1959 POSB savings account

I attended the When Nations Remember 2 conference on 28 November 2011. In his speech, the guest-of-honour, Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, the Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, recalled that as a kid, he used to have a savings account with the Post Office Savings Bank. He said;

 “I remember when I was a kid, we were issued with the POSB ‘Save At School’ stamp card with empty boxes for pasting postage stamps, and we would use our savings to buy 5-cent or 10-cent stamps to paste onto the card. When we complete the card with 20 stamps, we will give it to the school which will send it in to the bank, and it adds to our savings account. Till today, I still have a POSB account.”

Unfortunately, the minister did not have his original POSB passbook with him, and so most of the audience still had no idea what such a passbook looked like. But no worries. You can always come to Good Morning Yesterday. Thanks to my friend Jong Keng from ACS, I am able to satisfy your curiosity.

This is the front cover of the bank book. Notice, first of all, that it is not blue in colour. Notice also that the instructions are in Singapore’s 4 official languages; with the Malay instructions written in Jawi script. Older Singaporeans would have seen such writing in many official documents when we were young. And over in Malaysia, you will still be able to see some shops using Jawi in their signboards.

You must be wondering what was the interest rate. Well, as you can see from the inside cover, it’s 2.5% p.a. And interestingly, it is signed, The Controller, Post Office Savings Bank, Kuala Lumpur.

And this is the inside of the passbook. I wonder how much my friend’s $8 is worth after half a century?

Old documents quiz (1)

Do you know the meaning of these instructions found on the cover of an old document?

Hint: The front cover of this 1959 booklet contains this logo.