| p.26 | By 1835,
Europeans were planting nutmeg and other spices on a
commercial scale north and west of the town. Much of the
forest, particularly in Tanglin, had already been cleared
by Chinese squatter gambier and pepper planters who
felled the trees surrounding their plots for firewood to
boil the gambier leaves in order to extract its
commercial product. When the soil was exhausted, they
moved to virgin land and this process of continual
shifting led to the clearing of large areas of forest. J
T Thompson, government surveyor, 1841-1853, observed that
"The district of Tanglin in the beginning of 1843
consisted of barren looking hills covered with short
brushwood and lallang". One of the first Europeans to move into the country was Dr Thomas Oxley, the colony surgeon. In about 1837 he acquired 173 acres and formed Killiney estate, described in the 1840s as "the finest nutmeg garden". About the same time, William Cuppage, an officer in the postal service, occupied Emerald Hill, and Charles Carnie, a businessman, built the first house in Cairnhill in 1840. Soon other Europeans were moving to "country situations" in the nearby districts of Claymore and Tanglin. By about 1860, the nutmeg trees succumbed to a blight caused by a species of beetle. The estates, which by now stretched from Pasir Panjang to Adam Road, through Tanglin, Claymore and Bukit Timah Road, gradually failed. Some owners retained their holdings and erected houses for rental. Cuppage, for example, built Fern Cottage circa 1850 as his residence and rented out the first house he had built, Erin Lodge, on Emerald Hill. His son-in-law, Edwin Koek, added Claregrove on purchasing the entire estate after his father-in-law’s death in 1872. When George Garden Nichol offered his 150 acre Sri Menanti estate for sale in 1859 there was already a house on the estate. Other owners sold their estates which were then parcelled out in building lots and resold by their new proprietors. The process was continual, and the land was subsequently further sub-divided into even smaller lots. By the 1870s, nearly all of the nutmeg plantations had been transformed into large, pleasant and exclusive residential suburbs. The houses that stood on the wooded and undulating hills of Tanglin and Claymore between 1850 and 1880 were named after the estates of their European owners and many of the names survive to this day as road and place names - Tyersall, Chatsworth, Ardmore, Dalvey, Irwell Bank, Orange Grove and Cairnhill. A network of roads was formed along the original plantation carriageways or along the boundaries. Grange Road, Dalvey Road, Emerald Hill Road, Scotts Road, Duxton Hill, Oxley Road, Princep Street and Spottiswoode Park Road, to name a few, were roads which originated in this way. Thomas Oxley’s nutmeg estate provides a good example of what transpired after the failure. The land lay within an area bounded by Orchard Road, Grange Road, Leonie Hill Road, River Valley Road and Tank Road. In 1850, Oxley began to dispose of his land in lots. By 1862, there were 38 houses within the estate, mostly along St Thomas Walk and the area between Killiney and Oxley Roads. By 1880, a network of roads was completed - the present Somerset Road, Devonshire Road, Exeter Road, St Thomas Walk, Eber Road Dublin Road, Lloyd Road and Oxley Road. Oxley Drive was a private driveway that led up Oxley’s Hill where there were five houses: Pavilion, Bargany House, Bargany Lodge, Killiney Bungalow and Killiney House, Oxley’s own residence. |
| p.36 | [Photograph by Lee Kip Lin of] Killiney House, built by Dr Thomas Oxley, was renamed Belle Vue by Manasseh Meyer who purchased it about 1890. |
| p.148 | [Watercolour
of Singapore Town from Government Hill looking East,
1846] The watercolour sketch by J T Thompson is dated 1846. On the left is the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd and on the right is St Andrew’s Church. Except for the house of William Renshaw George, on the site of the present Raffles Hotel, none of the other houses can be identified with certainty.[...] George is best remembered for his purchase of the Singapore Chronicle in 1829. He sold the paper in 1835 and bought the Singapore Free Press in 1842, which he sold to Abraham Logan in 1848, having met with financial trouble the year before. |
| p.176 | [Painting of
Magenta Cottage, Killiney Road, c. 1880 by A L Watson,
circa 1904] Magenta Cottage stands at the corner of Killiney and River Valley Roads on land that once was part of Thomas Oxley’s Killiney estate. William Willans, a civil servant, sold it to George Tod Wright, a sea captain, within a month of purchasing it in 1863. In 1851 Wright was given command of the Hooghly, in succession of Jonas Daniel Vaughan (master attendant, 1856-1862) and had an unsuccessful encounter in 1859 with Chinese pirates off the Trengganu coast. He was well-connected for he married a daughter of Governor E A Blundell (governor, 1855-1861). Magenta Cottage was sold to Lee Chang Yan on September 29, 1882. The date of the construction of the main house shown in the painting is a matter of conjecture. Moniot’s map of 1862 shows a Magenta Cottage in the site with an entrance at River Valley Road, which it faced, while the present house is entered by Killiney Road. Therefore an earlier building, probably erected by Oxley, was most likely demolished and a new house build by Wright which he called Edrington. It is uncertain whether Lee Cheng Yan retained Edrington after purchasing the property. It is more likely that he demolished the house and build the present building in 1882 and 1983, keeping the old name. |
| p.177 | [Photograph of Lee Cheng Yan and family members photographed at Magenta Cottage circa 1910.] |
| p.206 | [Photograph
of exterior and interior of Grasslands, St Thomas Walk,
circa 1855] This house was probably built soon after Thomas Oxley began disposing of the lands within his estate. Henry Heweton, chief clerk of the land department and later municipal secretary, was the owner and occupier of the house in about 1860 and could have built it as well. He moved to Orchard Road and William Renshaw George occupied the house from 1861 until his death in 1873. The next known occupant was Bennett Pell, who introduced the telephone to Singapore. When Chia Keng Chin purchased the house in 1917, it was occupied by the Russian Consulate. |
| Bibliography: Jackson, James C., Planters and Speculators, University of Malaya Press (Kuala Lumpur, 1968) Makepeace, Walter, One Hundred Years of Singapore, J Murray (UK, 1921) Norris, George, "Singapore Thirty Years Ago", The Straits Times, Straits Times Press (Singapore, 1878) Pearson, H F, A History of Singapore, University of London Press (London, 1956) Tyres, R K, Singapore Then and Now, University Education Press (Singapore, 1976) |