Singapore Women's Hall of Fame

Maud Ethel Perera

Public Health Pioneer

In 1929, Maud Ethel Perera made history when she joined the Health Branch in Singapore as a staff nurse. It was the first time an Asian nurse was treated as being on par with European nurses and qualified to lead. As a staff nurse, she supervised other nurses, and that started her on the ladder to becoming a nursing sister.  

Until then, local nurses were considered a cut below the European nurses, as an editorial in The Straits Times in 1951 pointed out: “From the early years of this century – when the training of local girls for nursing began – up to World War II, the locally trained nurse was relegated to a subordinate and inferior status in the Government Hospitals, and any ambitions to rise to the rank of nursing sister were severely discouraged.” 

Nursing as a profession only began in Singapore in 1885, when a few European nuns from the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus responded to an appeal by the colonial administration and began working as nurses at the Singapore General Hospital.  

In 1900, four qualified nurses from England arrived and took over from the nuns. Soon after this, a nursing school opened. The minimum entry requirement was completion of the Junior Cambridge examination, which was done in the third year of secondary school. Initially there were few local trainee nurses because many girls then were not sent to school.   

Maud, the eldest of five children, was one of those who did get an education. In 1923, having completed her schooling at Raffles Girls School, she started training as a nurse at the St Andrew’s Mission Hospital. She qualified in 1928, and the following year joined the public health service as a Health Staff Nurse, reporting to the Health Sister, Ida Mabel Murray Simmons. 

With Maud as her second-in-command, Ida transformed infant and maternal health care in Singapore. Over the next two decades, the team led by Ida and Maud brought the infant mortality rate in Singapore down from 263 to 57 deaths per 1,000 babies.   

In an interview with The Straits Times in 1986, Maud described the work in the pre-war days and during the Japanese Occupation: “We had 12-hour shifts in those days, not eight-hour ones like now. You got a day off once a month. There were few nurses too. There were only 35 of us nurses in Singapore looking after thousands of casualties during the Japanese invasion.” 

When Ida retired in 1948 and returned to Scotland, Maud was promoted to act as the Public Health Matron, the first Asian to hold the position of matron in Singapore. She was in-charge of more than 20 maternity and child welfare centres in the rural areas of Singapore and had to reorganise and rebuild the rural public health service after the ravages of World War II. Singapore was later awarded the Kettering Shield Award in 1955 for best Maternal & Child Welfare Services in the Commonwealth. 

Maud was married to Albert Christie Perera and they had two daughters. The younger, Sylvia, recalled Maud being awakened at all hours of the night to deal with births the midwives could not handle. Sylvia also remembered accompanying her mother to offshore islands during the school holidays, where she conducted health checks on the people living there.  

In 1950, Maud was one of two nurses representing Singapore at the opening in Westminster Abbey of the Memorial Chapel to commemorate the services of all nurses of the British Commonwealth and Empire during the war.   

In 1958, Maud was awarded the Member of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of her public health work in Singapore.  

Maud retired in 1962 and in 1970 moved to the United Kingdom to be with Sylvia. Maud’s younger sisters had also become nurses at her encouragement, Sylvia said. In 1986, a year before she died, Maud visited Singapore to celebrate her 79th birthday with relatives here.  

One of the guests at her birthday party was Dr Nalla Tan, a prominent advocate of public health education who knew Maud in her nursing days. This was how Dr Tan described Maud: “She was a pioneer in health. As a nurse, she had a lot of heart. She was instrumental in getting donations to start clinics.” 

“Nursing was very tough in the pre-war and Japanese Occupation days. As a public health nurse, I had to go out to farms and the rural areas teaching people how to look after themselves.” – The Straits Times, 1986.