The soon to be lost post office of old along Alexandra Road

I have always enjoyed a visit to one of the few remaining standalone post offices of old, and make it a point to use one whenever I am able to. Quite unlike those of the new age, which tend to be tucked away in a hard-to-get-to location in the upper floors of a shopping mall or a community centre, they are much more accessible and conveniently position, with a small car park that makes running into one much less of a complicated task.

It was therefore sad to hear that one such post office — the Alexandra Post Office, whose services I used as recently as the 3rd of November, may soon be another one of to many things of the past. A joint HDB and SLA announcement issued this afternoon, has it that it is being acquired to permit public housing to be built on the narrow section of land between Alexandra Road and Prince Charles Crescent that the Post Office sits on.

Alexandra Post Office, as it was on 3 Nov 2021.

Built as Alexandra Road Post Office as part of a 5-year-plan launched in 1956 to develop a postal service that was “second to none” through the construction of some 22 new post offices and by improving efficiency and economy in operations, the post office was opened on 24 August 1957 by then Minister for Communications and Works, Mr Francis Thomas.

The post office now occupies a small section on the ground floor of the 1957 building, which at its opening, held the second largest postal delivery and distribution centre after the General Post Office.

Designed with a modern façade by architectural firm Chung and Wong — whose claim to fame were well-known buildings such as the Haw Par House of Jade at Nassim Road and the Tiger Balm Clock Tower Building at Selegie Road and Short Street and a firm at which Haw Par Villa’s actual villa’s architect, Ho Kwong Yew, had a stint in — the post office featured living quarters for its postmaster and family. It was also constructed to act as a postal distribution centre that was second in size to the General Post Office. The post office at its opening had a staff of 17 postmen, 2 clerks and was headed by postmaster Mr Horbex Singh.

Pat’s Schoolhouse, has occupied a larger portion of the building since 2008. One of the features of the building are the ventilation blocks that are reminiscent of the 1950s and 1960s designed buildings.

With the push to move postmasters out of their co-located post office quarters in the 1970s, and with the decline in demand for postal services through the use of email and online communications, standalone post offices such as Alexandra Post Office have seen the space required for postal services greatly reduced. As such the few that are surviving have seen the excess floor area, popular with preschools, being rented out. Alexandra Post Office for example, which was the first to be used by a preschool, has had a greater proportion of its floor area occupied by Pat’s Schoolhouse since 2008.

While the announcement may spell the end for Alexandra Post Office, it will not be the last of the post offices of a time forgotten. Several post offices or old, or at least the buildings that housed them are still around. It would nice to at least see some of them kept to recall how these post offices and their postmasters provided an important service in the many rural communities scattered across the island.

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Discovering 10 Hyderabad Road

Update (20 Jul 2018, 12.30 pm)

Registration has closed as all 40 slots have been taken up. Do look out for the next visit in the series – registration will open on a Friday two weeks before the visit date.  More information at Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets is back.

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The third visit in the 2018 “Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets” series of State Property Visits, which the Singapore Land Authority is supporting, is to No. 10 Hyderabad Road. The property, which is now wonderfully repurposed as the Singapore campus of the S P Jain School of Global Management (who are also hosting and supporting the visit), features a set of buildings that may seem vaguely familiar to some. The buildings, the oldest on the campus, feature tropicalised classical façades and can be found replicated across several former British military camps across Singapore dating back to the 1930s. Built as officers’ messes as part of the wave of military barracks upgrading and construction works of the era, this one at Hyderabad Road was put up for the same purpose by the officers of Gillman Barracks.

The British military pull-out in 1971 saw the building handed over to the Singapore government. The Dental Health Education Unit moved in in 1973 and then the Institute of Dental Health (IDH) – when the Dental Education Unit was incorporated into it in 1975. It was during this time that the campus’ six-storey learning centre and hostel was put up for use as a central facility for the training of dental therapists, nurses, dental assistants and technicians. Outpatient dental health clinics were also set up in the building.

The buildings of the former officers’ mess is now used by S P Jain as an administration building as well as as “hotel” for visiting faculty and features 20 very comfortable rooms as well as a beautifully decorated lounge and banquet hall.  There are also staff rooms, discussion rooms, a music room, a chill-out lounge and a library in the buildings – which participants can hope to see.

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Details of the visit and registration link:

Location	:	10 Hyderabad Road, Singapore 119579
Date	:	4 August 2018
Time	:	10 to 11.45 am
Registration	:	https://goo.gl/forms/goZZravHJk4hDrnx1

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More on 10 Hyderabad Road:

• The beautiful campus at Hyderabad Road
• Singapore Campus, S P Jain School of Global Management

More on Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets:

• On SG Magazine 5 July 2018
• 11 Best Tours of Singapore – TimeOut Singapore 11 Apr 2018
• 5 Guided Walking Trails To Discover Previously Inaccessible Corners Of Singapore – TheSmartLocal 28 Nov 2017
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets – LAND Sep 2017
• Guided tours of best kept secrets in S’pore – The Straits Times 23 Jul 2017

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The beer train from the Anchor Brewery

A wonderful set of photographs popped up On a Little Street in Singapore last week. The photographs were posted by Lies Strijker-Klaij and includes several of the old Anchor Brewery at which Mrs Strijker’s husband, the photographer, headed its Brewhouse and Bottling Hall in the 1960s as an employee of Heineken. The set of the brewery includes several rare photographs of the railway siding and the bonded store that was sited across Alexandra Road (where IKEA stands today), as well as an overhead conveyor bridge that was used to convey beer across to the store. Together with the brewery, the bridge was a longtime landmark in the area.

An aerial view showing the brewery, the bridge , the bonded store, and the railway siding (photo: Th. A. Strijker).

The brewery, occupied the spot where Anchorpoint (the shopping mall) and the Anchorage (a condominium) stands today. It was one of two breweries along a partly industrialised Alexandra Road, the other brewery being the Malayan Breweries Limited (MBL), a venture between Fraser and Neave (F&N) and Heineken. The Anchor Brewery, producing Anchor Beer, began as a $1 million venture by the Dutch East Indies based Archipel Brouwerij Compagnie named the Archipelago Brewery Company (ABC) on 4 November 1933. As a rival to MBL, which produced Tiger Beer, it entered into a five-year pooling agreement in March 1938.  The agreement, secured for it a 40% share of the beer market and 70% of the stout market in Malaya, with the intention that it was to eventually be extended to the breweries’ other markets in Southeast Asia, India, Hong Kong and China.

The bridge to the bonded store over Alexandra Road, 1969, decorated for the 150th Anniversary of the founding of modern Singapore  (photo: Th. A. Strijker).

A turn of events in Europe just one and a half years later would lead to MBL’s acquisition of ABC. Britain had declared war with Germany following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. ABC, which Germany’s Beck’s Brewery had an interest in, was then abandoned by its German management team and found itself in the hands of the government, who decided to keep the brewery running under their care before putting it up for sale in 1940. MBL submitted the winning bid and set up a subsidiary – the Archipelago Brewery Company (1941) – to run the brewery in 1941.  It wasn’t to be long however before another turn of events – the Japanese invasion and occupation – saw the brewery’s operators change hands once again when Dai Nippon, the producer of Asahi Beer in Japan, was asked to operate the brewery from late 1942.

The bonded store and a train leaving it (photo: Th. A. Strijker).

MBL returned to running the breweries after the war and it was in this post-war period in 1949 when the conveyor bridge, built 6 metres above Alexandra Road, was added along with a bonded storehouse (where IKEA is today). A private railway siding, connected the store with a pre-existing industrial branch line that connected with the main line across Jalan Bukit Merah. The industrial line was in use until the early 1980s, after which it was dismantled. The brewery closed in 1990 when MBL’s brewing operations were relocated to a new factory in Tuas and together with its iconic conveyor bridge and its store, were demolished in 1993 – except for a Arts and Crafts movement inspired house along Alexandra Road – the former residence of the brew master. The conservation building, now used as a restaurant, along with several hints of the former brewery found in the names of the mall and condominium that has replaced it (and also the ABC Brickworks Food Centre), are all that now remains of a brewery that introduced to Singapore what became until the 1980s at least, its favourite beer.

A loaded train leaving the siding (photo: Th. A. Strijker).

366A Alexandra Road – another Arts and Crafts styled house in the brewery compound – in which Mr and Mrs Strijker lived in (photo: Th. A. Strijker)  

The former Brewmaster’s House – conserved in 1993.

The tanks at Tanjong Berlayer

The impressions I have long held of the Tanjong Berlayer area were ones formed by the road journeys to the area of my early years. That came at the end of the 1960s when the squat cylindrical tanks at the end of Alexandra Road would be the signal that I was close to my journey’s end.

Dawn over the land on which the Maruzen Toyo / BP refinery had once stood, a landscape once dominated by oil tanks.

An aerial view of Tanjong Berlayer area in 1966, showing the BP refinery (source: National Archives of Singapore).

The BP refinery storage tanks (photo online at https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/753/20557489428_aaea44065e_c.jpg.

The end of the same journey is today greeted by very different landmarks. The tanks, emblazoned with what had been the recognisable British Petroleum (BP) shield, are no longer there, having belonged to a refinery that has since been shut. The land on which the refinery had operated on has been empty since the end of the 1990s, and it is now a host of other structures, including that of the 42 storey PSA building, that is what catches one’s attention.

PSA Building and not the oil tanks, is one structure that will now catch one’s attention at the end of Alexandra Road.

The opening in 1962 of the small 28,000 bpd refinery at Tanjong Berlayer, Singapore’s second, coincided with the industrialisation efforts of the early 1960s and came on the back of Shell establishing a refinery on Pulau Bukom in 1961. The refinery had started its operations, not as a BP run one, but as one operated by the Japanese partnership of Maruzen Toyo, supplying fuel to the nearby Pasir Panjang Power Station. What was significant about this was that it represented the first major Japanese industrial investment in Singapore. The Japanese interests in the refinery did not last very long however. It was sold to BP in June 1964, just over two years after it had opened.

An aerial view of the Maruzen Toyo refinery at its opening in 1962 (photograph online at http://www.kajima.co.jp/).

With the redesignation of the area’s land use preventing BP from extending its lease in the longer term, it decided to pull-out from the refining business in Singapore in the mid-1990s. Operations at the refinery stopped in 1995, with BP maintaining the site as a storage facility for a few more years before returning it to the State in 1998. Subsequently cleared, the site had been left empty until today, awaiting a transformation that is promised as part of the future Greater Southern Waterfront. And, as with the Keppel Bay area on which the former repair docks of the Harbour Board and later Keppel Shipyard were sited to the site’s immediate east, the transformation will erase what little has been left to remind us of a time and a place we seem only to want to forget.

A fire-fighting exercise at the BP Refinery in 1968 (source: National Archives of Singapore).

The site today.

The landscape will eventually be dominated by the futuristic structures of the Greater Southern Waterfront.