Pulau Sarimbun, a little known island tucked away in the northwest corner of the Johor or Tebrau Strait, has quite an interesting chapter in its history. Now forlorn and isolated due to the area’s heightened security, it was once a picnic spot and later a place of retirement for a Boer War veteran turned planter, tin miner and waterworks engineer, Mr W A Bates Goodall.
Mr Goodall’s bungalow on Pulau Sarimbun in 1932 (photo courtesy of Mr Stephen Downes-Martin).
Mr Goodall arrived at our shores as part of his deployment when he was in the service with the Manchester Regiment in the early 1900s but left soon after as “soldiering in the east did not appeal to me”. He visited the island regularly for picnics from 1923 to 1932 and as the “Robinson Crusoe life” appealed to him, decided to live in a bungalow perched on a cliff on the island upon his retirement after 13 years in the waterworks department in 1932. Mr Goodall was sometimes also referred to as the Laird of Sarimbun Island and “ruled” over four “subjects”: a Cambridge educated Chinese clerk, a Malay boatman and two Chinese servants and rented the island for some $35 annually. Mr Goodall lived on the island until his passing in October 1941 – just a few months before the Japanese invaded.
Pulau Sarimbun as seen on a 1938 map.
Interestingly, Mr Goodall wasn’t the island’s first inhabitant. There was apparently a mysterious Russian who lived in a hut on the island, who paid a rent of “three peppercorns” annually at the end of the 1800s. Sarimbun Island was described in a The Straits Times 15 March 1936 article as “sunny, shady and delightful a spot as can be imagined” and commanding a view “embracing the Jalan Scudai waterfront of Johore, and the Pulai, and Plentong Hills”. The same articles also explains that its name means “shady island” in Malay*, which the people of the strait thought was haunted. A rare indigenous fossil fern thought to have been extinct in Singapore, the Dipteris, was found on the island in 2003.
Mr Max Bevilacqua Bell and the attempt to cross breed Friesian cows with Indian cows in Lim Chu Kang
It is hard to imagine that Singapore had an agricultural past. The northwest corner, while we know was given to rubber (see also: A Lost World in Lim Chu Kang), was apparently also where cattle was reared.
The very rare photograph of Pulau Sarimbun was sent to me by Mr Stephen Downes-Martin in October 2015. Mr Downes-Martin, who lived in Singapore as a child in 1959, 1960, and then again in 1970, was the stepson of Mr Max Bevilacqua Bell, a businessman whose association with Singapore began from the early 1920s and lasted until the 1970s. Among Mr Bell’s ventures in Singapore was in cattle rearing. Mr Bell had a farm in Lim Chu Kang on which he attempted to cross breed Friesian cows with Indian cows but the war put a halt to that venture. A photograph of Mr Bell’s house in Lim Chu Kang also came in the same email.
Mr Bell’s farm in Lim Chu Kang in the 1930s (photo courtesy of Mr Stephen Downes-Martin).
* Sarimbun probably follows the naming convention adopted for Singapore’s islands by the Orang Laut, which have a prefix sa- or se-. Rimbun in Malay translates to “lush” from a perspective of vegetation – which well describes the island.
The Long and Winding Road 
Interesting!
My (so far) one visit to Singapore, doing touristy things, was enough to convince me of the many layers yet to be discovered. Your very interesting photos/articles are much appreciated. Thank you so much.
Excellent historical masterpiece! Love it! Thanks for your most informative blog…will certainly visit these places on my next visit from Sydney.
gg
(Posted on behalf of Mr. N. Narayanan)
Just as a matter of information, the attap building was not Mr Bell’s ‘house’ proper, but his weekend resort looked after by a Chinese ‘butler’, along with some cows and a couple of horses tended by a North Indian cowherd, who lived with his wife and small daughter in a hut outside (probably the one featured in the photo).
Mr Bell was a close family friend of ours, dating back probably to the 1920s when my father was acquainted with his parents and all their children. I myself have gone to the Kranji farm several times in my childhood days. Every morning a large blue tub (I think galvanised zinc?) of milk from Mr Bell’s cows was delivered by a ‘mosquito bus’ from Lim Chu Kang to our house at Newton Road.
Please find in the attachments a photo taken by Mr Bell at the farm c 1933, on the reverse of which he has set out the pedigree of the Friesian bull-calf featured.
N Narayanan
The photo taken at Kranji/Lim Chu Kang at the farm from which we got our milk literally ‘farm fresh’.(oh btw that is a bull calf, not a cow!)”