135 years on, the best is yet to be
The original ACS at Amoy Street
ACS at Coleman Street
ACS (Independent)
ACS (Barker Road) and ACS (Primary)
Our ACS milestones Mr Earnest Lau was the principal of ACS from 1977–83. This article originally appeared in the ACS 125 Commemorative Magazine.
I
n 1886, the immediate initiative came from Chinese businessmen who asked the Rev William F. Oldham to teach their sons. In fact, Mrs Marie Oldham, in a magazine article published in 1907, said that “there ought not to be any discrimination between evangelistic and educational work; each can be as educational or as evangelistic as the one in charge chooses to make it”. At that time, the school provided instruction in English in the morning and Chinese in the afternoon, and that was how it came to be called by its present name. The first 13 scholars studied at 70 Amoy Street, but the enrolment rapidly outgrew the shop house, forcing the first removal of the school to a new purpose-built school house adjoining the Methodist Church which the Rev Oldham had built at Coleman Street at the junction of Armenian Street. Here the ACS was to stay for many years until redevelopment in the 1950s obliged the School to rebuild. An important educational philosophy introduced by Oldham strove not to confine his scholars’ learning simply to the Standards but sought to spread it over a larger area, “that it may be useful to them in all their after life”. Education should cultivate the man and transcend the making of a livelihood. With well-qualified missionaries with college degrees, it was possible to offer
preparation for the Queen’s Scholarship, and introduce the Cambridge Junior and Senior examinations by the turn of the century. In the 1910s, an ambitious educational innovation was introduced by the Rev J. S. Nagle, whose mission was the transformation of the ACS into the Anglo-Chinese College, a job for which Bishop Oldham specially selected him. Although the project itself failed to materialise, the preparatory arrangements begun by the Rev Nagle encouraged him to raise the quality of teaching staff through foreign recruitment, thus providing the School with an unprecedented intellectual edge. It was also under the Rev Nagle’s leadership that the Old Boys’ Association was set up in 1914. The 1920s and 30s saw another milestone reached when some of the most prized and enduring traditions of ACS were introduced. The Principal from 1929–47, Mr T. W. Hinch, who is widely considered the tradition builder of ACS, played a central role in cultivating a distinctive School tradition that lay the foundation of what we now call the “ACS Spirit”. These traditions included the ACS Anthem written by H. M. Hoisington, which bonded and continues to bond ACSians together, the ACS Crest and Shield designed and
created by Dr Yap Pheng Geck, and the House system to encourage sports and healthy rivalry among students during annual Athletics championships. The Houses were named after Bishops Thoburn and Oldham, the Rev Goh Hood Keng, Mr Tan Kah Kee and Mr Cheong Koon Seng, all of whom showed great passion for ACS. The House system, which all our ACS schools observe, has since expanded to include houses named after Dr Lee Seng Gee, Dr Shaw Vee Meng and Tan Sri Tan Chin Tuan. The Pacific War years and the Occupation forced the closure of the School until after the war. The immediate post-war period saw a burst of activity, including a massive building programme that transformed the Barker campus into a fully equipped secondary school with its iconic clock tower, a sentinel of Bukit Timah. Together with this was the expansion of the Primary/ Junior Schools both at Coleman Street where the original buildings were torn down and rebuilt to cater for a much enhanced enrolment, and Barker Road where the boys were taught in classes which had been temporarily occupied by the Secondary classes. In 1950, Post School Certificate Classes, later known as Pre-University classes, were set up and the first batch of female students were enrolled in ACS.
