of our first generation cabinet members i confess that eddie barker was always the one who was but a name. i did not, truth be told, even know he had held any post other than minister of law, or that he was responsible for drafting the separation documents until this piece in yesterday’s st by susan sim (who is writing his biography on the eurasian association’s commission, it would seem.) i don’t find her prose particularly sprightly for the subject but in it one learns such a lot: inter alia, his role in securing the separation of singapore, his political career and personal life, and his place in singapore sports.
Excerpts:He was the first Singapore minister to sign the Separation Agreement with Malaysia in the early hours of Aug 7, 1965. Mr E. W. Barker, however, left space at the top for his senior colleagues and so became the fourth of the 10 Singapore names appended to the treaty we now know as the Independence of Singapore Agreement, 1965. ”
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It probably helped that Mr Barker had played on the same hockey and rugby teams in school as two of the key players on the Malaysian side - Deputy Prime Minister Tun Razak and Attorney-General Kadir Yusof - and each considered the other an old friend. For he was acutely aware that if things did not go well, he and Dr Goh could be accused of treason and the drafts produced as proof of their guilt. […] And so it came to pass that shortly after midnight on Aug 7, Mr Barker handed over the signed documents to Prime Minister Lee, who said: “Thank you, Eddie. This is a bloodless coup.”
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For his part in drafting the separation documents and securing the Malaysian signatures, Mr Barker […] should be a household name, especially in this Golden Jubilee year. Yet he is not. […] Is Barker Road named after him? One Singaporean in his early 30s asked me this when I said I was writing the biography of E. W. Barker. The young civil servant did not know who Mr Eddie Barker was, but he had gone to a school located in Barker Road. No, the road was named after Mr Arthur Barker, a British businessman and municipal commissioner who left Singapore in 1932, and was not related to the Eurasian who was Singapore’s law minister for 24 years.
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