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Before the rep points arms race, this forum was once a valuable resource for tacit knowledge from old timers. What a far cry from the cross dressers, canine sparring braggarts, psychotic transport workers and the culturally confused trolls of today.
I remember in 2007 one Phd student created a thread in the old delphi forum to find out more on the Bukit Ho Swee Fire. Our responses were quoted (and credited) in his research thesis:
(Excerpt from "FIRES AND THE SOCIAL POLITICS OF
NATION-BUILDING IN SINGAPORE" by Mr(Dr?) Loh Kah Seng http://wwwarc.murdoch.edu.au/publications/wp/wp149.pdf)
UNDYING RUMOURS
In the final consideration, however, the success of the PAP’s fire emergency
rehousing came at a social and political price. What happened in the aftermath of
kampong fires left a lasting imprint on the social memory of Singapore up to the
present. As development projects increasingly encroached onto areas of unauthorised
wooden housing in the 1950s, kampong dwellers commonly considered fire as an act
of arson committed by hostile landlords, the government, hired secret society hands,
or simply a spiteful neighbour. ‘It was always like that’, they ventured years later,
‘There was eviction and people did not want to move. After a while, fire broke out’
(Interview with Chong 13 February 2007). One kampong dweller claimed to have
‘seen a piece of cloth tied up with a metal wire and thrown onto the attap’ (Interview
with Goh 24 May 2007), while another ‘knew a friend who belonged to this type of
gang, they would set fire to attap houses because when the landowner bought over the
land, there were people who refused to be evicted, so they played dirty tricks’
(Interview with Ang 30 June 2007). In the logic of arson, fire was always
accompanied by suspicious circumstances: the scale of destruction, in marked contrast
to the minimum loss of lives, appeared to establish the existence of a well-crafted plan,
that ‘whenever there was resettlement, there was arson and no one got hurt’
(Interview with Chin 21 November 2006).
The enormity of the 1961 Bukit Ho Swee fire and the speed of the emergency
rehousing intensified such beliefs. The inferno was reported to have started at a
wooden house, No. 174-A, in Kampong Tiong Bahru. The Nanyang Siang Pau
carried interviews with fire victims claiming to be residents in the vicinity who
recounted how ‘the fire was caused not by Heaven but by scoundrels more evil than
wild beasts’ (28 May 1961). A middle-aged man apparently saw two men throwing
burning torches onto the roof of 174-A before fleeing (ibid.), while an elderly man,
relating how his neighbour had also witnessed the same thing, lamented that ‘some
heartless person(s) started the fire!’ (NYSP 26 May 1961). In June, the Nanyang Siang
Pau reported that the police had questioned more than ten self-proclaimed witnesses
of the alleged act of arson, which, the newspaper remarked, was sufficient reason to
establish the case for arson, but only that concrete evidence was lacking (10 June
1961). Subsequent reports of arson at Kampong Henderson in late May and early June
fanned the flames, leading the Sin Chew Jit Poh to conclude that ‘there is every
possibility that the recent biggest fire was [also] caused by some wicked elements’ (14
June 1961). On 9 June, the police detained a suspect but released him due to a lack of
evidence (NYSP 28 May 1961). A fortnight later, two attempts of arson were reported
on wooden housing at Carey Road which had survived the Bukit Ho Swee fire (ST 14
July 1961).
The PAP government tried to suppress the rumours as baseless and
contradictory and attributing them to malicious ‘outsiders’, ‘opportunists’ and
‘agitators’ (NAS 1961). But such responses were not completely successful,
indicative of how ‘there was nothing more powerful…than those exchanges of words
between neighbours’ (Farge 1993: 13). The rumours possessed an inner logic which
could not readily be disproved and which linked the local circumstances both before
and after the fire into part of a powerful web of conspiracy, a theory supported
seemingly by evidence and history. The rumours also reinforced the psychology of
calamity among the fire victims, explaining how families were rendered homeless in
an instant. In the absence of a convincing official report on the cause of the Bukit Ho
Swee inferno, the rumours were entirely consistent with the world-view and everyday
experience of former kampong dwellers. From the standpoint of urban social history,
the rumours, regardless of their validity, are important social facts.
In the view of many fire victims, the first possible indication of arson was that
the Bukit Ho Swee fire occurred on a public holiday. This meant that the kampong
children were not at school, but the men were fortunately at home to take care of their
families and consequently only four lives were lost (Interview with Mok 8 January
2007). Moreover, the fire managed to jump two roads and was burning in different
places at the same time. It was not possible, some people reasoned, that even with the
strong wind, for the flames rolling down the hill to leapfrog a 3-storey shophouse,
leave it untouched and then cross the main road. Such a ‘curious’ path of destruction
suggested that a plane, visible in the air that day, had separately set various areas
ablaze (Interviews with Soh 10 September 2007; Low 25 April 2007). The
government’s culpability, it was argued, was also established by its execution of a
coherent plan of rebuilding and rehousing: how the fire site was quickly redeveloped,
while the fire victims were promptly rehoused in the completed flats at the Tiong
Bahru fire site and the partially-completed flats at the cemetery site (Interviews with
Wee 27 April 2007; Lee 31 December 2006; Ong Bin 26 June 2007).
In March 1963, when two thousand people were rendered homeless by a
massive fire at Bukit Ban Kee, most of them were swiftly rehoused in the emergency
flats of nearby Bukit Ho Swee. What was perceived to have happened in 1961 had by
then become part of Singapore’s collective memory. A fire victim observed that ‘it
was just like the Bukit Ho Swee fire. There were many rumours but there was no
evidence’ (Interview with Lim Kok Peng 16 May 2005). The opposition party in the
Legislative Assembly, the Barisan Sosialis, declared that ‘[w]henever a fire breaks out
in any part of Singapore, the Minister will go there and grab the land for building
houses’ (SLAD 10 December 1963: 251). A subsequent fire at Pulau Minyak in
November 1964 destroyed the homes of 1,657 people, who were allocated HDB flats
‘barely 26 hours after the fire had broken out’ (Social Welfare Department 1964, 35).
The Barisan charged that the fire was ‘arranged by the PAP’ (SLAD 17 November
1964: 639).
Such rumours of arson have left an indelible imprint on the relationship
between the government and the population over whom they have ruled since 1959.
On the surface, the PAP’s political control is nothing short of hegemonic. The party
has never lost more than four parliamentary seats in an election or seen its popular
vote fall under 61% since 1963. In providing near-universal public housing to the
electorate, the PAP has established a powerful ideological hegemony over the people
(Chua 1997: 132). This political dominance, however, has not created an ‘affective’
relationship between the PAP and the citizenry (Lim 1994). On the contrary, the
relationship has been based on a pragmatic exchange of goods – votes for the
government and material rewards, including the ability to own a modern flat, for the
people. In addition, particularly to the government’s management of spaces and places
in contemporary Singapore, there has been a mixture of ‘collusion, conflict, and
collision’ in the citizenry’s responses, albeit verbal and unorganised (Kong & Yeoh
2003, 11). There is also widespread nostalgia for the ‘good kampong days’ among the
elderly people, which, really, is ‘an intrinsic critique of the present by the ordinary
people’ – of the more regulated and stressful living in present-day Singapore – and
which belies a desire for ‘recovering control over daily life within the present zone of
material comfort’ (Chua 1997: 162, 166). In short, what Singaporeans want for
themselves and what they want from the government is deeply conflicting.
When Lim Kim San passed away in July 2006, the occasion precipitated
critical emotional responses on Internet discussion forums, particularly from elderly
Singaporeans who remember the days when Lim presided over the kampong
clearance campaign. The perceived anonymity provided by the Internet made it
possible for Singaporeans to candidly comment on a sensitive political topic, which
would not have materialised in a public forum (Rodan 1998: 75). In the popular
Sammyboy.com’s Alfresco Coffee Shop, a hotbed of anti-PAP discussions, the
historical association between fires and kampong clearance was vividly recalled. A
poster named e_visionary asked rhetorically, ‘How many kampong was burned due to
a man?’, to which ÎÚÅ replied, ‘Yes, I heard stories about “government people”
“purplely” [purposely] burn down kampong to make way for new flats when all
negotiations failed’ (SB 2006).
It is not merely the elderly people who are interested in Kampong Bukit Ho
Swee and the great 1961 fire which destroyed it. A general revival of interest in the
country’s history has led Singaporeans one or two generations younger to ask critical
questions about the untold past. In 2006, the year of Lim Kim San’s death, the pilot
episode of a Malay-language documentary series boldly posed the question, ‘What
caused the fire?’ The programme featured interviews of a former kampong dweller, a
fire-fighter, a fire officer, a senior civil servant, a sociologist, and a history researcher
(myself), none of whom supported the arson theory. While this refusal to publicly
affirm the rumours highlights the sensitivity of the topic despite the intervening years,
it is indicative of the mindset of younger Singaporeans that questions such as these,
which impinge directly on the birth of socially-disciplined, modern Singapore, are
being asked. The episode concluded, in postmodernist fashion, ‘There are various
versions to history. It is all up to you to make your own conclusions’ (Oak3 films
2006).
CONCLUSION
Modern Singapore was born out of fire, and consequently the kampong infernos hold
an ambivalent place in contemporary society. As historical events, the fires belong to
the past but they remain in the present as personal and social memory. The
conflagrations and the emergency public housing which followed in their wake helped
to create the disciplined, modern nation-state of today, yet they are also an integral
part of present-day critiques of both the PAP government and the high modernist
philosophy of development which it has robustly implemented. The uncertainty with
which the citizenry regard the government and the forms and consequences of the
high modernity is indicative of the scale and pace of the social and economic
transformation, directed from above, which took place at the birth of modern
Singapore.
I remember in 2007 one Phd student created a thread in the old delphi forum to find out more on the Bukit Ho Swee Fire. Our responses were quoted (and credited) in his research thesis:
(Excerpt from "FIRES AND THE SOCIAL POLITICS OF
NATION-BUILDING IN SINGAPORE" by Mr(Dr?) Loh Kah Seng http://wwwarc.murdoch.edu.au/publications/wp/wp149.pdf)
UNDYING RUMOURS
In the final consideration, however, the success of the PAP’s fire emergency
rehousing came at a social and political price. What happened in the aftermath of
kampong fires left a lasting imprint on the social memory of Singapore up to the
present. As development projects increasingly encroached onto areas of unauthorised
wooden housing in the 1950s, kampong dwellers commonly considered fire as an act
of arson committed by hostile landlords, the government, hired secret society hands,
or simply a spiteful neighbour. ‘It was always like that’, they ventured years later,
‘There was eviction and people did not want to move. After a while, fire broke out’
(Interview with Chong 13 February 2007). One kampong dweller claimed to have
‘seen a piece of cloth tied up with a metal wire and thrown onto the attap’ (Interview
with Goh 24 May 2007), while another ‘knew a friend who belonged to this type of
gang, they would set fire to attap houses because when the landowner bought over the
land, there were people who refused to be evicted, so they played dirty tricks’
(Interview with Ang 30 June 2007). In the logic of arson, fire was always
accompanied by suspicious circumstances: the scale of destruction, in marked contrast
to the minimum loss of lives, appeared to establish the existence of a well-crafted plan,
that ‘whenever there was resettlement, there was arson and no one got hurt’
(Interview with Chin 21 November 2006).
The enormity of the 1961 Bukit Ho Swee fire and the speed of the emergency
rehousing intensified such beliefs. The inferno was reported to have started at a
wooden house, No. 174-A, in Kampong Tiong Bahru. The Nanyang Siang Pau
carried interviews with fire victims claiming to be residents in the vicinity who
recounted how ‘the fire was caused not by Heaven but by scoundrels more evil than
wild beasts’ (28 May 1961). A middle-aged man apparently saw two men throwing
burning torches onto the roof of 174-A before fleeing (ibid.), while an elderly man,
relating how his neighbour had also witnessed the same thing, lamented that ‘some
heartless person(s) started the fire!’ (NYSP 26 May 1961). In June, the Nanyang Siang
Pau reported that the police had questioned more than ten self-proclaimed witnesses
of the alleged act of arson, which, the newspaper remarked, was sufficient reason to
establish the case for arson, but only that concrete evidence was lacking (10 June
1961). Subsequent reports of arson at Kampong Henderson in late May and early June
fanned the flames, leading the Sin Chew Jit Poh to conclude that ‘there is every
possibility that the recent biggest fire was [also] caused by some wicked elements’ (14
June 1961). On 9 June, the police detained a suspect but released him due to a lack of
evidence (NYSP 28 May 1961). A fortnight later, two attempts of arson were reported
on wooden housing at Carey Road which had survived the Bukit Ho Swee fire (ST 14
July 1961).
The PAP government tried to suppress the rumours as baseless and
contradictory and attributing them to malicious ‘outsiders’, ‘opportunists’ and
‘agitators’ (NAS 1961). But such responses were not completely successful,
indicative of how ‘there was nothing more powerful…than those exchanges of words
between neighbours’ (Farge 1993: 13). The rumours possessed an inner logic which
could not readily be disproved and which linked the local circumstances both before
and after the fire into part of a powerful web of conspiracy, a theory supported
seemingly by evidence and history. The rumours also reinforced the psychology of
calamity among the fire victims, explaining how families were rendered homeless in
an instant. In the absence of a convincing official report on the cause of the Bukit Ho
Swee inferno, the rumours were entirely consistent with the world-view and everyday
experience of former kampong dwellers. From the standpoint of urban social history,
the rumours, regardless of their validity, are important social facts.
In the view of many fire victims, the first possible indication of arson was that
the Bukit Ho Swee fire occurred on a public holiday. This meant that the kampong
children were not at school, but the men were fortunately at home to take care of their
families and consequently only four lives were lost (Interview with Mok 8 January
2007). Moreover, the fire managed to jump two roads and was burning in different
places at the same time. It was not possible, some people reasoned, that even with the
strong wind, for the flames rolling down the hill to leapfrog a 3-storey shophouse,
leave it untouched and then cross the main road. Such a ‘curious’ path of destruction
suggested that a plane, visible in the air that day, had separately set various areas
ablaze (Interviews with Soh 10 September 2007; Low 25 April 2007). The
government’s culpability, it was argued, was also established by its execution of a
coherent plan of rebuilding and rehousing: how the fire site was quickly redeveloped,
while the fire victims were promptly rehoused in the completed flats at the Tiong
Bahru fire site and the partially-completed flats at the cemetery site (Interviews with
Wee 27 April 2007; Lee 31 December 2006; Ong Bin 26 June 2007).
In March 1963, when two thousand people were rendered homeless by a
massive fire at Bukit Ban Kee, most of them were swiftly rehoused in the emergency
flats of nearby Bukit Ho Swee. What was perceived to have happened in 1961 had by
then become part of Singapore’s collective memory. A fire victim observed that ‘it
was just like the Bukit Ho Swee fire. There were many rumours but there was no
evidence’ (Interview with Lim Kok Peng 16 May 2005). The opposition party in the
Legislative Assembly, the Barisan Sosialis, declared that ‘[w]henever a fire breaks out
in any part of Singapore, the Minister will go there and grab the land for building
houses’ (SLAD 10 December 1963: 251). A subsequent fire at Pulau Minyak in
November 1964 destroyed the homes of 1,657 people, who were allocated HDB flats
‘barely 26 hours after the fire had broken out’ (Social Welfare Department 1964, 35).
The Barisan charged that the fire was ‘arranged by the PAP’ (SLAD 17 November
1964: 639).
Such rumours of arson have left an indelible imprint on the relationship
between the government and the population over whom they have ruled since 1959.
On the surface, the PAP’s political control is nothing short of hegemonic. The party
has never lost more than four parliamentary seats in an election or seen its popular
vote fall under 61% since 1963. In providing near-universal public housing to the
electorate, the PAP has established a powerful ideological hegemony over the people
(Chua 1997: 132). This political dominance, however, has not created an ‘affective’
relationship between the PAP and the citizenry (Lim 1994). On the contrary, the
relationship has been based on a pragmatic exchange of goods – votes for the
government and material rewards, including the ability to own a modern flat, for the
people. In addition, particularly to the government’s management of spaces and places
in contemporary Singapore, there has been a mixture of ‘collusion, conflict, and
collision’ in the citizenry’s responses, albeit verbal and unorganised (Kong & Yeoh
2003, 11). There is also widespread nostalgia for the ‘good kampong days’ among the
elderly people, which, really, is ‘an intrinsic critique of the present by the ordinary
people’ – of the more regulated and stressful living in present-day Singapore – and
which belies a desire for ‘recovering control over daily life within the present zone of
material comfort’ (Chua 1997: 162, 166). In short, what Singaporeans want for
themselves and what they want from the government is deeply conflicting.
When Lim Kim San passed away in July 2006, the occasion precipitated
critical emotional responses on Internet discussion forums, particularly from elderly
Singaporeans who remember the days when Lim presided over the kampong
clearance campaign. The perceived anonymity provided by the Internet made it
possible for Singaporeans to candidly comment on a sensitive political topic, which
would not have materialised in a public forum (Rodan 1998: 75). In the popular
Sammyboy.com’s Alfresco Coffee Shop, a hotbed of anti-PAP discussions, the
historical association between fires and kampong clearance was vividly recalled. A
poster named e_visionary asked rhetorically, ‘How many kampong was burned due to
a man?’, to which ÎÚÅ replied, ‘Yes, I heard stories about “government people”
“purplely” [purposely] burn down kampong to make way for new flats when all
negotiations failed’ (SB 2006).
It is not merely the elderly people who are interested in Kampong Bukit Ho
Swee and the great 1961 fire which destroyed it. A general revival of interest in the
country’s history has led Singaporeans one or two generations younger to ask critical
questions about the untold past. In 2006, the year of Lim Kim San’s death, the pilot
episode of a Malay-language documentary series boldly posed the question, ‘What
caused the fire?’ The programme featured interviews of a former kampong dweller, a
fire-fighter, a fire officer, a senior civil servant, a sociologist, and a history researcher
(myself), none of whom supported the arson theory. While this refusal to publicly
affirm the rumours highlights the sensitivity of the topic despite the intervening years,
it is indicative of the mindset of younger Singaporeans that questions such as these,
which impinge directly on the birth of socially-disciplined, modern Singapore, are
being asked. The episode concluded, in postmodernist fashion, ‘There are various
versions to history. It is all up to you to make your own conclusions’ (Oak3 films
2006).
CONCLUSION
Modern Singapore was born out of fire, and consequently the kampong infernos hold
an ambivalent place in contemporary society. As historical events, the fires belong to
the past but they remain in the present as personal and social memory. The
conflagrations and the emergency public housing which followed in their wake helped
to create the disciplined, modern nation-state of today, yet they are also an integral
part of present-day critiques of both the PAP government and the high modernist
philosophy of development which it has robustly implemented. The uncertainty with
which the citizenry regard the government and the forms and consequences of the
high modernity is indicative of the scale and pace of the social and economic
transformation, directed from above, which took place at the birth of modern
Singapore.
