It will help the reader if I paint a picture of what life was like for a young, impoverished reporter at Times House, four decades ago. Visitors to a newspaper office today will be struck by how quietly work seems to get done. Reporters peck away at their computerised keyboards, picking up their buzzing handphones occasionally, and speaking in hushed tones generally. In contrast, the newsroom in the Times House of the late 60s and 70s was bedlam, especially in the late afternoon hours with typewriters clattering, telephones ringing shrilly and reporters talking loudly to make themselves heard over the din.
Very much the centre of the organisation, the newsroom was located on the ground floor of a two-storey building at the junction of Kim Seng and River Valley roads. The building, painted in dull yellow, looked decidedly unimpressive as it gazed across Kim Seng Road upon the dilapidated remnants of Great World amusement park, where once the infamous Rose Chan held sway with her striptease acts. A small tower that projected from the top of Times House failed to add any architectural significance. Hassan’s sarabat stall, a decrepit mama canteen, squatted next to the front gates. It added a homely touch, but it also sadly detracted from the importance of a national institution.
Inside Times House, swing doors — like those in a wild west saloon — flapped wildly each time we rushed out of the sprawling newsroom to or from our assignments. The doors helped the fast movement of traffic and reduced bodily collisions, we assumed. I once bumped into the rear of a Miss Namazie as I raced down a corridor. She was admirably built. I felt as if I had run into granite. So sorry, I gasped, to Miss Namazie. She turned around and said sweetly: “It’s quite all right, young man.” I hobbled away. I was all of 22 then, gangly, bespectacled, charming at times, but undernourished and in dire need of a good set of clothes.
The newsroom was dominated by a vast glass office that looked out on River Valley Road. Wee Kim Wee — many now know him as one of Singapore’s best-liked presidents — shared this glass cage with the non-resident editor-in-chief, the formidable Leslie Hoffman. Wee, a kindly man ill-suited for the relentless struggle between media and the government, did not involve himself in the editorial direction of the day. He was once reputed to be a leading journalist for United Press International, landing a number of legendary scoops, but that seemed buried in a distant past when we joined. He had the title of deputy editor/editorial manager and looked after office matters, the hiring of new staff, disciplinary matters, things of that nature. He did his best to get us to learn Malay as that was the national language, and he even engaged a cikgu (teacher) for the purpose. We started with a class of 20, which dwindled by the day, and finally ended up with just the cikgu and Wee. Perhaps it served him well. Wee went on to become high commissioner to Malaysia where his superb knowledge of Malay and his courteous ways endeared him to the Malaysians. He eventually rose to the highest office in the land as Singapore’s fourth president. His wife’s Peranakan cooking skills were well known. Each Chinese New Year, we would troop to his office-provided house in Swettenham Road to partake of a feast consisting of several spicy, eye-watering dishes that went down very well with the Tiger beer that he generously provided. We loved him for his genial ways, but we knew that Wee did not have the authority or the temerity to take big decisions, editorial or otherwise. He could not even decide whether the newsroom had enough typewriters to meet the demands of the evening rush of reporters who stormed into the office to bang out their stories.
I was a court reporter then, a veritable greenhorn, but eager to learn the ropes as fast as I could. I wanted to pick up the tricks of the trade fast so I could earn more than the piddling sum of $400 or so a month as a cadet reporter.
Most of us journalists, being an iconoclastic lot, never had a happy relationship with the management. We were congenial enough with our editors, believing that we were of the same ilk, and indeed most of them were, having risen from the ranks. Our ties with top management, largely European, who were housed on the upper floor, were less congenial. We hardly knew them, but felt they were supercilious and condescending.
One of our early squabbles with the company was over the scarcity of typewriters. Ronald Scott, the general manager, was a short, stout man with a thick moustache that covered much of his upper lip like a broom. We nicknamed him “The Bulldog” for his puggish demeanour. He had a perpetual frown. He stepped into the newsroom one morning at the ungodly hour of 9am — ungodly to journalists anyway — to check if our complaint about the shortage of typewriters had any basis in fact. That was the time when most self-respecting reporters would be out on their beats, or fast asleep in bed after a boozy night on the town. Scott stared at the expanse of empty silent space that was the newsroom and declared: “What, so many typewriters lying idle! There’s nobody using them! And you say we don’t have enough typewriters?” He stormed off, piqued.
I wondered if he was being facetious. More likely, he was ignorant of newsroom operations or he would have known that he should have dropped by at five in the evening. That would be when the newsroom would be a frenetic buzz of activity. Scott would have seen reporters pounding away at humongous Facit, and even older Underwood, typewriters as if their lives depended on it. Most were indeed working to a deadline which more or less coincided with the approach of sunset and, just as important for the better heeled, the opening of their favourite watering holes. Newcomers like me, less adroit at whipping up a story, would hover around the fringes of the newsroom, waiting to grab a typewriter not in use. This might happen when the user had to stand up to go for a pee, or get more paper to type on. The paper came from a pile of scrap newsprint cut into sheets on which we would type out our stories — in triplicate. The original would go to the editor, a copy would be sent by teleprinter to the head office in Kuala Lumpur, and one would be destined for the archives. It was a tedious exercise, typing in triplicate, and then dropping the copies into appropriate baskets on the news desk where the office boys would hurry them to their destinations. Inserting carbon paper between the sheets of scrap newsprint was itself a chore. But that was nowhere as difficult as getting one’s hands on a typewriter. A spare one, that is. We had to be at our guerrilla best to swipe a typewriter from under the very nose of a reporter who had stood up to stretch. It was a moment of great relief — and triumph — to be able to lug away one of those heavy machines to your desk and start banging out your story as fast as possible. The young ladies — they were quite frail in those days — would stagger with their commandeered typewriters, and we young blades would be ever ready to lend them a helping hand, in the hope that they would share a smile and more with us.
The thing is, Scott never showed up at these moments when securing a typewriter could make the difference between getting out your story on time, or forever be condemned as a laggard. Scott never gave in to our need for more typewriters, and we continued with our daily scramble to grab any machine we could get our hands on. The gulf between what we needed to get our work done — better salaries and working conditions and typewriters — and the company’s view of things remained as wide and unbridgeable as ever.
Even the department secretary, a Eurasian woman who felt she was part of management, showed a disregard for the needs of journalists. Perhaps she took a personal dislike to me for she subjected me to rigorous questioning each time I misplaced my company-provided ballpoint pen and had to go to her for a replacement. “What do you do with your ball pens? You eat them?” she would ask me as if I had committed a major dismeanour. “No darling, I sell them. I have a second-hand ballpoint pen shop.” I glared at her. I wondered why she was so haughty.
Equally haughty was Beryl Bain, another Eurasian woman — fair of face, bouffant hairdo, and probably a heartbreaker in her younger days. Beryl manned the switchboard, an abominably slow PMBX (a private manual branch exchange), with just 10 lines. We had to call operators such as Beryl to get an outside line. Often, there would be no line and reporters would get hot under the collar waiting interminably for one. I would imagine haughty Beryl punishing me, by denying me a line and chortling to herself. It was really unkind of me to entertain such thoughts of her. Perhaps it was because I had heard from the grapevine that she was once the apple of A.C. Simmons’ eye, when she was young, aeons ago. One day I dropped by her working station and saw her all tied up, answering calls, plugging cables to provide a line and pulling out another when the call ended. A row of lights blinked non-stop in front of her eyes. The unplugged cables hung all around her. She gripped a couple between her teeth. “Straits Times, Straits Times,” she intoned to an outside caller. “No line at the moment, hang on, I am going to plug you in,” she said to a staff wanting a line. Beryl spoke non-stop into her mouthpiece. She was a very much harassed soul. I felt so sorry that she had to do such stressful work. She must have been nearing her retirement age at the time. It became easier for us to get a line for outside calls when the company added another 20 lines, but it could have meant even more hell for the telephone operators.
Leslie Hoffman, the editor-in-chief, would show up at Times House every other week or so, wearing a full suit, as was his custom. He would sit at his big desk in the centre of the glass cage, smoking his pipe and peering out at the activity in the newsroom — over the top of a newspaper he always held high in his hands. He gave layabouts and gadabouts short shrift. Once he summoned into his sanctum a young bright spark who was up to his usual antics of chatting up the ladies. The chap explained that he had done his story for the day. News reports were called stories and photographs were described as pictures. I thought it was strange newsroom speak but, come to think about it, telling the news in the form of a story does capture a reader’s attention in the best way possible. And a picture certainly tells a story better than a thousand words.
But back to Hoffman and my friend, who had completed his story, and was by then trembling as he stood in front of the great man. “You finished with your story? Then sit down and type: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Keep on doing that. Practise your typing skills,” he thundered. He brooked no dissent, our Hoffman. He also did not believe that the government — Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, to be precise — had any right to tell the editor what to publish. Hoffman decided to move the company’s editorial headquarters from Singapore to the haven of Kuala Lumpur sometime after Lee assumed full, unchallenged authority of Singapore when the PAP won the elections for self-governance in 1959. Hoffman, too, did not seem to be aware that there were no spare typewriters in Times House on which to practise at that time of the day.
With Hoffman running The Straits Times from the KL office, all stories from Singapore had to be sent to him through a teleprinter. The office boys would rush a carbon copy of our stories to the teleprinter room where a very speedy team of typists would send the thousands of words daily on their way to Kuala Lumpur and Hoffman’s IN tray. He would decide where stories would be positioned in the news pages, and if a story deserved a byline.
It was a memorable day for a rookie reporter — described as cadet reporter, the lowest rung in the Collective Agreement between unionised members and the company — when he or she got their first byline. My first byline was for a story of a boy who was hauled to court as a result of having exposed his private parts to a young lady in the lift of the Housing Development Board block where they both lived. The boy’s lawyer explained to the court that the boy had a rash on his genitals and at that particular point in time while he was in the lift with the young lady, he had an uncontrollable need to scratch that part of his anatomy which was tormenting him. The magistrate decided to give the boy the benefit of the doubt and acquitted him of indecent exposure. Sit Ying Fong, the news editor — we all called him Sit — told me it was a lovely story. He sat me down in front of his desk while he patiently went through every word in my story, editing it into a tight compelling read. He tackled his task with great concentration. A cigarette hung from his lips, the ash dangling precariously. I watched, fascinated, switching my attention between Sit scribbling his way through my story and the ash that threatened to fall any moment. It did fall eventually on my typewritten efforts, and Sit brushed it away without missing a beat. Finally, he looked up and said: “Good read. I am recommending you a byline.” He showed me where he had initialled his “By” beside my name.
Later, before I went home, Sit said Hoffman liked the story and agreed that it should carry my byline. He said I had a nose for a good story. I was thrilled to see my name in print the following day, at the top of a single column story tucked away in the innards of the newspaper. It gave me a high, like a ganja-inspired hit. I guess I became like most other reporters, an addict to the glamour one believed, rightly or wrongly, a byline could foster. I don’t remember the headline now. Perhaps it went something like: “Boy with itch gets off the hook”. But I was put out of pocket by at least $3, as I had to buy tea for some 15 reporters in the newsroom from Lim, the tea boy who pushed his trolley through the newsroom every day without fail at 4pm. That was the price one paid when landing a first byline. Lim, dressed in his white T-shirt and pyjama-like bottoms, was undoubtedly the most abused man in the company as everybody yelled their orders at him as if he was their whipping boy. But I guess being the harassed deprived lot that we reporters were, we took it out on Lim. He was no boy, but an unassuming, submissive, skinny, middle-aged guy who seldom lost his cool, despite our maddening antics. One evening, as I was taking a stroll in Great World, opposite Times House, whom should I see but Lim, dressed immaculately in a starched, white, long-sleeved cotton shirt, and black, shiny terylene pants hitched high above his skinny waist, heading towards Flamingo Cabaret. He had black patent leather shoes on. I learned that the ladies working in the cabaret would permit men like Lim to hold them close as they glided through the romantic enchantment of a tango or a rumba. He nodded to me and disappeared into the dim interior of the club. A dollar for three dances. I saw Lim in a new light from that day on.
Most of us in the newsroom were broke well before the end of the month. But being young, and with an unquenchable gusto to learn the craft, we soldiered on, making do with char kway teow at $1.20 a plate, down at the coffee shop near Zion Road or, on worse days, a roti prata kosong and tea for a total of 50 cents at the mama stall outside Times House. An egg could be cracked onto roti prata for an additional 20 cents, but that was a luxury as those 20 cents could be saved for the bus ride home. So prata kosong (no egg) was what filled our hungry bellies on most days. Once a month, on payday, we would head off with Judith Yong, the prettiest reporter then, to Stella Doro in Orchard Road, for a $3.50-sirloin steak and a pint of draught beer for another $1.50. Five of us, including Judith, would split the taxi fare. That was the closest to the high life that we enjoyed. Judith was a jolly big sister to us.
My first intimation of how poorly my senior colleagues were paid was when Sit, our news editor, opened the envelope containing his Christmas bonus and said: “Still the same,” and shrugged sadly. I learned he had got his usual one-and-three-quarter months bonus of $1,700. That would mean he drew a rather paltry monthly salary of under $1,000. Sit was not only a great news editor, but he was also readily acknowledged as the best news editor in the whole of Southeast Asia. As a reporter, he had covered many of the gang clashes, uncovered many a society intrigue, and was married to a Miss Singapore runner-up. He drove a trundling old Jaguar. Sit had longish hair that curled over his collar and his trousers hung low over his hips. He had a certain foppish style. We admired him greatly.
Despite being broke most of the time, we were an enthusiastic lot. I organised a Christmas party in my first year at Times House in 1968. Everybody chipped in a few bucks. I got some bunting and holly and strung them up over the pillars and walls. A caterer would bring in the food by 7pm and the drinks, the strong stuff, were put into Sit’s little office for safekeeping. We hurried with our copy and I left for home for a quick shower. When I returned, the entire newsroom had been dimmed, the only light coming from the far corner where the sub-editors, or subs, still toiled to lay out pages, edit copy and write headlines. Sit was working on the last few stories. What amazed me was the smoke — great gusts of aromatic spicy smoke rising to the ceiling from a satay man preparing his skewers within the air-conditioned confines of the office. Smoke detectors had yet to be installed at the time. We had a merry night, dancing in between and on the top of our desks to music coming from a tinny-sounding transistor radio. Kisses were surreptitiously exchanged under the mistletoe. We all went home drunk at around midnight, many of us managing to catch the last bus home. The senior staff with cars went home later. One of them, a ruggedly handsome married man, drove off with a winsome lady reporter who wore mini skirts that fired up our imaginations no end. He smashed into a tree. The car was a wreck, but both occupants survived the crash, none the worse for wear. It was a sobering conclusion to a night of revelry.
The next morning saw a furious Scott looking at the detritus in the newsroom and turning apoplectic by the second. “A bloody pig sty,” he spat out, before storming off, vowing that never again would a party be held on the premises. He gave us the impression that Christmas office parties were not something to be encouraged, that it was a festival to be enjoyed only by westerners. Little did he know that the next company party to which we would sit down, would be a sumptuous multicourse Chinese dinner at a five-star hotel, paid for by the company.