In Loving Memory of Winston Koh

“Each of the animals had a special memory of Badger – something he had taught them that they could now do extremely well. He had given them each something to treasure: a parting gift that would become all the more special each time it was passed on to others.”

-Susan Varley in ‘Badger’s parting gifts’.

This is the third anniversary of your passing.

You may no longer be around, but like Badger, you have left behind gifts that others have picked up and used for the greater good. With the generosity of past students, friends and colleagues, we have raised sufficient funds for the School of Economics, SMU to establish the Professor Winston Koh Endowed Memorial Fund and Bursary, aiming to encourage undergraduates at the school to strive for excellence. If everything goes well, the bursary will be launched in the July 2016 semester.

Dear Friends,
We are pleased to inform you that, in Winston’s honor, the School of Economics at SMU has recently established the Professor Winston Koh Endowed Memorial Fund. The Fund will support the Professor Winston Koh Bursary to be awarded to deserving students from the School of Economics. The aim is to encourage undergraduates to strive for academic excellence and to undertake a holistic approach to their education at SMU.

We are indebted to Calvin Li Xiangrun and Henry Chua, who have worked tirelessly towards the realization of the project. Calvin, a former student of Winston, first mooted the idea of a fund in Winston’s memory and did all the ground work to ensure its feasibility, while Henry (from SMU’s Office of Advancement & Alumni) put his heart and soul into working out the nitty-gritty details leading to the establishment of the fund. We would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to their dedication towards turning a dream into reality.

If you have been toying with the idea of giving back to society and but have not made up your mind on how to go about doing so, we invite you to consider contributing to this fund. It will go a long way to help students who will otherwise not have the means or the opportunities to benefit from a university education and to realize their full potential.

The link to the memorial fund webpage is as follows:

https://www.alumni.smu.edu.sg/give/winstonkoh

Professor Winston Koh Memorial Fund The School of Economics at SMU has established the Professor Winston Koh Endowed Memorial Fund, in honour of the late Professor Winston Koh, to celebrate his contributions to academia and student life in the Singapore Management University. The Fund will support the Professor Winston Koh Bursary whi…

Today is the second anniversary of Winston’s passing. We chose this year to commemorate it quietly by simply remembering him in our hearts, and by recalling how his legacy lives on.

At his memorial two years ago, I promised to do what we can to promote greater safety in diving. Early this year, Winston’s dive instructor and dive operator admitted in a high court judgment to negligence leading to his death. This is a small but significant step towards improved dive safety, as we hope that this will signal to the diving community that there is an urgent need to improve safety measures, especially with regards to the responsibility of instructors towards novice divers in their charge.

On a separate note, to celebrate Winston’s love for adventure and travel, plans are underway for the sponsorship of an annual overseas cultural trip for residents of Boys’ Town, youths from financially difficult background, who would otherwise not have the opportunity to experience holidays abroad.

Finally, Winston’s interest in photography lives on through our daughter, who one fine day, picked up her father’s camera and decided to turn her hobby into a career.

Winston would have been proud!

Dear Friends,

Next week will be the first anniversary of Winston’s passing. Some of you have been asking me whether anything is being done to commemorate it. We have decided to keep it simple this year, as we still have not come to terms with our loss. For those who wish to join us to remember him, a commemorative mass will be held:

Date: 14th March 2014
Time: 6.30pm
Venue: Church of St Mary’s of the Angels, 5 Bukit Batok East Avenue 2

However, we know that what Winston would have liked best is for us to remember him in our hearts - he was after all, a man of little fuss!

You may also be interested to know that a scholarship bearing his name has been set up at his alma mater. The Professor Winston Koh – RI scholarship, launched in February 2014, will be given out annually to help students who are currently studying in RI and are eligible for financial aid under RI’s scholarship terms and conditions. These are students who, like Winston himself, come from a financially challenged background and who, we hope, will one day follow in his footsteps. If you wish to contribute to the scholarship and in so doing, help a larger number of kids, please fill up the attached form and mail it together with your donation to Raffles Institution.

We thought that it would be meaningful to commemorate Winston’s life and achievement by ‘giving back to society’ something that he firmly believed in. The scholarship is just a start!

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14164625/Gift%20Form%202014_Prof%20Winston%20Koh%20RI%20scholarship.pdf

Gift Form 2014_Prof Winston Koh RI scholarship.pdf Shared with Dropbox

Happy Birthday Winston

Straits Times published our contribution to the Father's Day Special microsite.
This note was written by Winston Koh on Father's Day in 2008.

Reader Contribution: Something my father wrote My dad passed away earlier this year on March 10. I thought it would be nice to share something he wrote in 2008 to his dad, my late grandfather.

Eulogy for Winston Koh Teow Hock – from Cantabridgian Friends 1982-85

Dear Friends

We are here to remember Winston Koh Teow Hock, the life he lived, the contribution he made, his joy for life and adventure that will never fade in our memories. I speak today not just on my own behalf, but also on behalf of all Winston’s and Caroline’s friends from our Cambridge years together. Forgive me if I do not do adequate justice to our Cohort’s memories of Winston on this occasion – we will have another opportunity later this year which I’m sure we all will make. None of us know how many years the good Lord will give to each of us and we must treasure our friendships.

I know here today, there are many who knew Winston in many different times and capacities. He was a multifaceted man with wide ranging interests, a great intellect, a diligent and responsible soul, a teacher and mentor, an adventurer. I and a number of us first met Winston in his teens, in our pre-university years swotting for A levels, where he excelled, impressing us with his academic stamina and abilities. Our Cohort went up with him to university, were there with him when he met, courted and fell in love with a beautiful girl. Winston and Caroline first set eyes on each other at Chinese Christian Fellowship in Cambridge – so we would say God brought them together. Winston did not make obvious overtures at the time. He was so subtle many of us at CCF, including Caroline, missed it. Then in the Princeton years which followed, love blossomed. Winston and Caroline married and he brought his wife from Mauritius to settle in Singapore and they had two lovely daughters – in line with govt policy – how like Winston even then!

The years following were whirlwind ones for Winston and our Cohort – they have passed so swiftly many of us wonder where have they gone. The children grew up from the days we would hold kids’ birthday parties as an excuse for us parents to get together and have a mini-reunion; our children became young adults, accomplished in their own right – just witness this in Melissa and Andrea. Several years ago, as one by one we started to pass the age of 40 and as a reminder of our mortality, our Cambridge year started to meet annually. We generously extended this invitation to our Oxford counterparts. Winston was always one of the first to respond to the email can you make this or other date, vying for first place with another dear friend based in Hong Kong! These gatherings were organised and made painless and seamless by another dear friend, a “national treasure”, who has been key to rounding up our Cohort each year, and who has been key to joining us up on this occasion. In the course of these gatherings, where we would tuck into Singapore’s gastronomic delights, chicken rice, otak, chilli crab, while reminiscing over stodgy English food, CCF houseparties, long ago times when we were young and 10 kg lighter, Winston would amaze us with stories of his travels, sporting achievements, ball room dancing prowess and athleticism. At the time I thought – Winston seemed to grow younger every year we met, with a new tale of adventure, a new skill mastered, a new challenge he wanted to conquer – you felt so energised in his company!

Above all, however, he did us the great favour of taking supremely well framed portrait shots which capture our moments forever. Every year we had a calendar of everyone whose birthday fell in each month of the year. Somehow, Winston managed to make everyone look a little more flattering and better looking on camera than in real life – no small achievement I assure you! Our memories of Winston contain some of the last well framed shots he took for us at our recent gathering late last year.

During those gatherings, we always took a group photo when Winston would put the camera on timer – we would always leave a prime place for Winston in the group shot and say : “come on Winston, hurry up and come take your place” – then we’d wait for the timer to go off and camera clicks. You will have read the many messages and tributes to Winston. I share the memory of this friend who posted: “I think of Winston in Heaven, looking down on us and madly snapping photographs”. This brought a smile to me, and that’s how I see Winston as well – back then and here today, looking at us from heaven with the good Lord, madly snapping those photographs.

Another friend shared, and I too remember Winston saying this when I asked him how he developed a passion for photography: “Life consists of not how many breaths you take; but how many moments take your breath away – I like to capture those moments”. By this measure, Winston led a very full life - he has shared phenomenal pictures of the places that he has been – wild mountain heights, windswept seas, places of almost unearthly beauty – that evoke within you the feeling “truly mine eyes have seen the glory of the risen Lord” - and I know many friends of Winston’s here today have been there with him - as well as simple, endearing scenes – friends breaking bread together, sharing a drink, exhausted after a race but high spirited, laughing over a memory. In sharing these, he has given all of us a gift.

Many here today are from SMU – including generations of students whom Winston taught. I hope you will appreciate what I will share: when we went up to university, Roman law was a mandatory first year subject. At the time, we wondered why study a legal system no one practices, and a language no one uses. Now that we are older, I understand and would share the words of an old Roman jurist and philosopher, Seneca: As with a tale, so with life, not how long it is but how good it is, is what counts. The life of Winston Koh Teow Hock – not how long but how good – and Winston’s life was a very good life.

Being of Winston’s generation, allow me to recall from Tennyson on the life of the ancient Greek hero and adventurer, Ulysses – some of may recognises Ulysses adventurous spirit in Winston: … and the end of my adventuring was to find that I have ended where I begun…. I am a part of all that I have met…” Winston has left a part of himself with each of us who have known him

And so, Winston our friend, we bid you not farewell but adieu. We shall meet again

From your Cambridge Friends (1982-1985)
23 Mar 2013

Rediscovered Winston's RacingThePlanet: Nepal 2011 blog

RacingThePlanet: Nepal 2011 I have completed the long march! Yippe! Boy, RacingthePlanet has a sadistic streak in planning such a tough stage. CP1 is 600m straight climb up, CP2 500 m down, Cp3 is 600m, you get the idea. There were 7 checkpoints In all, 3 very tough climbs up, 2 very tough climbs down, with several others o...

Eulogy by Andrea Koh:

First of all I'd like to thank everyone here today, for being here and showing me how well loved my dad is. Today I’m going to talk about a man who is no less than a modern day superhero. This man was a was a teacher, an avid dancer, a mentor, a sportsman, an inspiration, a role model, and above all, he was my dad. My dad was stubborn, lame, funny, weird, and vain. And I owe it to him that I turned out this way too. But, I thank him for letting me be like him, if I wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t have felt so close to him. Being the daddy’s girl that I am, my dad and I shared a special bond because of our similarities, and being both stubborn people, we didn’t always seen eye-to-eye. And yet, because of our similar personalities, I often felt like my dad was the only one who understood how I felt, and it was great having a friend in my dad who I knew would always be rooting for me, even if it wasn’t shown outwardly.

Of course, even superheroes aren’t perfect, but he was my dad, and I loved him and his flaws nonetheless. I’m so lucky to have a superhero for a dad, whose life seemed like it came out from a typical zero to hero Hollywood movie. He worked hard growing up from a tough childhood to become a banker and a professor, and he never stopped learning and excelled in everything he’s set out to try. Much like how a little kid relishes in showing off their favourite superhero to their friends, words can't describe how much I relish in showing my dad off to people. Because I love him, I’m proud of him, and not a day goes by without me being awed and inspired by him.

As every superhero lives a double life, for me, my dad wasn’t just the athletic sportsman, the intelligent, eloquent professor, or even the charismatic dancer who looks just a little too young for his age. To me, my dad’s double life was well, the life of being my dad. I often find that is the little things people do that let us see the greatness in them. My dad would always crack lame jokes that sometimes didn’t make sense and would leave us all with quizzical expressions plastered on our faces, save for him, who would be chuckling as if he was the funniest person in the world (In his mind at least) or doing little funny things like making song parodies in a strange operatic rendition. And of course, little things like reminding me to take my vitamin c, saying “Hi Andie!” when he came home from work, telling me not to sleep too late those little things made me remember that there's always someone there rooting for me, to keep going , and to not give up.

And when I faced a time when it seemed like everyone was against me and I felt so alone in the world, my dad supported me and always used to say "Who bully you? I'll beat them up for you." That made me feel more strong and protected than anything else in the world, it made me remember that I had my very own superhero constantly giving me superhuman strength to carry on in my life, no matter how hard it seemed to be. Even when he had our arguments, I knew my dad meant the best for me, and sacrificed so much just for my own good. Just like any superhero would, my dad would always put others first, and wanted to protect others at any cost.

My dad, the super hero, had the powers of love, compassion, intelligence, humor, and best of all, the power to inspire. The multitude of students he’s taught, friends and colleagues are proof of this. The numerous entries of everyone’s experiences with my dad and kind words about how my dad had inspired them through the years serve as evidence of the fact that my dad, like any superhero would, has helped so many people.

This superhero story hasn’t ended yet. While his physical being may not be around anymore, his story, his words of wisdom, and his inspiration lifestyle of lifetime learning will live on in all of us, and will never die. I believe that we all should strive to be like him, after all, who says superheroes only exist in movies when one has been in our midst for the last 50 years? I now leave you all with my dad’s own superhero catchphrase: Never lose your sense of adventure in life .

Eulogy by Caroline Koh: tinyurl.com/caroleulogy

Eulogy by Caroline Koh:

I never imagined that I would be standing here to pay homage to the man I loved and was married to for 24 years. You see, he was so fit, strong and healthy and in contrast, I was, as my children put it, the ‘lembeh’ one in the family.

How do you even begin to talk about a man who has done so much? In the early years of our marriage, Winston told me that he had a feeling he would not live long and as such, at the upstart, he tried to live life to the fullest, attempting to achieve every goal he has set for himself. By far and large, I think he succeeded in all aspects. Coming from a humble background, he worked extremely hard to earn a scholarship to Cambridge where he said he spent the three best years of his life, not only in terms of the magnificent place that Cambridge was but because of the close friendships he forged with the people he studied and played with. And in the tragedy of his death, the strength of this bond showed itself at its finest, as these friends prayed and assisted in their various capacities. So Cambridge friends, this is a tribute to you and thank you!

After obtaining a Double First in Cambridge, Winston moved on to Princeton where he did his PhD in a record 3 years… why the hurry, you may ask? Well, he was trying to conquer yet another peak…to woo and marry me! As you see, he succeeded yet again!

His studies over, he set out with his usual zeal to build his career, first with NUS, then a stint in the private sector. In the midst of his hectic schedule, he still found time to father two beautiful daughters, who as kids crawled their way to his office to play with Daddy after work and to enjoy the free goodies in the nearby pantry. Ultimately however, he felt that his true calling was in academia and SMU became his second home. He found delight in interacting with students, be it as their professor or a participant in the many student organized campus activities, such as ballroom dancing. So if you are one of the many he taught, worked or played with, thank you for sharing this part of his life.

Having established his career, Winston set out to do what he truly enjoyed…He took up running, swimming and cycling again and soon was racing around the globe. In the course of umpteen marathons, ultramarathons, three iron man, Kota Kinabalu, Mt Fuji and the Everest, he forged ties with many remarkable and wonderfully kind people, some of whom set aside their busy schedule to help search for him when he went missing. Dennis, Clifford, Richard and Wilson, you looked like Greek Gods or superheroes coming down to save the world when you stepped into the Marine Police office to offer your assistance, and your presence was most reassuring in a time of turmoil and uncertainty. So to you and the many other ‘running kakis’ who gave us comfort and support these past few days, I say a big thank you!

The events of the past few weeks were the most harrowing and traumatic that I have ever experienced and I sincerely hope that no other wife would ever go through what I went through. As such, my final promise to Winston is to push for the implementation of improved safety measures and protocols to ensure safer diving for all. In this way, his death would not have been in vain and instead would ensure that others live.

I admit (shamefully!) that I never had much time to explore Winston’s Facebook, but while searching for possible liturgy for this service, I chanced upon this quote of his:” When I was a young boy, I used to wonder why I came into this world, if there was a purpose for me in this world, would the world be any different if I did not exist, and what would I be thinking when my end draws near. Would I look back on my life and regret that I have wasted my time and energies on things that don’t matter, or would I say to myself that I have lived a good life, and with no regrets?” And I know that he would have smiled to himself, thinking that he has indeed had a good life with no regrets…

Thank you.

Eulogy by Alfred Koh:

I am Alfred, Winston’s younger and only brother.

Firstly, I would like to thank all of you for your presence today.

My heartfelt gratitude to a group of Winston’s close friends who have stood by us, giving us the support, strength and advice, since we received news of Winston’s disappearance at the diving trip. Thank you Dennis, Wilson, Richard, David, Clifford, William, Angela, Pauline and Kate.

On behalf of Winston’s family and mine, I would also want to thank friends who have kept us in your prayers throughout this difficult time.

When young, Winston had already set many dreams for himself.

Our parents are not educated. Our father was an odd-job labourer and he was the only breadwinner for the family. Going to school was a privilege then.

Winston did not let our family circumstance dictate what he can or cannot do. Instead he saw it both as a challenge and an opportunity to mould his outlook of life while working towards his dreams.

Winston is a fighter. Through sheer hard work, determination and perseverance, Winston excelled in his academic achievements. Coming from a neighbourhood primary school he worked hard and got himself to Raffles Institution followed by Hwa Chong Junior College. Thereafter he was awarded the PSC scholarship to read Economics at University of Cambridge in UK, graduating with Double First Class Honours. Winston subsequently held a PhD in Economics from Princeton University at the age of 25. I believe not many can achieve what Winston had by that age. Our parents are very proud of him.

Winston has been my role model since young. I am unlike him. I am the playful one while he the studious one. It was obvious from young that our parents pinned their hopes on Winston. And Winston did not disappoint them.

I remember two occasions when Winston played a pivotal part in my life. After PSLE at the age of 12, Winston at the age of 15 decided I should join a secondary school which had a niche band performance. He believed it would help me to get into the SAF Music and Drama Company when I served my National Service, so that I need not undergo the tough training in the infantry. However, when I was in secondary two, Winston subsequently decided that I should be transferred to SJI to have a better chance in passing my GCE O Level Examination. Thanks to Winston, I went on to junior college and tertiary education. This is what Winston is like, always forward planning. What I am today, I owe a large part to Winston’s advice as my dear brother.

Winston had proven himself to be a learner, a scholar, an educator, a ballroom dancer, a marathoner, and an avid photographer. I came to understand that Winston had wanted to learn scuba diving as a step towards underwater photography. Winston had truly embodied life-long learning.

There are over 3000 Likes in the memorial facebook that was created “In Loving Memory of Winston Koh”. It is truly a testimony of the many lives Winston had inspired and touched.

The past 2 weeks have been and still is a painful and emotional one for me. Though Winston and I did not meet often due to our busy schedules and commitments, I am deeply saddened by his sudden passing on. I have been thinking of those good, fun and silly times during our younger days. I miss him very dearly.

However, I find comfort and solace in that I will meet my beloved brother Winston again one day.

To me, Winston’s greatest and most important decision he had made in his life was to have received Jesus Christ as his saviour. I remembered clearly the day when Winston came home from Cambridge for his vacation break and proclaimed to our parents that he is a Christian and was baptised. He was then 20 years of age.

John 3 verse 16 of the Bible says “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, for whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” And in John 1 verse 12, it is said “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name (Jesus Christ), he gave the right to become children of God.” Winston is a child of God, safe in the arms of Jesus Christ.

Indeed Winston had fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith.

Winston, you will always be remembered. Good bye my brother. Till we meet again.

Dear friends,

Please take note that the wake will be held in La Verna room at Church of St. Mary of the Angels.

Thank you for all your support and encouragement.