The Tanglin Club's Churchill Restaurant and Library, History, Caricatures of Men Who changed Singapore's Landscape

 Yes, you need to be a member of the club, or to know a member, or to be a member of one of many clubs worldwide which have reciprocal arrangements. The club is gradually moving into the current century, whilst still retaining the nostalgic atmosphere of the old days. 

You need a letter of introduction from your club to visit the Tanglin, or, if you are a member of the Tanglin club, you need a letter of introduction from them to visit a club overseas. 

What's new is that you no longer need a piece of paper. You can receive your authentication online on your mobile phone.

The hall has flowers, seats, oil paintings of the old days, lists of past presidents, and a grand staircase.

Angela Lansbury beside a picture of Old Singapore, the original Tanglin club. Photo by Trevor Sharot.

 The Entrance staircase is still there, but now the Tanglin has a lift for those with wheelchairs.

The Tanglin has changed, improved, expanded, a lot. It now has an outdoor pool, a children's pool. The restaurants include a Chinese restaurant. 

The sports building across the street is linked by an overhead walkway. If you have walked up from the shops and the Orchard MRT or a bus stop. You can save yourself waiting for the traffic lights to change by going into the sports building and walking across the walkway above the road.

Tanglin Club lobby with grand staircase, seats and flowers, photo by Angela Lansbury.

Upstairs, that grand staircase, is a library.  And caricatures of past presidents going back many years.

The Libary

You need your membership card to get through the door.

I spent an hour or so reading through a book on how to give TED talks.

My husband was researching members of the Tanglin club from about a hundred years ago. In those days the VIPs, heads of companies and heads of the railway and so on, and members of the governing and deciding committees, were members of the Tanglin club and the Cricket club. (Other clubs came along later, since I have lived here.)

Books and Caricatures

Caricatures of the VIPs are around the walls of the corridor leading to the library. My husband had been chasing up who the people were. He had their names in minutes of decisions about whether and when and where to build new railway lines. He is writing a book on the railways of Singapore. 

Then he thought of checking if they belonged to any clubs Sure thing. And the people he was researching knew each other and belonged to the same clubs. The Tanglin Club. The cricket club. The golf club.

So one man was a president of the club. Later his buddy becomes president of the club. And all their pictures are on the wall. Not just the slightly out of focus copies, photos, in the history books. But the originals. History come to life.

Downstairs in the lobby, if you look up, you can see the library shelves above through the glass windows. Funny, I have been going to the club, on and off, for years, but never noticed that. 

So those caricatures of the presidents of the Tanglin Club are not just photos of long-gone members of a club. These are the people immortalised in street names, railway tracks, the directions of roads, the whole landscape of Singapore.

The names of streets, dams, railway stations, roads reflect the government figures of the day. And you can match up the names of streets with the faces in the pictures.

I have a book of the street names of Singapore. I shall do some matching up soon, of the faces that fit the names. That will be fun.