SARAWAK was once ruled by the Brooke Rajahs for over 100 years from 1841 to 1946, starting with James Brooke, then his nephew Charles Brooke and finally Charles’ son Charles Vyner Brooke.
In 2010, the descendants of the Brookes set up the Brooke Trust in Britain to preserve the family papers and artefacts.
The trust has since grown to be actively involved in sharing and exploring Sarawak’s history and heritage through various projects.
One of its newest projects is developing James Brooke’s retirement home in Britain, Burrator House, into a museum.
“We were fortunate during the pandemic to be able to get the resources together to acquire the Rajah’s house in Devon.
“It was his home away from home when he was not in Sarawak and it has a lot of love and goodwill,” Brooke Trust chairman Jason Brooke said.
He said the house was sold by Charles Brooke 150 years ago when Sarawak was in debt, but it had always been on the family’s radar as their ancestors were buried in the neighbouring church.
“It’s retained a Sarawak connection and gets a lot of Sarawak visitors, so we were really fortunate when the opportunity came up for us to acquire the property.
“We’ve spoken with the Sarawak Museum Department about a collaboration on installing a museum here, telling the Sarawak story in Britain.”
Closer to home, the Brooke Trust is working with Yayasan Hasanah on a digital Borneo archive project.
Brooke said this would be an online platform for about 5,000 historic photographs of Borneo from the trust’s collection.
“These are mainly ethnographic photographs from the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s which are incredibly rare and mostly unseen.
“We want to make those available around the world for free. It’s an exciting project which will provide an opportunity to search the images, for example by location and keywords,” he said.
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