Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore

Preface

Preface At around 3 p.m. on 25 May 1961 a small fire broke out in Bukit Ho Swee, a kampong (village) settlement of wooden housing on the western fringe of Singapore city. Within hours, the inferno had jumped across two roads and destroyed the homes of nearly 16,000 people. Kampong fires were not unusual in Singapore, but the scale of this disaster surpassed all previous ones, even the great fire of February 1959 at Kampong Tiong Bahru, just across the main road from Bukit Ho Swee, which had rendered 5,000 people homeless. What ensued at Bukit Ho Swee was even more remarkable. By 1961 Singapore had become a self-governing state under British colonial rule, and housing thereby came under the purview of the People’s Action Party (PAP) government, elected in 1959 in a landslide victory . Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew assured the fire victims that they would be rehoused in modern apartments within nine months. This promise resulted in the first big building project carried out by the Housing and Development Board (HDB), established the previous year to implement the PAP government’s ambitious housing programme . The HDB quickly erected high-rise blocks of emergency flats on the fire site, enabling former squatters to return to Bukit Ho Swee — not in nine months but within a year. The fires and flats of Bukit Ho Swee loomed in the background of my childhood years of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1969 my parents got married and began living with my grandparents in their threeroom flat in Block 29, Havelock Road. I was born in 1972, followed two years later by my sister. In 1975 our family of four moved into a one-room rental flat in Block 28, Jalan Membina, the site of the emergency housing built after the 1959 Kampong Tiong Bahru fire. So began my experience of living in one-room housing. Two years later we shifted to an improved one-room flat in nearby Block 14, and again in 1980 into a lower-rent, improved one-room flat in Block 79, Indus Road. I found the housing embarrassing and repeatedly urged my parents to obtain a larger home. But my father was a coolie on a daily wage and my mother a housewife, although xxi xxii Preface the family also did some handicraft work at home for additional income. My parents slept on blankets laid over the linoleum in the living room and my sister and I on a bunk bed in a partitioned corner. Once, my face burned with embarrassment when a classmate from Havelock Primary School visited my home and said, “Your house so small ah?” The school, as opposed to the flat, was the centre of my life. I knew nothing of Block 79; as Yeo Seok Thai, a resident in the block, told me in an interview, it was complicated (hock chap), where low-income families struggled with debt and their children ran afoul of the law.1 I graduated well from Havelock and enrolled in River Valley High School on Kim Seng Road, which had sheltered victims of the 1961 inferno. In 1989 my family at last left the locality for a three-room flat in Yishun New Town, in north Singapore. This, I thought happily, was the true meaning of progress. I knew nothing about the great kampong fire and had no wish to return to Bukit Ho Swee. 1 Author’s interview with Yeo Seok Thai, 3 May 2007. The author at a playground outside Block 28, Jalan Membina, the site of the emergency housing built after the 1959 Kampong Tiong Bahru fire, 1970s. Photograph by Loh Tian Ho Although I myself knew nothing about the blazes and the kampong settlements they razed, they have remained in the minds of those of my parents’ generation, the “pioneers” who made the dramatic transition from unauthorised dwellings to public housing. Among the first former kampong dwellers I interviewed was my father, who had lived in Kampong Bukit Ho Swee. He spoke about kampong life, the fire, the rumours of arson, and about happily moving to an HDB flat. This was the first time my father shared with me what one would call the “history of modern Singapore” as he knew it. I transcribed and translated the interview, which was in Hokkien, and gave a copy to my sister. My mother had lived in a wooden house...