 120,000 allied prisoners of war, a figure decimated by forced labour on the Siam-Burma railway. Asia had beaten the Europeans.

After 1945, and to the annoyance of the Americans who were against former colonial aspirations save for their own, Britain re-emerged determined to regain their “Crescent of Influence” from Northwest through to Southeast Asia.

Racially, and in other aspects of their colonial rule, the British were only superficially liberal. Reimposing their exclusive hierarchical systems was especially galling to non-white Singaporeans who felt, quite rightly, Britain had abandoned them, and a wave of nationalism swept the region.

Of the period following Japanese rule, Lee Kuan Yew, a former student at the exclusive Raffles College had said “My education in the unfairness and absurdities of the human existence was completed by what I saw in the immediate aftermath of the war. If three and a half years of Japanese occupation had earned me my degree in the realities of life, the first year in liberated Singapore was my postgraduate course.”

En route to Java in 1946, Captain Dirk van den Bogaerde, later the actor Dirk Bogarde, on seeing the British reinstate themselves on the island, recalled Singapore as “a white-washed bastard Tunbridge Wells – with palm trees.” It wasn’t to stay that way for long.

Lee had watched the Japanese march in and the British marched off to captivity. He cut his teeth as a translator for the Japanese, and later the Cambridge-educated lawyer formed the Peoples’ Action Party (PAP). He led the party to eight victories from 1959 to 1990, and oversaw the separation of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965 and its subsequent transformation from a relatively underdeveloped colonial outpost with no natural resources into a First World “Asian Tiger”.

Singapore is technically a democracy but opposition is barely tolerated and politically, people are expected to conform to the status quo.

Today Singapore is noted for its cleanliness, prosperity, efficiency in all manner of things, multi-ethnicity, conformity and the prescriptive nature of its laws, but unlike most of the rest of Southeast Asia, it’s relatively corruption-free.

Its laws are no laughing matter, and on the plane in there was the warning on the PA about the importation of illicit drugs into the island and its offsider, the death penalty. Singapore’s Changi Airport is often rated one of the best in the world. It’s certainly efficient. Customs’ interest was sparked by my Swiss Army knife. Apart from that they weren’t bothered.

Singapore is a city under surveillance. You can’t go anywhere without being filmed. Little wonder then, there are so few police to be seen on the streets. They’re all back at the local nick watching television. That is aside from the transit police, uniformed in dark blue with grey berets, and who hunt in packs up and down the platforms trying to look menacing.

Raffles Place metro station in rush hour, which in Singapore starts about 6am but really gets going after 8, is a sea of people all travelling in one direction. It’s all very orderly as you’d expect but trying moving against the flow and the going is slow. 

“Mind the gap” is delivered in the Queen’s own English, and then in Cantonese. All signage is in the island’s four official languages including Hindi and Malay.

There isn’t a single anything out of place in downtown Singapore. Hemmed in by glass, marble and concrete towers the streets can be quite dark. It’s all rather artificial and watching the people around the metro entrance reminded me of the set of a film, like Logan’s Run, living the good life provided by the one-party state, except they don’t die when they hit 30.

Downtown near the Fullerton Hotel, a magnificent neo-classical building on the banks of the Singapore River, the joggers were out. The expatriate workers or hotel guests were running along the river banks resplendent in their designer sports gear. It’s difficult, if not impossible to find space to breathe, let alone exercise in this most urban of countries. There’s no space which leaves you feeling rather claustrophobic, like you’ve taken a great breath but then are left gasping, waiting to exhale.

Even the heat’s claustrophobic. Want to lose weight? Put a backpack on and go walking in Singapore for an hour, and see how you go.

The island is largely a cross between shopping complexes and housing estates. On the North-South metro line you can circle much of the island. There are some open spaces but largely it’s highly developed. Singaporeans grow up in high-rises, are educated in high-rises, spend their working lives in them and then retire there too.

The island-state has made the most of its seemingly meagre resources in a way that perhaps no other nation has, and it’s impressive you have to say. Even the disadvantages have been turned to advantage. Take its small size for example. Many of the services it requires are outsourced to neighbouring states, it’s close to Malaysia and Indonesia after all, so food production is not a problem, neither are primary resources.

People often marvel at the example of Singapore, of what it has become, and to what is now referred to as Singapore Inc. But then some of those same people openly admit they wouldn’t actually want to live there, with its restrictions and censorship, neither would I.

The public transport system is fast and efficient and much like the country itself is conformist and prescriptive. The names of the stations reflect the island’s rich and varied past; Mountbatten, Lavender, Dhoby Ghaut, and Tiong Bahru. Everywhere are the cameras. I counted 10 at a single entrance to Exhibition Station on the way to Raffles Hotel, a Singapore landmark, some of which appeared to be watching each other.

Singaporeans are accomplished commuters. Reserved seating for the elderly and infirm, is strictly observed. They rarely utilise the “grab” poles for stability, seemingly able to counterbalance the motion of the trains leaving their hands free for their favourite pastime, thumb culture.

Devoid of natural resources, it has made the most of its asset, its geo-strategic position as the go-to-way between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, its compactness, and of course, its people.

Nice place to visit, but I don’t think I would want to live there.