Our Hero,


Sunday 24 March 2013
Our Hero , Elizabeth Choy at 06:16

Biography

Elizabeth Choy
born on 29 November 1910 to a Hakka family in Kudat  British North Borneo.

Choy was looked after by a Kazadan nanny and acquired Kadazan as her first language.

She became an Anglican at St Monica's boarding school in Sandakan and went on to complete her education at Raffles College in Singapore. 
As her family could not afford the fees, she started to teach.


In August 1941 she married Choy Khun Heng, a book-keeper employed by the Borneo Company.

World War II

During the Japanese Occupation, she worked as a canteen operator at a hospital with her husband where patients from General Hospital had been moved to.  Choy became a volunteer nurse with the Medical Auxiliary Service . 
Elizabeth Choy and her husband secretly brought food, medicine, money, messages and even radios to British internees. Unfortunately, they were caught by the Japanese. Her husband was arrested on 29 October while she was arrested on 15 November 1943. The Kempeitai thought that they had given information to the British which led to the sinking of several Japanese ships in Keppel Harbour in 1943. 

Elizabeth Choy was imprisoned in a small cell for 193 days with 20 other prisoners in the old YMCA building. Elizabeth went to inquire about her husband but the Japanese denied knowledge of him . During her imprisonment , She was badly tortured by the Kempeitai. The Kempeitai made her kneel down on a frame of three-sided wood. They tied her hands behind her back and also her legs. She could not move at all. Then, they brought her husband and he was made to kneel beside the frame to watch her being tortured. They slapped and kicked her and gave her the ‘electric shock’ treatment. The pain was extremely unbearable.

Verbal Account

"When my interrogators could not get any information out of me,they dragged my husband from Outram Prison,tied him up and made him kneel beside me.Then,in his full view,they stripped me to the waist and applied electric currents to me.The electric currents sent my whole body into spasms;my tears and mucus flowed uncontrollably.The pain was indescribable,but it must have been thousands of times worse for my husband who had to see me being tortured."



Despite being terribly tortured, Elizabeth Choy refused to confess. After 193 days, she was released from the prison. Her husband was released much later. After the war, she was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of her valour in 1946 during the Japanese Occupation of Singapore. She was known as a war heroine. 


Post-War


After the war, Mrs and Mr Choy were invited to England to recuperate. During their stay, Elizabeth Choy got awarded the Bronze Cross and the Order of the Star of Sarawak . They were honoured for their work in assisting British POWs in Malaya during the Japanese Occupation. In addition, Mrs Choy received the honour of having a half-hour private audience with the Queen.
During her four year stay in England, she took up Domestic Science at the Northern Polytechnic and taught at a London council school. Intent on studying art but without the finances for this venture, Choy began a stint as an artist's model .


Later life


On returning to Singapore after her visit to Britain in 1949 Elizabeth Choy resumed teaching, and became involved in the political developments preceding independence.  Elizabeth Choy also became Singapore's first woman in the Legislative Council in 1951 and she was also recognised as a dedicated educator. She started teaching first at St. Margaret's School and later St. Andrew's School; and was the first principal of the Singapore School for the Blind in 1956. At the age of 96, Elizabeth Choy passed away on 14 September 2006 because of Pancreatic Cancer .  




xoxo,
you know you love me



Our Hero : Lim Bo Seng at 04:16

Biography

Lim Bo Seng ( 林谋盛 ) 
Born27 April 1909

was a Chinese resistance fighter based in Singapore and Malaya during the World War II He is regarded as a war hero in Singapore.He was born in Nan'an, Fujian, China in the final years of the Qing Dynasty, as the 11th child but the first son in the family. In 1925, Lim Bo Seng came to Singapore at the age of 16 to study in Raffles institution under the British colonial government. He discontinued his education at the University of Hong Kong in 1929 when, upon his father's death, he inherited senior Lim's businesses which included the Hock Ann Biscuits and factories for brick manufacturing. In 1930, he married Gan Choo Neo, a Straits-born Nyonya with whom he had seven children. Theirs was a love marriage, unusual in those days. 


Lim was also a prominent figure in the Chinese community in Singapore nominated to take on several posts :
  • Chairman of the Singapore Building Industry Association
  • Board Member of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce 
  • Executive Member and Education Director of the Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan






Being the head of the Labour Services Corps, he provided the British government with labourers for the war effort before the Japanese invasion. When the Japanese troops began advancing towards Singapore from Malayan, he and his men dynamited the Causeway. 

on 11th February,

Lim left Singapore and travelled to SumatraIndonesiawhere he was trained to fight in the jungle and later recruited resistance fighters for Force 136. (special operations force formed by the British in June 1942 to infiltrate and attack enemy lines. )


Operation Gustavus

Lim Bo Seng sent the first batch of Force 136 agents to Japanese-occupied Malaya in 1943 to set up an an intelligence network in the urban areas in Pangkor, Lumut, Tapah and Ipoh.  To avoid detection by the Japanese, secret messages were smuggled in empty tubes of toothpaste, salted fish and even in the Force 136's members' own diaries.

To avoid identification by the Japanese, Lim Bo Seng even pretended tp be a businessman at checkpoints. He used the alias Tan Choon Lim.

Unfortunately, there were many traitors who led to the downfall of Force 136 and Lim Bo Seng. Lai Teck, one of Force 136's members leaked out valuable information that allowed the Kempeitai to pick up coded messages from Force 136. This led to the captures of many of the members in Force 136.

Capture and death


Lim Bo Seng was captured by the Japanese in March-April 1944.
He was taken to the Kempeitai headquarters for interrogation and he refused to provide the Japanese with any information about Force 136refused to reveal the names of the people who worked with him against the Japanese. ) despite being subjected to severe torture.

In prison, Lim Bo Seng often shared his food with the other prisoners. Due to the lack of food and unhealthy living conditions in the prison, he fell ill .He protested against the ill treatment of his comrades in prison. He fell ill with dysentery and was bedridden by the end of May 1944 . Lim died in the early hours on 29 June 1944.






Skit on Lim Bo Seng : 


xoxo,
you know you love me




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We from from Greendale Secondary School , Class 2E1 , bringing you the history of our Singapore Heros , Lim Bo Seng and Elizabeth Choy
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