Chronicle No. 25 · Incidents
The Morning a Tiger Was Found Beneath the Raffles Billiard Room
Singapore, 13 August 1902: an escaped circus tiger takes shelter under a hotel, and a headmaster is sent for.
The Raffles Hotel in Singapore had been open fifteen years, since 1 December 1887, when the Armenian Sarkies brothers turned a seafront bungalow into ten rooms and then into an institution.
On 13 August 1902, a tiger was found underneath it.
The animal had escaped from a travelling circus performing nearby. It made its way across town and settled in the crawl space beneath the hotel's Bar and Billiard Room, a building raised on piers, where the staff kept empty crates and boxes. Charles McGowan Phillips, headmaster of Raffles Institution, was summoned with his rifle. By the retelling he arrived still dressed from a ball at Government House. Three shots missed. The fourth did not. The Straits Times carried the news the same day under the headline A tiger in town.
The detail that everyone remembers is the detail that is wrong:
- The tiger was under the room, not under the billiard table
- The space was a storeroom, not the bar floor
- No game of billiards continued serenely overhead
It is often called the last tiger shot in Singapore, though later killings are on record, so treat that claim gently too.
Raffles has never needed to embroider. A hotel calm enough to send for a schoolmaster, clear the guests, and then reopen the bar is more impressive than any tale of sang-froid over a cue.
Every long-lived house accumulates stories like this. The ones worth repeating to guests are the ones you can still stand behind when somebody checks.
“A tiger in town”
Lesson: Hotels inherit their legends whether they like it or not, and the accurate version is nearly always the better story to tell.
