Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  The Political Agent has, forbye, more orthodox functions. He must persuade Rulers and influence public opinion. He must justify (stern task) the workings of the United Nations and intercept the policies of the Arab League. He must help to negotiate oil concessions. He must expound the need for a law on workmen’s compensation and even, in settling sea frontiers, explain to an illiterate sheikh the principle of constant equidistance involved in the trigonometry of the median line. He must be severe and masterful when he feels insignificant and ill-assured. He must at times be as diplomatic as any conventional diplomatist.

  But above all he must travel: in a long and ceremonious caravan or in a solitary Land Rover; in his own dhow or in an R.A.F. aeroplane; at speed across the gravel desert, slowly and painfully through a mountain wadi, or stuck altogether in the mud of the salt flats. This is his Crispin’s Day6 that will live into his old age. Long after the minutes and the submissions and the subcommittees have faded, he will remember waking on the great plateau to the scuffle and the mutter of the bedu at their dawn prayers; coming out of the tent to see them huddled in their skimpy cloaks round the fire waiting for the blackened coffee-pot to heat up; the hawks behind them on their perches, now huddling in against the cold, now fluffing out their feathers to dry off the night-dew. Or being called out from a party with a message of a shooting in the hills; the scurry round for a driver and a bed-roll and then out of the Agency gate and away across the salt flats into the dunes; sleep in the sand beside the track, then up at first light and through the mountains to where two groups of bandoliered tribesmen wait for him nervously. Nor will he forget the incense and the rose-water proffered by his host at the end of a stiff and dusty journey, or the chanted, stylized greetings, strophe and antistrophe, of the desert bedu, or the Agency dhow at anchor in the bay of Dibba with the Red Ensign fluttering improbably over those unheard-of fishermen.

  All this will pass one day and we shall be centralised and standardised. The powers and the privileges, the discomforts and the eccentricities – all will vanish, and with them the fun. Meanwhile, Political Agent Dubai is a splendid job in a splendid place. When the name is changed and the first consul or Ambassador arrives, it will indeed be the end of a very auld sang.

  I am sending copies of this despatch to all Gulf posts, to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and en titre personnel to Mr. Balfour-Paul at Her Majesty’s Embassy in Beirut.

  I have, &.

  A. J. M. CRAIG.

  Her Majesty’s Political Agent

  1. ultima ratio regum: ‘The last argument of kings.’

  2. my Wilson and my Cox: Sir Arnold Wilson and Sir Percy Cox, British colonial administrators of Iraq (then Mesopotamia) during and after the First World War.

  3. pro-consular: A leader imposed by a foreign power; a jibe often thrown at ambassadors from superpowers (e.g. the United States) who try to lean on their neighbours (e.g. Canada).

  4. bara sahib: (White) colonial master.

  5. majlis: Formal sitting; legislature.

  6. Crispin’s Day: From Shakespeare’s Henry V:

  And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered, We few,

  we happy few, we band of brothers.

  Across the centuries, Crispin’s Day (25 October) has by chance become famous for battles. As well as Agincourt, the Charge of the Light Brigade also fell upon it.

  ‘If you asked the Chinese Singaporean why he was put on this earth he would without hesitation reply: “to make money” ’

  SIR ARTHUR DE LA MARE, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO SINGAPORE, OCTOBER 1970

  A bittersweet farewell. Sir Arthur de la Mare used his valedictory from Singapore to state the case, as controversial then as it is now, for the British Empire as a force for good. De la Mare titled this despatch ‘Farewell to the Lion City’. His valedictory from Thailand is equally striking (see p. 75).

  With its affluent population, clean streets and ordered society Singapore remains a poster child for the potential of imperial rule to civilize and enrich its subjects; the strongest evidence among all Britain’s former possessions in the case for the defence of empire. In material terms, Singapore today is an example to the rest of the world of how to run an economy. Politically, however, it is a case of arrested development, with democratic rule along one-party lines (the current Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is the son of the founder of the nation, Lee Kwan Yew, more of whom below).

  De la Mare’s pride in Singapore’s development is badly tainted by what he calls ‘that hour of dishonour at the Ford Motor Works’. The car plant was the setting, on 15 February 1942, for the unconditional surrender of British forces in Malaya to the Japanese. In ten days of fighting, troops under the command of Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival lost the supposedly impregnable Singapore peninsula to an invading Japanese army less than half their size. Sixty thousand British and empire troops became Japanese prisoners of war in what Winston Churchill called the ‘worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history’.

  The Straits Chinese – and that means Singapore, for the minorities who make up some 20 per cent of the population do not count – are self-made men who have gained power and affluence by hard work, tenacity and business acumen. They have been immensely successful, and success, particularly in a race naturally self-reliant to the point of cockiness, tends to make men overreach. The Singaporeans, with their minute power-base and a population of only 2 million, cannot expect to make such a showing in the world as do the Japanese, but while they dislike and fear the latter they feel a sneaking admiration for them for having, in a bare quarter of a century since total defeat, out-smarted, out-guessed and out-manoeuvred the rest of the business world. And if the Singaporeans concede to Japan the palm of Asian success story No. 1 they have no doubt at all that they are Asian success story No. 2. But just as, I suspect, many Japanese prefer not to face the fact that part at least of their success stems from good fortune, notably the guilt-complex of the United States, and that sooner or later the privileges and advantages thrust upon them will be withdrawn, so I believe many Singaporeans prefer to forget that it was one thing to make money while a benevolent foreign Power provided the necessary setting for the acquisition of wealth, but quite another thing now that they themselves have to shoulder the responsibility and financial burden of independence. To be fair, some of the more mature Singaporeans do realise this, and while lip-service is everywhere paid to the goddess of Sovereignty there are those among the older generation who secretly hanker after the good old colonial days when, while the complaisant British undertook the necessary but unprofitable tasks of administration, they themselves could address their single-minded devotions to the goddess of Mammon. If you asked the Chinese Singaporean why he was put on this earth he would without hesitation reply: ‘to make money’. Independence and sovereignty are expensive, and the Singaporeans, like many other newly-independent nations, are discovering to their chagrin that their own tax-masters are harder on their pocket than were the much-maligned colonialists …

  People who work hard with brawn and brain deserve to succeed and the Singaporeans work hard with both. They make mistakes, they have a touch of arrogance and insensitivity, they are materialistic and grasping. But they have purpose, drive, vision and above all tenacity. Their simplicity has hitherto not been marred by spurious pretensions to culture, and they have no chips on their shoulder about being the sons of toil. Honest labour ennobles them, and their very industry commands respect. Some observers are repelled by their self-righteousness, but theirs is not the self-righteousness of the Indians, based on nothing but conceit, but rather that of the Americans before their confidence collapsed, and is based on the knowledge of achievement. It is brash but not nauseating and it is largely neutralised by their many qualities. With time and the march of so-called progress they will lose some of their simpler communal virtues: th
e working-man will adopt the still outlandish notion that Jack

  is better than his master: the new denizens of high-rise urban apartment buildings will not or ever remain the kindly, uncomplicated people so long inured to the life of the kampong.1 With a few notable exceptions the rich have hitherto shunned the public ostentation of wealth, both to deflect the jealousy of the gods and to fool the tax-man. But the power of the gods is waning, and the tax-man is no longer easily conned. Elaborate, expensive, tasteless and crashingly boring entertainment at the ‘de luxe’ hotels and night-spots springing up all over Singapore is becoming widely regarded as the accepted way to consummate the union between wealth and ‘gracious living’. Singaporean hostesses, may heaven forgive them, are beginning to read Emily Post.2 The social homogeneity born of a common urge for self improvement is loosening. The ‘rugged society’ of Lee Kwan Yew’s3 ideal is already being eroded by hedonism, and the disorders of sophisticated urban society are not far away. I consider myself fortunate to have known the Singaporeans at their simple best: my successors may not, I fear, find them as likeable as I have.

  It is now 34 years since I first saw Singapore, and though until I took up my present post I had never lived here for any length of time it has long exercised a strange fascination upon me, both attractive and repellent. Attractive because of its vigour, industry, bustle and thrust: repellent because every day I am reminded of the shame of 1942. It was as a diplomatic prisoner in Japan that, on my birthday, I heard of Singapore’s surrender. Mercifully for all of us held captive in the enemy’s capital we were then too numbed and too uninformed to realise that what had taken place was not only an appalling military disaster but the most shameful disgrace in Britain’s imperial history. It was only later that we heard of the irresolution, the incompetence and the bungling of those charged here with the duty of defending not merely Britain’s military interests, but her very name. One may or may not regret the passing of empire but no loyal British subject living in Singapore can forget that it was here that the hollowness of the imperial ethos was so cruelly and so shamefully exposed.

  Reminders of that shame beset me daily. It is not the people of Singapore who remind me of it, for no Singaporean has ever mentioned February 1942 to me in criticism or reproach. But history is too near, and the smell of our ignominy still hangs in the air. The very house I live in was occupied by the Japanese Commander of Singapore Military District; every time I drive along the Bukit Timah Road I relive, in imagination possibly even worse than the actual reality, that hour of dishonour at the Ford Motor Works; the monument erected near the Padang4 to the local Chinese victims of Japanese atrocity is a memorial not only of Japanese savagery but also of our betrayal of our trust. And it does not relieve me to recall that the military pomp and ostentation – not to say the arrogance – with which we reoccupied Singapore was a sham and a fraud, for we reoccupied it not by our own efforts, but by an American atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima …

  … [I] am grateful to the Singaporeans. We have a national reason for being grateful to them: it is they, more than anyone else including ourselves, who have done most to restore the British image in East Asia. For, unlike the present rulers of many other former British possessions they have not only maintained the heritage we left them, they have improved upon it. In so many other places the governmental and civil structure we left behind has fallen into misuse, corruption and decay. Here it is kept in first-class working order, furbished and efficient, a tribute to Stamford Raffles, who remains the national hero, and to the able and dedicated civil administrators who followed him. It is a tribute to them, the people of Singapore, that they remember us, not as the military bunglers who brought upon them the agony of three and a half years of Japanese terror, but as the honest and just administrators who for almost a century and a half helped, guided and supported them as they transformed an uninhabited malaria-infested swamp into the model of peaceful and ordered prosperity which Singapore is today. They are justly proud of their own achievement, but they willingly bear witness that it was we who made it possible. The foreigner who now visits Singapore is heartened to see what Asians can do, but he cannot but reflect also on the colonial Power which created the setting, educated the present leaders, trained them in the arts of business, administration and self-government, and finally, when the time came, handed over power to them not reluctantly or with recrimination but in friendship and goodwill. And if that foreigner is himself a man of goodwill he must acknowledge that Britain too has reason to be proud of her handiwork.

  1. kampong: Native village (Malay).

  2. Emily Post: American author (1872–1960) of Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home.

  3. Lee Kwan Yew: Prime Minister of Singapore, 1959–90. Lee led Singapore into independence from Britain, into (and out of) federation with Malaysia, and on to prosperity as an Asian Tiger. ‘In a matter of expediency,’ says de la Mare of Lee elsewhere in this despatch, ‘this most enigmatic of men … will brush aside all sentiment and all tradition, and will treat his best friends just as shabbily as he would his worst enemies.’

  4. Padang: Green space in the heart of Singapore’s business district.

  ‘For the first time since the Dutch swept the Medway, our country was despised’

  SIR FRANK JOHNSTON, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO AUSTRALIA, APRIL 1971

  There is real anger in this swansong. Johnston’s rage at the manner in which Britain shook off our colonial responsibilities in the Far East still resonates nearly forty years on. In the late 1960s Britain’s distaste for the trappings of empire saw us rush our exit, which inevitably led to stumbles. In 1967 more than a century of British rule in Aden (now Yemen) ended in an ignominious ‘scuttle’, a full-scale military retreat under sniper fire (‘without glory but without disaster’, as Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, the last high commissioner put it). Elsewhere in the Middle East, Britain’s unseeming haste to wash our hands of power damaged the nation’s standing among the newly independent states we left behind, and contradicted assurances given by our ministers in London, and repeated by our diplomats on the ground, that local allies and clients would not be left high and dry.

  Malaysia and Singapore proved to be another example. The trauma of separation was felt at the very extremes of the empire, as Johnston explains here. In the late 1960s British policy on maintaining troops in Malaysia and Singapore went through several evolutions – or ‘phases’ as Johnston calls them. The first was a commitment to stay for as long as those countries wanted to play host. The second phase was for withdrawal by the mid 1970s. The final phase was for accelerated withdrawal by the end of 1971. The manner in which these shifts were communicated to the Australians – each new position accompanied with an assurance of its permanence – made for a ‘painful process’ for the high commissioner, one in which he was powerless to do anything except ‘watch our Government’s credibility evaporate’.

  Britain’s relations with the Antipodes would be further stretched two years after Johnston wrote his despatch, when Edward Heath took the UK into the European Economic Community. Losing preferential access to the British market was hugely costly, wiping out (for example) much of the Australian butter industry overnight. Australia and New Zealand had been established as farming colonies – the larder of the empire – and the mother country was severing that link in order to sell goods to France and Germany. To add to the ignominy, Antipodeans arriving in London had for the first time to submit themselves to EEC border controls as ‘foreigners’.

  In the course of these proceedings there was a ludicrous episode which had such a disproportionately bad effect on our relations with Australia, and was also so symptomatic and characteristic of the period, that it should not be concealed from the historian. When we were preparing to give the Australians advance notice of the second phase, i.e., withdrawal in the mid-1970’s, one of the reasons discussed in Whitehall for this change of policy was the argument that ‘white faces’ did more harm than good o
n the mainland of Asia. The posts concerned, including Canberra, advised strongly that our case should rest on the economic and financial arguments, and that the ideological point about white faces should not be used. It was clear that in this country it would have the worst possible effect, and would jangle nerves very deep in the Australian character; after all, if you come to think of it, the Australians themselves are ‘white faces’ on their own mainland. In accordance with this advice, an official communication was made to the Australian Government basing the new policy entirely on economics and finance. At the same time however an authoritative British source conveyed to the Australians the political arguments in favour of planning to remove white faces from the mainland. When this message was reported to them, Mr. Holt1 and his Government simply exploded. I have never known the relations between the two countries more difficult. It was not only that the communication about white faces reflected seriously on the sincerity of the official British message, concentrating as it did exclusively on the economic and financial arguments. After all, it is nothing new for British Governments to be distrusted by their allies and associates; this has been a familiar situation to us at least since the Peace of Utrecht.2 But, up to now, if we had been distrusted, we had at least been taken seriously. It was the inherent frivolity of the ‘white faces’ episode which was so regrettable. To Australians the defence of South-East Asia was and is a matter of national survival. For us to tell them that we were withdrawing our forces, and to offer them instead a piece of trendy left-wing theology, was like seeing a swimmer in difficulties and throwing him a pair of waterwings by Mary Quant. It all accentuated the flibbertigibbet impression which, during these years, our country all too often gave overseas. In the eyes of Australians Britain seemed to be dwindling to a minute island where there was practically nothing except ‘swinging London’ and in which Westminster and Whitehall were insignificant compared to Carnaby Street and the King’s Road. We had lost our national reputation for gravitas and appeared as a giddy butterfly flitting unsteadily round the fringe of world politics. It was a heart-breaking period for British representatives on this side of the globe, a time of severe national humiliation. For the first time since the Dutch swept the Medway,3 our country was despised …