Malayan Spymaster

by Boris Hembry

  It made little difference where one lived. Great Britain was the protecting power, and the Malayan Civil Service (MCS) provided administrators at all levels, the mentris besar, the management of the Public Works Department (PWD), the district officers, the magistrates (although some were Malays) and judges, and the police of lieutenant rank and above, throughout the country. The clubs, banks, agency houses, lawyers, veterinary surgeons, doctors and others were in all the major towns, and the system of British law generally prevailed. It was considered at the time that, after India, the Sudan and Malaya could always count on getting the best recruits into the Colonial Service. (I must say, knowing what I do now about the responses of the most senior officials to the events leading up the surrender to the Japanese in 1942, and my own experience when serving on the Federal War Council during the post-war Emergency, I find this difficult to believe.)

  Jock Reid was a small, broad-shouldered, bow-legged Scot, with a Glaswegian accent one could cut with a knife, a fair-minded and extremely pleasant man whom I was to know for the rest of my time in Malaya. After welcoming me he confirmed that I was expected at Sungei Plentong Estate, Johore, but would probably be transferred in six months or so, soon after Barton, the manager, returned from his home leave which was due to begin shortly after my arrival.

  Dr Reed took us to lunch at the Runnymede Hotel which along with the Raffles in Singapore was one of the two most prestigious hotels in Malaya. The Runnymede had magnificent views across the Penang Strait to the massive rock formation of Bukit Mertajam, Kedah Peak and the jungle-covered mountains in the background which formed the backbone of the Malay Peninsula. ‘Malaya’ is derived from a Hindustani word for mountain, and was first used by voyagers from India many centuries previously on seeing these mountains from the sea. Hence, too, the ‘Himalayas’.

  After lunch – henceforth I was to know it as tiffin – we hired a car and drove around the island, visiting the Snake Temple, the Chinese Temple and the Botanical Gardens, and I saw for the first time the padi fields, banana groves, rubber plantations and jungle, and the hustle and bustle, the noise and the smells, and the peoples of many races, all of which were to be so much part of my future life. We rejoined the ship late in the evening, but not before I had experienced for the first time the cacophony of a tropical night, the almost deafening sounds produced by every kind of bullfrog, lizard and insect imaginable.

  We sailed that night for Port Swettenham, further down the coast and the port for Kuala Lumpur. Port Swettenham, named after one of the great early administrators of the Straits Settlements, had only one wooden jetty – a far cry from the Port Klang of today, which is a vast port complex. Here we bade farewell to Dr Reed and the few passengers who had boarded at Penang for the short trip down the coast, and after only a couple of hours set off on the final leg of the voyage to Singapore.

  I got up well before dawn to watch our arrival. The final few miles into Singapore are dotted with islands, usually the home of Malay fishermen, many to be seen in colourful sarongs, busy on the beach repairing their nets, or fishing from sampans (wooden boats) or blahts (small huts built on stilts in quite deep water, and from which they could cast their nets). They also used the blahts to lay out their catch to dry. The smell of a typical blaht was indescribably awful, as I was to find out 12 years later when escaping to Sumatra. Like Penang, the approach to Singapore was full of shipping of all sizes and description, only more so. Then as now, Singapore was the major port and commercial centre for the whole region, the hub from which Malaya exported most of its rubber and tin production. Thus its importance to Great Britain, and the Royal Navy’s ‘impregnable’ Singapore Naval Base.

  The Achilles went alongside Collyer Quay to disembark passengers, before returning to the roads to discharge its cargo into lighters. I was met by a young assistant from Ridsdell’s local agents, Sandilands Buttery, named Leighton, and driven to their offices to meet Mr Bromley-Davenport, the manager. After the usual pleasantries he remarked that he had no idea why I had been sent out because rubber was selling at only sixpence a pound, and the price was still falling, and that it was entirely possible that we would all be sent packing in a matter of months. Poor Bromley-Davenport. He correctly read his own future, but luckily both Leighton and I survived the slump and we continued to meet off and on for the next quarter of a century.

  Leighton drove me to the Raffles where, after a beer in the Long Bar, he left me to wait for Barton, my new manager, who was driving in from Sungei Plentong, not only to meet me but also to discuss estate business with the agents. Barton arrived at about noon, a tall, stoutish man with a tremendous laugh, and we got on well from the start. We were to have very little time together before his departure on leave, but I must have created a reasonable impression because he specifically requested for me to act for him when he went home on leave again in 1934.

  He took me to the Singapore Club for tiffin. It was then the most prestigious club on the island, situated in the Post Office building overlooking the Padang. I remember being most impressed at the sight of numerous tuans besar having their post-tiffin snooze in long planters’ chairs, and the large number of servants in attendance. These were summoned by shouting ‘boy!’ – something I was to do many years later, in a fit of absentmindedness, at the Cumberland Hotel, in London, to the acute embarrassment of my party and myself, and to the equally acute annoyance of the waiter.

  Tiffin over and business concluded, we set up off up the Bukit Timah Road towards mainland Malaya.

  Creeping in Johore (April 1930 – December 1930)

  We crossed the causeway to Johore Bahru and arrived at the manager’s bungalow at about tea time. The road from JB – as Johore Bahru was known throughout Malaya – to the village of Sungei Plentong passed through mile after mile of rubber plantations, which all seemed pretty dreary to me at first sight, but these rows upon rows of rubber trees, much disliked by journalists and authors down the years, soon became of absorbing interest to me as I began to learn my chosen profession.

  The entrance to Sungei Plentong Estate was through the village, really little more than a collection of corrugated iron- and atap-roofed huts lining the main road, although the shops seemed to be well stocked with everything that one could want by way of tinned foodstuffs, dry stores and live chickens and ducks. My first impression, even as a new boy, was of rather weary-looking trees, much bracken, and rutted roads. Unfortunately, second impressions only confirmed the first. I was soon to realise that the Ridsdell group of companies was not known for the quality of its trees or the husbanding of resources. In the good times of high rubber prices and profits, during and just after the Great War, the Ridsdell companies had declared large dividends, so, unlike more soundly administered firms, most of them had little in reserve to fall back on when times were hard.

  I liked the look of the manager’s bungalow. Bungalow is a Hindustani word, used from Bombay to Shanghai to describe any house occupied by a European, no matter the size or the number of storeys. Barton’s was single storey, built on brick piers, as was normal in Malaya, spacious, roofed with thatch laid on corrugated iron, and with a wide verandah on three sides. It looked out over to a jungle-covered bukit (hill) in the middle distance – of which more later. It also had electricity, something that I was not to have again until Jean and I moved to Kamuning Estate, Sungei Siput, in 1936.

  Barton was expecting not only me that day, but also the visiting agent (VA). Most rubber companies employed senior planters to visit their estates every six months or so, to inspect, criticise and recommend changes. He brought with him not only the expertise of many years planting, but also an up-to-date knowledge of what was happening on other estates in the group, and also of planting and manufacturing innovations. On completion of his visit the VA would write his report, usually in the manager’s office, which was then read by the manager, and the criticisms and recommendations fully discussed before submission to the local agents in KL and, eventually, the board in London.
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  This VA arrived in the evening and after supper he and Barton got down to talking shop, and what, in my naivety, I thought was heavy drinking. But being excluded from the shoptalk, I had but one whisky and water and went to bed early, feeling suddenly very homesick and not a little apprehensive of what the morrow would bring.

  The most popular alcoholic drinks amongst Europeans were Tiger beer and a ‘stengah’, a long whisky with water or soda. Although stengah means ‘half’ in Malay, the normal proportions were about one third whisky to two thirds water, so that several stengahs could be downed before one exceeded a couple of English pub-sized doubles. Long drinks helped to replace the fluids lost through heavy sweating during the day.

  At 5.30 the next morning I attended my first muster. Every morning the coolies mustered on the estate padang, an open space where people congregated for meetings or games; rather like the village green in England. I did not have to ask the way. I merely followed my nose. The smell was nauseating: a mixture of sweaty bodies, human excreta, curry, cooking, urine and fire smoke. The Tamil coolie, when wishing to relieve himself, merely squatted where he was, particularly in the dark at muster time.

  All the manual workers on the estate were known by the Chinese word ‘coolie’. Contrary to present-day ideas the word coolie was not considered in any way derogatory, and I shall be using this word until my narrative reaches the post-war period when it was replaced by the term ‘estate worker’.

  On arrival at muster I was met by R. P. ‘Pete’ Peters, the senior assistant – and at least 100 pairs of inquisitive eyes. He introduced me to the kranis (clerks) and conductors. The kranis were also Indians, but of a higher caste, well-educated, and they spoke fluent English. The conductors were responsible for the supervision of the labour force in the field, the direction of the various gangs to their allotted tasks and, above all, the standard of tapping. They had to ensure that there were enough tappers for the daily cropping. One could usually expect about 10 per cent of the labour force to be absent at any given time, because of illness, disinclination to work or, more often than not, a hangover from imbibing too much toddy, a powerful alcoholic beverage distilled from coconut milk.

  The kranis called the roll and noted absentees. Later they completed the divisional muster reports which showed where the field gangs were working, the number of vacant tasks, and the number of sick reporting to the ‘dresser’. This was a man with elementary training and much experience in basic medical matters – the day-to-day illnesses such as malaria, diarrhoea, minor injuries and also, of course, pregnancy. Their skills varied, but on the whole they were very competent. In fact, I had greater faith in the competence of the dresser than in several estate doctors I could mention.

  When muster was over Peters told me to go back to the bungalow for tea and then to meet him at the estate office at 6.30 am.

  I liked Pete immediately. He was about 28 and would have been planting for four or five years. He was married, and his wife Easter was with him. A very good rugger player, he had more than once represented the South vs the North, the ultimate accolade in Malayan rugby. This at a time when each side would have had a least one Blue, possibly an international trialist (usually a Scot), and most certainly several Services caps.

  At 6.30 Pete began the job of teaching me to be a rubber planter. I was now a ‘creeper’ – the term used for very new junior assistants, who crept around the estate trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, not knowing their backsides from their elbows, and not being able to speak more than a word or two of either Malay or Tamil. After he introduced me to the senior office krani, a stout and very cheerful Southern Indian, we set out on foot to inspect one of the divisions. The estate was divided into three divisions, each with a senior conductor in charge, with a junior conductor, a krani, and two or three kanganis (foremen) under him.

  Rubber trees are not indigenous to Malaya. They grew wild in Brazil, hence their botanical name Hervea Braziliensis, and the Brazilians, wishing to protect their world monopoly of this increasingly important raw material, prohibited the export of any plants, seedlings or seeds, under severe penalties. However, in 1876, the British botanist Henry Alexander Wickham, later Sir Henry, collected a quantity of seeds and smuggled them out to the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, where they germinated. A number of seedlings were sent out to Singapore, but none survived. Shortly afterwards more were despatched to Ceylon and there they did prosper. From these, 10 young plants were shipped on to Malaya and planted in Kuala Kangsar, Perak. As late as 1980 one of these original trees still stood in the grounds of the District Office.

  In the late 1880s several hundred seedlings were planted as shade trees for the pepper on Kamuning Estate, Sungei Siput, Perak, and they were still there in all their splendour nearly 60 years later. I was most distressed when I returned to Kamuning in October 1945 to find that these historic trees had been felled for firewood during the Japanese occupation.

  By 1897 there were some 34,000 acres of rubber planted in Malaya. Forty years later there were 3,250,000 acres, of which 45 per cent were owned by British, European and American companies and the rest by Asians.

  Pete showed me how to tap a rubber tree. Thin slivers of bark are cut from the trunk, in a diagonally downwards direction, and the latex – as the sap of a rubber tree is known – flows from the incision into a small earthenware cup which is attached to the tree, usually by a length of wire. The tappers start work at 6 am and continue until about 11.30, when they would break for a meal, usually rice and curry, brought out to them by their wife or children. At noon they would begin to collect the latex from the cups, pouring it into buckets. If the trees on his task were of reasonable quality a good tapper would collect about six gallons of latex, although this yield was considerably improved when bud-grafted trees came into production in the mid-1930s.

  When the latex had been collected, the tapper would sling the buckets over a kandar stick across his shoulders, and wend his way, often at a jog, to the collecting point where the contents of the bucket would be weighed, a sample taken for density, and the actual amount of rubber calculated. In those days a tapper was awarded a ‘name’ for one day’s work, but later, in order to encourage higher production, he was paid on a yield basis, so much a pound weight tapped. This way the tapper earned more and the company achieved the higher production required, but the conductors had to be even more vigilant to ensure the trees were not damaged by over-enthusiastic tapping.

  A ‘kandar’ was a tough piece of wood, about six feet in length, with wire hooks at each end on to which the buckets were hung by their handles. Again, I never ceased to be astonished at the way a frail-looking Tamil could carry 12 gallons of latex, weighing about 120 pounds, often for several miles without stopping, and rarely spilling a drop.

  The Tamil, like most Indians but by no means all, is basically a gentle person, but when roused can become an absolute fiend, especially where women are concerned. One night, when I was back on Sungei Plentong in 1934, I was having supper when the dresser came in, placed a small bloodstained package of newspaper on the table, which he unwrapped to reveal a bloody piece of meat some two inches square. When I asked what it was he replied, ‘Ramasamy’s ear.’ It seemed that Kupan, my cook, had returned from the toddy shop to find Ramasamy astride his (Kupan’s) wife. With a roar he had leapt on them both, and in the ensuing fracas had bitten off the ear. I suggested that he was lucky it was only his ear that was amputated.

  I later had all three in my office and successfully mediated between them, fining Ramasamy the cost of treating his wound at the JB hospital, docking a similar amount from Kupan’s next pay, and lecturing his wife on the necessity for marital fidelity whilst being in the privileged position of living at the manager’s bungalow and enjoying a higher standard of comfort and living than she would otherwise. Nowadays, of course, it would have been a matter for the police, probably a custodial sentence for Ramasamy, a divorce for the Kupans, and criticism of me for presuming to act as
I did without the necessary qualification in counselling.

  During our first walk around the division together, Peters explained that my duties entailed not only general supervisory work but also the compilation of the check rolls. Check rolls were the absolute curse of all junior assistants. Briefly, they were the official estate records of expenditure on labour. The names of all the labour force were written down in a column on the left of the double page in the roll book, and daily a tick or a cross was entered against each name to signify whether the individual had worked or not. If the coolie had committed a misdemeanour, such as faulty tapping or being late for work, he would be awarded only a half name. The number of names earned each month by the person concerned would be totted up in the right hand column. It follows, therefore, that the totals of the horizontal columns had to tally with those on the vertical. Invariably there would be a difference, usually an odd half name. Many were the times that I have sat up half the night trying to find the missing half name, to balance the books. In addition to these daily work records, details of cash advances, rice issues and any other relevant information were recorded on the right hand page. These check rolls were an absolute nightmare, but had to be kept accurately as they were part of the audit. Often I had to enlist the help of the office clerk to track down my mistake. The rolls had to be checked by the junior assistant in his own time, which I always considered unfair, and when I was in a position to alter this custom I did so without hesitation.

  The first few months are gruelling and frustrating for a new junior assistant – as, I suppose, with most jobs. One would work nearly all hours that God gave, but without the experience to do anything much but to ‘creep’. I would be up at 5 am, attend muster at 5.30, return to the bungalow for a shave and some tea and fruit, back to the office at 6.30, or straight out to walk around the tapping, taking in the weeding and drainage gangs. At about 11,I would return to the bungalow for a meal, midday rest (in Malaya this was known as a ‘lie off’) for an hour before going out to oversee the measuring of the latex, check up on the weeding gangs again, until about 2.30, when I returned to the office to listen to coolies’ complaints and requests, mediate on quarrels and disputes, and generally act as the father and the mother to the estate workers. No one appeared to query the ability of a rather immature, unmarried 20-year-old to proffer sound advice on marital problems and life in general.