Peter's Memories of Cameron Highlands

I was at Tanglin in the Cameron Highlands - for a couple of years around 1950-1952.

The only names I can recall are, Philip Distin, Mike Register, Vaci Koblizek , Hamish Sturton and Jane Oborne.

My father - Algernon Wear - worked for the PWD from 1926 to 1956 and was on the last boat to leave Singapore the day before it fell on Friday 13th Feb 1942. The boat was sunk and he ended up on Pompong Island with the other survivors and eventually got to India, South Africa and Nigeria, where I was born, my mother having escaped to Western Australia. 

We returned as a family to Malaya in 1946 and I went to Cameron Highlands from 1950-1952. I nearly succumbed to malaria while I was there (I had a temperature of 106!) and was in hospital where there were a number of Gurkha soldiers. I remember them looking round the door and asking, "Small boy, ok?" 

I left for school in England (as was the tradition, of course) and my father finished as Director of Public Works in Singapore, retiring just before independence in 1956.

I'm the boy in the floppy hat in the doorway waiting for the trucks in two photos from 1950. The girl in the gingham dress I think was Jane Oborne (standing top of the stairs with baby doll) .

By extraordinary coincidence, my wife's father's cousin was a soldier on the convoys, which we verified by both of us remembering a plane crash on the way up the hill one year. 

Peter Wear turned 75 in March 2019 and still keeps in touch with the Alumni on a regular basis.