page_title: Anglo-Chinese School
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Anglo-Chinese School / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The National Archives of Singapore at 1 Canning Rise, Singapore 179868. It occupies the former campus of Anglo-Chinese Primary School, which moved out in 1994.
context_page_description: The Anglo-Chinese School, is a family of Methodist schools in Singapore and Indonesia founded in 1886 by Bishop William Fitzjames Oldham as an extension of the Methodist Church. Anglo-Chinese School is usually abbreviated as "ACS," with the Anglo-Chinese Junior College abbreviated as "ACJC." Its students and alumni are referred as "ACSians". ACS was the first school in Singapore to have a flower named after it, the "Ascocenda Anglo-Chinese School orchid", a hybrid created by the school to mark its 116th Founder's Day on March 1, 2002.
context_section_description: Founded on March 1, 1886 by Bishop William Fitzjames Oldham as an extension of the Methodist Church, the school's first location was a shophouse at 70 Amoy Street, Singapore with a total of 13 pupils. The name of the school came from it conducting lessons in English at night and Chinese in the afternoon. By the following year, enrollment had increased to 104 and the school moved to Coleman Street.
  Between 1914 and 1920, under the leadership of the Reverend J. S. Nagle, the school introduced regular religious (or "chapel") services and physical education classes. Afternoon classes were started for academically weak pupils. In a bid to ensure continuity in school life and keep the school adequately staffed, Nagle encouraged ex-students, known as "old boys", to join the school as teachers. To this day, the Anglo-Chinese School Old Boys' Association is a link through which many "old boys" continue to maintain close ties with the school.
  The Anglo-Chinese Continuation School started in 1925 under new principal, the Reverend P.L. Peach, who had to leave the school due to the newly imposed government age limits on school attendance by boys. Eventually, ACS became the Oldham Methodist School while a secondary school opened in Cairnhill Road.
  During the World War II Japanese occupation of Singapore between 1942 and 1945, lessons were suspended. The school opened again in 1946, a year after the Japanese surrender, once the buildings at Cairnhill and Coleman Street had been made safe following damage sustained during the war. The pre-war principal, T. W. Hinch, who had been interned by the Japanese during the occupation and had been sent back to England to recover, returned to the school in June 1946. He set up "X" and "Y" classes, each with different levels of difficulty, for students who had missed years of their education due to the occupation. In September, 1950, the secondary school relocated from Cairnhill Street to Barker Road.
  In the same year, the school set up "post school certificate classes, later known as "pre-university classes" to prepare students for tertiary education; the first batch of girl students were enrolled in ACS although students in the lower grades continued to be all male, a practice which persists to this day. Dr Thio Chan Bee, the first Asian principal of ACS, took over in 1952. During his tenure, both the Cairnhill and Barker Road premises expanded, in the latter's case through the building of Lee Hall, a three-storey building housing twelve classrooms and four laboratories.
  The Oldham Methodist Secondary School merged with the Secondary School at Barker Road in January 1961. The school completed the construction of the sports complex at Barker Road in 1970, with an Olympic-sized swimming pool (the first in all the schools in Singapore) and a sports hall. In 1977, pre-university classes shifted to the newly constructed Anglo-Chinese Junior College at 25 Dover Close East, off North Buona Vista Road, leaving the Barker Road site for the secondary and junior schools. The junior school relocated to new premises in its old neighborhood at Cairnhill in 1985.
  ACS celebrated its centenary in 1986 with the publication of a hardback history of the school, titled Hearts, Hopes and Aims, that detailed the rich student and teacher life over the years, .
  In 1988 when the Ministry of Education started its independent school program, the school again reorganized. New regulations allowed schools access to private funding and subjected them to less government regulation in the content of their curricula. Renamed ACS (Independent), in 1993 the school vacated the Barker Road campus and moved to Dover Road. After strong lobbying by alumni, the Barker Road site became the site of a second secondary school. At the same time, the Anglo-Chinese Primary School abandoned its Coleman Street premises (the old building now housing the National Archives of Singapore) to share premises with the new secondary school at Barker Road, now named ACS (Barker Road).
  Complete rebuilding of the Barker Road campus took place in the late 1990
caption: ACPS moved out of the Coleman Street campus in 1994; in its place now are the National Archives.
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