Haji Mohamed Taib bin Haji Abdul Samad (1858-1925)

FAMILY HISTORY | My Paternal Great Grandfather | Haji Mohamed Taib bin Haji Abdul Samad (1858-1925)

My paternal great grandfather was a Minangkabau prince who fell in love with a Dutch girl. Being Minangkabau, his family was in a matriarchal and matrilineal society where property is inherited on the female side. His family forbade him to marry her as they didn’t want the family property to go “out.” On his bride’s side, the Dutch colonials did not permit local men to marry Dutch girls, only Dutch men were allowed to marry local women. The fact that he was a prince couldn’t change the Dutch stand on marriage. Since both families were against the marriage, the young (he was only 18) couple eloped. He was disinherited and lost his princely title. They arrived in KL penniless with only the clothes on their backs in 1876 - “sehelai sepinggang” - as the Malays would say.

When they first arrived, his first job was landing a contract as a street-lighter (no, not street-fighter, but street-lighter!); at maghrib he would go round KL adding carbide to water and lighting the acetylene gas produced by the reaction in these “lampu carbide” streetlight lamps.

Later, because he spoke English (as a prince he was educated) he got a job as a chief clerk in the Land Office. People went there to change ownership (name) on land titles. When Malays inherited land that couldn’t be further sub-divided among the children of the deceased, the procedure was for the property to be sold and the proceeds divided among the children of the deceased. For a quick sale, properties were often sold below market value.

Haji Mohamed Taib took to buying some of these for himself and later sell them at market value, for a neat profit. This wheeling and dealing in real estate was so successful that one of his six sons, my grandfather Haji Abdullah, used to buy and sell land every day of the week, according to an old partner at Skrine & Co who one day was looking at the old files and records from decades before. He was so rich that he earned the gelaran Orang Kaya Haji Abdullah. He was the first Malay non-royalty to own a car in British Malaya, an Armstrong. For recreation, he used to go hunt tigers in Pahang and his hunting party would consist of an entourage of 20 elephants. They would set off to Pahang along the Old Gombak Road.

Haji Abdullah sat on the Sanitary Board of Kuala Lumpur, the precursor to today’s DBKL, together with the likes of Thamboosamy, Treacher, Yap Kwan Seng and others.

Orang Kaya Haji Abdullah had ten wives of all races - four at any one time. My paternal grandmother was Bugis and she lived in a two-storey brick mansion at 49 Old Klang Road, opposite the Petaling Police Station, which was demolished and became Furniture World in the mid-1990s which was itself subsequently acquired and demolished to make way for the expansion of Jalan Puchong. Another of his wives had lived in an identical mansion on the opposite side of the Old Klang Road, near the Petaling Railway Station. That mansion was demolished in the mid-1960s and the site used for a BP (now BHP) petrol station. Haji Abdullah would divorce wives that didn’t bear him children - infertility being valid grounds for divorce in those days - and re-marry. He used to own large tracts of land in KL, most of Chow Kit, Kampung Baru, the whole of Bencoolen Street (later Java Street, then Malay Street and now Jalan Melayu), and in the area around Rodger Street and the Central Market. At one time he used to live at 39 Malay Street, which was the site of the Bank of Nova Scotia in the 1960s, then Safety House and now Alpha Arcade.

As a young boy in the 1960s, I used to accompany my dad to collect rent from three properties on Malay Street, the last stop being Ceylon Bakery where I would invariably get a treat of cream cornet and teh tarik.

True great grandfather and grandfather stories!

Reference:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Taib_bin_Haji_Abdul_Samad