HISTORY needn't be found only in ancient stones or the time-misted doings of stone-age people.

This point was driven home by the loving tribute which this section paid to several hotels on their way to joining a long line of buildings that have given way to time and new orders.

Hotel Equatorial has closed and The Marco Polo is closing at year-end. The Cairnhill Hotel's death sentence has been suspended for a year, while Melia at Scotts is only just a memory.

And the Cockpit now stands empty and shuttered, waiting to undergo a sea-change.

None of these is older than Singapore's history as an independent nation, with Melia not even older than a Primary 4 child when it passed into history.

However, the cover package in Life! on March 5 showed that even relative youngsters in the march of time have something to add to the country's collective memory, and provide posterity with a glimpse of Singapore in the second half of the 20th century.

First, hotels have their own history to tell. Second, as places where many public moments are marked and the seeds of even more private memories are sown, they help capture history as it is happening.

Thus if bricks and mortar can speak, imagine what stories our hotels can tell about the tragedies, successes or failures of those who passed through their doors or were their owners, and in that way mirror the social, economic and political events of their era.

For me, reading about the clutch of hotels that have, or will soon, become dust brings back some vivid points in my life as a reporter during some of the most hungry years of Singapore's economic development.

I remember how a retired civil servant, Mr Hsu Hse Kwang, used to be among the guests at lunches at the newly-opened Ming Court Hotel, where we picked up story tips. Like one about a soon-to-be opened hotel in the Beach Road area.

That hotel, the Singapore Merlin, now renamed Hotel Plaza, was among a number springing up in early recognition of tourism as one of the potential money-spinners and job creators to fill the gaping hole left in the young nation's fledgling economy by the accelerated British troops' withdrawal in the late '60s.

Mr Hsu also introduced reporters to Mr Lien Ying Chow whose Mandarin Hotel in Orchard Road was near completion.

I can't forget how impressed I was to see this pioneer Singaporean entrepreneur, who was then already an elderly man, scrambling up the still uncemented stairs of the incomplete building to show off his project.

Hotel Equatorial ... a mystery death soon
after it opened its doors.

I can't forget, either, a mystery death at Hotel Equatorial soon after it opened its doors, although its owner in his recent reminiscences with this paper didn't mention this incident.

Two foreign tourists stopped over at the new hotel but before the night was over, the woman had fallen off the roof-top of the 15-storey building. Somehow, the couple had made their way to the roof-top, despite warning signs that it was out of bounds.

Was it murder or suicide? I believe a verdict of misadventure was returned by the coroner.

But it was certainly suicide for an old classmate's husband when he made a high-level exit from the Mandarin one Chinese New Year holiday, ahead of the 1973 stock-market crash.

For the cluster of new hotels that was fully operational by that year, it was a misadventure of miasmic proportions when the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries quadrupled its oil prices, sending world economies into a tailspin and aircraft fuel into orbit.

The Opec bombshell probably explains why in the same year the Goodwood Group, under a Singapore-based entrepreneur, sold its pride and joy, Hotel Malaysia -- claimed to be the first modern purpose-built hotel in Singapore -- to the Hongkong and Kowloon Wharf group.

The hotel shed its old name -- which in any case had become an anachronism since Singapore was long out of Malaysia -- and emerged as The Marco Polo Singapore.

And before long now, that too will disappear, though not its listing on the Stock Exchange of Singapore, a privilege not given to Hotel Singapura which disappeared both as a landmark on Orchard Road and as a listing of the SES.

The company was delisted following a takeover offer at $8 per share imposed on Mr Ng Teng Fong by the Securities Industry Council in the early '70s for allegedly breaching some takeover rules.

The land on which the hotel stood now hosts the Forum Galleria, owned by Hotel Properties, whose flagship, the Hilton International, also has a colourful beginning.

Owned originally by local publishing wunderkind Cho Chok Kim, it came on the market after its owner got into trouble with the authorities over some corporate deals that led to the lawyer behind them landing in jail.

But then, hotels built by one party who sells them for a song to another, who then reaps the profits, litter the history of these five-star palatial establishments in Singapore.

It is the same even for the grandest dame of them all, the Raffles Hotel, as its founders, the Sarkies brothers would testify, if still around.

Of all the hotels built in the past 35 years or so, the Shangri-La and the Mandarin are possibly the only ones which continue to remain with their original owners.

The question now is whether history will repeat itself. As the new owners of the Cairnhill, the Cockpit and Melia turn their acquisitions into homes, will they meet with a painful glut, even for upmarket residences?

Will they then be converted into hotels in the new millennium, and add a new twist to the already chequered history of hotels in Singapore?

First published in The Straits Times, March 13, 1998

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