There are plenty of perks of being a tertiary student in Singapore.

You get public transport concession passes, below market rate canteen food, and access to declassified British correspondence dating back to when Singapore was a Straits Settlement.

Archival records

The last perk listed above is available to students from the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University.

In case you never knew, your NUS and NTU student and faculty account grants you access to various British correspondences that would otherwise require a trip to the British National Archives just to preview.

The NTU library, for example, stores digitised copies of colonial records that you can easily access if you have a student or faculty login details.

How do you access them?

If you're from NUS:

1. Head to the library portal
2. Click on the Findmore Tab and key in the CO/FO/WO records that you are looking for.

Note that you'll need to leave a space in between the letters and the numbers. If you join them together, you won't be able to locate the record in Findmore.

You can find Colonial Office (CO) series information here and here.

If you're from NTU:

Head over to the digital library here.

This is the Records of the Colonial Office, Commonwealth and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices, Empire Marketing Board, and related bodies.

You'll be redirected to dialogue box requesting for authentication:

Enter your NTU credentials and you'll arrive here:

Under each entry is a link to the British National Archives that tells you more details about the entry. For example, that CO1030 details the political situation in Singapore in 1961.

What can you find there?

Looking through archived materials can be pretty dry.

For example, CO939 contains the Colony of Singapore's Blue Book -- annual reports from the colonies detailing things like expenditure, revenue, economic statistics etc.

Others are correspondences between British officials that run the gamut between mundane and thriller-level exciting.

Some documents relate to other colonies.

For example, CO537 treacherous undertaking contains secret documents that related to the Uganda Railway, a that killed many of the Indian labourers that were brought from India.

Closer to home, original correspondence in CO1022 covers the Malayan Emergency that broke out in 1948, and includes reports on the British progress against Communist fighters.

If you're looking for British reports on Singapore, you would want to look at CO1030, which includes details about Singapore's political situation after the war and before independence -- including Merger, Operation Coldstore, and the Emergency.

According to the British National Archives, CO1030 contains:

"[Records] of the Far Eastern Department relating to British colonial possessions in Far East Asia, covering Malaya, the Malay Federation and Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, North Borneo, Hong Kong and Sarawak, and its successors dealing with Hong Kong only. Amongst the wide variety of subjects covered are social, economic and constitutional development, the Malay Emergency, refugees, education and immigration policy."

Happy digging.

[related_story]

Top images via NTU