27 December 2025

Göran R Buckhorn

As sometimes happens, HTBS is contacted by a person who has a rowing-related question about a medal, a trophy or a rower. The other day, we received an email from Plum Johnson in Toronto, Canada. Plum is trying to research a photograph of her late father (see above), Alexander U. Lind (1915-2007).

Plum writes that her father is the fourth person (third oarsman) from the left, and she believes the crew is from the Singapore Rowing Club.

Mr Lind was British, born into an expat family in Oporto (the historical English name for Porto in Portugal). He was orphaned at a young age and was forced to leave school. “Dad found work as an office boy in London and bicycled to and from his rented room at a boarding house, reading discarded newspapers from trash bins and studying for insurance exams at night,” Plum writes.

Mr Lind joined a rowing club on the Thames, although it’s uncertain which club it was. When he was twenty, he won the top prize from the Institute of London Underwriters, leading to a job with the New Zealand Insurance Company (NZI). The company sent him overseas, to their Singapore office. But he wasn’t there long before World War II broke out.

In 1939, at the age of twenty-four, Mr Lind was mobilised into the Malay section of the Royal Navy Reserves. Three years later, in 1942, when Singapore fell to the Japanese, he made a daring escape with fellow officers in a small native sailing vessel. From Malaya they crossed the Indian Ocean and were rescued off the coast of Ceylon, Plum writes.

The question is now, is the photograph on top from Singapore RC, which Plum suspects?

The “old” Singapore RC never survived the Japanese occupation, although after the war, the club came to life again and several regattas are known where the club, now called Royal Singapore Rowing Club, raced against crews from the British forces, as I wrote in an article in 2014.

Maybe there is someone among HTBS’s readers who can shine some light on the old Singapore RC.

One organization for Plum to contact is the Singapore Rowing Association, though I much doubt that the association has any old records from before WWII.