For sale: Billionaire puts Raffles on the market as his wealth plummets
Saudi Arabian prince hoping Singapore hotel’s mythical status will
force a quick sale ` even at $450m
By Paul Vallely
Friday, 17 April 2009
Just $450m will buy you all the splendour and legend associated with
Raffles.
It’s a tough business being a billionaire during a credit
crunch. Apparently Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia is down to his last
$13bn (£8.7bn), which is something of a pittance when you
consider he was worth $21bn last year. But that was when his 3.9 per
cent stake in Citigroup was fetching $50 a share rather than the
present measly $4, and share prices continue to tumble.
All of which explains why he has decided to put that grandest of grand
hotels ` Raffles of Singapore ` up for sale. So if you have a spare
$450 million…
There is something apt about the sale. Prince Alwaleed, who will take
a good deal less for one of London’s most famous hotels, The Savoy,
which he also wants to sell, lives a life which is a byword for
extravagance. His 317-room-palace is said to be adorned with 1,500
tons of Italian marble, silk carpets and gold taps. He has 300 cars,
250 television sets and reportedly has an Airbus A380 on order as his
private jet. Who knows how much of that is true? But then you can ask
pretty much the same of the legendary Raffles Hotel.
Its very name conjures the heyday of empire. But though that may be
correct of the man after whom it was named ` Sir Thomas Stamford
Bingley Raffles, one of the architects of the British imperial
expansion as the founder of the city of Singapore ` the hotel dates
from half a century later. The existing hotel dates only from 1887 and
the fag-end of empire.
But then legends have a habit of becoming their own reality. Its
rattan chairs and ceiling fans speak still of the age of the sola topi
and the white linen suit in which the writer Somerset Maugham took up
residence at Raffles. Every morning he sat at a table in the left hand
corner of the Palm Court where he would wr e frangipani tree,
surrounded by orchids and bougainvillaea.
He visited the hotel repeatedly, turning the expat gossip there into
the plots of his short stories. But that was in the 1920s, a decade
before Noel Coward too arrived and was accounted by the locals, in his
own words, as "a little rowdy, perhaps on the common side".
But then there was always something faintly seamy about a place which
was, for all it was the apotheosis of raj-like Britishness, founded by
four Armenian brothers. They were, however, masters of the art of
spin. When the 23-year-old Rudyard Kipling recorded "a place called
Raffles Hotel, where the food is excellent and the rooms are bad" one
of the Armenians edited it into an advert, quoting the great man as
saying: "Feed at Raffles where the food is excellent!"
The hotel gradually became more grandiose in a series of renovations,
the first of which, in 1899, installed a 10,000-gallon tank to ensure
a steady water supply and a steam engine to generate electricity
sufficient to illuminate 800 bulbs and operate ceiling fans in all the
public rooms. But it never lost its eye for a PR triumph.
In the 1850s Singapore had been plagued by tigers which ate at least
300 of the locals. So much so that the government offered rewards for
every beastie bagged. Raffles claimed the last of these, though it
turned out to be an animal which had escaped from a nearby "native
show" rather than a wild creature. Fable soon had it that the last
tiger was shot in the hotel’s billiard room, though it was actually
cornered beneath the room, which stood on stilts in the hotel garden.
Myth attached, too, to the hotel’s celebrated cocktail, the Singapore
Sling, a pink gin-based concoction for ladies which was invented in
the hotel’s Long Bar shortly before the First World War. The complex
recipe, involving pineapple and cherries, was said to have been
preserved in the hotel safe, even though the original formula had in
fact been lost and it was inventively pieced together again from the
fading memories of old ba re were the 300 Japanese troops who
committed suicide in the hotel using hand grenades following the
liberation of Singapore in 1945. That tale seems to have been
concocted from a single act of hara-kiri after a farewell sake party
for 300 officers in the hotel.
Not all the myths of Empire were exaggerated. No Asians were allowed
as hotel guests until the 1930. But the most celebrated guests turn
out to be film stars ` Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Ginger
Rogers ` as much as figures of imperial greatness (though Emperor
Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia did stay there, his visit most
distinguished by the fact that his Pekinese escaped the ban on dogs in
the restaurant).
Raffles has been a place of conspicuous consumption as much as
colonial grandeur. The house champagne is Bollinger and the house
cigars are 10in Romeo y Julietas. One of its most cherished legends is
of a 23st Dutch archaeologist, Professor Pieter van Stein Callenfels,
who drank gin by the bottle ` he sometimes had three for breakfast `
and once ate every dish on the hotel’s menu, and then proceeded to do
it all over again, only backwards.
But the true story of Raffles is a lament for a past that never
was. It is a caricature rather than a true remembrance, in which the
modern moneyed classes, served by waiters in brass-buttoned white
tunics, sip Singapore Slings in the Long Bar and throw the shells from
their monkey nuts onto the floor in an emulation of colonial contempt
for the locals which is about as authentic as smashing plates in a
suburban Greek restaurant.
The reality was and is something different. Last week Raffles ordered
the closure of two of the nine public toilets in its shopping arcade,
whose tenants include Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, and Swarovski. The move
would cut costs, the management said. Look on my water works, ye
mighty, and despair.