SINGAPORE TURF CLUB – RACING INTO OBLIVION

The announcement of closure of STC by 2027 does not bother me one bit as I do declare I am not a punter. This news, however, jotted my memory in a few ways back when horse racing was at its old Bukit Timah grounds. I recall elder brother telling me when I was a little kid that the two most prestigious clubs in any prominent cities is not golf clubs, but horse racing and yacht clubs. Well there goes one prestige for Singapore. In my youth I spent some time bunking at a house at Bk Timah some distance away from the turf club. In the wee hours of 4 or 5am in the mornings I would be awakened by some muffled voices over a megaphone. I was told those were horse trainers going through morning routines. Then the dreaded weekends when Bk Timah road traffic was jam-packed with punters in all shapes and colours. Whilst I am no punter, I was a weekly visitor on Mondays …. to work. I was a junior audit clerk with Turquand Young and my Monday task was to witness the incineration of used bet slips by club officials.   

Almost all Singaporeans will simply receive the news with some nostalgia. That's about it. All will accept the explanation of falling attendance as the cause and conversion of the land for housing as a positive. None will question the veracity of the decision which seemed out of the blue, nor reflect on a time in the distant past when there was a power-grab by the government.

STC was a private club founded in 1842. Some time in late 1980s, the government grew uncomfortable of a private club holding immense wealth and huge plot of prime land. It’s a secretive club and no one from the public has any idea the amount of undistributed wealth it had accumulated over 150 years. Should it decide to dissolve one day, it would have certainly made several Jeff Bezos then. It had such potential political power it needed to be controlled. The government tried to put its man on the board. The job fell on the Minister of Law, the affable Eddie Barker. STC snubbed the government and Barker did not get the votes. Back then. I was already a PAP watcher and thought STC was finished. As predictable as the sun rising in the morning, the government almost immediately created the Singapore Totalisator Board in 1988 and set up the Bukit Turf Club as agent to operate the horse racing and 4D operations from STC which was dissolved in the same year. Adding insult to injury to old members, in 1994 Bukit Turf Club changed its name to STC.

Was there equitable distribution by STC members upon dissolution, I have no idea. Whether it was the most audacious wealth grab, confiscation or redistribution, I leave it to you to decide. A hint lies in the massive social spending by the Board as it embarked on an incredible donation spree in the years following its creation. I am not making any moral judgment, simply narrating past events.

The 120 hectares of land will eventually be added back to the government’s land bank for future needs. For the $500m sunk into the Kranji race course development, it’s about throwing $20m to the wind each year for last 2 decades. Trust a bunch of government appointees to run an 180 year old institution into the ground. William Henry Macleod Read, who started the club in 1842, must be turning in his grave.

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