Fullerton Heritage - General Post Office

11:52 AM  , , , , , ,  

Raffles Place
South, Singapore
March 2013

(This article is part of Merlion Wayfarer's Fullerton Heritage Guided Tour series.)
  
The Fullerton Hotel is remembered as the site of the original General Post Office (GPO). It was the anchor tenant, which only moved in a fortnight after the Fullerton Building's official opening. The GPO covered the two lower floors with postal halls, offices and sorting rooms.
The postal counter stretched from the current location of the bar counter in the Post Bar to the Jade Restaurant at the other end of the hotel. At 300 feet long, it was the longest in South-East Asia.
There were mail drops through which mail would fall to a band conveyor on the basement and dispatched up to the sorting room. The basement was connected to a 35-metre subway that ran underneath Fullerton Road to a pier, where overseas mail would be transferred to or picked up from ships.
During World War 2, the Fullerton Building was converted into a military hospital.

The Post Bar


Named after the main tenant of the Fullerton Building before its restoration, the ground floor Post Bar is a pub with fine dining facilities and al fresco dining options in the adjoining outdoor East Garden. A popular drink is its very own Fullerton Sling.
One of the few places left in the entire hotel where the original ceiling is retained...
The length of the original ceiling runs along the width of the Post Bar...

Red Pillar Boxes

The first Pillar Post Box was installed in 1873 during the British colonial era. As part of the effort to preserve the memories and as a tribute the GPO, two original Red Pillar Post Boxes have been retained - at the Post Bar and at the Fullerton Heritage Gallery. These boxes were specially shipped in from Great Britain and feature the EIIR (Elizabeth II Regina) British royal cipher on its door as a symbol of the ruling monarchy at the time when the pillar post box was produced - during the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

An operational postbox in the Post Bar - Mail is collected at 5pm every weekday...

At the bottom of the postbox, a dial with the locations of countries around the globe is shown
with the distance indicated in road journeys...
Today, the only other similar operational postbox stands at the entrance of the Singapore Philatelic Museum at Coleman Road near Dhoby Ghaut.

The full album is available at:
Merlion Wayfarer's Picasa (Places - Fullerton)

Sources

  • "Singapore's 100 Historic Places" by National Heritage Board (2002). Archipelago Press.
  • "Fullerton Building" by Cornelius-Takahama, Vernon  (19 May 2001) .  Singapore Infopedia, National Library Board.