he House System developed in Britain between 1820 and 1860 in the traditional
English Public School. Many British students then were boarders in ‘Houses’,
cut off to a large degree from home and parents. Over time these Houses developed
a domestic quality and their own corporate identities, providing a framework
for pastoral care of students and the fostering of healthy sporting and cultural
extra-curricular rivalry and competition with other Houses. Some Houses even
had regular "House Teas". Houses were usually named after Old Boys
of distinction whose names, it was hoped, would inspire and challenge students
to live up to the high ideals with which those names were associated. The names
also reminded students of the debt they owed to those who had preceded them
in building up the School and to those who transmitted their traditions into
the hands of the current generation. (Why, even that fictitious Hogwarts School
from the Harry Potter series had four Houses that competed keenly against each
other in exotic sports like Quidditch!)
The House Masters were usually senior teachers responsible
for the personal welfare of pupils and were usually staff whom the pupils
already held up as role models. Pupils joined a House at an early age and
remained in their House until they left school. The House System helped build
an individual's strengths within a group and created a bond with other pupils
of all ages. As pupils reached their senior years at the School they became
increasingly involved in running and co-ordinating activities of their
respective Houses. The sense of community within each House encouraged a
strong feeling of identity, loyalty and belonging.
The first headmaster, Mr. B. E. Shaw, was an educationist
of some renown in Malaya and a believer in an all-round education. So it was
not surprising that he adopted elements of the British House system for the
V.I. in 1921. (The High School, Bishop's Stortford, where he last taught had six
Houses.) It is not clear, though, why this wasn’t done much earlier as, by the
turn of the twentieth century, the first V.I. boys, comprising those who had
joined in 1893 would have already reached adolescence. Under Shaw’s system
the School was divided into five Houses for competitive sports like cricket,
hockey and football. With three masters in charge of each House, they were
known as the Red, Yellow, Brown, Green and Orange Houses.
Faced with a burgeoning school population in 1923, Mr. R.
J. H. Sidney, Shaw's successor, added five more Houses, making a total of ten
Houses. He also dispensed with the naming of Houses after colours. Sidney had
taught in King Edward's School in Birmingham which had its own system of
eight Houses named after former Chief Masters or Deputy Chief Masters. In the
case of the V.I., though, the Houses were named after persons who had been
closely connected with the founding and development of the school. There was
also, probably, to Sidney’s mind, no Old Boy of the then thirty-year-old
Institution who had yet made enough of an impact in the world to be worthy of
being immortalized in a House name.
Sidney made House membership easily and conveniently determined.
A boy was assigned to a House according to the last digit in his school admission
number. Thus ‘1’ placed him in Thamboosamy, ‘2’ in Rodger, and so on. The eight
Houses from Sidney's old Birmingham school had colours uncannily close to
today's V.I House colours: Light blue, dark blue, yellow, red, green, purple,
white and pink! Yet back in 1923, for some reason, Sidney failed to think up single
colours for five Houses of those eight, bestowing on them TWO official
colours each instead of one:
Messrs K. Thamboosamy Pillay, Kapitan Yap Kwan Seng,
and Towkay Loke Yew were businessmen and leaders of their own communities.
Their efforts and donations, along with those of other citizens of Kuala
Lumpur, led to the founding of the V.I. in 1893. They became trustees of
the school as well. Each sent his son(s) and, later, even grandsons, to
the school they jointly helped found.
Born in Singapore in 1850, Mr K. Thamboosamy
Pillay received his early education at Raffles Institution. He sailed
to Klang in 1875 with James Guthrie Davidson, when the latter was appointed
Malaya's first British Resident. Prior to that, he had been a clerk in the
legal firm in which Davidson was a partner. He was later transferred to
the Treasury where he eventually became chief clerk and acted as State
Treasurer on a few occasions. He was sent to India by the Malayan Government
to bring over the first batch of Indian immigrants for the Railway and
Public Works. Thamboosamy resigned from Government service in the 1880s
and, going into partnership with Towkay Loke Yew, managed the New Tin Mining
Company in Rawang. They were the first to use electric pumps for mining
in Malaya.
A Justice of Peace and member of the prestigious KL
Sanitary Board, Thamboosamy was the acknowledged leader of the Tamil
community. His other business interests included coffee planting, real
estate and construction. He was a member of both the Selangor Club and
the Turf Club and owned several horses. Thamboosamy died in 1902 in Singapore,
where he had gone to attend a meeting at the Singapore Turf Club. In addition
to a V.I. House, a street in the Chow Kit district and a Tamil primary school
in Sentul are also named in his memory. His son, K. T. Ganapathy Pillay, was
a Victorian and served as the second President of the VIOBA.
Dr Loke Yew migrated to Singapore from China as
a boy and first worked in a shop. Leaving his $4 a month job, he next went
to Perak where he was one of the contractors for food supplies to the troops
in the Perak war. He
leased opium, spirit, gambling and pawn-broking farms from the Government
and was the owner of numerous tin mines, and in later years, rubber estates,
notably Hawthornden Estate outside Kuala Lumpur. Although he became a
multimillionaire, he was excessively careful about petty expenditure. Yet
in the greater scheme of things, he was extremely generous. Hong Kong
University benefited from his charity and returned the favour by conferring
an honorary Doctor of Laws degree on him. Loke Yew was generally the least
expensively dressed man in his own office, used second-hand motor cars
for transport and often went to work by rickshaw instead.
There is a story that one rainy day his wife went in
their car to fetch him home from Hawthornden Estate and found him soaking
wet with a cangkul in hand showing a coolie how to dig. He died at a
ripe old age on February 24, 1917, greatly respected and mourned by all
strata of society. A road near the V.I. leading south to Cheras is named
after him. A few of his sons went to the V.I. including Loke Wan Yat and
cinema magnate Loke Wan Tho.
Kapitan Yap Kwan Seng, a Guangdong Hakka, was born
in 1846 in the Chak Kai district. At the age of 18 he sailed for Malaya where
he first worked as a tin miner in Seremban. In 1870, he moved to Selangor
and became one of the pioneers of its tin industry. He also set up a brick factory
to meet the construction demands of Kuala Lumpur town that was rapidly developing.
(The area where his factory was located later became known as Brickfields.)
He was the founder of the Pooi Shin Thong which provided free medical
service for the poor. Drawing on his own funds, Yap Kwan Seng ran this hospital,
which he renamed Tung Shin Hospital, for 13 years. He also built the Tai Wah
Ward and the Chak Kai Koong Kon in Jalan Sultan. A community leader, he once
established his own constabulary to look after his widespread business interests.
Yap Kwan Seng became the fifth and last Kapitan China in 1890.
He was appointed a member of the State Legislative Assembly and made a magistrate
as well. He was the first Chinese to serve on the Kuala Lumpur Sanitary Board. His
residence was in High Street (near the present Hotel Malaya) which had a garden and
an audience hall where he sat to administer justice. When the Pahang War broke out
in 1892 he provided transportation and supplies to the British and during the Boer
War he helped raise $10,000 for the Crown. When Sir William Maxwell the British
Resident became Governor of the Gold Coast in West Africa, Yap Kwan Seng sent
thirty of his miners there to introduce the Chinese system of mining. He died in
1902 leaving behind a rich legacy of charity and concern for the less fortunate.
Several of his 15 sons were Victorians as were a number of his grandsons,
including Queens Scholar, Yap Pow Meng, and great grandsons. Jalan Yap Kwan
Seng and Lorong Yap Kwan Seng are named in honour of him while Jalan Sin Chew
Kee is named after his tin mining business.
Sir John Pickersgill Rodger (1851–1910) was Acting
British Resident of Selangor from 1884 to 1888, then Resident of Pahang in 1888,
returning to succeed Sir William Treacher as Resident of Selangor from 1896 to
1902. He and his wife were very popular in Kuala Lumpur society. He was wealthy
and was able to entertain lavishly and subscribe liberally for worthy causes.
He was an all-round sportsman and excelled in tennis and billiards. There is
a story - probably apocryphal - about Sir John and a young colonial service
functionary, who had been invited to dinner for the first time after arrival
in Malaya. After dinner, when the men adjourned to the billiard and card room,
our Resident asked the budding empire-builder: "Do you play
bridge?"
"No, Sir," was the reply.
"Do you play billiards?"
"No, Sir," was the reply again.
"Have you got a rickshaw?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Well, goodbye."
Sir John was posted to Perak
as Resident in 1902 to 1903, and subsequently was appointed Governor of the
Gold Coast (Ghana today) from 1905 to 1910. He took a keen and lively
interest in the V.I., the only English school for boys in Selangor during his
administration. The Rodger Gold Medal, founded by him in 1895, was awarded
to the top scoring student in the Cambridge School Certificate examination
before the war. (The award is now known as the Rodger Scholarship.) Sir Roger
visited the school often, assisting in the examinations for the Treacher
Scholarship and the Rodger Medal. He offered valuable suggestions while he
was Chairman of the Trustees of the School.
The impetus that first led to the founding of the School
came from the then British Resident in Selangor, (1892-1896), Sir William
Hood Treacher. He launched the fund to establish the V.I. using, as
nucleus, the unspent Treasury money collected six years early for 1887 Golden
Jubilee of Queen Victoria. His wife, Lady Treacher, laid the foundation stone
of the new school on August 14th, 1893. Sir William became the first President
of the Board of Trustees of the VI. He went on to be Governor of the Straits
Settlements from 1901 to 1904. The scholarship awarded to the top boy in Form
Four is named for him.
The reasons for his successor to name a House in honour
of Bennett E. Shaw were obvious. This conscientious and hardworking
Headmaster had pioneered education in the V.I. over a 28-year period which
set many precedents in Selangor and the other states as well. The colonial
Government also paid tribute to him in 1938 by renaming Gaol Road, the road
in front of the school, Shaw Road.
Mr Nugent Walsh was a prominent citizen of Kuala
Lumpur and a great friend of the V.I. The Nugent Walsh scholarship was founded
in 1909 as a memorial to him and took the form of a monetary grant to the boy
who stood second in the Form Four examinations. Steve Harper was the
Inspector of Police of Selangor and another friend of the school in its early
days. The Steve Harper Memorial Fund was started in 1898 to purchase books for
needy V.I. pupils but is now defunct.
Mr G. W. Hepponstall was, in a sense, the first
headmaster of the V.I. He was the author of a geography textbook and had
operated an English school in Kuala Lumpur before the establishment of the
V.I. His pupils formed the nucleus of the new VI when Mr Heppnstall was
appointed acting Headmaster in 1893. He ran the fledgling school until Mr
Bennett Shaw arrived from England in June, 1894, and thereafter became an
assistant master on the staff.
The Supervisor of the Primary School was a Scottish
lady by the name of Miss Davidson. Arriving in Malaya as a young woman
she was with the Methodist Girls School for a short while before joining the V.I.
in 1905. From then till 1919 Miss Davidson devoted all her talent and energy
to teaching the three R's to young Victorians in High Street. She died unexpectedly
while on home leave on February 24, 1919. Her memory was honoured by Mr Sidney
who named a House named after her. A tablet was also erected in the school to
perpetuate her memory but this disappeared during the Japanese occupation. Sir
John, Sir William, Miss Davidson, and Messrs Shaw, Hepponstall, Nugent-Walsh
and Steve-Harper were those who, according to the School Song, "came
across the ocean" to help build the school and were thus honoured by
their eponymous Houses.
When the V.I. moved to its present site in 1929, the primary
boys remained in High Street and later transferred to Batu Road School. With
its school population halved, the number of houses was correspondingly pared
back to five. Now House membership was determined by two last digits instead of one:
With only eight houses the old system of allotment
according to the last integer(s) of a pupil's school admission number
could not be used. New pupils were assigned to their Houses according
to the order in which their names appear in the school register, the first
eight names to each of the eight Houses; then the next eight names in the
same order and so on.
In the beginning the House system was only for sports
but in the Lewis era when clubs and societies flowered, it became fashionable
to have competitions not only between individuals, classes or forms but
between Houses. Thus, there was an explosion of Interhouse debates, oratorical
contests and quizzes sponsored by the respective societies. Even the Cultural
Society got into the act and organized, of all things, an Interhouse play reading
competition in 1968. (Hepponstall House carried the day with its rendering of
Chekhov's The Bear; Shaw was runner-up with Noël Coward's Blithe
Spirit.) And if a House boy still lacked sporting muscles or the gift of
the gab, there were the annual InterHouse Analytical Chemistry competitions
organized by the Science and Mathematics Society to anoint the year's Senior
and Junior Analysts, bringing some intellectual lustre to the winning Houses.
In the school’s annual athletics meet, Houses not only competed
to see whose athletes ran fastest or jumped furthest, but also vied to have
the best decorated tent on Sports Day. In recent years Houses have also been
judged as to how well their contingents fared in the opening march
past!
Late in 1962 the name of Davidson House was changed to
Sultan Abdul Samat House after the great great great grandfather of
the present Sultan. He was one of the founders of the school and also one
of its two original Patrons. The Sultan had donated generously to the fund
to launch the school.
In 1974 Hepponstall House was renamed Lee Kuan Yew
House, honouring the distinguished Old Boy who had been an outstanding
sportsman in his school days in the 1920s and a VIOBA chairman from 1963 to
1965 and again from 1984 to 1986. He was also a member of the V.I. Board of
Governors.
His father was the owner of the famous Lee Wong Kee restaurant,
then located in High Street, a stone’s throw from the gates of the school where
Lee Kuan Yew was a pupil. (The restaurant later moved to Batu Road next to
the Odeon Theatre). An outstanding athlete, he established a high jump record
in the Selangor Amateur Athletic Meet which stood until 1947. He was also in
the school relay team and represented the school in football. Kuan Yew was
among the boys of the School Certificate class who literally moved to the new
V.I. building in 1929, carrying their chairs and tables with them. In the 1930s
he set up a Selangor record for the pole vault. After the completion of his
school certificate, he assisted his father in the family business until 1933
when he left for Hong Kong University. Returned in 1936 with a B.A. degree,
he taught briefly in Victoria School in Singapore. He returned to join government
service in Malaya and became a Collector of Estate Duty. After his department
was absorbed into the Inland Revenue Department, Kuan Yew was promoted as Assistant
Comptroller of Inland Revenue a position he held until his retirement.
There were very few V.I. events that this loyal Old Boy
missed in his time, be they Sports Day, Speech Day, Teachers' Day or VIOBA
dinners. After his retirement from active sports he officiated in many of
the SAAA and MAAA meets as a judge. He passed away on 19 August 1987. He
is the only V.I. Old Boy with a House named after him.
So the present Houses are:
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