Extracted from:
E-mail: moorhead@gol.com
In October
2002, my wife Mutsuko and I visited Penang, Malaysia, for the first time. As
you will see, it turned out to be an amazing trip, but first some background is
in order....
Long
before Merdeka, the authorities in Malaya faced a desperate need to train more
teachers to cope with the rapidly expanding school population and decided to
send eacher trainees to Kirkby, near Liverpool, as a temporary measure while
training colleges were being built in Malaya. My father, Frank (Francis J) Moorhead, was the youngest of eight children of
John and Sarah Moorhead, who had emigrated from County Monaghan in Ireland and
settled in Liverpool…
Dad
studied history at Liverpool University, obtaining an MA. In the early 1950s,
Dad took up the job of Senior Lecturer in History at the newly-established
Malayan Teachers' Training College in Kirkby, then a small village about 10
miles outside of Liverpool.
The
college was set up in a former hostel for munitions workers that had been
refurbished to accommodate 150 students a year on a two-year course, so that
from the second year there were some 300 students in residence. Before the
arrival of the Malayan students, it had been used as an emergency training
college to train teachers (especially returnees from the war) for schools in
England and Wales. Most of the lecturers also lived in the college along with
their families.
Thus
it was that our family of five, Mum, Dad and three boys (myself, Tony and
Michael) came to live in this strange enclave of Malayans – Malays, Chinese,
Indians and Eurasians – set in the Lancashire countryside. At the time, steam
trains still ran right past the college from Exchange Station in Liverpool,
stopping at Kirkby Station before travelling deeper into Lancashire. The Kirkby
housing estate was in its infancy and the college was surrounded by farmland. I
guess I was seven years old when the college opened, Tony would be five or six
and Michael three or four. Our first sister Ann was born in 1952 while we were
living in the college.
My
memories of the college are inevitably vague, but looking back I am intrigued
that we had no sense that the people living around us were any different from
anyone else. I remember being impressed by the beautiful saris and other
colorful clothes that the girls wore, the turbans worn by the Sikhs, and the
exotic smells of curry and other native cuisines that often wafted by. However,
several names stuck in my memory – Sidek Elamdin, who was quite a sportsman (we
used to go to his room and, dragging his cricket bats outside, demand that he
bowl at us), and two girls, Olive Andrews and Mavis Mehta, who used to babysit
us when Mum and Dad went out to functions at the college and elsewhere. I think
they were in the first batch of students, arriving very early in 1952 and
leaving 24 months later when I was eight years old.
Dad
often told us in later years that he was dismayed to find that his students
knew a lot about English and European history, but nothing about the history of
their own country. He therefore set about writing his own textbook, "A
History of Malaya and Her Neighbours," which was eventually published by
Longman's Green in two volumes… Around the time our second sister Mary was born
in 1957, we moved to a more spacious house in Melling, a couple of miles away.
As the Kirkby housing estate expanded and the Labour government of Harold
Wilson actively promoted comprehensive education as a matter of policy, Dad was
offered the job of headmaster of the new Catholic school, St. Kevin's
Comprehensive, which was being built on the estate. Inevitably, our connections
with Kirkby College gradually faded, but Mum and Dad often talked very fondly
about his former Malayan students and I have hazy recollections of occasional
visits from some of them, notably Sidek Elamdin and Halimah Abdul Ghani (his
wife)…
Some
years later I graduated from SOAS (London University School of Oriental and
African Studies) …(and) was offered a two-year contract with Berlitz, Japan,
arriving in Tokyo in November 1968...serving as company president for close to
20 years, I decided to call it a day and work as a freelance translator of
Japanese to English, specializing in finance, law and communications
.
Looking
round for somewhere to spend a relaxing holiday recently, eagle-eyed Mutsuko
found an excellent off-season offer to stay at the Shangri-la Rasa Sayang
Resort, a luxury hotel in Penang. We arrived there late on October 20, 2002.
Obviously, thoughts of Dad's old students were in the back of my mind, but I
had no idea how to reach them (or even whether they were still alive -- after
all, most of them would now be in their seventies, I realized}…
I had
a stroke of luck. A search on the Internet uncovered a report in the Malaysian
Star Metro publication that the 1952-3 batch of Kirkby students had held a
reunion dinner on September 8, 2002 in Kuala Lumpur. Fortunately, it included
the telephone number of the Kirkby College Alumni Chairman (1952-1954), Hashim
Yunus, and when I contacted him he was most gracious and gave me several key
telephone numbers, including that of Sidek Elamdin. Mr Yunus also remembered
Dad and had very kind words to say about him. I immediately contacted Sidek who
was very excited to hear from me and we arranged to meet for lunch the
following day.
When Sidek
met us in the hotel lobby, we saw this tall, distinguished looking gentleman
with a black "songkok" (a Malay cap) and white beard who beamed all
over his face as he hugged us in greeting. With typical generosity, he arranged
for a round-the-island trip the following day, then whisked us off to the home
of another of Dad's students, Saleena Yahaya-Isa (nee Lee Kooi Jong, who has
been created a "Dato," a state knighthood from Penang). Saleena and
her husband Yahaya bin Isa took us all to the Penang Swimming Club where we
were soon joined by Marie Lim for a slapup lunch provided by Saleena and
Yahaya. In fact, I recalled vague memories of Saleena and Marie when I met
them, but they of course had much clearer memories of Dad in particular. They
were especially impressed by his dramatic approach to teaching, which they both
admired so much that they adopted it themselves during their teaching careers.
We learned that many of the Kirkby students had done very well after their return to Malaya. Initially, many of them were sent to teach in remote areas and we heard hair-raising stories of their adventures in jungle or seashore villages in the early days. Sidek eventually became a headmaster, before entering the civil service, where among other things, he was a close friend of Tunku Abdul Rahman, the "Father of Malaysia." Sidek has been awarded no fewer than three state "knighthoods" for his services to Penang and other states and after retiring from the civil service, taught at the University of Science Malaysia in Penang until 2001. He is now 72.
The
following Saturday, Sidek very kindly hosted a dinner for us at Marie Lim's
residence where, in addition to the above, we were joined by Olive Wong, Mohan
Singh, Khoo Yeoh Gan Hong ("Gregory"), Tan Beng Theam, Paravathy
Kumarasamy and Lee Keng Yew. Once again, most of the faces were familiar even
after 50 years, though of course their memories of Kirkby were much clearer
than mine. All of them are in their seventies and some suffer from ailments
ranging from Parkinson's disease to deafness, heart and prostate problems, but
Mutsuko and I were struck by their remarkable high spirits, sense of humour and
friendliness. Although there were Malays, Chinese, a Tamil and a Sikh present,
there seemed to be no boundaries between them, just a lot of
mutual
respect for each other's cultural and religious backgrounds and genuine
affection.
Both
Olive Wong and Marie Lim spoke about how handsome Dad was, and Marie told me
with charming frankness that I was not as good-looking as Dad, partly because
I'm portly! She had a wonderful group photograph of the staff and her fellow
students in her living room, and I must say Dad did indeed look very smart. All
sorts of names that I'd long forgotten emerged during the conversation, including
Williams, Gurney, Walters, Beauchamp, Danielli, Dunn, Wilson, Chesters, McBain,
Woolley, Beeching, Terret, Cross and Walker. Apparently, the Walters boys
Christopher and Godfrey have visited Malaysia several times….
Sidek
in particular seems to have a phenomenal memory, not just for songs but for
jokes and puns. In fact, he was laughing and joking all the time, though his
eyes brimmed on many occasions when he recalled times with Mum and Dad,
especially when Dad found it very hard to say goodbye at the end of his course,
yet insisted on bidding him farewell a second time…..
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MTTC_Kirkby/