Interlopers The Arrival of Rivals 27

The Hongkong & Shanghai Bank, the Union Building and Telegraph House were all completed by the end of 1924 and that same year Santry and Lundon were both made partners of Swan & Maclaren. This followed the retirement of Harry Robinson, who had stepped down at the end of the previous year—he had led the firm since the departure of A. J. W. Watkins in 1915. The retirement of Robinson left Herbert Courtney Atkin-Berry at the head of the practice—Atkin-Berry relocated from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore—with Santry and Lundon as his junior associates; presumably Santry and Lundon were on an equal footing since they joined Swan & Maclaren at the same time. They were supported by staff architects Cyril James Stephen and the talented Frank Wilmin Brewer, both of whom had joined the firm in 1920.

Keys & Dowdeswell

The year 1924 was also when work began on a new General Post Office and Government offices at Fullerton Road. This was a project that had aroused considerable public interest over several years since the proposed building was to be the largest structure yet erected in the Straits Settlements. Designs for the GPO had actually been put on public display as long ago as 1920, but the project had been delayed several times due to the uncertain financial climate. (The US recession of 1921 to 1922 had resulted in a crash in tin and rubber prices, the twin mainstays of the Malayan and Singaporean economies.) It was not until the beginning of 1924, therefore, that work actually began on site.

The new GPO was designed by the London partnership of Keys & Dowdeswell, who were contracted by the Singapore Government to come up with an imposing new edifice for this most prominent and prestigious site, until then occupied by the old General Post Office and the Exchange Building.1 Major Percy Hubert Keys, who was the driving force in the team, was very much the commanding officer type with a distinguished service record in the Royal Engineers during the First World War. Prior to the war, Keys had designed and supervised buildings for the London postal service; with budgets of up to £5,000,000, they included some of the largest reinforced-concrete buildings then erected in London.2 A winner of the Architectural Association’s prestigious Bannister Fletcher medal in 1905, Keys was elected a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects not long after his arrival in Singapore; Frederick Dowdeswell, who seems to have been the junior party in the practice, was an associate.

During their early years in Singapore, Keys and Dowdeswell were not allowed to accept private commissions on account of their being in the employ of the Singapore Government—an exception seems to have been made in the case of the Sailors’ Institute on Anson Road, which was completed in 1924. This restriction was relaxed in 1927, at which point Keys & Dowdeswell began to accept commissions from the public and private sectors. Overnight, Swan & Maclaren found themselves no longer the biggest fish in the pond, but faced with some fairly serious competition.

The figures speak for themselves: out of the six major corporate commissions in downtown Singapore between 1927 and the end of the decade, only one—Meyer Chambers—went to Swan & Maclaren, the contracts for the other five being awarded to Keys & Dowdeswell. Their clients included the Dutch trading company, Messrs Internationale Credit en Handels Vereeniging Rotterdam (1927); the Mercantile Bank of India (1927); the Kwangtung Provincial Bank (1928); the Oversea-Chinese Bank opposite page Meyer Chambers, Raffles Place, Frank Lundon, 1929. below The General Post Office, otherwise known as the Fullerton Building, Keys & Dowdeswell, 1920–1928.

Commissioned by Swan & Maclaren’s long-time clients, Meyer Bros, the anchor tenant was the Ho Hong Bank, which moved into the completed building in December 1930 (this was two years before the Ho Hong Bank was incorporated as part of the newlyconstituted Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation). After the Second World War, Meyer Chambers was taken over by the Overseas Union Bank (established 1949), at which point it became known as OUB Chambers. The building was demolished in 1981 to make way for today’s OUB Centre.