Read Online Singapore Swing by John Malathronas - Free Book Online

1893. Pleased immensely by her hybrid she duly registered it in Sander’s List, the Who’s Who of orchids, and entered it in several competitions, winning in the Rarest Flower category at the 1899 Singapore Flower Show. That was the peak of her success with the Vanda, since she died, unmarried, a few months later. One century on, like so many low-rise dwellings, her garden and her house on Narcis Street have been demolished to provide space for a shopping mall.
    I don’t know who first thought about it, but give the guy some kudos: orchid breeding is now used for political flattery. My jaw dropped when I walked into the VIP Orchid Garden and came across the lavender-like Dendrobium Margaret Thatcher (withered), named during the British prime minister’s visit to the gardens in April 1985. At least she saw her orchid bloom; this is more than can be said for Princess Diana: her sparkling white jasmine-like hybrid with a pink centre was named in her memory a month after she died. There is the orchid de rigueur for Nelson Mandela (golden brown) but there is also an orange/mocha Dendrobium for Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia and a white, pink and yellow Mokara for Bertie Ahern. Still, it is the Vanda Tsolmon , dedicated to the wife of the Mongolian prime minister, that delivers the ultimate political snub: its shrubs are refusing to flower.
    Ah, orchids are great fun. Now, where am I?
    Let’s see. There is the old imperial NAAFI, the Britannia Club, built in the Spanish style. Like many older buildings in Singapore it is closed and under scaffolding; is it being demolished or renovated? A sign proudly shows the Health and Safety statistics: so many accident-free hours achieved in many more total man-hours toiled. The total number of fatal accidents is zero, although, confusingly, the fatalities seem to have a positive annual rate: an alarming 1.95, no units given. I consign the inexplicable to oriental mystique.
    There it is – I’ve reached my destination, the most famous watering hole in South East Asia.
    It is through grand establishments like the Savoy in London, the Ritz in Paris or the Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro that a bourgeois narrative and perspective can be reconstituted; their mere presence helps define a city in the same way the city provides them with uniqueness in return. They are the catwalk on which celebrities sashay; their rooms and bars are the canvas for the creation of legends; and their past, peppered with showbiz anecdotes, provides the glamour. They may be the Hello! magazine alternatives to academic historical discourse, but it is there that the spirit of a metropolis chooses to dwell. They are the city and of the city at the same time, as much alive as museums are dead. So if you want to experience the Singapore of old, come to the Raffles Hotel, as imperial a relic as the Privy Council and as English as bad weather.
    Surprisingly for such a colonial icon, the Raffles was a venture by four Armenians, the Sarkies brothers. They purchased a bungalow on Beach Road whose previous ownership history reflects the waxing and waning of fortunes in the raw capitalist atmosphere of the free port. It was originally built by the Dares, a well-known Singaporean-Anglo family who owned one of the four original ship chandlers’ firms. There exists a wonderful memoir by George Dare, one of the teenage boys in the family. He used to go off shooting pigeon and wild pig ‘ in the jungly swamps beyond the race course and the Hindoo cremation ground ’ – today’s Toa Payoh – where he was unsettled by stray dogs devouring three partly burned corpses ‘ slightly grilled and smelling horribly ’. After rats, controlled by Farquhar who paid one wang per corpse, and centipedes that fell from the atap roofs, stray dogs were the biggest nuisance in Singapore. On one occasion, a pack of them attacked the boy’s pony on the Esplanade and threw him down ‘