No Telephone at our kampong house

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We always wondered why our Bedok kampong house had no telephone. Whenever urgent calls needed to be made or received, it would be at our neighbour Kak Min’s home. When calls came for us, she would so kindly walk out of her home, cross the compound and called out to us across the fence to come over her front gate (a walk out and around the bend to get there). 

Some time ago we discovered this document of March 1957 which showed that our late father had indeed attempted to install a phone in the house actually. This application to the then Singapore Telephone Board, predecessor of Singtel, showed the annual fee to be $252.50. This was likely too high a price to pay compared to the anticipated usage, so the telephone was never installed, considering having a phone was a luxury in those days. At least for us as he was drawing a Radio Malaya technician's pay and was the sole breadwinner.

Application for telephone in 1957 but did not proceed

Kak Min our neighbour at the fence with our family

How Kak Min's phone probably looked like (this photo not ours, dated mid 1950's circa)



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