Researching my family history, and understanding where, and how my ancestors lived, is infinitely fascinating, since the world they knew is so far removed from anything that any of us could imagine in the 21st century.

My grandmother was the firstborn child of a Straits-Chinese family living in Southeast Asia in the late 1800s. Originally from the city of Pelambang, in southern Sumatra, sometime shortly after the turn of the last century, my great-grandparents packed their bags, and decided that the Dutch East Indies was not the place to raise a family. Instead, they moved from Sumatra, across the Strait of Malacca, to Singapore, which was then part of a collection of British colonies known as the Straits Settlements (hence “Straits Chinese”).

Here, they lived with my great-grandmother’s sister, slowly raising a family, and giving birth to – eventually – four girls, and a boy.

Singapore in the early 1900s was, by all measures, a recognisably modern city. It was the capital of the Straits Settlements, and featured all the trappings of such a position, such as schools, hospitals, public transport systems, and of course, a police force.

The Singapore Police Force – or as it was back then – the Straits Settlements Police – was unique among police forces in Asia. Established in 1820, just a year after Singapore’s official founding, the Straits Police was – and is – the oldest operational professional police-force in the whole of Asia. It was established so soon after Singapore’s establishment as a free-trading port that it beat the creation of the London Metropolitan Police by a whole nine years!

The Early Straits Police Force

The early Straits Police Force had extremely humble beginnings, with a full complement of just eleven men to act as clerical-staff, patrol-officers, sergeants and police-inspectors. The first police chief was Francis James Bernard, son-in-law of Singapore’s first governor, William Farquhar. While Farquhar had some military experience (he held the rank of Major-General), Bernard had no such army training, and no policing experience of any kind whatsoever! He was a newspaper-editor!

Singapore’s multicultural nature meant that the police force was soon made up of officers from each of Singapore’s main ethnic groups, such as Indians, Malays, Indonesians, Chinese, and also British expatriates. This racial diversity was necessary for the police-force to operate, because up to half a dozen languages or more, were spoken within the colony!

In the 1860s, the police finally got their first real, proper headquarters, when grand new premises were constructed on South Beach Road in central Singapore. These remained in operation until the 1930s and 40s, until the buildings were vacated for more modern premises after WWII. The original headquarters buildings were demolished in 1978.

In the late 1800s, police uniforms were standardised with a khaki cotton tunic, shorts, puttees, boots, a cap with a police badge on it, and an equipment-belt. This would remain more or less unchanged right up until the 1950s, with only minor alterations.

Straits Settlements Police Whistle

By the time my ancestors had started living in Singapore, around the turn of the 20th century, the Straits Settlements Police had come a long way from its humble beginnings in the 1820s. By the 1900s, it had a large, elegantly designed new headquarters, proper uniforms, and modern equipment.

And one of those pieces of equipment were police whistles.

Back in the early 1900s, almost every police-force in the world issued its officers with service whistles – they were essential for crowd-control, passing orders, getting attention in emergencies, and signaling to other officers. However, their most important role was as an alarm-raising device. In a policing system that relied on regular beat-patrols done on foot, the main use of an officer’s service whistle was to raise the alarm in the event of a crime being committed. If a patrolman saw someone being mugged, for example, they would blow their whistle before moving in to engage the suspect, or would blow their whistle if the miscreant tried to get away.

The purpose of doing this was to let officers in neighbouring beats know that a crime had been spotted, and that the arresting officer (since officers almost always patrolled on their own, without partners) would need backup. The responding officers would blow their own whistles, so that the arresting officer knew that help was on its way, and then run in the direction of the original whistle blasts. A bit like a police car with its lights and siren today, an arresting officer would continue to blow his whistle until backup arrived, so that other officers knew where to run to.

The whistle that I added to my collection is stamped with “STRAITS SETTLEMENTS POLICE FORCE” across the barrel. When this whistle was manufactured, back around 1910, the main supplier of police whistles in Singapore (as well as almost every other part of the British Empire) was the Birmingham firm of Joseph Hudson & Co., which had by then been in operation for over four decades.

Police whistles became standard-issue equipment for officers starting in the early 1880s, when a replacement was sought for the heavy, wooden police rattles, and by the early 1900s, almost every officer would’ve carried one. Police forces (as well as other organisations like railroad companies, hospitals, the postal service, and so on) could special-order their whistles from Joseph Hudson & Co. It was as simple as writing to the company, and placing an order for so-many whistles, and would they pretty-pretty-please include a special stamp on the barrel, identifying the institution or company placing the order.

A custom stamp would then be manufactured, and this was added to the machinery that produced the whistles. The stamp was then rolled across the whistles during manufacturing process, impressing the name of the police-force (or other such institution) onto the barrel.

Because of this, there’s actually a wide range of whistles manufactured by Joseph Hudson & Co (which at the time, was the largest whistle-factory in the world), along with an almost endless array of barrel stamps printed across them. That said, whistles marked “Straits Settlements Police Force” are among the rarest around.

This is largely because of the short time-period in which these whistles would’ve been made, spanning from the first decades of the 1900s, up until the early 1930s, if that. It is unlikely that fresh whistles would’ve been supplied at regular intervals. Instead, they would’ve been sent in batches, if or when the Straits Police required another order. If whistles were recycled between one officer leaving the force, and another one entering it, whistles – which were police property, after all – the whistle of the outgoing officer would likely have been sterilised, and then handed over to an incoming officer, rather than ordering a new one all the way from Birmingham. This would’ve kept the number of new whistles required relatively low. Only when whistles in the current order were running out due to increased officer-numbers would a new batch have been ordered from the factory in England.

It’s because of all these factors – short length of use, relatively small officer-numbers, and recycling of used whistles, and possibly others – that police whistles with “Straits Settlements Police Force” stamped on the barrel are so rare.

So while the whistle is only a small piece, it is a rare survivor and a reminder of an aspect of life that existed in Singapore and the wider Straits Settlements in the early 1900s, when my ancestors were living there in their early childhood.