The
son of an English colonial and a Malacca-Portuguese mother of Dutch/Portuguese/Malay
lineage, Briton, Wilfred Hamilton-Shimmen was born in British colonial Singapore
in 1940, approximately 11 months before Japan threw down her gauntlet in Asia
to join Germany in her world war against Europe and the United States, attacking
the former Malay island among the other colonial outposts in the region.
Raised as a White, with a retinue of servants to care for him, he was imprisoned as an infant with his mother in the dreaded Japanese Sime Road Internment Camp for White civilians on the island during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore. His father, in the meanwhile, was detained, tortured and executed by the infamous Japanese Kempetai Secret Police as a spy.At war's end he was placed in a White-run British colonial boarding home for White and part-White children in Singapore, and raised as an English child. As his mother had refused to be repatriated to England, at the age of 12, because he was considered too old for the co-ed boarding home, he was transferred to a local-run boarding school for boys.
Becoming part of his mother's Eurasian/Asian society from then, he had to learn to 'adjust' to a new set of mores, change his diet, his very English accent as well as throw out the English attitude ingrained since birth, (because it upset the 'locals'), and discover the native-parts of his island-home which he had never known.
He has worked as a showbiz journalist, a reporter and sub-editor for a newspaper, and as a foreign correspondent. He switched to advertising copywriting in his early thirties before turning his hand to public relations.
His poem The Reef, written at age 17 (1957) was published in Illustrated Weekly of India on 7 June 1959, another poem, Merdeka Bridge, was published in The Seed in 1961, a publication of the Malaysian Sociological Research Institute.
In 1961 he was award-winning playwright for his one-act play Aku Raja, based on the travels of Admiral Cheng Ho, the Chinese Muslim eunuch, and emmissary of 15th Century Ming China, to the Malays, winning 1st Prize (English language section) of the pan-Malaysia-wide contest, as well: Over-all Best Play for all other language entries (Malay,Chinese, Tamil).
His novel, Seasons of Darkness, was published in 1993. It was well-received by celebrated writer Han Suyin, Dr. Mahathir Mohammed, Prime Minister of Malaysia, the late Hon. Mr. S. Rajaratnam, former Senior Minister, Singapore Government, and H. H. The Sultan of Johor. The book is included in the Singapore National Library's bibliography Celebrations: Singapore Creative Writing in English in 1994.
He was one of 10 top prize-winning scriptwriters in the Canadian film company UTV International's Scriptwriting Contest from over 500 international entries,in July 1998 for his script Trez Amigos, a story set in 1500s Portuguese-Melaka
In 1997 the Government of Portugal offered him a scholarship to attend Portugal's Classica Universidade de Lisboa to enable him to learn something about his ancient Portuguese roots: language, culture, history. He discovered that the Kristang patoa of his mother' Kristang community is understandable by the Portuguese in Europe. Today he can speak the Portuguese of Portugal and has some inkling of what Portugal had contributed to the many lands of Asia.
Wilfred Hamilton-Shimmen is currently working on another MS which will give interested readers more than an inkling of what the actual history of Asia Portugueza was.
© Copyright Wilfred Hamilton-Shimmen
Write to me: Wilfred_Shimmen@yahoo.co.uk