Raffles

by Victoria Glendinning

  The materials were probably not as Coleman had specified. Raffles cannot be accused of extravagance. The bungalow had rough plank walls, verandahs at front and back, and an atap roof. Its frontage was a hundred feet, and its depth fifty feet. The interior consisted of two large rooms, with small square ‘wings’ on each side for bedrooms. It was not substantial, and seemed sometimes in danger of being swept away by the wind. After Raffles left, Coleman supervised a makeover using brick and tile, and added a neo-classical pediment. With subsequent improvements, Raffles’ Residency House lasted until 1859.

  The project dearest to Raffles’ heart was the Singapore Institution. Although it had been in his mind ever since 1819, he founded his ‘native college’ only towards the end of this last stay, holding the inaugural meeting on 1 April 1823. He invited all the principal inhabitants of the place, including the Sultan and Temenggong. The Institution could not have got off the ground without the input and co-operation of the missionary community; his main collaborator was the Rev. Robert Morrison, co-founder with Milne of the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca.

  The Institution was to comprise a ‘literary and moral’ department for the Chinese, a ‘literary and moral’ department for Siamese, Malays and others, and a ‘scientific department’ to serve both. The scientific department was to offer natural philosophy, natural history, chemistry and the elements of anatomy and medical science.

  Natural philosophy, to include ‘the Newtonian system of astronomy’ and ‘the mechanical and chemical properties of matter’, was to be taught through the medium of English. But it was expected that professors in the scientific department should ‘pay attention to the native languages’ with a view to translating scientific books. ‘When funds can afford it’ there would be an observatory, and an astronomical clock.

  The purpose was to ‘educate the sons of the higher order of natives and others,’ including Europeans who wanted to learn native languages. Raffles named and appointed ‘native masters’ for Malay, Javanese, Siamese, Bugguese, Arabic and Pali. Another object was ‘to collect the scattered literature and traditions of the country’ and publish and circulate the most important. There was to be a library.

  Raffles was the Patron, and appointed Trustees, co-opting in absentia William Wilberforce, Charles Grant and William Marsden; he planned to establish a ‘Committee of Co-Operation’ in London. Among the resident Trustees were Lieutenant-Colonel Farquhar and Captain Flint, Captain Davis (another of Farquhar’s sons-in-law) and British merchants who were Raffles’ friends. He appointed a Secretary and a Management Committee, and made provision for a President, a Principal and a Treasurer – the latter two both the same person, the Rev. G.H.Thompson, who was also the Professor of Malayan Languages. Mrs Thompson was to organise a class for girls.

  The Institution’s motto was Raffles’ own: ‘Auspicium Melioris Aevi.’ He compiled statutes and byelaws. ‘It shall be the duty of the officers of the College to cherish, at all times, a paternal feeling of kindness to the students’ and to ‘set an example of patience, moderation, good temper, and assiduity.’ ‘Pagans, Christians and Mahomedans are all admissible as students.’ The religious requirements were Rafflesian: ‘The forms of Protestant worship will be observed…but neither native students nor Native Masters are compelled to attend Christian worship.’ The European officers of the Institution were to be Protestant Christians; but the Native Masters ‘may or may not be Christians,’ but they ‘shall be, when practicable, correct moral men, according to the opinion of their own nation.’ The Rev. Mr Milton, in charge of the Chinese school and Professor of Siamese, was commissioned to purchase presses, and to supply fonts in English, Malayan and Siamese.

  Funds were raised by subscription. John Palmer declined to contribute; he would have done so ‘when all was Sunshine with me,’ even though he feared ‘the precocity of the scheme.’ There was ‘a donation from Lieutenant-Governor Raffles on behalf of the East India Company’ equal to his personal subscription (2,000 Spanish dollars). Raffles had no authority to commit the Company but the Company honoured the commitment.

  Farquhar subscribed 1,000, and Lady Raffles 200. The projected sale of the Anglo-Chinese College in Malacca, which Raffles planned to merge with the Institution (this never happened), ought to bring in 4,000. A fortnight after the first meeting subscriptions, actual or notional, amounted to 17,495 Spanish dollars. As a result, 15,000 dollars were voted for the construction of buildings to a plan drawn up by Lieutenant Jackson, to be completed within twelve months. The site, which Raffles and Farquhar chose together, was a hundred acres on Bras Basah Road (where Raffles Shopping City is now).

  Raffles envisaged the Institution, through its generations of future alumni, as ‘the means of civilising and bettering the conditions of millions’ way beyond Singapore. It was his ‘last public Act,’ he told Wallich. ‘It is here that I think I may have done some little good and instead of frittering the stock of zeal and means that may yet be left me in objects for which I may not be fitted, I am anxious to do all the good I can here.’ He wished he could infuse into it ‘a portion of that spirit and soul by which I would have animated it as easily as I endow it with lands etc.’

  It was all projected at speed, within weeks of his departure. Dr William Montgomerie, who was to teach anatomy and medical science, also left Singapore soon afterwards, as did the Rev. Robert Morrison. Even though he was not even in Singapore in 1823, the designated Professor of Natural History was George Finlayson – a naturalist whom Raffles met with John Crawfurd when their ship called in at Singapore en route for Bengal, and to whom he instantly established a strong attachment. Finlayson was, Raffles later wrote, ‘indefatigable’ as a botanist and a gifted writer ‘even though he may not rank with a Burns, or a Leyden, in point of talent.’ In November 1823, when he was back in Bencoolen, he heard that Finlayson had died; he wrote a ‘Memoir’ of Finlayson to accompany his published Journal of the Mission to Siam; the Literary Gazette’s reviewer (December 1825) commented that ‘the memoir speaks very feelingly, and the account is an affecting one.’ Like so many of Raffles’ arrangements for the Institution, Finlayson’s appointment as professor had been purely aspirational.

  Unsurprisingly, work on the Singapore Institution stalled after Raffles, Montgomerie and Morrison left. Construction did not get going until four years later, and was shoddily done. Grants continued to be made by the Supreme Government, but the project was mismanaged and virtually abandoned after some years. The buildings deteriorated and fell into decay.

  But Raffles’ vision of the Institution survived. It was rebuilt, with added wings, in the 1830s: this is the so-called ‘old’ Singapore Institution depicted in a watercolour of 1841. It continued to transform itself through Singapore’s successive cataclysmic upheavals. Today, re-named the Raffles Institution, and affiliated to the Raffles Girls’ School, it is an independent secondary school on a campus in central Singapore. It still claims to be animated by Raffles’ ‘spirit and soul’, Raffles’ motto is still the school motto, and Raffles’ coat of arms is its crest. ‘Old Rafflesians’ distinguish themselves all over the world.

  Raffles and Sophia found new friends in Singapore. The merchant David Skene Napier, a trustee of the Singapore Institution, was the son of Professor Macvey Napier, editor of the Edinburgh Review; and it was through Professor Napier that the honorary degree of LL.D from the University of Edinburgh was conferred on Raffles in 1825. David Skene Napier, with his first wife Anna – ‘the Naps’ – came to occupy the place in the Raffleses’ and Flints’ lives previously filled by ‘the Tots’.

  Maryanne’s daughter, also Sophia but known as Sophie, was born while Raffles and Sophia were in Singapore. They had no word of their own Ella’s safe arrival in England before they left Bencoolen. Raffles wrote to his mother that they were ‘not a little anxious – at one time I thought she would be our only one, but I think there are at last certain signs of another forthcoming in about six or seven months… We are in hopes it may b
e a Boy – but I fear we shall never have another like our dear Leopold.’

  The Raffleses were irredeemably philoprogenitive, but Sophia sadly miscarried that baby. On the way to Singapore, Raffles wrote to Cousin Thomas that ‘the delicate health of Mrs Raffles [Thomas’s wife] should be removed by breeding – at least so I find it with my Wife who is always best when coming into bearing and shewing fruit.’ When in April they at last heard that Ella and Nurse Grimes were safe with Sophia’s parents in Cheltenham, Sophia became pregnant again. ‘Lady Raffles being in the family way,’ Raffles wrote to Wallich, ‘all other complaints seem to be absorbed as her pregnancy advances.’

  The Rafflesian fertility was, to the Naps, enviable, and Raffles took on the role of counsellor in the matter of making babies. His advice was to keep trying, but not too stressfully. He wrote to Maryanne after his return to Bencoolen about ‘my dear little friend, Nap’s wife’ who ‘by listening to my counsel is again with child – these things come of course if people would only have patience and perseverance. Nothing is gained by being in too great a hurry…’

  The Naps were good friends, but as always Raffles felt that he lacked informed, sensible colleagues on his own level. Maryanne and William Flint were anything but sensible. Nothing in Java or Sumatra had prepared him for the utter newness of Singapore. ‘I assure you,’ he told the Duchess, ‘I stand much in need of advice, and were it not for Lady Raffles, I should have no counsellor at all. She is nevertheless a host to me, and if I do live to see you again, it will be entirely owing to her love and affection; without this I should have been cast away long ago.’

  ‘A host to me’? He must have meant that Sophia sustained his life as the Rafflesia arnoldii was sustained by the tree on which it was poised, connected by tissue as fine as silk. Once, she had been dependent on him – parasitical. Now it was perhaps the other way round.

  Whatever the quality of her advice, Sophia could not prevent the deterioration of the relations between Raffles and Farquhar. In the letter of 8 December Raffles said to Nathaniel Wallich: ‘Since you left us, I have been compelled to some rather sharp correspondence with the King Malachi [i.e. Farquhar, ‘King of Malacca’] of which and other things he will no doubt complain abroad – but I am happy to say that personally we remain as you left us and that I perceive symptoms which induce me to believe that he now takes a different view of my measures to what he did at first.’ Farquhar, like Raffles, did not want a showdown.

  Raffles and Sophia moved into their new bungalow on the Hill. ‘Nothing,’ he told William Marsden, ‘can be more interesting and beautiful than the view from this spot.’ They looked down on to the High Street and out to the harbour, alive with the movements of vessels from many nations – except from England. No English ships entered the port of Singapore in its first four years, officially discouraged so as not inflame the Dutch while the ‘paper war’ was ongoing.

  ‘Our abode on the Hill,’ was ‘very roomy and comfortable,’ he told Wallich. Ominously, he told his friend that he had had ‘several alarming attacks since you left us – one not many days ago when the doctor wanted to hurry me off to England by a ship on the eve of sailing – but let what will happen I cannot move from hence until my place can be supplied here, even if it should be my fate to leave my bones below ground… The house is full of carpenters and bustle and my hand is unsteady.’ The ‘attacks’ were his terrible headaches. It might have been better for Raffles’ happiness if he had taken that ship for England, but it would not have made any difference to the headaches.

  Between 1 January 1823 and his departure in June, while planning the Institution he rolled out a raft of regulations. The first concerned the registration of land, to control unauthorised building development. The second re-established Singapore as a free port, ‘the trade thereof open to ships and vessels of every nation free of duty, equally and alike to all,’ with special responsibilities for port management allocated to the Master Attendant (William Flint).

  The third concerned the police, and the appointment of Magistrates. The fourth prohibited all gaming-houses and cockpits as ‘being highly destructive to the morals and happiness of the people.’ The fifth concerned slavery ‘which my Representative seems to have permitted to an unlimited extent.’ All slaves and slave-debtors in Singapore were entitled to claim their freedom, apart from those in the households of the Sultan and the Temenggong ‘out of deference to their authority, as not coming under the operation of slave laws.’ The sixth established the Resident’s Court, with the assistance of two Magistrates, and Raffles himself, to sit every Monday at nine a.m., their business being to try causes beyond the jurisdiction of the Magistrates’ Court.

  In his ‘Scale of Crimes and Punishments’ simple or culpable homicide incurred solitary confinement. The punishment of murder ‘by Amok’ was ‘To suffer death, with confiscation of property; and the body to be ignominiously exposed on a gibbet for twenty-four hours.’ This constituted a post-hoc ratification of Raffles’ extreme reaction when in March that year William Farquhar was stabbed by a Malay, causing much loss of blood but no danger to life. The Malay was killed. Raffles, that very night, commissioned an iron cage from the blacksmiths. The point, for him, was that an assault on British authority in the person of the Resident was not to be tolerated. The next morning he had the Malay’s corpse drummed round the town in a buffalo cart and then suspended from a gibbet inside the iron cage. This was contentious. Raffles’ actions could have inflamed the Malays against all Europeans. Raffles was shrewd enough to take counsel with the Sultan and the Temenggong; the body was taken down, released to the Sultan, and buried ‘with lustration and prayers’.

  Prince Leopold’s niece Victoria was born in the year that Raffles founded Singapore. Singapore represented for Raffles the glorious realisation, in miniature, of his fantasy of good governance under British rule with himself as the ‘great Mogul’ – as Queen Victoria would be as Empress of India. Raffles achieved his dream only because, while Singapore had great geopolitical significance, it was such a small-scale polity – not, like Java, a whole intractable country, nor, like Bencoolen, a run-down settlement on the edge of another large intractable country.

  During the happy time at Bencoolen in 1820, he marshalled his thoughts in two letters to Thomas Murdoch, who was not in the political loop – an older man, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a former wine merchant in Madeira. Raffles got to know him when he was in London on leave, and used materials on the Portuguese colonial period in Murdoch’s library while compiling The History of Java. He wrote to Murdoch about the relationship between the rulers and the ruled.

  His thrust was that there is no one template for Europeans who set themselves in authority over other peoples. The same system would not work in Sumatra as in Java. In Bencoolen, he had to assume ‘a new character’ among the people, ‘that of lord paramount’, because the Sumatrans were ‘perhaps a thousand years’ behind the Javanese. ‘In Java, I advocated the doctrine of the liberty of the subject, and the individual rights of man – here [in Bencoolen] I am the advocate for despotism. The strong arm of power is necessary to bring men together, and to concentrate them in societies, and there is a certain stage in which despotic authority seems the only means of promoting civilisation.’

  ‘There appear to be certain stages and gradations through which society must run its course to civilisation, and which can be no more overleaped or omitted, than men can arrive at maturity without passing through the gradations of infancy and youth. Independence is the characteristic of the savage state,’ and only a despotic power can bind people into an economic and social entity. At a later stage of a society’s development the ‘seeds of internal freedom’ are sown, in order to ‘set limits to that power whenever it may engender abuse.’

  Raffles did not reflect that the abuses of despots are not generally checked for the asking.

  ‘I cannot be one of your tacit spectators of barbarism.’ Enlightenment – he used that word – must take
precedence over ignorance. He saw hypocrisy and irresponsibility in a policy of ‘affected respect for the customs of savages, of abstaining from all interference, and endeavouring to perpetuate the institutions of barbarism.’ The British had used their power quite wrongly: ‘We have employed it in the most arbitrary of all modes, in the exaction of forced services and in the monopoly of the produce of the country. While, as if in mockery, we have professed to exercise no interference with the native administration of the country, we have made ourselves the task-masters of the people, and with a false humility have refused to be their governors. Ought we not to discard this empty pretence?’

  He used the phrase ‘the rights of man’, but not in the sense of the American Declaration of Independence, nor of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and he did not question the right of one people or nation to rule over another. He believed that large-scale colonisation was the way forward. In Sumatra he would, he told Murdoch, ‘re-establish the ancient authority of Menangkabu, and be the great Mogul of the Island. I would, without much expense, afford employment for twenty or thirty thousand English colonists…’

  And then, like a great cry: ‘In short, what would I not, and indeed what could I not do, were I free to act, and encouraged rather than abused?’

  But it was now ‘all very speculative, and I am sorry to be obliged to add, also very visionary, for there is no chance of my ever attempting anything of the kind – the time has gone by when I had the spirit for it.’ That was before the children died. Afterwards, he had little spirit for anything at all, except for Singapore.

  Chapter 13

  Fame in Flames

  Singapore and Bencoolen 1823–1824

  Raffles was anxious to appoint a successor to Lieutenant-Colonel Farquhar ‘in whom he had little confidence.’ He wrote to Calcutta recommending his supercession on 27 January 1823, stating that Farquhar was ‘totally unequal to the charge of so important and peculiar a charge as Singapore has now become.’ It had ‘grown beyond his management,’ and he brought up Farquhar’s application for leave in 1820, already put off for three years. He wrote to Wallich asking him, if he should see John Crawfurd in Calcutta, to tell him he had sent in his ‘recommendation for the relief of the present Resident – and that I am anxious to get away before May.’