To honour the passing of the seventy five years in the life of an institution is very different from commemorating someone’s birthday particularly when it involves not only the historical evolution of a school but also the changing times of a young nation such as ours.
Hardly anyone of our School’s living population of today will be able to truly comprehend the meaning of its past as we have yet to achieve a collective appreciation of how we have come to be what we both as individuals as well as citizens of a vibrant new society.
Our very name, despite repeated attempts to mangle it, has remained the same not to mention a number of other icons such as Jacob’s Green and the various houses, namely, Cheeseman, Colin King, Soon Eng Kong and Stowell.
Other snippets of our days at the school might include the delicious fare in the quaint tuck shop at the corner of the playing field, of the verdant and luscious produce of Mr Kam Kee Hock’s much loved vegetable garden between the Teacher’s Quarters and the H.M.’s house, or even the ubiquitous office, visits to which, for many, invariably ended with a sharp pain in the buttocks!
It is these things, both living and inanimate, that collectively make up one’s memories of what it was to be a HSBM boy.
They are, indeed, the tangible links with our historic beginnings and our colourful pre-Merdeka past but what of the less physical and readily visible ties that give each and every one of us as Old Boys a warm and comfortable feeling of pride and a sense of belonging?
Looking back at old photographs of the School, it is almost incredible that the men who had gathered in the town’s photo studio for a historical group picture in 1927 were to be ultimately responsible for all that the school came to be known for especially in the quality of men that it produced.
Even more, when one reads the almost unbelievably personal reminisces of some of the select few of this elite pioneering staff members in the Golden Anniversary edition of The Bukit, none of us will be able to deny the utter sincerity and total dedication of these early teachers.
It was this core of pioneer teachers whose names are now just a memory that was the backbone of the School’s rise to fame from a backwater such as Province Wellesley.
As we observe the seventy fifth anniversary then, we ought to be acutely aware of their absence today as they have almost all to a man faded away with the passing of time and we’re left only with our fond memories of them.
Looking back at the emergence of HSBM since 1927 from the current standpoint, one of the first things that strikes you is the simple fact that exactly thirty years after it was established we became an independent nation.
Thus, in a sense, the greater part of our school’s history has been very much our own responsibility and, yet, the question that begs to be asked is: Just how much has the old School changed during this relatively short span of time?
One does not expect any simple answer to such an intriguing way of assessing our past seventy five years but it needs to be borne in mind that change is inevitable, for nothing is static in history.
And yet, the older alumni amongst us quite often find it rather a challenge to have to concede that time and tide have indeed waited for no man and that our alma mater after seventy five years may indeed be much more hallowed institution today than it once was!
Apart from a short break caused by the Japanese Occupation, HSBM went on to challenge and, very often, soundly beat not only its immediate rivals in the rarefied confines of the Peninsula for more than half a century.
HSBM would have never amounted to much if it had been just another British colonial institution to educate the natives among a motley gathering of rice farmers, rubber tappers, civil servants and petty traders.
Undoubtedly, the vision of the founding father, E La M. Stowell, to mould the newly established school along the strict but slightly elitist lines of the English public school model has much to do with the nurturing of the school’s character.
But, surely, the amazing thing is that this no doubt well intentioned aspiration was left in the somewhat unusual charge of a small band of valiant locals and it is entirely to credit their that we have become what we are today.
Most old boys of the pre-Merdeka years will never be able to forget the names of these archetypal Malayan gentlemen of that period when, as a Malay, Chinese or Indian or Eurasian in what was then British Malaya, they were all caught in a fascinating dilemma.
Themselves thoroughly schooled in the British educational tradition and yet ethically not entirely detribalised, one remembers them as neatly attired in stiffly starched, usually white, long-sleeved shirts and trousers with their de rigueur ties.
In recalling the glorious record of HSBM’s seventy five years but we are all undoubtedly very conscious of that proud tradition in the initial years of our nation’s rise to greatness.
The conservation of HSBM is, after all, a permanent symbol of the rise of this part of Penang from being an unknown rural countryside in the early part of the last century to a bustling high-tech industrial society in which the old school continues to outshine its rivals both academically and in sports.
