A Legacy of Books

Hedwig Anuar was born on 19 November 1928 and named Hedwig Elizabeth Aroozoo. She was the second of seven children and grew up with four sisters and a brother. She was especially close to Marie, her eldest sister, and would speak to her every day until Marie passed away in 2003.

Her parents were Eurasians Percival Frank Aroozoo and Agnes Beatrice Danker. She grew up in Johor Bahru where her mother was born. Her family moved to Singapore in 1937. This was pre-independence so both countries were still considered one.

The family grew up with a lot of books.

We had books in every room in the house, spilling over into the verandah, corridors and stair landings.

Hedwig Anuar, “A lifetime of reading”, The Straits Times, 31 August 1985

Her father was a teacher from 1917–1938 and collected modern first editions. He loved all kinds of books so the family grew up reading a wide range from classics such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales to the works of early feminists such as Virginia Woolf. Through her father’s library, Hedwig was able to read European and Asian works in translation such as French and Russian novelists and Chinese and Japanese poets.

I was an avid listener when he discussed politics at the dinner table with my grandfather and my uncles.

Hedwig Anuar, “Under the Apple Tree”, Landmark Books, 1991

Her father was also very open-minded about politics and encouraged his children to read widely. He was, however, very strict about his treatment of the books and trained them to treat each book with respect: no dog-eared pages, the careful use of bookmarks and always returning them to where they were found. The family loved Sundays as he would use that time to dust all his books and all the children would help.

Hedwig was very close to her family. All the siblings would work together on plays and performances for Christmas which Marie directed. The four older sisters would also write together in “The Pickwick Club”. Hedwig also started two neighbourhood newsletters, Thoughts of Youth and Light, and was their chief writer.

In 1938, her father became the school principal of Gan Eng Seng Secondary. He was very pleased about this as his grandfather, Simon Aroozoo, had been good friends with Gan Eng Seng when they worked together at the trading company, Guthrie and Co. Hedwig studied at the Convent of the Infant Jesus (CHIJ) on Victoria Street with her sisters.

In 1939, when Hedwig was nearly eleven, World War II was declared. The schooling of her sisters and her father’s career were put on hold. Her father’s library downsized as his political books were destroyed or hidden away in the attic. They also had to sell some books for income. Despite that, Hedwig still found comfort in her father’s library with “unflinchingly honest, moving and brave”¹ books such as The Enormous Room (E.E. Cummings), The Testament of Youth (Vera Brittain) and philosophy books by Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw. To protect the remaining books, the family would turn the bookcases to the wall when the Japanese soldiers visited.

Percival Frank Aroozoo
Hedwig’s father, Percival Frank Aroozoo, was born in 1900. He is the son of Frank Aroozoo who oversaw the Bidadari Cemetery. His grandfather was Simon Aroozoo who worked with Gan Eng Seng. Two of Singapore’s roads, Simon Road and Aroozoo Avenue, are named after him.

Percival was one of the first Asian principals of schools in Singapore and was the headmaster for Gan Eng Seng School from 1938 – 1955. He shaped the school’s identity by designing the school crest and creating the school creed. He oversaw the school’s transition from a primary to secondary school. He was also an active member of the Singapore Teacher’s Association and was a stage manager for the teachers’ productions.

1. “A Lifetime of Reading”, The Straits Times, 31 August 1985, Page 1

Levelling Up

During the war, Hedwig would earn some money by teaching English to the children of her father’s friends and neighbours. This was an instinctive step for her as there were family expectations to be a teacher since her aunts and uncles were also teachers.

After the war, Hedwig continued her studies for a year in CHIJ Victoria Street. In early 1947, she was a relief teacher in the same convent while waiting for her results. Every morning, she would report to the principal and was assigned a class that had no teacher for the day. As a result, she taught across many age groups from kindergarten to pre-college. She found it very difficult to teach as she was not good at discipline and class management. The experience was painful for her and she realised during these six months that she did not want to become a teacher. She started to get more interested in politics.

She entered Raffles College in September 1947. The classes contained students of mixed ages because of the war. Some students were much older as they had started university in 1941 and had to stop because of the war, while others were younger as they had been overseas in the war and their studies were not interrupted. Despite the age gaps, there was a sense of solidarity as they had all gone through adversity together.

She started to get very involved in student activities. She joined the Literary, Dramatic and Debating Society (LDDS) and became its Secretary. She was also named “Lady Rep” of the Raffles College Students’ Union Committee, in which she was the only female member on the committee. In her Honours year in 1949, Raffles College was merged with King Edward VII College of Medicine to become the University of Malaya. She was one of three women elected into the new Student Council.

She graduated in 1951, the only female graduate in a cohort of five. Unlike the men in her cohort, she was not able to land a job with the Admin Service despite being the only one of the five who had First Class Honours. She decided not to join Marie in taking a diploma in education. Instead, she tried applying for the Queen’s scholarship to continue her studies overseas. While waiting for the results of her application, she went back to her alma mater to do relief teaching for nine months. When she did not receive the scholarship, there was some pressure from those around her to join the teaching profession, like her sisters Marie, Joyce and Eleanor, or social work as those were the careers that many other women chose.

The first steps toward a career
In 1952, she was invited to apply for an opening in the University of Malaya Library. She started as a library assistant in the Catalogue Department and received on-the-job training. There was no library course in Singapore so she studied for a correspondence course on Cataloguing, Classification and Administration on her own time as she was not given time off during working hours or study leave. Both Hedwig and Eleanor sat for the Registration Examination of the Library Association of the United Kingdom and passed.

In 1955, Hedwig received a three-year scholarship from the university library to study at the School of Librarianship, Northwestern Polytechnic University in London. Eleanor was also awarded a scholarship from the Teachers’ Training College to be trained as a librarian in Loughborough College. While they were both in the United Kingdom, Hedwig became the Secretary of the Malayan Forum where she worked with others to organise programmes that invited visiting politicians to give talks on various Asian and African countries. Sometimes, she would profile them for articles in Suara Merdeka (Sound of Freedom). She would often stay up in the office writing articles and typing out the articles of others.

She would also host visiting politicians and fellow students in her flat to discuss Malaya’s political situation and current affairs. Some of these students included future politicians such as Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee and David Marshall.

Returning home
She graduated in 1959 and returned to Singapore to serve her scholarship bond. She was promoted from library assistant to Assistant Librarian and sent to the University of Malaya’s Kuala Lumpur campus to start up a university library there.

The next year, she was sent to Singapore to serve as the Director of the National Library in Singapore for one year.

Because of the war, I wanted to know how it happened. How were we colonised? We had learnt Empire History all through our lives without questioning it. Why were the British ruling us? What made them come?

Hedwig Anuar, Oral Archives: Disc 11, National Archives of Singapore, 18 August 1988

Building Foundations

In her one year as Director of the National Library (1960 – 1961), she supervised Operation Pindah (Operation Move) to move books from the Raffles Library to its new location. There was no budget set aside for the move. The date had already been set and there was not enough time to request for more funds. She was also not able to arrange for transport due to the short distance. She asked the staff to weed out as many books as possible to make the task easier and asked them to bundle the remaining 150,000 books into bundles of 10 or a carriable weight. She then organised a human chain of around 50 staff to pass down the bundles by hand, unpacking them at Stamford Road. The move was completed in just two weeks and Hedwig treated all of the staff to a satay party at her home after.

The Stamford Road library was officially opened in November 1960 by Singapore’s first president, Yusof Ishak. During the opening, he noted that there were not enough chairs. There were only bookshelves as the tables and chairs were being made by the Prisons Department. It was the cheapest furniture that Hedwig could get at the time but they could not arrive in time for the opening.

Once the library was fully set up, it needed a lot of publicity to encourage visitors. Hedwig was featured on several radio shows where she would share about new books in the library, read books from the library’s collection and give weekly book reviews.

She also worked with her team to start a mobile library using three vans that were sponsored by UNESCO and a private donor in Singapore. At the time, there were very few branch libraries and they only operated for a few hours, three times a week. The vans first travelled to three locations: Yio Chu Kang, Siglap and Choa Chu Kang, and eventually expanded to ten mobile library points including West Coast, Tanjong Pagar, Bukit Panjang and Pasir Panjang. The mobile library served some of the outlying schools as it was difficult for children and their families to visit the Stamford Road library.

At this time, around 50% of the population was literate. She strategised an early intervention for children to cultivate the next generation of readers. There were also outreach efforts for adults. She advocated for the purchase of more books in Chinese, Malay and Tamil as a top priority.

In the early days of the library, many people were not aware of how they should look after the books they borrowed. There were cases where books were torn or scribbled on. Some visitors even used a penknife to neatly cut images out from art books. With her team, Hedwig set up an exhibition of mutilated books as part of the library’s efforts to educate the public on how to respect books. Some visitors were shocked by these displays. The message she focused on was that a damaged book had no use and would deprive someone else of a book. Hedwig also implemented fines for any damages to books as well as the cost of replacement books if the damage was too great. These helped to decrease instances of such vandalised books.

In 1961, after the library was fully functioning, Hedwig finished her contract with the National Library and headed to London for personal reasons.

Because of my educational background, in terms of my father being a committed educationist, I had always thought that education was the most important gift that anybody could have actually. Without education, [you would] be very severely handicapped in whatever you did and basic literacy and learning English was important in terms of getting jobs.

Interview with Hedwig Anuar, Accession No. 002036, Track 13, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore. 1998

A Library for Everyone

In 1962, Hedwig returned to Singapore and was the Assistant Director of the National Library for two years before assuming the role of Director in 1965. With the focus on adults and children in its earlier years, Hedwig recognised that there were not enough options for teenagers. They needed content that was more relevant to their own experiences and more challenging than the books offered for primary school children. She started work on curating a collection of books for teenagers.

In 1966, Eleanor returned to Singapore for a few years. She had completed her Fellowship of the Library Association (LA), Part 3 on Children’s Librarianship and School Libraries and was appointed the head of the Children’s Department at the National Library. When Hedwig conceived the idea of a collection for teenagers, Eleanor was the most suited for the role of the Coordinator of Young People’s Services as she was the only person with formal training and qualifications in school librarianship. The term “Young People” was chosen instead of “teenager” as the latter word was new to Singapore at the time. The National Library did not want the job title to sound too “American” as most of the books in the library were British books.

Under Hedwig’s leadership and Eleanor’s direction, programmes were offered for people aged 13 to 20 years old. There were talks, debates and even a young writers group. The Young People’s Service became very popular and the participants of these programmes wrote their own book reviews and organised a magazine for themselves. They started outreach to secondary schools to introduce books to the students.

During this period, the five professional paths of the Aroozoo sisters converged in the advocacy for the development of school libraries and the training of teacher librarians. Hedwig, as the Director of the National Library, offered bulk loans, a free advisory service, training and a list of suitable books to Malay, Chinese, English and Tamil schools. She also chaired the publication of school library standards. Marie approached the National Library for advice on developing a library in the school she was posted to, CHIJ Katong Convent Secondary, for 1,000 students. Eleanor, as the designated School Library Advisor, helped in the classification and cataloguing of the books in her school’s library. Eleanor also promoted school libraries to the Ministry of Education and later that year in 1966, a model Primary School Library was set up during the Teachers’ Training College’s Library Week.

While her sisters were being trained overseas, Lydia graduated from the University of Malaya in Singapore in 1960 and became a reporter for the Singapore Free Press. Several of her articles covered the National Library including its mobile library visits to 37 schools and documented its music collection and colonial records. Joyce became a primary school teacher at the CHIJ on Victoria Street. From 1968 – 1969, 92 secondary school teachers, including Marie, and 12 primary school teachers attended the teacher librarian training.

Besides schools, Hedwig wanted to continue the outreach she had done in 1961 to promote reading habits to the public. From 1963, she compiled and scripted a radio show called “Life and Letter” for Radio Singapore for about two years. In the programme, she would showcase books with an Asian background and travel books. She also hosted a weekly series, “Calling the Housewife”, where she would curate shows centred on women novelists from Asian and non-Asian countries. In both shows, she would ensure that the books were available in the National Library’s collection and invite listeners to borrow them.

During Hedwig’s time as the Director of the National Library from 1965 – 1988, the library’s membership grew from 43,000 to 330,000 across nine libraries. She would travel often for seminars and conferences and proposed solutions for challenges unique to Asian countries such as the cataloguing of Malay names and a user-focused approach to cataloguing a multilingual, multi-script collection that made sense to visitors.

In her career, Hedwig published over 100 articles, reports and conference papers in Singapore, Malaysia and other international journals, including a paper on the Blueprint for Public Library Development in Malaysia (1968). She also spearheaded the National Library’s campaign to computerise their systems.

Cataloguing of Malay Names

Apart from problems of transliteration, the cataloguing of Malay, Indonesian, Chinese and Tamil names is complicated by such problems as the lack of surnames (in Malay), the use of honorifics and familiar names (in Chinese), the use of titles of dignity (in Indonesian and Malay) such as Raden and Tengku, which become part of the name.

At present, catalogue and book cards for Malay, Chinese and Tamil books are written by hand. But next year we shall have a Tamil typewriter, and eventually will have to obtain a Jawi and a Chinese typewriter as well.

From “The Provision of Books in Malay, Chinese and Tamil in Raffles National Library”, Library Association of Malaysia, pp. 355–356. 1960.

Click here to view the document, courtesy of National Archives of Singapore.

Always a Step Ahead

Hedwig wore multiple hats. In addition to being the Director of the National Library from 1965 – 1988, she was also the Director of the National Archives for a decade. She co-founded The Library Association of Singapore (1957), the National Book Development Council of Singapore (1969) and was one of the founding members of AWARE (1985).

In her visits to overseas conferences, she soon realised that librarianship was a feminised profession in many Asian and Western countries. Many women like her who did not want to become teachers or social workers decided to become librarians instead. However, in these conferences, she would often find herself the only woman in the room as the top librarians in the West were usually men.

Hedwig always considered herself a fighter and would stand her ground when asking for more grants or a bigger push for the policies she proposed. She cared deeply for her staff and implemented an open-door policy to hear their concerns.

I was known to be a fighter: That I would always keep fighting for my staff for scholarships and for promotions. Fight for more money for the library also. Fight over the scheme of service—and as I said, that was another crucial area to get the pass degree graduates on par more or less with the honours graduates in terms of the library qualifications being the more important criteria—things like that.

Interview with Hedwig Anuar, Accession No. 002036, Track 36, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore. 1998

Through her advocacy, she managed to raise the salaries of library staff, attracting more men into the profession.

After her retirement, Hedwig continued her work in teaching English literacy to housewives from lower-income families as part of her volunteer work at AWARE.

Her passion for literacy and her initiative in developing educational outreach programmes played a large role in Singapore’s literary landscape and has made a large impact in our lives.

As you enter the doors of the library, take note of the many facets of the library we take for granted today from the furniture provided to how easy it is to borrow books. The next time you borrow a book from the library, think of Hedwig Anuar and the work of the many staff who helped lay the foundations that make the library what it is today.

How I Became Aware by Hedwig Anuar

Librarianship was a new profession in Singapore. Although I was the Director of the National Library, I soon realised, from my attendance at overseas conferences, that librarianship was also a feminised profession in many Asian and even Western countries, like teaching, nursing and social work. Top librarians in the West were usually men, so I was sometimes the only woman as some conferences, just as I had been the only woman or one of the few in my student days.

Download the full excerpt of ‘Feminist Consciousness’ here, courtesy of AWARE.

This tendency towards non-conformity and independence of thought and action has stayed with me throughout my life. Perhaps it was the rebel in me that led me to AWARE.

Download the full excerpt of ‘University Days’ here, courtesy of AWARE.

Hedwig Anuar Children’s Book Award

To celebrate Hedwig Anuar’s groundbreaking work in children’s librarianship and nurturing young readers and writers, the Singapore Book Council presents the biennial Hedwig Anuar Children’s Book Award (HABA) for an outstanding Singapore children’s book. Find out more about the award and the 2020 winners here.

Kelly and the Krumps
Author: Ken Kwek, Illustrator: Lolita Chiong
Image courtesy of Epigram Books

Borrow a copy from the National Library

Hedwig Anuar is a visionary woman and I am honoured to be a recipient of an award which celebrates her commitment to children’s literacy. The award emphasizes the importance of sparking children’s imagination through a simple but timeless and magical medium: books.

Ken Kwek, winner of Hedwig Anuar Children’s Book Award 2020

The beautiful trophy and the money are what supports the literary landscape in Singapore. This is a gift I will always cherish, and [it will] also serve as an inspiration for me to work harder on local children’s books.

Lolita Chiong, winner of Hedwig Anuar Children’s Book Award 2020