SCC Bits of Fun History

A Club as old as the Singapore Cricket Club has a long history – much of which is filled with events that led to important sporting, social and even political developments in Singapore. Here though, we look at some of the interesting and sometimes funny moments in SCC’s history.

The “Pink Elephant”

Some time in the 1880s or ‘90s, the SCC cricketers perpetrated a practical joke which briefly caused the drinker’s proverbial “pink elephant” to come to life.

Under the cover of night, the young men stole across the road from the Club pavilion to the front of the Town Hall (today’s Victoria Theatre). There stood the statue of a Thai elephant, presented to Singapore by the visiting King of Siam in 1871.

The Cricket Club pranksters painted the poor elephant a tasteful shade of pink and green. According to one 1921 account, “An indignant Municipality speedily restored him to a proper sense of decency. But after all, cricketers will be crickets and in those halcyon days, paint was as cheap as whiskey!”

The Thai elephant statue now stands in front of The Arts House at The Old Parliament, opposite the Club.

The Presidents’ Drinks

Charles Stringer (President: 1882, 1889 – 1891, 1899-1900) was so fond of his gin and tonic that fellow Members used to order a “Stringer gin and tonic”.

Andrew Gilmour’s (President: (1947-1949, 1962 – 1967) favourite tipple was a whisky-water in his personally preferred proportions and was so well known in the Club that SCC aficionados would simply order “A Whisky Gilmour, please”.

In the 1980s, most members knew that President Haider Sithawalla’s (President: (1981 – 1985) drink was a non-fattening, non-alcoholic “Gunner”- a drink still popular with Members today.

SCC Past Presidents Charles Stringer, Andrew Gilmour, and Haider Sithawalla.

Visit by “The Napoleon of Cricket”

The visit of Charles Gordon Macartney and his Australian cricket eleven to Malaya in 1927 was “the” sporting event of the Pre-World War II era in Singapore.

The tour was organised and financed largely by the SCC, but arranged on the initiative of AP Penman of Selangor. The Australians played nine matches, three of them on the SCC Padang, the rest in Malaya; they won five games (including all that were played on Padang), drew three and lost one.

The Australian tour brought normal life in Singapore almost to a complete halt. The Straits Times remarked that the number of managers, junior assistants and even tambies (Indian messenger boys) gathered around the Padang suggested that very little work was being done and that “a good many office messages must have been an unconscionable time getting there”. The spectator crowd at one of the Australian matches was estimated at around 4,000.

The first “Singapore” team to play the Australians on the Padang was apparently a solid SCC eleven, which drew a storm of protest from the public; in the remaining two matches, non-European and non-SCC players were selected for the Singapore side.

Macartney described the tour as “one of the finest trips of my career”.

For SCC, one memorable performance was notched up by Andrew Gilmour, later to become a long-serving SCC president and nowadays, the Club’s Honorary Life President. He was in his late twenties in 1927 and a fine slow-medium bowler who caught Macartney out at cover point

The magazine Straits Produce said the Australian performance had inspired the people: “Small Malay and Chinese boys may often be seen in Singapore playing cricket at odd corners where before they would have been kicking a football. So the time may come when Malaya can raise as good an Asiatic cricket eleven as it can a football one.”

Transformation of the Padang!

In 1982, the Straits Times played an April Fool’s Day joke on its readers.

Under the unlikely heading “Hot-air High-rise”, the April 1 edition of the paper declared that there were government plans to “transform the Padang in front of the City Hall and Supreme Court from a sleepy football field into a dazzling new heart of the city.”

Singaporeans, long inured to almost daily announcements of some new building project or other, swallowed this fantastic tale hook, line, and sinker. But this time they were instantly up in arms, outraged at the lese majeste that could even contemplate such a fate for the Padang and its treasured sports clubs.

Callers jammed the Straits Times switchboard, some of them specifically lamenting the supposed imminent demise of the Singapore Cricket Club. At the Club itself, General Manager Mr. K Balasundram and his staff also had to cope with a flood of calls.

A mixed cricket match in 1949, recalling similar matches when women first joined the Club in 1938. In this particular match, the women won by 49 runs against the men, who were handicapped by having to bat, bowl and field left-handed. (Photo courtesy of Cecil Cooke)

Women Accepted for Associate Membership

Members voted unanimously at an Extraordinary General Meeting in July 1938 to accept women for associate membership, and thus fell what the press said “was once Singapore’s most famous male sanctum”. It seems to have been the first Singapore club to take such a step.

Members’ ladies and daughters would not be charged; other women would be accepted on application and would be charged $1 a month. No women members would have voting powers – this was to remain the situation into the 1980s.

Previously, the ladies of SCC, if and when they were allowed into the SCC pavilion at all, were relegated to the upstairs verandah to view games or other events on the Padang. They moved up and down by a rear staircase which avoided their ever having to cross the path of the men in the front verandahs or main bar, right up to the 1930s.

The women marked their coming of age with a novelty cricket match between their own eleven and a male Club eleven. In deterrence to the ladies, the men were handicapped by being required to bat, bowl and field left-handed, if they were right-handers. Watched by cheering spectators, including the Governor Sir Shenton Thomas, they thus made a good-humoured entry into the mainstream of Club life. Within a year, 22 women associate members had been elected to the Club.

The “S.t. Shovellers”

During a refuse collectors’ strike in 1936, the Club’s rugby section turned out in full force, its ranks swollen somewhat by a few passing sailors recruited en route, and set about clearing the rubbish accumulating in Singapore’s streets. Thus the acquired the insalubrious tag “S.t. Shovellers”.

Fuelled by beer and Cold Storage sausage rolls kindly donated to their cause, the rugby players toiled away. A grateful Health Department said that in two hours they have removed as much as one of their Department trucks usually took away in one day.

After this unorthodox warm-up, ex-President Peter Frend had to be hosed down in the garden before his wife Dorothy would let him into the house. “The smell was pretty terrific,” he recalled.

Rugby player and former SCC President (1951) “Peter” MBC Frend was a S.t. Shoveller in the 1930s.