Life and Times of HRH by Herman Ronald Hochstadt (review)

In April 1971, Lee Kuan Yew famously quipped that Singapore’s progress depended on the efforts of a talented elite governing Singapore whose number was so small that they could all fit into a jumbo jet—300 people. If all these people were on the same plane and it crashed, he joked, Singapore would fall apart. Lee never gave an indication of who would be on his doomed metaphorical jet, but it is likely that Herman Hochstadt, one of Lee’s trusted trouble shooters in the civil service, would have had a ticket.

He was Lee Kuan Yew’s Press Secretary from 1962 to 1965 and thereafter held key positions at a string of Ministries, such as Foreign Affairs, Defence, Education, Communications, Finance, and Law. His amusing and frank accounts of how he worked with Lee Kuan Yew during his long career in the Singapore civil service make his autobiography valuable to readers interested in knowing more about Lee’s relationship with his civil service.

Hochstadt has written a very Eurasian autobiography of his life, with a self-deprecating style of humour. The first few chapters give insights into Eurasian life during the colonial era and how complex identities could be. Among them is the memorable story of his father, Henry Hochstadt, waving his birth certificate in front of the Japanese Occupation administrator Mamoru Shinozaki to prove his racial identity.

At the time of decolonization, the ‘Malayanization’ of the civil service saw the departure of many of the British colonial administrators who were being replaced with fresh local graduates from the University of Malaya, such as Hochstadt. He entered the civil service in 1959, around the same time as other graduates who would also go on to be crucial key figures in the Singapore civil service—Sarjit Singh and Ngiam Tong Dow. Hochstadt describes how initially he picked up the work of departing colonial civil servant Tony Colton, who gave him much assistance, and remained his good friend after Colton took up a managerial position at the Straits Times. Hochstadt recalls during his first decade of his days in the civil service not just the successes, but quite a number of events that did not go according to plan or were near mistakes.

The autobiography gives a thorough account of Hochstadt’s early career in the civil service, but as he moves into the period when he held high office later in his career, readers hoping for a detailed account of policy making and implementation will be disappointed. Like many civil servants, he invokes the Official Secrets Act, which they all sign, as a reason not to give such thorough accounts. Instead, he offers a number of anecdotes, which are amusing and interesting. They do give insights into decision-making.

From reading Hochstadt’s autobiography, the reader gets a sense of how crucial the well-educated University of Malaya graduates were to maintaining and increasing the civil service’s efficiency and expertise, working with the political leaders to implement their policies in an era of early nation-building. Yet, the small Singapore civil service of the 1960s would be unrecognisable to the staff of its present-day counterpart with its 85,000 civil servants working in the large concrete and glass air-conditioned towers today.