Anne Griffith-Jones

Anne Laugharne Phillips Griffith-Jones OBE (15 April 1891 – 28 November 1973) was a British educationalist who founded Singapore's Tanglin Preparatory School, which is now known as the Tanglin Trust School. Early years Born in London, England, Griffith-Jones was the youngest of 11 children and daughter of a Welsh barrister Griffth Jones and Anne Laugharne Phillips, who were married in 1873. (Her brother, John, was father of Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the prosecuting barrister [later judge] involved in the 1960 prosecution of Penguin Books for the publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and the 1963 trial of Stephen Ward relating to the Profumo affair.) She, along with many women of her time, had no formal qualifications. During World War I, she served as a welfare officer at a munitions factory in Wales, for which she was awarded an MBE. In 1923, Griffith-Jones came to Singapore to spend a three-month holiday with her brother, Oswald Phillips Griffith-Jones. After her vacation, she chose to stay in Singapore to dedicate her life to the education of expatriate children, founding the Tanglin Day School which later became the Tanglin Preparatory School, where she became widely known as “Miss Griff”. When the school first opened in March 1925, it functioned from a disused supper shed within the premises of the Tanglin Club. It began with five students but soon began to grow rapidly. The school served the needs of children up to the age of eight. At the time, many British expatriates living in Singapore had to send their children to Britain to attend boarding school at an early age. This meant being separated from their children for a lengthy period of time.