Early Life

Sheares had a close relationship with his sister Alice and often loved to play doctor with her. There was once when he made Alice swallow a one-cent coin as a medical “pill” in their game. Benjamin was six years old then and received a good hiding from his mother Lilian. Throughout his growing years, Benjamin showed ambition to become a doctor - a dream deemed almost impossible for someone who was Asian and came from a poor family in the early colonial days of Singapore. However, Alice continued to spirit him on with that dream, against his mother's wishes for her son to take up a job as a clerk and start helping out with the family bills as soon as he completed his Senior Cambridge Examinations

Sheares' early education was at established institutions such as the Methodist Girls' School, St Andrew's School and the Raffles Institution. In 1923, he was accepted into theKing Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore and was conferred the L.M.S. in March 1929.