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dreadfully shaken and stunned ’. Because of such incidents, the first three days of every month were set aside for convict labourers to catch dogs.
    Yet even they weren’t as dangerous as the tigers who roamed the island. The main casualties were plantation workers who had to work in the outskirts of the jungle: in the 1840s they averaged a casualty a day. Pitfalls, cages with those captured strays as bait and shooting parties decimated the man-eaters, but it took until the dawn of the new century to clear the island completely. Funnily enough, it is then that the most celebrated tiger story pops up for posterity – at Raffles.
    It was the proverbial hot and steamy night in August 1902 when the drinking tuans in the Raffles Bar and Billiard Room noticed an unwelcome guest – unwelcome not because of its low breeding, but because of its fearsome character: crouching under the billiard table was an adult Bengal tiger. A tiger in the city? Why, it must have swam the Straits of Johore and stridden through the jungle, before it decided to chum it up with the punters in the bar. (‘ Who’s that, old boy? ’ ‘ A tiger, M’lud .’ ‘ Have we been introduced? ’) A crack shot was summoned and the impertinent tiger soon became a trophy as well as providing a cracker of a tale that still delights tourists, combining as it does the stereotypes of imperial derring-do and English sangfroid. The truth is not as dramatic. The billiard room was a pavilion outside the main Raffles Hotel and, like any floodable structure near the waterfront, it stood on four-foot brick pillars to survive the monsoon. The tiger had escaped from a travelling circus and was as tame as can be. Scared and hungry, it found shelter underneath the billiard room, hiding among the stilts. An Indian servant spotted the animal staring through the low veranda railings and informed the management. They, in turn, brought in Mr C. M. Phillips, the schoolmaster at Raffles Institution next door, who shot the beast into legend with his Lee-Enfield rifle. When measured, the animal was found to be 7 feet 8 inches long and 3 feet 4 inches tall.
    But back to the Dares: their business went under and their Beach Road house was sold to the Yemeni trader, Syed Mohammed bin Ahmed Alsagoff, a member of a wealthy Arab family who came to Singapore and made his fortune through coconut and lemon grass plantations in what is now Geylang Serai. He also branched into shipping with the Singapore Steaming Company and bought the Jeddah , the ship whose voyage in August 1880 caused a sensation as big as that of the Titanic some thirty years later.
    The Jeddah, under Captain Joseph Clark, set sail from Singapore to Saudi Arabia carrying 953 Muslim pilgrims for the hajj. She found herself in the centre of a hurricane in the Arabian Gulf, and started to leak while her boilers became incapacitated. What happened next shocked the merchant navy: Captain Clark and his crew panicked. Leaving the passengers to their fate, they lowered the lifeboats and abandoned ship ignominiously. They were picked up by another vessel, the Scindia, and cabled Singapore that the Jeddah had foundered. No one would know what had transpired, had the steamer Antenor not appeared in time to tow the Jeddah expertly to the safety of Aden much to the shock of Captain Clark who had arrived there the day before. The resulting court of inquiry heavily censured Clark, but it was the first officer, 28-year-old Austin Williams, who became the inspiration for Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim . Unlike the central character of the novel, Williams – the real Lord Jim – did not find redemption among wild tribes in Borneo but worked humbly as a ship chandler in Singapore, living at 32 Barker Road in Bukit Timah, near the present Methodist church. He died of a fall in 1916 and is buried at Bidadari cemetery next to his only son who predeceased him.
    The Sarkies brothers bought the bungalow