Much Ado About Matilda House
Behind every exhibition lies a trove of unchosen treasures. Curator Hannah Yeo shares two stories of the mysterious Matilda House not featured in our latest exhibition Punggol Stories.
One of the hardest things about curation is selecting what stays in and what is left out of an exhibition. When I began researching Punggol’s history for the Punggol Stories exhibition, the name Matilda House appeared early and often. People on the internet loved debating whether this old bungalow was haunted. Some believed that the alleged supernatural activity was what “protected” the building from demolition. Whatever the case, Matilda House is one of the only remaining pieces of “old Punggol” left, so I knew I had to include it in the exhibition.
A Brief Overview of Matilda House
Matilda House was built in 1902 by the Cashins, a prolific Singapore Eurasian family of Irish descent who built their wealth through plantations. The single-storey bungalow had six rooms, an open veranda, a fruit orchard, stables and tennis court. The property was so vast it could host two helicopters during the American Helicopter Society’s Family Day in 1989.¹ A long staircase through the back garden led to a beach along the Punggol River, 200 metres away.²
Four generations of Cashins occupied the seaside house till the late 1980s.³ In the following decades, the bungalow was left abandoned. In 2000, Matilda House was earmarked for conservation by the Urban Redevelopment Authority. Eventually, it was repurposed as a clubhouse serving residents of the Treasure Trove condominium, which opened in 2015.
Space and access limitations in the exhibition meant that not everything that we’d researched made it to the final exhibition. Here are some stories of Matilda House we left on the cutting room floor:
Made for the Big Screen
In the 1980s, Matilda House was used as the sets of two TV series. The first was a BBC series called Tenko. The story follows a group of expatriate women in Singapore who survived a Prisoner of War camp together. Then came the Australian production house Grundy Television’s Tanamera, a movie adapted from a 1981 novel of the same name (a copy of which was donated to the National Library by Edwin Thumboo).⁴ It tells a story of forbidden love: Julie Soong and John Dexter were the children of wealthy business families in Singapore whose cross-cultural relationship was seen as taboo.
Tenko and Tanamera centre on the lives of the colonial elite in Singapore and their intersections with the local population both before and after the Second World War. To me, they also symbolised foreign anxieties and impressions of Singapore as a hotbed of competing ideas in a time of transition.
I found it fascinating that both shows featured the same type of antagonist: a hot-headed Chinese man who, as a passionate Communist, seeks to rid Singapore of British imperialism. What’s more, this bad guy role was played by the same Singaporean actor, Lim Kay Tong, who, in both shows, takes the main female characters hostage at Matilda House. Talk about déjà vu. In this sense, could Matilda House have made for an interesting site where foreign understandings of Singapore were explored and ultimately documented through film?
I enjoyed watching these intriguing video dramas, but we could not feature them in the exhibition because we couldn’t get the rights to display the footage. Here are the links if you’d like to watch it yourself.
Reimagining a Riverside Resort
Another thing that I struggled to visualise was how close Matilda House was to Punggol River before land reclamation. Early on in my research, I’d come across an anecdote that mentioned how the Sultan of Johor would come over to Matilda House for tea by boat. That would have meant that the House had easy access to a waterway. I also found a quote by Joseph Cashin talking about how they used to swim in pagars:
“I remember the house for the bathing, the open spaces, and the fruit trees. In those days bathing (swimming) had to be done in pagars – stakes driven into the seabed to form a lagoon – because there were crocodiles around,” said Joe Cashin in a 1989 interview with The New Paper.⁵
It wasn’t until much later that I came across a collection of photos by the late architect Lee Kip Lin that depicts just how close the house was to the sea. They were originally labelled “Lorong Cheng Lim house”, and so didn’t come up in our initial Matilda House searches. Yet the staircase in the photos is unmistakably the one in Matilda House. By the time I discovered these photos, it was too late to include them in the exhibition, so here they are instead:
You can now view the full collection of photos on PictureSG by searching “Matilda House”. If you want to see how close Matilda House was to the sea on maps, you can search “Treasure Trove” (which is the location of Matilda House today) in NUS’ Historical Maps of Singapore database.
I really enjoyed researching Matilda House and reading up on its interesting stories and I hope the conserved building will inspire more research – especially on the two films that had used it as their set.
At the time of its conservation, Matilda House was deemed significant as the “only remaining historical bungalow in Punggol…[with]…the potential to be developed for community use for Punggol New Town”.⁶ The current arrangement, where Matilda House is embedded within a condominium complex, in turn surrounded by a sea of public housing, brings it both closer to and still one step removed from the public.
Is there more room for Matilda House to serve the community and imbue a greater appreciation of the long history of Punggol that not many people are aware of? I hope so. This is one reason why we highlight Matilda House in the Punggol Stories exhibition at the Punggol Regional Library. Our “Memory Map” installation features quotes by people who remember Matilda House, like this one by Nicola Allen,
“I have very fond memories of spending weekends at Matilda House with Charles and Mary Cashin. I have many pictures of us playing in the early 60’s with our parents relaxing in the grounds.
Howard Cashin would make his famous “ponggol stew” on the Barbeque every time we went. I still have a carving given to my parents by Howard Cashin. We would walk out into the sea, trying to avoid treading on the sticklebacks which were lethal if you trod on one.
Mr Cashin would take us out to the rubber plantation to watch the sap run down the tree trunks. Happy days. I do hope that the wonderful old house is preserved to its former glory! Nicola Allen (née Fenn).” – Comment to blog post by Remember Singapore, 2011.⁷
Besides the Punggol Stories exhibition, if you want to see Matilda House for yourself, you can sign up for the Punggol Discovery Bus Trail organised in conjunction with the exhibition. The trail will bring you to Matilda House, as well as other locations such as Fo Guang Shan Temple, Al-Islah Mosque and Punggol Jetty, to explore the history and development of Punggol.
Hannah Yeo is a Curator with the National Library, Singapore, and curated the “Punggol Stories” trail at Punggol Regional Library.
[1] Loh Tuan Lee, “Matilda House and Memories,” New Paper, 28 August 1989, 4. (From NewspaperSG)
[2] Robert Powell, Singapore Good Class Bungalow, 1819–2015. Singapore: Talisman, 2016.
[3] Howard Edmund Cashin. Oral history interview by Thian Yee Sze, 19 March 2009. Transcript and MP3 audio. National Archives of Singapore (accession no. E000044), 4–5, 12.
[4] Barber, Noel. Tanamera: A Novel of Singapore. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981.
[5] Loh Tuan Lee, “Matilda House and Memories,” New Paper, 28 August 1989, 4. (From NewspaperSG)
[6] Urban Redevelopment Authority Conservation Portal. “Matilda House.” Accessed 3 February 2023. https://www.ura.gov.sg/Conservation-Portal/Explore/History?bldgid=PGLRD
[7] Remember Singapore. “Punggol Matilda House.” Last updated 25 August 2016. https://remembersingapore.org/punggol-matilda-house/.
