By Wong Kah Wei 

 

The full title of this 1902 book written by Charles Burton Buckley is An anecdotal history of old times in Singapore: (with portraits and illustrations) from the foundation of the settlement under the Honourable the East India Company, on February 6th, 1819, to the transfer of the Colonial Office as part of the colonial possessions of the Crown on April 1st, 1867. In two volumes, Buckley tells the story of Singapore’s history starting with Stamford Raffles until when Singapore became a Crown colony in 1897. I was particularly attracted by the keyword “anecdotal” and “photos and illustrations”. Is this going to be an easy-read filled with personal stories instead of scholarly essays?  

In the Preface, Buckley tells us that his book was written based on a compilation of newspaper articles from Singapore Free Press and information from books, documents, pamphlets, gathered from various sources with comments and remarks from friends such as W.H. Read and James Guthrie. He also relied on his own experiences and personal experiences of various friends. The compilation and recording took over twenty years.  

Buckley gives us reasons for writing his book. To him, “time would be well spent to collect the information of the old days” because writings of Crawfurd, Logan, Braddell and others on Singapore “would soon be forgotten and the books scarcely to be obtained”. Furthermore, Buckley considered it “pleasant to think that this book is carrying on” with Braddell’s unfinished project of writing a book on the history of the Straits Settlements. Braddell’s notes was also a source for Buckley’s book.  

Charles Burton Buckley “re-established” the weekly newspaper Singapore Free Press in 1884. Buckley admitted that his book is “made up largely of scraps” and is intended for readers who “have some association with Singapore”. The details he had added were intended to “keep alive the memory of those who, in the early days of Singapore, helped make it what it has become”.  

Buckley decided to arrange his information chronologically starting with a chapter on Sir Stamford Raffles. Subsequent chapters continue Buckley’s narration, chronologically interspersing his book with chapters on various institutions and places such as The Raffles Institution, The Roman Catholic Church and also The Horsburgh and Raffles Lighthouses. The index at the end of Volume 2 is to guide the search for specific themes or people.  

Browsing through Buckley’s book, one is astounded by the details such as names, dates, places and various events. These details include costs, subscriptions and so on. An example is the chapter for the year 1821 where Buckley gives the cost of roads, aqueducts, buildings, produces, import and export duties and so on. He also included the different types of roads (eg. Carriage roads, horse roads, foot paths, etc) and lengths of these roads. These are information likely to have been taken from government reports which he did not specifically identify or cite.  

In fact, a few book reviews pointed out that Buckley’s work has “serious limitations as a source on Singapore history” (Lockard, 1986). 

Perhaps the more scathing book review was written by Carl A. Gibson-Hill, a former director of the then Raffles Museum. In his book review published in 1954, Gibson-Hill claimed that “Buckley nowhere defines his sources explicitly [sic], and he seldom indicates his authority for any particular passage or statement”. Gibson-Hill went on to give a number of examples of inaccuracies such as errors in dates and names, “altered meanings” and some facts which were misleading. This includes the “first vessel built at Singapore” was the schooner Sree Singapura of 1839 which Gibson-Hill corrected as the brig Elizabeth, built in 1829. Gibson-Hill pointed out that Buckley wrote of many “firsts” in his book and “great majority of them are wrong” (Gibson-Hill, 1954). Gibson-Hill had three points to make about Buckley’s book – “Buckley did not verify his references; he did not read his sources properly; he did not even read his book properly”. Although, he considered Buckley “a careless, slipshod worker”, Gibson-Hill rationalises that Buckley did not have “the natural capacity or training” and with “ill-health and too many activities”, Buckley probably did not have much time to do the work properly. Even as the book was meant to be a book on anecdotes, Gibson-Hill concluded that Buckley missed out some of the best stories. Sources such as births, marriages, deaths, movements, partnerships between people were ignored.  

Buckley had a little caveat. In his Preface, he claimed that “trouble has not been spared to make it as correct as the existing means of knowledge would allow”.  

As a librarian who also teaches information literacy skills, I cannot help but chuckle at how appalled Gibson-Hill was at the unreliability of Buckley’s book as a reference text. The lack of reference to specific sources could have possibly compelled Gibson-Hill into checking the facts and looked for gaps.  

Today, we expect any written work to have citations unless it is a creative work or a commentary. Librarians teach students how to evaluate sources to select authoritative and reliable sources for their research and assignments. We also teach the necessity to cite sources so that readers can trace sources to check on them.  

I asked myself if students could have ascertained whether Buckley’s book is not a reliable reference source. The easiest way almost anyone would take to ascertain is to go to our AI “friends”. Only one AI tool said that it was unreliable because there was “a lack of corroboration from other historical records”. None pointed out the inaccuracies and gaps in information. 

We have the benefit of hindsight. Since 1902, scholars have likely used or reviewed Buckley’s book. Book reviews are useful to provide different perspectives.  

If nothing else, we could consider Buckley’s anecdotal history as a huge endeavour by a concerned Singapore resident who wanted to record information he feared might be lost. This, too, have its place in our library collections along with the book reviews.  

 

References 

Buckley, C. B. (1902). An anecdotal history of old times in Singapore: (with portraits and illustrations) from the foundation of the settlement under the Honourable the East India Company, on February 6th, 1819, to the transfer of the Colonial Office as part of the colonial possessions of the Crown on April 1st, 1867. Printed by Fraser & Neave. 

Gibson-Hill, C. A. (1954). [Review of An Anecdotal History of Olden Times in Singapore, 2 vols, by C. B. Buckley]. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 27(1 (165)), 235–243. 

Lockard, C. A. (1986). [Review of An Anecdotal History of Old Times in Singapore, by C. B. Buckley]. Pacific Affairs, 59(3), 544–546.