Ipoh World

The President, Lions Club of Batu Gajah, Mr. Francis Wong, ladies and gentlemen, I am honoured to be invited by your Club to give a short talk on Batu Gajah. I shall begin by saying that about 120 years ago, during the Kinta Tin Rush, which began around 1884, which coincidentally, was also the year that BG was made the capital of Kinta, it was the most important town in Kinta, and perhaps, the second most important town in Perak, after Taiping the State capital. It all had to do with the town's location on the Kinta River.

Before the British came (in 1874) there were already three important centres of mining in Kinta with the Malays and Chinese working of these mines – Gopeng, Papan and Lahat. Each of these mining centres was served by a river port or landing stage, Gopeng by Kota Bharu, Papan by Batu Gajah and Lahat by Pengkalan Pegu. In those days there were no proper roads and railways, and the Kinta and Perak Rivers were the only means of communication with the outside world. Everything that the miners needed had to be sent upriver by boat, and all the tin-ore that was mined had to be transported by boat down to the coast. Of course in those days the rivers were broad and deep, before decades of mining silted them up. Elephants transported the tin-ore on land. There were only two cat roads, between Gopeng and Kota Bharu and between Papan and Batu Gajah, where bullock carts could ply. Generally bullock-cart transport was cheaper than elephant transport.

Kinta was then very isolated. There no was no overland route from this district to the neighouring districts of Kuala Kangsar and Larut, except jungle tracks accessible only to elephants. To get from Taiping to Batu Gajah, for instance, one had to go to port Weld, take the steamer to Penang, then another steamer to Teluk Anson, and finally a boat up the Perak and Kinta rivers, the whole trip taking almost a fortnight.

During the Perak War of 1875-76, there was a brief skirmish at Pengkalan Pegu, which was an inportant Malay political centre in those days. It was the domain of the Dato’ Panglima Kinta, and Sultan Ismail had a house there. The Dato Panglima Kinta was entrusted to look after Sultan Ismail's regalia, which included a herd of 20 fine elephants. After the Perak War, the British set up their first station in Kinta at Pengkalan Pegu, and it would have been their headquarters of the district were it not for its location higher up on the Kinta River, making it inaccessible to the heavier boats during the dry season.

In 1879, the British made Kota Bharu their headquarters, and for five years it was the centre of all their social and commercial activities. Kota Bharu was the lowest landing stage on the Kinta River, within a day's journey by motor launch to the coast. However, Kota Bharu was on low swampy ground, and it was so malarial that it had to be abandoned five years later.

In 1884 the British shifted their headquarters to Batu Gajah, which was the next landing stage, and was accessible to boats throughout the year. During the wet season the bigger boats and tongkangs could berth at its huge stone jetty, while during the dry season, smaller boats could still make it. This was important as it ensured that from Batu Gajah provisions could reach the miners in the interior at all times of the year. The Kinta River was the lifeline of the whole Kinta Valley.

(As a sidetrack, some think that the name Batu Gajah meaning “Stone Elephant” was derived from two elephant-shaped boulders in the Kinta River, making it impossible for the bigger boats to go further upriver to Ipoh, so that the goods had to be transferred at Batu Gajah to smaller boats for the journey upriver. Even before the British came, BG was already a busy trading station. There were Malay huts on both sides of the Kinta River. There was a large smelting house, which belonged to Tye Lee and Co, in which Capitan Chin Ah Yam had a share. Batu Gajah then was already a mining centre, though not as important as Papan or Gopeng. A lot of the immigrants came by boat from Teluk Anson.)

The oldest part of BG was at River Road in what is now called Old Town. One of the first things the Chinese immigrants did was to build a temple, the Kuan Tay Miew, which was situated beside the river. A rough-edged frontier town sprang up around the temple, with opium and gambling dens, brothels and liquor shops. Surrounding it were Malay kampongs. In the 1880s Old Town was surveyed and building lots were demarcated. Roads were built in the kampongs, and many Malays applied to have their land converted into building lots. Many Malays set up shops in Old Town. Batu Gajah belonged to the mukim of Sungei Trap, and had a famous Penghulu, Pandak Akhat.

The British chose a hilly plateau a couple of miles out of town called Changkat for their offices and bungalows. Changkat was very differentfrom Kota Bharu in that it was very healthy. In time a pretty European enclave grew up in Changkat. They built the European Hospital, beside a district hospital for the natives, a jail, police station and offices here. In 1890 the Kinta Gymkhana Club was founded, with Charles Alma Baker and F Douglas Osborne among the founders (the present site of the Kinta Golf Club. The Kinta Gymkhana Club was closed in 1910 and was converted into a golf club). Horse racing became an important social event for the Europeans as well as for the Asians as membership was open to all races. The bungalows of the high officials, eg, the District Officer, were all clustered around the racecourse. In 1892, they built a complex of three offices – the Land Office, the High Court and the Survey Office, which were the first imposing public buildings to be built in Kinta.

For the first ten years Batu Gajah was the ideal headquarters for the British. Ipoh was then only a village of the jungle, and Batu Gajah was an important town, with a landing stage surrounded by Chinese and Malay shops and houses, and administrative machinery at Changkat. The first District Magistrate, as he was then called, was J B M Leech, and he served until 1896. All the important land matters were handled by the DM. The Kinta Tin Rush started in the early 1880’s, and there was a great influx of Chinese immigrants with a great demand for mining land. The Kinta Land Office in BG became the biggest and most important Land Office in the country serving the richest district in the Peninsula. The DO Kinta was next in importance to the British Resident in Perak.

In 1882 a Roman Catholic priest, Father Francois Allard set up the Parish of St Joseph in BG and built a chapel on the hill in Changkat. His parish consisted mostly of vegetable farmers, and the congregation eventually grew to over a thousand. This was the second oldest Roman Catholic parish in Perak, after Taiping.

However, the next decade saw the emergence of Ipoh as an important mining centre. While the population of BG never exceeded 2,000 even by 1910, the population of Ipoh grew by leaps and bounds as it became the heart of the rich tin mining district. By 1893 it was already 5,000. When the Kinta Valley Railways was completed in 1985 linking Ipoh with the coastal port of Teluk Anson, all the tin that was mined in the Kinta Valley could be transported to the coast by rail, likewise all the provisions could be sent to the interior by rail also, making Ipoh, the terminus of the Railway, even more important as a distribution centre. The river traffic was superseded by the rail traffic. The boatmen lost their livelihoods and Batu Gajah lost its importance as a landing stage. The original reason for choosing BG as the district capital was no longer valid. However, by then, the British had already set up their administrative machinery, and saw no reason to shift. The businessmen in Ipoh found it very inconvenient having to go to BG for official matters, as the journey took up the better part of a working day. By 1895, they were clamouring to have the district capital shifted from BG to Ipoh.

In 1909 the people of Ipoh presented a petition to the High Commissioner, Sir John Anderson, asking to shift the capital of Kinta from BG to Ipoh. The reasons stated were:

1. Ipoh had a population of 30,000 with 1,200 first-class shophouses and numerous commercial houses, whereas BG only had a population of 2,000 with just one long main road, 12 first-class shophouses and not one important European commercial house except a collecting agency of the Straits Trading Company.
   
   
2. There were three mining engineering firms in Ipoh managing 9 European mines with a capital of £800,000. Most of the Chinese mining towkays lived in Ipoh.
   
   
3. All the lawyers’ firms were in Ipoh, where people had to go to transact legal matters, but the Land Office and Senior Magistrate’s Court was in BG.
   
   
4. Ipoh was more accessible than BG to the towns along the Ipoh-Tronoh railway line, such as Menglembu, Pusing, Siputeh and Tronoh.
   
   
5. Ipoh had the most number of railway passengers, making it the railway capital of the district.

The government’s reply was that it had already spent nearly half a million dollars on building offices and bungalows in BG at a time when things were cheaper, and if it were to do the same again in Ipoh, it would have to spend twice that amount. Since Ipoh was connected to BG by rail, a journey which took only half an hour, and also by road and telegraph, the inconvenience complained of was not too great as to warrant a shift of headquarters.

It was a close shave for BG.. Had the headquarters been shifted to Ipoh, BG would have died a natural death and the town as we know it today would be a ghost town. The British’s policy was not to abandon towns that they had built up, although it might not have been the wisest policy from a commercial point of view. The importance of Batu Gajah lay in the fact that it was an official town administering the richest tin mining district in the world.

Some interesting personalities:

In 1890 three persons arrived in Batu Gajah who were to have an impact on the history of the district – F Douglas Osborne, Charles Alma Baker and William Smith. Douglas Osborne lived in BG and worked in Gopeng where he introduced the hydraulic method of tin mining, and formed the famous mining engineering firm of Osborne and Chappel, which was transform European methods of mining. Charles Alma Baker became a contract surveyor for the Kinta Land Office in 1892, and later became one of the richest men in Kinta, earning fortunes from tin mining and rubber planting. His bungalow, one of the oldest in BG, situated just across the road from this club, was only recently torn down, a sad loss of a heritage site. However, it was William Smith who was the most interesting, for it was he who built the famous Kellie’s Castle, which remains an enigma to this day.

William Smith was born in 1870 in Moray Firth, Scotland and came to Malaya as a 20-year old civil engineer. He joined Alma Baker in road construction in south Perak and later in his contract surveying. In 1893 he joined the Kinta Valley Railway for one year as an Assistant Engineer. Later he became a Government contractor.

In the nineteenth century the Government gave generous concessions of land to European settlers interested in “scientific” cultivation, ie, setting up plantations. William Smith acquired 3,000 acres of land around Batu Gajah on very generous terms, ie, without premium and at a rental of 10 cents an acre for ten years, and 50 cents thereafter. He first planted coffee, and built a modest wooden bungalow, the first Kellas House, at the present site of Kellie’s Castle.

Although coffee prices were good in the early 1890’s, by 1896, its price had collapsed and a lot of the coffee planters were ruined. William Smith was also affected. He wanted to switch the rubber, but by the early 1900’s still had not the capital to do so. He also had a number of mining concessions but had not worked on them. In 1903 he was recalled rather suddenly to Scotland to see his dying mother. Her maiden name was Kellie, and when he came back from Scotland, he added this to his name, calling himself William Kellie Smith.

He had a sudden change of fortune on his return to Malaya. He met his wife, Agnes. Tan Sri Mubin Sheppard, who wrote an article on Kellie’s Castle for the New Straits Times Annual, says that he met her on the ship back to Penang. She was coming out East for the first time, and William Smith was a tall, handsome and dashing bachelor. He must have swept her off her feet. They got married almost immediately, and had a daughter, Helen, the next year. Agnes was an heiress, due to inherit $300,000 in 1906.

He transferred half of his holdings to her name, making Agnes the owner of a 1,500 acre estate, Kellas Estate, and arranged with a Singapore firm to advance her $24,000 a year for three years to develop Kellas Estate. However, he did not use all the money to develop the estate. He built a distillery costing $20,000 for distilling the perfume patchouli from patch leaf grown in the estate, and also for distilling lemon grass. In the late 19th century patchouli was a very popular fragrance in Europe, the fabrics manufactured in India and sent to Europe being scented with it. However, by the late 1900’s, its popularity had declined, and his distillery was a failure. (Its popularity was revived in the 1960’s during the hippies’ “flower power” era). He also bought sawmill machinery costing $1,500 to cut the logs felled from his concessions.

Agnes was not used to the heat in his wooden bungalow. He built her a solid brick bungalow costing $8,500 so that she need not spend a lot of her time at hill stations. This is building (now in ruins) behind Kellie’s Castle. At the time it was the most beautiful bungalow in BG, even outshining Alma Baker’s mostly wooden bungalow. In 1905 the Chinese firm in Singapore told him that it could not advance Agnes any more, having been ruined by Chinese failures in Batavia (now Jakarta) where it had invested a lot of money. The trustees also told Agnes that they could only release the money in 1908. Thus the Kellie-Smiths were faced with mounting debts, which they had no ready cash to repay. Agnes had no choice but to approach the Government for a loan of $50,000 to tide them over until the trustee released her money.

The Government, having to abide by regulations, insisted on a valuation of the estate. They found only 277 acres planted with rubber. Taking the valuable timber on the concession into consideration, they offered Agnes a loan of $10,000. Kellie Smith was furious. He wrote to WP Hume, the Secretary to Resident in Taiping, “My wife is of course borrowing, or asking for the loan on her expectations, or rather her own funds which will be released from trustees on 15th January 1908. $10,000 is absolutely of no use at all”. Agnes appealed all the way to the High Commissioner, but could not move the Government’s obduracy. In fact Agnes’ “expectations” became something of a joke among official circles, the word having a double meaning. Kellie Smith had no other option but to sell the estate to an agency house. In 1906, Kellas Estate became Kellas Ltd, with Kellie Smith as the Managing Director. In 1910 this was split into the Kinta Kellas Ltd, concerned solely with rubber, and the Klian Kellas Ltd, which was also involved with tin mining.

Why did Kellie Smith build Kellie’s Castle when he already had a lovely mansion where they could entertain the upper crust of Kinta society? This is the question that I would like to bring up for discussion. When Agnes received her inheritance in 1908, of course, they were among the wealthiest couples in Kinta and could well afford to indulge in William Kellie’s Smith’s whims and fancies. My theory is that he had a grudge against the Government who had made fun of Agnes’s “expectations” and did not really believe she was actually an heiress. He wanted to build her a mansion that was more resplendent that the Residency in Taiping. There was really no functional use for the new “castle” or “palace” whatever one would like to call it. There were 14 rooms, a wine cellar capable of holding 3,000 bottles of wine, a shaft for a lift, a flat rooftop for parties or tennis, but no kitchen or servants’ quarters. It was connected with the old mansion by a covered passage, and was probably not independent of it. In fact, there was going to be no one to use the castle. In the early 1920’s Agnes left Malaya with their son Anthony for Britain for his education. Kellie Smith got a big concession of land in Portuguese Timor for planting, and would have to be away from Malaya for long periods. In 1926, with the castle still unfinished, he went to England with his daughter Helen to visit his family, and it was on the return trip that he caught a cold in Portugal where he was going to finalise the terms of his lease, and died in the Portuguese capital.

Editor's note: Dr Ho Tak Ming, a practicing General Practitioner, is a well known author and historian. He writes for the fortnightly newspaper 'Ipoh Echo', the magazines 'Heritage Asia' and 'Vicinity Perak' and has published two books, 'Doctors Exraordinaire' and 'Generations: The story of Batu Gajah". There are several articles of his, from both the Echo and Vicinity, in this archive.

To see an early photograph of Pengkalan Pegoh (Pegu), the First British Station in Kinta , click here.

To see an early General View of Telok Anson (c1906), click here.

To see an old photograph of Batu Gajah Old Town (1881), click here.

To see a photograph of Batu Gajah (1907), click here.

To see a photograph of William Kellie Smith (c1911), click here.

To read about Batu Gajah street names, click here.

To read more about the book Doctors Extraordinaire, click here.

To read more about the book, Generations: The Story of Batu Gajah click here.