I am indeed very grateful to the organising committee for inviting me to participate in today's historical event. I am asked to say a few words on my early days at GESS and I find it quite difficult to do justice to the subject. Please excuse me if I should go off at a tangent.

Nevertheless, the island was hardly developed and the business activities were mainly found in areas near the mouth of the Singapore River and in the Telok Ayer Basin. Amoy Street, McCallum Street and Telok Ayer Street and the surrounding areas could be considered to be the District 9 or 10 of present-day Singapore. Jurong was a mass of swamps; and Serangoon, Bukit Timah, Changi and Katong were 'ulus'.

I believe large areas of land were cultivated with spice plants and rubber trees. There was little industrial activity except for tapping of rubber adn the manufacture of rubber sheets for export. I can remember seeing foul-smelling freshly0coagulated rubber slabs and smoked sheets being transported in bullock carts. There were few motor cars or lorries on the roads.

For entertainment at home, there was His Master's Voice gramophone and records. But there was no radio; and television was not heard of. The ordinary people did not know of terms like COE, EDB GDP, GST, IT, etc, and were ignorant of such expressions as trade liberalisation, globalisation, high tech, internet, e-mails etc. For the primary school children of my days, life was quite relaxed. The youngsters of today have much more opportunities to gain information so that they are more knowledgeable adn smarter but many are pressed to absorb that vast amount of data, analyse and think about them.