LIFE IN IPOH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24817, 17 January 1942, Page 8

LIFE IN IPOH

WESTERN MALAYA RICH TIN MINING CENTRE WHAT ENEMY HAS ACQUIRED Ipoh, strategically important, and a rich tin-mining centre in Western Malaya, has fallen to the Japanese. I lived there for a year, and I shall always remember how pleasant and beautiful it was, wrote Edna Dimmock in the Sydney Morning Herald recently. The most memorable view I ever had of it and the surrounding countryside, with its many tin mines, was from the air in a club plane flying from the local aerodrome. The country round about Ipoh is exquisite, a succession of hills and gorges and limestone cliffs projecting upwards like yellow columns. The varying colours spread out below were very striking—browns and yellows contrasting with the deep blue and green pools around the tin mines. Seen from the ground the mines were mostly mud and gaunt machinery against the skyline, but from the air they took on a quality almost fairylike. View From Air In the midst of all this was the town itself, with its various streets, the main ones very wide, with narrow lanes in between them. There were the usual shops of all kinds, mostly kept by natives, who lived either above or below the shop, though spending a great part of their lives on the pavement.

Roads radiated in all directions to important places such as Taiping (Perak’s State capital), Kuala Kangsar, where the Sultan lived, Batu Gajah (Stone Elephant), and Lumat, on the West Coast.

From the air you can pick out large buildings, such as the golf club, with the golf course encircling it, the greens a bright emerald against the darker green of the tree-tops, and the bunkers like neat white patches. Not far away are the racecourse and the swimming club.

Pritchard’s, the big European shop, is prominent, not far from some of the Government offices. It has the usual cafe, where people meet and drink coffee and talk in an atmosphere of endless time and leisure, now alas gone, perhaps for ever. Close at hand, on the station itself, is the Station Hotel, where everyone stayed on arrival in Ipoh. European Homes

The Ipoh Club is (or was) the town’s social centre. It is a large building with lawn tennis courts about it, with near by the Padang, the large, turfed sports ground, where football, cricket, and hockey were played. Europeans, very few by comparison with the thousands of Malays, Chinese, and Indians, live some way out of the town proper in spacious wooden or concrete bungalows and two-storeyed houses, surrounded by big compounds, with trim flowering hibiscus hedges. Most of the houses are four or five miles away from the Government offices.

A friend who is. I fear, in Ipoh at this moment, was in its first air raid. He said in a letter that the people went into the shelters without any disorder, though all were naturally somewhat agitated. The shelters were trenches four feet deep, with a roof to keep out the rain. It is very difficult anywhere in Malaya to black-out a house, as, for the sake of coolness, there are so many openings. If these have all to be closed it can be very hot, in spite of large electric ceiling fans. Ipoh is very steamy and glaring by day, but the nights can be chilly enough to call for thin blankets. Train From Singapore The train journey from Singapore to Ipoh is a long one, for Ipoh is nearly 300 miles north-west. You leave Singapore by the night mail running at 10 o’clock, in a very comfortable airconditioned sleeping-car, with a specially wide bed, and arrive at Kuala Lumpur for breakfast the next morning. After an hour there you set off again, crossing the Perak border during the morning, arriving in Ipoh for lunch.

It is incredible to think that the place I knew and liked so well has been turned perhaps into a shambles, or at the best, thoroughly defaced and its beauty destroyed.