A window into a gas lit past

As well as having the power to evoke a deep sense of longing in us for places we can no longer see, old photographs can be windows into the past, and provide us with clues to life beyond what the rose-tinted lenses we often have on, have us see.

This 1941 photograph, is a perfect example. Captured in colour — a rarity for photographs from those days, it was one of a large number taken by Harrison Forman. Forman was one of two American photographers, the other being Carl Mydans, who documented a Singapore making preparations for a war that no one thought would come to its shores.

McCallum Street, 1941, Harrison Forman Collection

The photograph shows an incarnation of McCallum Street that we may have forgotten about, as a street that looked quite typical of much of built-up Singapore, lined with a most common of urban constructs, shophouses, with poles of laundry hung out to dry. The shophouse façades are also quite typical, and have inscriptions in Chinese characters that told of the aspirations of the houses’ earlier occupants. A rickshaw dates the photograph to before they were taken off the streets in 1947. Interestingly the shophouses are raised, which could indicate that the possibility of the street being flooded was considered in their construction.

Another interesting aspect of the photograph, is the absence of any form of street lighting except for a single gas lamp post. Gas lamps provided much of the public illumination back in the day, and the single lamp would certainly not have brightened the street to the levels that we have come to expect today. The municipality’s first gas lamps were lit came on 24 May 1864, the birthday of Queen Victoria, and replaced the much less effective oil lamps that were first introduced on 1 April 1824. For the purpose, the Singapore Gas Company was established in the 1860s to produce methane from coal. The gas company was transferred to the municipality in November 1901.

By the time that this photograph was taken, electricity also powered a selection of street lamps. Electrical lighting on a large scale was first seen in 1897 on the premises of the Tanjong Pagar Dock Company. Electricity however, was only made available to the municipality in 1905 through an arrangement with the Singapore Tramways Company to supply of excess power from its plant in MacKenzie Road. Electric street lighting was introduced in 1906 to light up Raffles Place, Boat Quay and a section of North Bridge Road. It would however only be in the mid-1950s that a complete switch was made to electric street lighting.

There would also have been other items connected with gas lighting and gas supply that would have been visible. Some appear in other photographs from the era. The huge gas holder at Kampong Bugis, part of the Municipality’s Kallang Gasworks, was on item that was quite a landmark. It was after the gasworks that the name of the area in the Hokkien vernacular, “Huay Sia” (火城) or “Fire City”, came about.

Another large gas holder from the pre-war era that was also a visible landmark was located off Maxwell Road. Installed in 1913 and reconstructed after the war, the Municipal (later City Council) Gas Holder stood on a site just across what became Kadayanallur Street from Maxwell Road Market (now Maxwell Food Centre) — right where URA Centre stands today.

The Gas Holder at Maxwell Road.

The use of gas lamps also required an team of lamplighters to be employed. The task of the lamplighter was to light the lamps up at 6 pm and blow them off at midnight. The installation of time switches in the 1940s reduced the need for these lamplighters, although many remained in employment to clean and maintain the lamps and as back ups should the automatic timers failed. The task was by no means easy or safe, lamplighters could be seen carrying their ladders on bicycles and propping them against the arms that projected horizontally from the gas lamp posts. There were a number of fatal accidents involving falls or due to lamplighters being struck by vehicles in the course of performing their duties.