Daim Zainuddin - Early Life

Early Life

Daim bin Zainuddin is the youngest of thirteen siblings. His father was a clerk in the Kedah State Service and his mother a homemaker. Daim received his early education at the Malay Primary School in Seberang Perak, Alor Setar and then advanced to the Special Malay Class at the Sultan Abdul Hamid College, which was an English–medium school.

Being a youth of the 40’s, during a period when the British Colonial Policy encouraged Malays to attend Malay schools, when Malay parents worried about the possible influence of an English education on their children’s religious faith and cultural identity, Daim and his parents were able to transcend these limitations. In fact, his broad-minded parents enrolled all their children at English–medium schools as they did not want their children to become “better farmers and fishermen”. However, Daim was very much an absentee student. He had worked out a strategic studying method whereby he would only need to focus on subjects that he would need to pass to advance to the next class and that required little effort - English and Malay languages and Mathematics. He devoted his free time to pursuing his main interest which was sports and more sports.

Career-wise, Daim would have ended up as a teacher except that due to some miscommunication he had been totally unaware that his name was on the list of successful candidates for Brinsford College, England, a teacher training college.

Throughout his youth, he was very much encouraged by a mother who wanted him to further his studies and a father who wanted him to become a lawyer. His mother sold some land to raise money for him to study law in England. Realizing that “time is money”, the former absentee student became a diligent and disciplined scholar in law who after eighteen months at Lincoln’s Inn London and at the youthful age of 21, was called to the English Bar in 1959. It was also during his student days in London that he developed his voracious appetite for reading which till today is his favourite pastime.