Getting the word out, no matter how harsh

A cinema slide screening titled Traffic With The Devil was shown at cinemas, alongside a car that was wrecked in a real road accident.

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It was also towed around the city to "bring home the disastrous consequences of bad driving".

"CAN YOU STAND THE BURDEN OF HAVING SO MANY CHILDREN?" While modern campaigns might tiptoe around sensitive topics, their colonial predecessors charged ahead with little care for subtlety.

"I feel like people in Singapore were actually more squeamish later on," says Dr Jinna Tay, a senior lecturer at the NUS Department of Communications and New Media. "The early campaigns got quite gritty. They didn't shy away from harsh language and realities."

One slide screening shown in local cinemas by the Singapore Family Planning Association (FPA) depicted a weary Chinese mother with six children, holding empty rice bowls. The accompanying text asked: "Can you stand the burden of having so many children?"

The solution - birth control - was presented in capital letters, followed by instructions for married women to visit a clinic for advice.

Such directness was a hallmark of pre-independence campaigns because of both the scale of the problems and the audiences they were addressing.

Singapore had a literacy rate of just 52.6 per cent in 1960 and universal education had only just begun to take shape, so campaigners reckoned that simple and memorable messaging was needed.

A TRUE-BLUE GROUND-UP INITIATIVE These campaigns took shape against a backdrop of inequality and poverty.

Dr Ho says Singapore's early family planning campaigns emerged in a time of overcrowding, women's health issues, children being sold and widespread child malnourishment in the post-war years.

This meant the mostly women volunteers behind the FPA were tackling a problem they saw every day. "These women didn't have time for niceties - (they wanted to) just get the message out and worry about it later.