RAFFLES HOTEL: COCKTAIL OF ARTISTIC TALENTS
Dominic Walsh
The Times
April 16, 2009
UK
Raffles Hotel will forever be associated with the Singapore Sling, a
gin-based cocktail that was invented in the hotel’s Long Bar shortly
before the First World War. But it was as a tiffin house that the
hotel started its life in 1887, when the four Sarkies brothers of
Armenia, proprietors of the Eastern & Oriental hotel in Penang,
decided to launch a business in Singapore.
The brothers named the hotel after Sir Stamford Raffles, who colonised
Singapore 68 years earlier, and as the beach-side property was expanded
beyond its original ten rooms it soon became a haven for Europeans
seeking some of the comforts of home.
The hotel’s billiards room was reputedly where the last wild tiger
in Singapore was shot in 1902, although the official history claims
the tiger had escaped from a nearby "native show".
Somerset Maugham made the first of his visits to Raffles in 1921,
reputedly turning titbits of gossip he overheard at dinner parties
into some of his best-loved stories. In 1930 Noel Coward arrived at
the hotel and played Captain Stanhope in Journey’s End at the Victoria
Theatre near by.
In the postwar years Liz Taylor and Ava Gardner were among the
patrons but the hotel was a shadow of its former self. In 1989,
after designation as a national monument by Singapore’s Gove rnment,
it closed for refurbishment. The restoration of the hotel in French
Renaissance style brought accusations that it had become a caricature
of its former self. The redesign did put Raffles back among the great
hotels and in 2006 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh stayed there
during a state visit.