Article

The Bandar Bahru group photograph

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The Bandar Bahru group photograph

Falconer and Gullick (1989) present a forensic re-examination of a well-known group photograph long misattributed to the Pangkor meeting of January 1874, demonstrating through documentary and visual evidence that it was in fact taken at Bandar Bahru in Lower Perak on 15 September 1875 during the visit of Sir William Jervois, Governor of the Straits Settlements. The article resolves a decades-long confusion by identifying all ten figures in the photograph and explaining how the erroneous Pangkor attribution became entrenched in the historical record.

Summary

The photograph in question had been published as early as 1908 with a caption linking it to the Pangkor Agreement, and three of the four known surviving prints bear handwritten inscriptions identifying the seated central figure as Sir Andrew Clarke. The authors dismantle this tradition on several grounds: the seated figure is visually indistinguishable from known portraits of Jervois rather than Clarke; Birch, who appears in the photograph, was deliberately excluded from the Pangkor party by Clarke; and the photograph includes officials (McCallum, Plow, Stirling) who were not present at Pangkor but were part of Jervois’ 1875 tour. The decisive piece of evidence is a 1941 letter from the 91-year-old Swettenham to Dr. Mubin Sheppard, in which he stated unambiguously that the photograph “has nothing to do with Pangkor, or Sir A. Clarke” and was taken at Birch’s house at Bandar Bahru (p. 23).

The authors then proceed to identify each of the ten figures, drawing on a comparative photograph taken at Kuala Kangsar during the same tour (from Swettenham’s own collection), a 1873 photograph of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council, and biographical sources. Figures 4 (Jervois), 6 (Birch), 9 (Speedy), and 10 (Swettenham) are identified with confidence; figures 1 (Anderson), 2 (Innes), 3 (McCallum), 7 (McNair), and 8 (Stirling) are established through cross-referencing with the Kuala Kangsar and 1873 photographs. The most problematic figure is No. 5, identified as H. F. Plow, whose presence in Jervois’ party is unexplained by any contemporary account. The authors speculate that Plow, a former protégé of Governor Ord, may have been retained in a junior clerical capacity and brought along as a “walking and talking archive of past decisions” (p. 30).

The article also raises the possibility that the photograph has been tampered with, noting that Plow’s figure appears to stand out in the background in a manner suggestive of superimposition, and that Datuk Lim Chong Keat observed retouching on his print (p. 32). The authors conclude that the most likely explanation for the Pangkor misattribution is that, in the thirty years before the photograph’s first publication, the generation of officials who remembered the events of 1874–75 had retired, and the historical importance of Pangkor created a demand for a pictorial record that the photograph was prematurely pressed to fill (p. 22).

Key Findings

  • The photograph was taken on 15 September 1875 at Bandar Bahru, the day before Jervois departed Perak for Singapore; Jervois and his party arrived at Bandar Bahru on the evening of 14 September (p. 26).
  • The seated central figure is Sir William Jervois (Governor 1875–1877), not Sir Andrew Clarke, as confirmed by portrait comparison and Swettenham’s 1941 letter to Dr. Mubin Sheppard (pp. 23, 26).
  • Captain William Innes (No. 2), a Royal Engineers officer stationed at Penang, was killed a few weeks after the photograph was taken in the first assault on the Malay stockade at Pasir Salak (p. 28).
  • Commander Francis Stirling (No. 8) commanded the gun-vessel Thistle (1868) which had brought Jervois up from Singapore; he was Senior Naval Officer in the Straits of Malacca in 1875 (p. 29).
  • H. F. Plow (No. 5) had served as Private Secretary and Clerk of Councils to Governor Ord (1867–1873) but does not appear in any official account of Jervois’ tour; his presence remains unexplained by contemporary records (pp. 30–31).
  • The photograph was first published in 1908 in Wright and Cartwright’s Twentieth Century Impressions of British Malaya, which identified the seated figure as Jervois but still captioned the image as showing officials “concerned in enforcing the provisions of the Treaty of Pangkor” (p. 26).

Conclusion

Falconer and Gullick establish beyond reasonable doubt that the photograph records Jervois’ visit to Bandar Bahru in September 1875, not the Pangkor meeting of 1874, and provide the most complete identification of all ten figures to date. Their broader argument is that the photograph’s misattribution reflects a wider pattern in which the historical prestige of the Pangkor Agreement created a demand for visual evidence that outstripped the actual documentary record, leading to the premature and confident labelling of an ambiguous image.

Context

  • The study draws on four surviving prints of the photograph (held in the National Museum Singapore, the Royal Commonwealth Society Library, and private collections), the Kuala Kangsar group photograph from Swettenham’s collection, the 1873 Legislative Council photograph (Foreign and Commonwealth Office Library, London), and Swettenham’s 1941 correspondence with Dr. Mubin Sheppard.
  • The article contributes to the historiography of early British photography in Malaya by demonstrating how the scarcity of photographic records before the mid-1890s made individual images vulnerable to misattribution, and by arguing that Birch, rather than a professional firm such as G. R. Lambert & Co., was the most likely photographer of the 1875 tour (p. 33).

References