Floating on a Malayan Breeze by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh

Money was tight in the Raffles family – his mother once scolded him for the extravagant sin of reading by candlelight. The name of Raffles has acquired an aristocratic ring, but Thomas Stamford Raffles (Tom to his friends) was a working-class boy from the village of Walworth just south of London, son of a sea captain who would later fall victim to some sort of scandal (no one seems to have figured out exactly what). He lived in an age when anything seemed possible, when illness and death lurked in foetid water, and when the fortunes of men and nations might turn on the shot of a cannon or the length of a red carpet. Most of all, nothing in his life was ever carved in stone. He endured personal tragedy yet maintained an air of mischief. He made great friends and bitter enemies. He was a man beset by contradictions, torn between his ideals and his loyalty to the Empire. Raffles was more complicated – and more interesting – than the cardboard caricatures invoked by devotees and detractors alike. Gazing down at sweltering passersby with imperial hauteur, aloof in his monumental marble, Raffles has become a quasi-mythological figure, a convenient symbol both for those who would celebrate the British Empire and for those who would damn it.Īs Victoria Glendinning points out in her perceptive and engaging new biography, Raffles and the Golden Opportunity, this is all rather a shame.

No guidebook fails to mention him no whirlwind tour is complete without a pilgrimage to his statue, located near the mouth of the Singapore River, not far from where he landed in 1819 to found the original settlement. The name of Raffles is everywhere in Singapore – shopping centres, schools, streets, companies and, of course, the legendary Raffles Hotel, purveyor of the Singapore sling and allied tropical delights. Raffles and the Golden Opportunity 1781–1826īy Victoria Glendinning | Profile Books | $39.95

Floating on a Malayan Breeze by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh