The Grand Hotel was the (emphasis on “the”) place to stay in Ipoh when the 1914 Pamphlet of Information for Travellers was written.
This 40-room hotel opened Dec 16, 1909 to much acclaim from the press and public. It was located on Lahat Road, a few minutes’ walk or rickshaw ride from Ipoh railway station, in a building leased from the family of the late Dato Panglima Kinta Wahab.
Prior to the opening of the Grand, railway travellers would have to stay at the government resthouse on Station Road or one of the Chinese-owned hotels in town. The Station Hotel above Ipoh’s famous railway station was not opened until 1914.
The Grand Hotel was run by one Pierre Z Creet, an Armenian businessman who gained hotel experience at the Raffles in Singapore owned by the Sarkies brothers, with whom Creet was closely associated and possibly related.
Creet was born in Julfa, the Armenian district of Isfahan, Iran, on Jan 16, 1881. For a time, he was assisted by two of his brothers, Makertich and Simon. Malcolm Gasper, a fellow Armenian from Raffles, helped run the Grand in1913.
Despite the experienced management team and Ipoh’s need for a quality hotel, the Grand was not financially successful for a number of reasons.
The district’s planters and miners were used to buying drinks on credit by signing a chit, and when Pierre stopped the chit system – presumably to ease his cash flow and prevent bad debts – a number of disgruntled regulars switched to the Ipoh Club, where they could just sign for their gin pahits.
In addition, the opening of the new Station Hotel in 1914, together with the economic downturn caused by World War I, meant the Grand’s glittering existence was short-lived. It closed down in June 1918.
The hotel became the Methodist Girls School for a while before being reborn as the Majestic Hotel under new management.
By the 1930s the hotel had once again regained its position as the hub of Ipoh’s social life – until the Japanese invasion during World War II finished it off for good.
The building is no more and the sprawling campus of the Anglo-Chinese Girls School occupies its site until today.
Click here for more tales from 1914.
This article first appeared on Great Malaysian Railway Journeys.