Singapore connection

We were always told as children by our mother that her grandfather had spent some time in India. When I started researching the family tree a few years ago I asked my aunt (my mother's sister) for information, and among other things she told me that her grandfather's first wife had died in India. I had been trying off and on to find out more, particularly when the IGI started putting Indian records on the internet, to no avail. I visited my aunt again in the autumn of 2011 and she showed me a photograph of the company my great grandfather had part-owned. It was called "Alexander, Gowans & Co." With a name we could get somewhere and it turned out the family had gone to Singapore rather than India. The address of his company was 76 Brass Bassa Road. My great grandfather was in Singapore between the years of 1889 and 1896 (approximately) before coming back to the UK. My brother (who lives in Australia) did a lot of the internet research about all this - and then a bell rang for him. A year or two ago he spent a night or two in Singapore and had chosen the hotel simply because he could get a good deal. He stayed in the Carlton Hotel which has the address 76 Bras Basah Road - and having researched the history of that plot of land it seems definite that he completely unknowingly spent that night or two on the very spot where his great grandfather had part-owned a business over a century earlier.