PFS heritage walk

Let me begin with some irrelevance. I was just thinking that, since the oldest participant in our Penang Free School heritage walk last Saturday entered Form One in 1956, there must have been at least 50,000 students who had walked through the gates of the old school over the past 70 years. Just an estimate, mind you, because it is a number that no one can easily verify. So I plucked it from the air.

Then I considered that with the 30 participants who turned up for the heritage walk, they constituted only 0.06% of those 50,000 Old Frees. My devious mind then thought, wow, the other 99.94% of Old Frees must already know everything about their old school, and that's why they weren't interested in this activity at all. 😁 

Anyway, Siang Jin and I concluded that even with only these 30 participants, the heritage walk was still a great success. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly. Some had not returned to the Free School for a very long time, so for them it really was a walk down memory lane. 

We began in one of the classrooms where we introduced the participants to the Free School Guide and explained how it came about. Although we usually trace its beginnings to the school's Bicentenary celebrations in 2016, the seed was actually sown a year earlier when Lean Kang, a former Prefect of the Free School like Siang Jin, was the organising chairman of the 150th anniversary dinner of the school's Prefects' Board. He had, at some point, taken a peek into the Prefects' Room and wasn't particularly impressed with what he saw.

Funds raised from that dinner went towards improving the Prefects' Room, among other things. Both of them then channelled the excess funds towards organising a series of exclusive student leadership workshops for the Prefects and other potential student leaders from 2017 until 2024. Myself and one or two others were invited to assist. We had Tan Soo Choon as our bedrock trainer until his untimely demise at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. He is still greatly missed. Somewhere along the way, Siang Jin realised that nobody was going to read Let the Aisles Proclaim, my 350-page book on the school's 200-year history, and we decided that perhaps we should do something more manageable. So we took the information from the book and turned it into 10 short videos.

We asked some of our schoolmates from the Class of 1970 (Form Five) to get involved, and they responded enthusiastically. This is perhaps an appropriate time to mention Teik Wah who did the voiceover admirably, Chei Jin lent his voice to the School Rally and the main man behind the video productions, Kumaraveloo. That was in 2019. Then, in 2024, Siang Jin and I worked on the Free School Guide itself, an interactive mobile app that would allow people to access information about the school from anywhere in the world. In a way, the student leadership workshops, the videos and eventually the Free School Guide were our own small way of giving something back to society. We had benefited from our years at the Free School, so what better way to give something back than to contribute to the school itself and to the students who would come after us? That, in a nutshell, was how it all started.

Then came the shock about two months ago when we learnt that the PFS210Years organising committee had suddenly announced a PFS heritage walk through the school grounds on the morning of the third of October. This caught us completely by surprise because we hadn't been informed of any such plan. Ivan Ooi, the organising committee chairman, subsequently spoke to Siang Jin about it and the two of us decided to chip in and help. At the very least, we had to defend our turf and make sure that whatever was told to the participants would be based on correct information and not hearsay. But the fact that the organisers announced the event without consulting us was not quite right. A fait accompli for them, perhaps, but it was boh sui. 

We anticipated that perhaps 70 to 100 people might register for the walk, but in retrospect, the 30 participants turned out to be quite a comfortable number. We could take our time and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. After the introduction, we proceeded to the Pinhorn Hall which I have always considered to be the soul of the school. My main focus there was on the wall plaques, where I explained the story behind the donors who had contributed towards the construction of the former Penang Free School building in Farquhar Street, now occupied by the Penang State Museum. Their names are permanently etched on three marble plaques there.

When the present school building was completed in 1927 and the school moved into these premises on 9 January 1928, the same donors' names were reproduced on a wooden plaque and mounted in the space above the main entrance to the school hall. Very few people today know about its significance. Most visitors tend to concentrate instead on the plaques bearing the names of the Head Boys, the Queen's Scholars and the Headmasters. I thought it was worth bringing this little piece of the school's history back into the picture.

From Pinhorn Hall, we took a short walk to the Archives building, which had already been opened up for the visitors. For many of the participants, this was the first time they had even realised that the Archives rooms existed, let alone stepped inside them. I could only manage a preliminary explanation because everyone seemed much more engrossed in exploring the rooms for themselves, which was probably a good thing. After all, an archive is something you really should be allowed to poke around in rather than simply have someone standing there telling you what you're looking at.

Eventually, we returned to the classroom for a quiz and, after that, called it a day with a fairly robust singing of the School Rally. Thirty people may have been only 0.06% of my rather fanciful estimate of 50,000 Old Frees, but judging from the enthusiasm in the room, I don't think we needed the other 99.94% to make the morning worthwhile.

PS. There was a special dinner at the school on the same night to commemorate the 210th anniversary, but I did not attend because I had a prior appointment elsewhere. For me, the next significant events will now be on the 21st of October itself. The traditional visit to Robert Sparke Hutchings' grave in the morning followed by The Old Frees' Association's annual dinner in the evening.