A Biographical Account of the Social Welfare State in Late Colonial Singapore, 1945–1965

Abstract

This chapter presents a biographical approach to the foundation of a social welfare system in late colonial Singapore, circa 1945 to 1965, in a historical situation where there was little or no local precedent of a centralized welfare system. By throwing into sharp relief the experiences of rendering and receiving aid, I present an account of how individuals helped lay the foundations of the social welfare system. I show how their actions were a part of a broader colonial policy, which sought to refashion the colonial plural society into a cohesive community with the integral or even leading role of the state. This provides a basis to present Singapore’s history beyond a triumphalist narrative and to compare welfare state developments in colonial and other contexts.

Introduction

Singapore does not have a welfare state in the sense of the state guaranteeing a minimum income or managing social insurance programs that cover contingencies at various life stages.¹ Nevertheless, Singapore has a social welfare system that combines elements of the welfare state, such as social security programs that cover retirement, healthcare, housing and education needs (namely the Central Provident Fund and MediShield Life), and social services for both the individual and the family. Conventional presentations of Singapore’s social welfare system, usually compiled by economists, sociologists, and social work academics, focus on the contemporary and the institutional.² In other words, they evaluate current social services and related institutions, policies, and legislation, with brief historical overviews that rarely capture diverse and complex human experiences in requiring, rendering and receiving social welfare. What did it mean to be poor, destitute or in need of welfare assistance? To whom or what can such individuals and families turn? What motivated individuals, community organizations and the state to provide welfare assistance? These questions take on even more historical significance as there was no coordinated approach to social welfare in Singapore until after World War II.

These questions form the basis of this chapter’s approach to the early development of Singapore’s social welfare system. As the term “biographical account” suggests, I focus on the human experience, specifically that of needing and rendering assistance, which in turn provides an intimate insight into the building of a social welfare system in late colonial Singapore. This is done primarily through the personal letters, oral histories, and biographies of the understated yet critical actors of Singapore’s social welfare system. These include the colonial officials who headed Singapore’s Social Welfare Department (SWD); the local SWD officers and volunteers who, by carrying out their everyday duties and responsibilities, gave tangibility and meaning to social welfare in post-war Singapore; and, not least, some of the individuals and families—the elderly, women, children, and the sick. Though partial or incomplete, such sources nevertheless provide a platform from which we can better appreciate the diverse range of human emotions and experiences in requiring and rendering assistance, especially in a historical situation where the provision of welfare assistance was not the norm or expected. The biographical approach layers the conventional legislative and institutional histories of the welfare state, allowing us to better comprehend fundamental historical change as experienced by individuals.

Their intimate accounts provide a deeper appreciation of the encounters between individuals and institutions in a late colonial/early nation-building situation. Such encounters do not necessarily follow conventional historical presentations of Singapore’s past, which are usually based on political developments: British colonial rule from 1819 to 1942; the Japanese invasion and occupation from 1942 to 1945; decolonization and the struggle for independence from 1945 to 1963; independence from colonialism through a political merger with Malaya to form Malaysia in 1963; and, after separating politically from Malaysia in 1965, the continuous struggle to remain viable as an independent island nation-state. As such, the memories and perspectives presented in this chapter are valuable, as they allow for a different understanding of Singapore’s history beyond events preordained as significant in a triumphalist narrative. These experiences may only be cursory to those political events, but they are no less significant. They give insights into the socio-economic conditions of late colonial Singapore. They capture the satisfaction of resolving a case and ensuring assistance was rendered, and they uncover the complications and frustrations in creating and operating that social welfare state—within a situation where deliberate state interventions into personal spaces were not the norm. These experiences complicate—in a good way—the organized and at times absolute renderings of social welfare by political rhetoric and in some scholarly discourse. The specific case of Singapore not only adds layers to its colonial experience, but it also provides a basis from which comparisons can be made to similar colonial situations.³

Backdrop: The Colonial Situation

Until World War II, social services in colonial Singapore developed in a piecemeal manner, initiated mostly by the community, with rare interventions by the colonial state. This reflected the laissez-faire or limited state approach adopted by British colonial authorities ever since they established a trading settlement in Singapore in 1819. The colonial society that subsequently evolved was a plural society, made up of diverse migrants with divergent loyalties and interests, with little to no common social will to see themselves as one community.⁴ As detailed elsewhere, the absence of a common social will resulted in the troubled and uneven development of social services and its related institutions and initiatives.⁵ There was no organized approach to provide relief during moments of need, or a common purpose to aid the vulnerable holistically. For instance, there were varying responses to the economic pressures caused by the 1930s Great Depression.⁶ Take, for instance, the experiences of three workers affected by the Depression: Augustin, a South Asian estate overseer working in British Malaya since the 1920s; Wong, a Chinese working in a motor engineering firm after arriving in Singapore in 1933; and Valentine, a Singapore-born Eurasian clerk. As part of a repatriation policy for Indians, Augustin was sent home to Kerala in 1932.⁷ Wong lost his job barely seven months after he arrived in Singapore, and was forced to become an itinerant hawker.⁸ In contrast, after losing his clerical position, Valentine relied on his family for accommodation and support during the Depression years.⁹

The colonial state was all but absent, but this situation allowed non-state organizations to take the lead. The Salvation Army, for instance, took over existing relief funds when it first arrived in Singapore in 1935. On the eve of World War II, it had established industrial homes, a hostel for discharged prisoners, and a children’s home. Sometime after it opened, the female industrial home took in Tan Beng Neo, who ran away from home after a row with her father. She recalled that “after running away from home, I had no money. I had five or six dollars only,” and that the Army “gave me a bed.”¹⁰ The Army also paid for her midwifery course and in return Beng Neo trained to become a Salvationist. In April 1939, she and six others became the first local officers of the Army.¹¹ The training and experience Beng Neo and others gained from their time in the Army would stand them in good stead in creating and supporting the social welfare system to come.

Elsewhere in the British Empire, events were unfolding that would fundamentally change colonial policy from the previously hands-off approach to a more interventionist policy in the area of social welfare. Industrial and social unrest in the British West Indies during the late 1930s led to the Colonial Development and Welfare Act in 1940, whereby metropolitan Britain committed itself financially to the social and economic development of its colonies.¹² Although Singapore was surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942, colonial planning for a post-war future accelerated as the tide of the war turned. From 1943, the Colonial Office helped prepare a series of policy directives to guide post-war rehabilitation in Singapore and other colonies. The social welfare policy directive called for the establishment of a Social Welfare Advisory Committee made up of government officials and non-government representatives with the objective of stimulating and coordinating social welfare work.¹³ It directed that the “Government should appoint a Senior Social Welfare Officer and any Welfare Staff should be under his direction,” and that the “efforts of these Officers and Committees should be directed towards improving the general well-being of the community in its widest sense.” All agencies and organizations, official and unofficial, were extolled to cooperate and to coordinate their programs in a “general plan for social welfare.”¹⁴ There was no clear definition of social welfare, but it was clear in the planners’ minds that, as part of a broader social policy, it would help forge a more cohesive colonial society.

After an absence of three and a half years, the British returned to Singapore in September 1945. During the British Military Administration (BMA), the Malayan Welfare Council was created, from which regional committees were established. The committee for Singapore, known as the Singapore Executive, became responsible for coordinating relief efforts such as the provision of food and medical supplies, and services for refugees and displaced persons, and for locating missing persons. The Singapore Executive also initiated a child nutrition program and direct financial assistance, and laid the foundations of a coherent youth policy via the establishment of youth clubs and a juvenile court. When the civilian government was established in April 1946, the new SWD took over most of the Singapore Executive’s services and programs.¹⁵ It is from this point that the building of Singapore’s social welfare system began in earnest.

A New Beginning: Tan Beng Neo and Institutional Care

The SWD was more than merely a new government department. It reflected the colonial authorities’ intent to shed pre-war laissez-faire approaches and to implement a “modern approach to the problems of delinquency, leisure, and want.” The SWD was a “new kind of instrument,” which was to be at the “disposal of the whole community.” In the SWD’s first annual report, social welfare was seen “as part of the obligation of the community, as the State, to the community, as individual citizens.” Social welfare was no longer going to be palliative or transient, or the domain of private charities, but an “essential public service.”¹⁶ Such lofty objectives required skills and expertise previously undeveloped by the government, and hence it had to start from scratch. During the initial years, the SWD benefited from the expertise of Salvation Army officers, some of whom went on to join the former.

Beng Neo was one such officer. During the British Military Administration, she was an investigator for its emergency relief scheme. Beng Neo had to verify the applications by examining the applicant’s “living conditions and so on and made […] my recommendations whether they needed any relief or not.”¹⁷ She vividly remembered that it was extremely difficult to locate the given addresses as house numbers were not organized in running order (or any order for that matter). The investigator’s senses were assailed by a variety of sights and smells. Beng Neo remembered the stench of pig farms, the wretchedness of desperate poverty, and the heartbreaking sight of families mourning loss—she recalled a family of several women with more than a dozen children, and all its male members were lost during the war. Beng Neo also helped coordinate operations in the People’s Restaurants, an integral part of the SWD’s communal feeding program.¹⁸ She recalled that she “used to go round on my bicycle and go around and see how the food was…. Occasionally I tasted [the food] a bit to see if they’re all right.”

Beng Neo officially joined the SWD in September 1947 as assistant matron at the Girls’ Homecraft Centre (GHC). Originally called the Nantina Home, the GHC was a symbol of a new approach to the rehabilitation of women and young girls at risk (such as orphans and victims of abuse) by deliberately separating them from known prostitutes to avoid the perceived bad influence of the latter. Beng Neo recalled in particular four girls who were sisters, the oldest being about “seven or eight” years old and the youngest three. Their father had disappeared. Their mother “went mental” and was unable to take care of them. The youngest apparently would wet herself and so Beng Neo “had to clean her up, changed her pants, cleaned her up and so on.” Beng Neo’s daily routine was divided between the home and the main office: “Half the day I was there in the morning. I had the little ones. I had to teach them, looked after them, cleaned them up sometimes. And in the afternoon, […] I had to go to the main office and did investigation work.”¹⁹ Beng Neo’s task was made more challenging by GHC’s bare facilities:

There wasn’t even a blackboard or chairs or anything. So [the girls] used to sit on the sort of platform. […] Nantina used to be a sort of Japanese hotel […] they had those types of platforms which were very useful. They didn’t have to sit on the bare floor. The little ones would sit on my lap. I used to give them a bit of love and cuddle. […] And I just looked after them as if they belonged to me, as if I was their auntie or mother.

In December 1947, Beng Neo was asked to take over Mount Emily Boys’ Home. The home housed just over 100 boys between the ages of six and fifteen. Beng Neo’s first impression was that the place was “filthy, stinks like a zoo. The children, little boys of six and seven had lice on their heads. The bugs were crawling up the walls. They had scabies, red eyes, and chicken pox. […] And there wasn’t any food. Two jars of salt, that’s all I found in that Home.” While the SWD supplied some food rations, Beng Neo required more. She managed to persuade some “parents to bring their rice ration. And every day I cooked a huge pot of rice and I got a lot of dehydrated soup mix and boiled these great, big pots.”²⁰

Beng Neo’s problems were compounded by having no budget in her first year, and so she had to make do with what was available. She bartered canvas for temporary shelters supplied by the Red Cross for sewing machines and clothing materials. She enlisted the Fire Brigade to clean and refurbish the old building, organized the children into work parties, and taught the older boys to sew and make clothing. The boys were also sorted into groups for cooking and maintenance around the home. She solicited help from the general public, such as staff from a nearby swimming pool to teach swimming, and a scout to start up a Boy Scout troop. Two girls from the Pasir Panjang Girl’s Home (where rescued juvenile prostitutes resided) were enlisted as cooks. To raise funds, Beng Neo organized a sale of work during Christmas, getting the boys to use the spare Red Cross canvas to make shopping bags and handles. She planned a daily routine that provided elementary lessons, a duty roster of house chores, and sufficient time for play and leisure. Older boys were encouraged to find outside employment, returning to the Home after work. As there were few other full-time SWD staff in the beginning, Beng Neo lived at the Home and became the boys’ surrogate mother. She took her position seriously, at one time confronting one of her former residents for cheating on his wife, long after he had left the Home and was a working adult.

In 1950, Beng Neo took over York Hill Home, a residential home for nearly 200 girls from infancy to school-going age. The residents were a mix of orphans, abuse victims, petty criminals, and those from troubled families. Beng Neo divided them into two groups, one school-going and the other designated as “Home girls.” The latter were mostly “overage girls” who had gotten into various types of trouble, “sometimes involved with men. Some were even pregnant. […] Sometimes they would run away from home. Sometimes they were ill-treated. You should see some of them with marks all over their body, legs. […] They had been bashed about. […] And a few might even be theft cases.” The “Home girls” learned sewing and embroidery work to make clothing “for the younger ones.” They were also involved in the preparation of meals “for the rest of the Home and cooking for the nursery children.” Essentially, they were learning to take care of infants and younger children. The girls would leave York Hill if they found work upon completion of school or if they were to marry. Beng Neo sometimes had to “persuade” the Department to give a “dowry” for the orphaned girls, which she would use to buy the girl

A pair of shoes, a pair of slippers, a comb, a hairbrush, hair oil, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a pair of scissors, powder, lipstick, Eau de Cologne, talcum powder, a mug, a basin, two pieces of scented soap, two suits of pyjamas, three sets of underclothing, three to six dresses, six handkerchiefs and a little sort of suitcase to put all the things in. So that she goes out, at least she has a certain amount of decent things to start life with.²¹

Beng Neo was describing a situation where a girl had no one else to turn to except the Home and the SWD. The items described above are the bare essentials one reasonably expects a person to possess. In retrospect, it is difficult to imagine the type of life these orphaned, abandoned, or troubled girls would have faced without the Home and Beng Neo.

The protection and support afforded by York Hill Home had its limits, however. For some who left, their lives did not immediately get better. Beng Neo remembered girls returning to the Home or asking for help after being abused by their husbands or adoptive parents.²² At the wedding of another girl, Beng Neo recalled confronting the groom’s relatives as they were making snide comments about the absence of the girl’s natural mother. The stigma of the home left Beng Neo feeling helpless. She noted that people did not “understand that the Home is for training” and received girls who had an assortment of problems.²³ One particularly poignant story was of a ten- or eleven-year-old girl who came to York Hill because her father was dead and her mother was hospitalized with tuberculosis.

And I used to take her to the hospital to see the mother. I even left the address and all that but the hospital never informed us when the mother died. It was, I think, a couple of months or when I took the girl back to the hospital that we found that she was dead and already buried. And I had to console the girl.²⁴

The presence of Beng Neo was a boon to a fledgling SWD badly in need of trained staff. She could work independently and manage challenging situations with initiative and imagination. In 1951, Beng Neo traveled to England for further education and training. Beng Neo thought that she could have gone earlier, but “staff was not easy to get in those days.” At one stage, she was managing two homes simultaneously. She recalled: “Usually, most of the staff that helped […] really came from the Salvation Army. You see there was nothing, nobody was trained. Nobody was able to do the work. And to get somebody to take over my job was quite… you know, a task.” She opined that “the jobs that [the SWD] started did not seem to progress until the Salvation Army officers joined them.”²⁵ Beng Neo worked for the SWD until she retired in 1969. Her memories not only capture vividly the experience of pioneering an aspect of Singapore’s modern-day social welfare system, they also provide a window into the experiences of young children and women who needed and received her help.

Paving the Way: Daisy Vaithilingam and Medical Social Services

The SWD was only one part of Singapore’s social welfare system. Almoners (or medical social workers) also played an important role in building Singapore’s social welfare state, one of whom was especially successful in transforming her personal initiative into sustained social programs and policy. Contemporary policies and programs concerning child welfare, such as the fostering scheme, education for children with disabilities, and public awareness of persons with disabilities, can trace their origins to the endeavors of Daisy Vaithilingam. Inspired by an almoner’s talk, Daisy started out as a student almoner in 1950. One memorable task was to solicit donations for walking aids:

One of the first things I did was to write to people just using the telephone book […] to ask them to help out patients who needed orthopedic appliances. That means, like crutches or calipers. Some appliances to help them to learn to walk. Many of them were people who had been affected by polio. […] Every time I opened a letter there would be a check. People we didn’t know. We just looked through the telephone book, [wrote] to companies and said that we had a child, can you help with so much. That was the first time I saw how generous the people in Singapore were, because we would always get checks to help the children.²⁶

After formal training, Daisy officially became an almoner in 1954. In the following year, she became the first local head of Singapore’s almoners’ service. The service started in 1949. Almoners, named for the alms distributed to needy patients, were the predecessors of the modern-day medical social worker. However, in late colonial Singapore, almoners did more than that. In the context of little to no social support for hospital patients, the almoners of Singapore helped establish services, programs, and organizations—many of which still exist today—to address pressing social needs.²⁷

One pressing issue was the number of unwanted children in the hospital wards, due to a variety of medical conditions. Daisy recalled that in “the children’s unit we had lots of children who were mentally handicapped, severely handicapped to an extent that they couldn’t walk.”²⁸ There were no institutions dedicated to this particular social need, so like Beng Neo, Daisy made effective use of what was available (and who was willing to help). She noticed several hospital attendants were “very good at looking after these small babies,” and she began organizing them to take the babies home with an allowance. “A lot of them had got quite attached to the children, for they had remained in the ward for a long time. So they were quite happy to take them home.”²⁹ As the scheme expanded, the almoners collaborated with the SWD to ensure potential foster parents were properly assessed. The SWD formally took over the scheme in 1956, which still exists today.³⁰ Daisy also focused on the caregiver, understanding that caring for children with disabilities required additional support. She succeeded in lobbying the SWD for a family allowance to help caregivers who had to give up their jobs to care for the children.

Daisy also worked directly with the Education Department and schools to ensure that children with physical disabilities were still able to have an education. For those who could not travel, she arranged for teachers to teach on the hospital wards so that the children “would not be at a disadvantage” when they could be discharged. For those who could travel, Daisy and her colleagues arranged for transportation (provided by the SWD) and worked with the schools to ensure accessibility for the children. Daisy recalled a heart-warming example of a school principal ensuring that all classes of a particular level remained on the ground floor so as to allow a child with physical disabilities to continue attending school.

Children with intellectual disabilities held a special place in Daisy’s heart. She was a founding member of a voluntary organization that became known as the Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore (MINDS), first as Secretary and then later as President. One of the largest and oldest social service in Singapore today, the origins of MINDS can be traced to the collaborative efforts between the almoners, the Singapore Children Society, and the Rotary Club to establish a school or training center dedicated to preparing children with intellectual disabilities for employment and everyday living. Established in 1961, the school was called Towner Chin Pu—the latter two words a direct transliteration from Mandarin for “improvement.” Towner Chin Pu, and the training centers that followed it, laid the foundations for special needs education in Singapore.

Seizing the Initiative: Constance Goh and Family Planning

The Singapore Family Planning Association (SFPA) was established in 1949, the result of volunteers confronting poverty on a daily basis for over two years. The SWD took over the Singapore Executive’s child feeding scheme in 1947. However, lacking sufficient resources, the SWD restricted the program to children of families receiving financial aid, and even then, only to one child per family—usually the youngest. Moreover, the SWD had to rely on volunteers to run the feeding centers. The volunteers, mostly women, were confronted with the daily sight of large numbers of hungry and malnourished children and their inability to feed every one of them. A volunteer recalled, “the older brothers and sisters used to come along the centers and look longingly at what was being done for the younger children.”³¹

Soon, the volunteers began to realize the root cause of this situation, and from there, the helplessness of the children’s mothers. Another volunteer lamented:

And people were just breeding. […] [T]hey have so many children in one family, they can’t afford to feed or clothe [or] send them to school. […] I used to meet these young girls. […] One moment you see her expecting, and the next moment you see her with the baby. And after a year and soon after, she’s carrying again. And I used to tell her, ‘How can you expect another child?’ She said, ‘What to do,’ she would say.³²

Another volunteer, Constance Goh, also recalled: “Children were running wild; if parents could not feed those they already had, how could they add more to the family?”³³ Soon, Constance and her fellow volunteers had had enough: “It was seeing all [this] poverty […] that convinced us that something had to be done about family planning. […] Family planning was […] to allow women to space and limit the size of their families.”³⁴

Constance practically bullied the then SWD head, Percy McNeice, into becoming the first President of the SFPA—giving the association the semblance of official support.³⁵ She opened the first SFPA clinic in November 1949, on the premises of her doctor-husband’s clinic.³⁶ During the SFPA’s early days, the association’s activities had to be discreet. Constance recalled:

The news spread by word of mouth. Few women could read. And we dared not say too much: we never had any publicity because if it was known we would be accused of trying to thrust something at other women, having nothing to do, or trying to get jobs. That was the attitude of the men, the public. So we worked quietly undercover. It caught on gradually. We wanted to create the climate for [the] government to accept us, for people to think that we were doing good things for others.³⁷

Nevertheless, over time, Constance and the SFPA grew in confidence and began publicizing their work. Described as someone who was “absolutely outspoken [with] a sense of social rightness,”³⁸ Constance did not hold back. She shared in an interview that “a woman who had had 22 pregnancies begged the doctors ‘to do something to stop it all’. She had 20 children. Her husband was unemployed.”³⁹ She attacked polygamy, sharing one case where a 41-year-old woman, who had had seventeen children, found out her husband had taken a younger wife—even though he was incapable of supporting his existing family.⁴⁰ She recalled one “particularly off-hand” husband who reassured his wife—already the mother of eight children—that additional children could be given away. There was precedence, as the couple had already given two away.⁴¹ Constance bitingly summed up the men’s general attitude:

It was very difficult to persuade men to use condoms. Most men thought only of their own pleasure. They thought their fun might be spoiled, their health injured. The worship of ancestors influenced their attitudes as well. You must have sons to provide for you in the after-life and to carry on the family name, to serve you. The daughters get married and go away. It is the sons who remain and if you don’t have sons, you must try again and again.⁴²

Opposition also came from the Catholic Church. Constance recalled how a priest would condemn her to hell about “twice a month.”⁴³ Fellow volunteers were also “accused of corrupting the young and scheming to depopulate the earth.”⁴⁴ One volunteer recalled hospital nurses actively working against the SFPA, for instance giving misinformation about the clinic’s opening hours.⁴⁵ The SWD head McNeice also commented that the “nurses who were Roman Catholic were advised by the priests to […] they mustn’t assist in anyway and in fact if they were asked to assist in anyway, they must refuse on moral grounds.”⁴⁶ SFPA members worked hard and smart. While preparing for the official launch of the SFAP and anticipating opposition from religious bodies, Constance and her volunteers formed a committee to “look into the teachings of the Bible, the Koran, and the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures.” Constance recalled that they found “nothing specific against [the SFPA’s] immediate objectives” and that opposition came mainly from the Catholic Church during the organization’s early years.⁴⁷ From 1951, the SFPA received a small grant from the government annually. Even so, the volunteers did not take it for granted. Lady McNeice recalled having “to lobby the Legislative Councilors […] to either support us when this matter was brought up in Council, or, at least, to abstain from voting against us.”⁴⁸ That the annual grants increased to a high of $120,000 in 1958 (from the original grant of $5000) was a testament to the volunteers’ efforts.⁴⁹ The SFPA was not only responsible for arresting and reducing Singapore’s fertility rate from 1958,⁵⁰ it was also a regional and international leader. In 1952, the association became a founding member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, with Singapore acting as its headquarters for Southeast Asia. It acted as a guide and mentor to similar associations from around Southeast Asia, hosting visits and educational workshops for sister branches. The SFPA was ahead of its time. McNeice recalled that the SFPA operated more openly in Singapore compared to its counterpart in England, where even the addresses of its family planning centers were not publicized.⁵¹

Constance and her fellow volunteers in the SPFA were, moreover, part of a broader women’s movement during the post-war years that ultimately led to the Women’s Charter in 1961, by which polygamy outside of religious situations was outlawed and the rights of women, vis-à-vis their husbands and children, were legally enshrined.⁵² Constance and her volunteers not only recognized a root cause of poverty, they took it upon themselves to do something about it. In doing so, their impact was far-reaching, as they laid the foundations for an official state policy on population, enabling family planning to extend beyond the demise of the original SFPA.⁵³

Social Bonds to Build a Nation

The work of Beng Neo, Daisy, Constance, and their colleagues provided much-needed tangibility and coherence to Singapore’s social welfare system during its early years. Within the first decade of a deliberate social welfare policy, individuals and families in need of assistance became increasingly aware, via a plethora of social services and programs, of a social welfare state that accepted responsibility for their well-being. For instance, when Augustin was referred by his almoner to the SWD in 1952, as he was unable to work due to a chronic illness, the SWD gave him 19 dollars every month under the Public Assistance (PA) scheme, the successor to the BMA emergency relief from 1951. This was in contrast to him being repatriated back to India earlier in 1932. By then, Augustin had made Singapore his home, for better or worse. Similarly, Valentine was unable to find work as age and illness caught up with him. His parish priest, familiar with his circumstances, advised him to go to the SWD for help. From 1955, he began receiving 15 dollars every month under the PA scheme. In both cases, we can see the social welfare system in operation, via the almoner and priest referring Augustin and Valentine to the SWD for help.

The reason we are aware of both individuals and their encounters is that the emerging social welfare system needed trained staff to operate the various services and programs. Information about Augustin and Valentine came from a research paper on elderly PA recipients completed by a student from the Social Studies Diploma program. Anticipating that more trained social welfare officers were needed, this program was established in 1952 at the University of Malaya. It was a two-year program that exposed students to subjects such as law, history, sociology, and psychology, as well as attachments to the SWD and social service agencies to provide first-hand experience.⁵⁴ It exists today as the Social Work Department at the National University of Singapore.

In executing their work, Beng Neo, Daisy, Constance, and their colleagues also forged strong bonds with the people to whom they gave assistance. Such bonds could manifest as deep feelings of gratitude. Beng Neo recalled a former York Hill resident insisting on giving her a treat at the restaurant where she worked.⁵⁵ Daisy was gleefully recognized by a graduate from one of the training centers for children with intellectual disabilities she helped set up.⁵⁶ An SWD officer once returned to his motorbike to see a couple of chickens and several bunches of rambutans hanging from the handlebars—ostensibly tokens of appreciation from grateful applicants for assistance—and another received regular visits from his former hostel residents to seek advice about finding work or simply to pass on news about doing well in school.⁵⁷ Social bonds could also manifest as feelings of belonging or loyalty. This was discovered by another SWD officer when she was posted to a youth club located in a “gangster area” part of Chinatown (“People’s Park”). At first wary of the gangsters who loitered nearby, the officer realized after establishing a rapport with them that they were more than willing to assist her, even escorting her to the bus stop whenever she worked late.⁵⁸ A PA recipient felt a sense of gratitude to the SWD for assistance given to him and his family during a testing period when his father died. In 1970, he joined the SWD, beginning a forty-year career in social work as he “wanted to give back to society what [he] gained from it.”⁵⁹ This personal statement exemplifies the raw potential of social welfare to build and buttress a cohesive community via positive relationships between individuals and their government.

This is perhaps where the creation of Singapore’s social welfare system ideally meets the broader policy objective of colonial development and welfare, which was to create a cohesive community out of Singapore’s pre-war plural society. In 1955, an unpublished five-year plan suggested that the SWD “should […] no longer be concerned with residual needs.” Instead, it “should be concerned with social development and take a positive part in the construction of a society more in harmony with the political, physical and economic environment of today.”⁶⁰ The last colonial head of the SWD, Tom Cromwell, attempted to do this through community development, which was “a movement designed to promote better living for the whole community, with the active participation and, if possible, on the initiative of the Community.”⁶¹ This manifested primarily via the building of community centers, which was described by Cromwell as

[A] building where there is a hall, big enough to play badminton in, with a proper stage for amateur concerts and plays, baby shows, lectures and so on, and rooms in which committees of clubs and societies can meet; provide first aid posts, a telephone, kindergartens (more or less unofficial) and some kind of training for children who can’t get into school, facilities for boys and girls, youth clubs and so on. […] In short, it is our job to build up a feeling of neighbourliness among people who just happen to be neighbours.⁶²

An internal SWD memo reiterated that the community center catered to all individuals, regardless of “sectional” needs and interests, providing a space for the “pursuit of common interests.” The memo continued:

Neighbourhoodliness does not, of itself, necessarily constitute a social bond; but if, by grouping its leisure activities in a recreational and educational centre, a neighbourhood can develope [sic] into a socially conscious community, learning, by managing the affairs of the Centre, to participate intelligently in the affairs of local and central government, then education for democracy will have made a real advance.⁶³

By the end of 1957, the SWD had built at least eight community centers.⁶⁴ In 1960, the management of all community centers in Singapore was permanently transferred to the People’s Association, a government agency that still exists today.⁶⁵ The potential of community centers was clear to the pioneering generation of Singaporean political leaders. In clarifying the purpose of the community center, S. Rajaratnam, the then Minister for Culture, echoed the SWD memo: “When the Government introduced Community Centres its main aim was to use them as training grounds for democracy. Democracy does not mean only an elected leader running the country. […] Democracy means people also learning to do things for themselves; people willing to do service voluntarily for the community.”⁶⁶

The community center memo was a clear attempt to connect the SWD and social welfare to nation-building. At its most fundamental, nation-building refers to the efforts to foster a cohesive community within a defined territorial boundary by emphasizing commonalities, such as language, culture, a shared heritage, and a common vision of the future.⁶⁷ The community center was perceived as integral to the “fostering of a spirit of neighbourliness and common citizenship in the present plural society.”⁶⁸ The reference to a “common citizenship in the present plural society” is intriguing, as it appears to be a reference to John Furnivall’s earlier writings on the problems of the colonial plural society. Furnivall was a former official in the British colonial Indian Civil Service. He worked in Burma from 1902 until his retirement in 1931. He studied at Leiden University from 1933 to 1935, researching colonial policy and administration. In 1948, he published Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India, which expanded on his earlier studies on the problems of the plural society created by colonialism and their possible solutions.⁶⁹ One suggestion Furnivall made was to have the government play a central role in facilitating the “re-integration of society through Nationalism.”⁷⁰ Hence, Cromwell’s use of community development appears to build on Furnivall’s idea of using nationalism to address the issues posed by Singapore’s colonial society then. Cromwell clearly felt a strong government presence was necessary, as “there is no real nationalism in Singapore. […] People do not feel [themselves] to be Singaporeans.” He commented, rather presciently, that “it is just possible […] that racial antagonisms may be exacerbated after independence.”⁷¹ He observed:

A natural lack of cooperation between the ‘alien’ Chinese and the local Government, because they do not feel they belong to it. They cannot speak any of the recognized languages, and like the Englishman abroad they see no reason to learn them. They are fearful, easily led by their own kind and they have a remarkable sense for joining a majority in semi-passive movements antagonistic to ‘government.’ It is due largely to ignorance of the way Government works and what it does.⁷²

Cromwell’s efforts at rudimentary nation-building were overtaken by events ironically enough initiated by decolonization. His influence and power were reduced, and he was eventually replaced by a local officer. Cromwell’s ideas, however, particularly the use of community centers and the centrality of government in Singapore’s nation-building efforts after independence, remained in practice long after he left.

Conclusion: The Value of Lived Experiences

The above is but a brief glimpse into the possibilities of a more intimate, biographical approach to histories of the welfare state and social welfare systems in general. The experiences of individuals, such as SWD officers, almoners, volunteers, and the individuals they assisted, provide a platform from which we are made more aware of, first, the everyday work of creating a social welfare system in a situation where there was little to no local precedent; and second, the basic experience of rendering and receiving aid. These contemporaneous perspectives and memories bestow an intimacy to conventional policy, legislative, and institutional histories by providing personal insights into the rationale behind those policies, legislation, and institutions. In doing so, they illuminate more clearly the historical interactions between the individual, the state, and society at large: in this case, they show how individual action helped foster a more cohesive society in late colonial Singapore, and how that society and the community in general were re-defined to include a more prominent role for the state.

This approach allows us to perceive the welfare state as more than just an abstract or monolithic institution providing social assistance. It encourages us to approach the welfare state as an institution or institutions that are grounded in everyday individual actions, which in turn produce experiences that give meaning to receiving and rendering aid. This also provides a basis to compare Singapore’s experiences with other related contexts, be it in how social policy was used in other former colonies to refashion colonial society after World War II, in examining the intensified role of the state and how that continued into the post-colonial period, or in the less prominent but no less significant impact of individual action.