Singapore was caught up in Taylor Swift fever with the American pop sensation in town for a six-concert Singapore leg of her sixth tour. There was also much excitement over Swift’s Singapore connection with the revelation that her grandmother, soprano Majorie Finlay, “spent a lot of time in Singapore”, and that her mother Andrea, “grew up here”. Screen grabs from Swift’s music video “majorie”, a song Swift wrote in tribute to her grandmother, showing glimpses of her grandmother’s Singapore residence were widely circulated, leading to much speculation as to where the house was and if it was still standing. Without much to go on except for the screen grabs, it would have been looking for a needle in a haystack.
Identifying the house, however, proved to be less difficult, thanks to childhood friend’s and Singapore American School schoolmates of Andrea Finlay, including Julia Nickson (of Rambo: First Blood Part II fame) and Nancy MacIntyre Hollinshead, who runs “Singapore Childhood Remembered” on Facebook. They were able to provide leads, as well as confirm how the how looked like.
The leads included the house’s general location “off Whitley Road”, descriptions of the terrain walking up to the house from Whitley Road, as well as a photograph of Andrea with friends taken outside the house that provided vital visual cues. Unfortunately, all that can be said for reasons of privacy (of the current occupants), is that the house is part of Mount Pleasant government housing estate. It is also in a cluster of houses of the same design, with several distinctive features that match the images in the screen grabs and photograph mentioned. A positive identification of the house was made on Wednesday (6 Mar 2024).
Mount Pleasant estate
The government housing estate laid out with Mount Pleasant Road as a spine with several branch roads running off it, contains large residences that were built for senior government officers and their families in the 1930s. They accommodated the likes of the Director of Public Works and Director of Civil Aviation, Master Attendant, as well as members of the judiciary. Some of these houses were let out to non-government residents from the late 1950s.
The residences, which have been referred to as colonial bungalows or “black and white” houses, are of various designs and while given a white finish coat with black details, and perhaps have some features typical of black and white houses, many are not technically not black and white. Common features of these houses are designs to maximise natural ventilation such as generously sized openings, verandahs, pitched roofs with Marseille tiles and use of timber floorboards. The houses were also laid out on elevated grounds and given expansive gardens and today are surrounded by lush greenery.
Mount Pleasant and the Battle for Singapore:
Mount Pleasant Road, was where on of the last battle lines was drawn before the guns fell silent on 15 February 1942. Based on the work of battlefield archeologist Jon Cooper, we know that some of the houses along the road witnessed some very fierce battles on the night of the 14th and morning of the 15th of February. More information can be obtained on this in Jon Cooper’s Tigers in the Park.