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SINGAPORE – When Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, contested the 1955 general election in his first election outing, a rival for the Tanjong Pagar seat was a 33-year-old teacher named Peter Lim Seck Tiong.
Mr. Lim, who describes himself as a political novice, lost but became a pioneering university administrator who won the hearts of many poor college students with scholarships he obtained from foundations to help pay for his studies, as well as the creation of a cooperative. more than 50 years for students to purchase books and other study materials at affordable prices.
Also known in later years as the Reverend Peter ST Lim, he died in Edmonton, Canada, last month. The family held a memorial service there on October 5, the day he would have turned 98.
In recounting his brief political career in 1994, he said: “I thought I could do something good in my life and I thought the best way to do it was to pursue politics, where you could influence the way things were going in Singapore. “
He was born and raised in Tanjong Pagar and lived for many years in a Duxton Hill house.
But he had little knowledge of how to organize and run an election campaign when he ran in 1955 as a candidate for the Singapore Progressive Party (SPP), a leading political party at the time, recounted in interviews that his niece Verena Tay recorded in 1994.
“In a sense, he was alone,” he said.
The irony was that four years earlier, in 1951, Mr. Lee was an electoral agent for an SPP candidate contesting the Legislative Council elections.
Mr. Lim recalled that Mr. Lee “had come back from England full of experience. He had seen how it was done there and when he returned he became an electoral agent for John Laycock.”
“So he learned the strings from John Laycock, I couldn’t learn anything from anyone,” he added. Mr. Lee was then an attorney at Mr. Laycock’s law firm.
Lim became deputy secretary general of the Singapore People’s Alliance (SPA), a political party that Mr. Lim Yew Hock had founded in 1958.
[[nid:441604]]He recalled being abroad during the 1959 general election nominations and missed being sent to another seat where, he said, his chances of winning were better.
Later he turned his back on politics and went back to being an educator.
Lim became director of the Anglo-China School (ACS) in Seremban in 1961 and the then head of the Democratic Action Party, Chen Man Hin, approached to join them, but he refused.
In 1965, he returned to Singapore and joined the then University of Singapore, later renamed the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he worked for more than 30 years before retiring in 1996.
Among other things, Mr. Lim was appointed pastor of Fairfield Methodist Church in 1948, was appointed first pastor of Barker Road Methodist Church in 1956, and was a teacher at ACS, Barker Road, his son Eric, 74, told The Straits Times in a telephone interview from Edmonton, where he lives.
“Dad lived a good, successful and long life and served his Lord well,” she added.
The NUS Alumni Relations Office said, “Your contributions as a former director of the NUS Alumni Affairs and Development Office, and in his many other roles, ranging from student liaison officer to assistant secretary, will always be remembered with sweetie.
“The ideas that he started, such as the NUS Limited Multipurpose Cooperative Society (formerly known as the University of Singapore Cooperative Library) to help students, remain to this day.
[[nid:183341]]“In celebration of their contributions, the Peter ST Lim Scholarship was established by alumni of the 1993/1994 academic year to assist financially disadvantaged college students from the College of Arts and Social Sciences.”
The director of the NUS cooperative board of directors Lim Bee Lum, who had known him for almost 70 years, said he was “a man of great compassion.”
In the early years of the cooperative he founded in 1969, he rented a van to sell textbooks to college students on the Bukit Timah campus. Today it has three points of sale that sell, among others, personal computers, books, medical equipment and campus souvenirs.
Former head of the National Kidney Foundation TT Durai said: “As then president of the university’s student union, I had approached him countless times for scholarships from various foundations for poor students.
“He helped each of them.”
Lim, whose wife died in 2010, is survived by his son, daughter and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
This article was first published in The times of the strait. Permission is required for reproduction.
