Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Francis Maxwell Allan, Birth 23 January 1879, Penang

BIRTHS. 

At Northam Lodge, Penang, on the 23rd instant, the wife of John Allan, Esq., of a son.

[Straits Times Overland Journal, 1 February 1879, Page 1]

John Allan, Death 27 September 1894, Surrey

THE LATE MR. JOHN ALLAN. 

The death of another old Straits man is reported we regret to say, in the case of Mr. John Allan, of Messrs. Sandilands Buttery & Co., Penang, who died at home on the 28th ult. The news reached Penang by wire the following day. Mr. Allan had been ailing for a couple of months with an attack of fever, contracted it is supposed during a recent visit to the East, when he was in charge  for a time of the Sumatra tobacco estates, in which his firm had an interest. Mr. Allan came out to this Colony in a sailing ship nearly 30 years ago, and has been closely associated with Penang since that time. For about a couple of years Mr. Allan represented Penang as a Member of Legislative Council having been sworn in on the 12th January 1880. Though not taking any prominent part in Council proceedings Mr. Allan always gave useful support to his unofficial colleagues.

[The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884-1942), 3 October 1894, Page 2]

DEATHS 

ALLAN - at 3 St Andrews Square, Surbiton, Surrey, on 27th inst., John Allan, of London and Penang.

[Glasgow Herald, 28 September 1894]

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Giovanni Battista Cerruti, Death, 24 May 1914, Penang

Death. Cerruti. Capt. G. B. Cerruti, aged 63, on Sunday, the 24th inst., at the General Hospital, Penang.

[The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser (1884-1942), 28 May 1914, Page 6]

Cerruti's Grave

One was a little sorry to read this week that the remains of Signor Cerruti, the patron saint of the Perak Sakai, are to be disinterred from the Penang cemetery and taken back to Italy.

If any white man ever identified himself with this country it was Cerruti, for he lived in the hills with the Sakai and devoted many years of his life to studying them, trading with them and teaching them to improve their miserable conditions of life by means of agriculture and handicrafts.

He won the complete confidence of the Perak Government and held the official appointment of Superintendent of the Sakai, a post that has never been revived since his death.

His book "My Friends the Sakai" was written in Italian and translated by an English lady, who did not make an especially good job of it, but it contains some remarkably interesting first-hand observations and experiences. It is an extremely rare publication in the secondhand book market nowadays.

[The Straits Times, 17 September 1933, Page 5]