ABSTRACT
Should you be interested in knowing something about the education of girls in Malaya, a visit to a local English-language school for girls would reveal all, suggested Miss Josephine Foss, headmistress of Pudu English School (PES or Pudu) in Kuala Lumpur (KL), in 1935. ‘You will see there athletic, happy, healthy and normal girls, far better fitted to take their share in the struggle for existence in Malaya than their less fortunate uneducated sisters.’ 1 She might also have added a comparison with their mostly ‘less fortunate’ mothers and grandmothers, few of whom had had any English or vernacular education, let alone played sport. Yet those of the older generations who had received such education and had experienced games or drill formed the foundation on which were built the inter-war developments that Miss Foss described. As Miss Mabel Marsh, headmistress of the Methodist Girls’ School (MGS) in Kuala Lumpur, noted in 1930, ‘a new attitude towards physical education is being engendered and a new spirit is pervading our schools to which the past generation was a stranger’. 2
