Anna Harvey: discovering her roots

What a beautiful backdrop, don't you think so? The lady in the picture is Anna Harvey from Sheffield, England, who happens to be the great-granddaughter of Leslie William Arnold, a former pre-World War Two headmaster of Penang Free School.

Anna was in Penang for a holiday after finishing some work in Singapore. Her first visit here, and she wanted to discover her roots, which led her to visiting Penang Free School to learn something about her great-grandparents.

So there I was with the Headmaster, Syed Sultan, when Anna arrived with Geam Liang in tow, basically because she was his guest. We had a good 45 minutes of exchanging information, myself telling her about the school and she telling us about her family. Then the Headmaster whipped out a copy of Let the Aisles Proclaim to present to her and I did the honour of adding my signature to the book.

Myself, Anna, Syed Sultan and Geam Liang who was the School Captain in 1977, and a teacher in the Free School for several years from 1992, which made him an ex-colleague of Syed Sultan too. And incidentally, Syed Sultan had his first posting in Penang Free School in 1992, left in 2000 to be a Senior Assistant elsewhere and returned as the Free School Headmaster in January 2022.

Later, Geam Liang and I took her on a quick tour of the school. Visited the hall where she was happy to see Arnold's picture above one of the doors, the school plaques - the Headmaster plaque as well as the Roll of Honour where Arnold's contributions were acknowledged. Then onward to the Archives block where she tried searching for Arnold in some of the old school publications and archived pictures. She asked a lot of questions about some other personalities featured in the room, like Tunku Abdul Rahman, P Ramlee and Lim Chong Eu. Anna took particular interest in the music score of the School Rally.

Any resemblance? Nope, I don't think so! But yes, four generations apart.

We walked around the school field to complete her tour of the premises. At the far end, we explored the external ground of the bungalow where Arnold stayed from 1925 till 1930. I was rather excited to show Anna the bungalow because this was the first time that I had ever told anyone that this was exactly where Arnold lived with his wife Elsie and children Jack and Doreen.

It's a shame that these old colonial bungalows are rather rundown and unoccupied. They are also very big with several bedrooms on the top floor which is accessible from an external staircase at the back. The kitchen and presumably the servant's quarters are in a separate annexe behind the main bungalow building. These bungalows were built three years before the main school building was occupied in 1928 and the senior school masters moved in to stay from 1925. At that time, they bordered the fringes of the jungle in the Green Lane area. This must have been a very secluded spot then, totally unsafe and eerie. I wonder whether there were any security then, from animals or even unwelcomed people.

A short walk took us to the former Headmaster's bungalow which has been transformed into the Penang Digital Library. Anna was fascinated by the idea of a digital library but wasn't sure of how it works. I could only tell her vaguely that the members could borrow the digital books to read on their computers for a limited time before the access to the books expired. We looked over the bungalow but with every nook and cranny already completely renovated and modernised, there wasn't anything much to appreciate. But I believe the staircases still maintained their old charm.