In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

  Round the back are a couple grunting in oral passion, as in the Penang fort. Further on, in the midst of the tombs, sits a man on a deck-chair, in shorts, two cans of lager at his feet. He grips a third and swigs mechanically, turning the pages of a magazine devoted to second-hand sports cars. Can this, I wonder, be the vicar? In the Church of England anything is possible. I pause and wait until he looks up peevishly.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I ask, ‘are you anything to do with the church?’ (or possibly, ‘Church?’)

  ‘Nah, mate. But I knows me way around.’

  ‘I’m trying to get in.’

  ‘Well, it’s locked innit. This is London. And it’s Sundee. The assistant vie lives in the house by the gate. I should try there if I was you.’ I do. He returns, sated of discourse, to study an article on wire wheels.

  ‘The curate is away teaching his Scottish dancing.’ Forget it. I go to the museum next door.

  The bell on the door brings out the custodian, a long-haired, busily spectacled man, used to repelling bousculant youth. A whiff of something stronger than Sunday mouthwash is in the air. I greet, I sniff around. Upstairs is an exhibition of English batik, tamed to the production of dressing-gowns and ‘art’. Raffles would have approved of that. I hit my head twice on low beams.

  Downstairs I launch into my curatorial solidarity act, ask about the church, Raffles.

  ‘Highwood House,’ he says. ‘You can walk across the fields from here. It’s been through the mill since Raffles lived there, nursing home, private school. Everyone’s had a go at it. In a decent country, it would be a Raffles museum but there you are. Church? Well, I’m not supposed to but I’ve got the key. Take you round if you can hang on a bit. He’s got no tomb, of course. Just a bit of a plaque they put up later. The vicar had shares in a West Indies plantation and seeing as how Raffles opposed slavery, they didn’t get on.’

  The inside of the church is the familiar mix of cold stone and warm colour. Most of the memorials seem to celebrate feats of competitive campanology. Raffles is reduced to a little square of brass, the sort of thing you might screw to your gate, saying ‘No Hawkers’ or ‘Beware of the Dog’.

  ‘I farm the ground, 111 acres, myself, and Sophia takes charge of the Poultry and Pigs. We brew our own beer and bake our own bread and lead an entire Country life. The change of air, scene and interest have already worked an amendment in my health, and as this is the first point to be attended to I devote my time almost exclusively to the farm and grounds …’

  – T. S. Raffles

  It is a verdant haunch of English countryside, nibbled at by trim suburban villas. The air zithers with heat, muting sound like snow. It is thick, a medium in its own right, like the water in an aquarium. Time is particularly slow today. It takes an eternity to raise your hand to wipe the sweat off your forehead.

  Parks make the greenery practical, and Singaporean polyethnicity has come home to visit Raffles, a world reversed, like English batik. The cold realities of England buckle and melt in the heat. The cricket teams treading the soft grass are all black, while Indians and Chinese dominate the tennis courts. A Tamil family eat a picnic, the parents withdrawing under a tree, dipping languidly into dishes with their fingers, the children baring their flesh redundantly to darkening sunshine, ears plugged with Walkmans. In the streets, paunched Pakistanis whisper past in fat-tyred Mercedes.

  Up the hill, may, bluebells and cow-parsley are all in riotous growth, the whole impoverished herbarium of the townie. As I pick my way through the trees there is a crackle of twigs, the whiplash of branches as some great beast moves through the glade. A deer perhaps, as in the park at Bogor. No – a lurking, fat flasher performing his austerities in the undergrowth, who waves his slack, pink slug at me in a token fashion, without – it is implied – personal relish or rancour. A duty paid to the mere name of concupiscence. Or perhaps he is waving it at Nature, some sort of besotted ecologist. He looks dispirited, driven by joyless devils. It is hard to believe this is happening. The English way seems to be to insist it isn’t and intimidate with my lack of belief. Help thou my unbelief.

  ‘The East India Company are now talking of taking up my case and granting me an annuity, but I fear it will be very moderate, and £500 a year is the largest amount I hear of. This, had I the means of living independent of them, I should not be inclined to accept, but necessity and consideration of my family must predominate and I must e’en be content with what I can get. I have unfortunately been a considerable loser by the cession [to the Dutch] of Bencoolen – some thousands. My Bankers have failed here and altogether my prospects are not as comfortable as they were.’

  – T. S. Raffles

  At the top of the rise is Mill Hill School, with immaculately mannered Indian boys, conversing in cut-glass English accents as they wait for their parents to call and take them to tea. A cricketing pullover lies on the path. I pick it up. The woven nametape reads ‘Ahmed Akbar – fourth form’. Surely I saw that willowy Chinese prefect, now playing croquet, at the Raffles Institution? An absurd ‘gate of honour’ stands outside the school – massively shut – but, like a sacred principle, with plenty of space to skirt round it in everyday life. It is impossible not to create in your head silly rituals that would be played out there, perhaps even colourful brass-band ceremonies.

  * * *

  Life never tired of hitting Raffles when he was down. Having destroyed his family it now completed the rout of his modest fortune. Late in 1826 Raffles’ Javanese bankers went bankrupt, stripping him of most of his small remaining capital. The extraordinary thing is that he showed no signs of bitterness, though the incompetence of his friend and banker, McQuoid, seems to have been largely responsible. Friends began to notice his speech had become thick and inarticulate. Life was paring him down for the final blow. It came in the form of a reply to his many years of petitioning the Company for justice in their judgement of his Java administration. They grudgingly approved much but still referred, ponderously, to the land sale as a ‘questionable proceeding’. Attached to the judgement was not the pension whose meagreness he confidently deplored, but a bill for over £20,000 in repayment of accounting quibbles going back nearly ten years, charged with interest. The unkindest cut of all was to demand repayment of expenses involved in the founding of Singapore. On the same day Raffles became first president of the Zoological Society. They would put a bust of him in the Lion House in memory of Singapore, the Lion City. He was to have more busts than children.

  * * *

  There it was, Highwood House, a good, serviceable house, a reduced, middle-class mockery of the classical, but very far from the sprawling splendours of Buitenzorg. ‘Unpretending but very convenient’, it had been termed. A blue plaque, attached curiously to the gate, recalls the founding of Singapore. Here Raffles exhibited some of his Eastern ‘curiosities’, dusted no doubt by the Editor. Poverty had reduced them to buying in nothing but wine and fish, a reversion to the subsistence economy of their Bengkulu estate. Yet still no bitterness poisoned Raffles’ life. At the end he was reduced to doing his own haymaking, the sort of task that pleased him best, though he complained a little of the heat. He had become a marhaenist.

  To one side stood a pub, doubtless the one Raffles had bought with the estate. I looked at the sign – The Rising Sun. I had to smile. It was as if I could feel keys turning and tumblers clicking in my head. That, after all, had been the name of the Masonic lodge in Bengkulu, Raffles’ lodge. I remembered a comment he had laughingly made. ‘Wilberforce has the “Crown” and I the “Rising Sun”.’ He had delighted in the absurdity of it. Was there here some great secret revealed? Should I look for obelisks or other signs of Masonic conspiracy in the car park? I thought not. After all, the rising sun was the symbol of Edward III and, I was sure, old maps would show the pub had that name long before Raffles. It was the last in a line of serendipities, and clearly amused Raffles himself.

  ‘When I was a small child, maybe two years old, Mother pronounced a benedic
tion on me. She had risen before sunrise and was sitting motionless in the dark on the verandah of our little house, doing nothing, saying nothing, just looking toward the East and patiently watching the break of day.

  I, too, got up and came to her. She stretched forth her arms and, gathering me to her bosom, she hugged me silently. Moments later, she turned me around so that I, too, faced the East. Then she said softly, “Son, you are looking at the sunrise. And you, my son, will be a man of glory, a great leader of his people, because your mother gave birth to you at dawn. We Javanese believe that one born at the moment of sunrise is predestined. Never, never forget you are a child of the dawn.”’

  – C. Adams, Soekarno: An Autobiography

  * * *

  ‘The poor dear fellow [Raffles] got up and left his room at five o’clock and at six was a corpse, found seated upon the stairs after life had fled. Sir Everard Home who was attached, I believe sincerely, came to High Wood, and under his superintendence the body was opened and his report stands a striking proof how little the best medical opinions are to be depended upon. For years I had witnessed the sufferings of my friend and whenever medical aid was called in, whether in India or in Europe, no notice was ever taken of the sufferings of the head but as they said to denote disease of stomach or liver. Yet on dissection, it was found that liver and stomach were quite perfect and sound in every respect, whilst the head gave the clearest proofs of long continued disease. And the opinion was that if death had not occurred, idiocy or madness must have soon appeared, an opinion that reconciled his best friends to his early death, for he was only forty-five years of age.’

  – Captain R. Travers

  Confusion was to dog Raffles to the end. As well as two sets of names, he has two ages and dates of death. Being born at sea on 5 July is the same as being born on land on the 6th, since in those days the nautical day ran from noon to noon and the land day from midnight to midnight. Since he died on the morning of 5 July he was, in fact, still forty-four.

  The East India Company were incredulous when probate revealed how little the total goods and property of Sir Stamford Raffles, forty-four, were worth. Normally, anyone who had enjoyed such high office in the Company would have devoted himself avidly to feathering his own nest. Raffles had been unusual in spending freely on science and learning and had never stinted on creature comforts and hospitality, signs not of love of luxury but rather largeness of spirit. The Company was therefore grudgingly obliged to reduce its claims on his estate and settle for £10,000 in cash, contenting itself with thus stripping the Editor of all her capital.

  Another wave of mortality engulfed the Editor, taking her sister and father, as if in mockery of Bengkulu. But her first duty was to clear her husband’s name of all the insinuations of the Company. She sat in the lonely house on the hill, surrounded by signs of former greatness and Raffles’ school-boy treasures – worthless from a purely pecuniary point of view – and began to gather the materials for her Memoir, to transmute personal experience into history and so, perhaps, lay it to rest.

  * * *

  It was cool and quiet in the Abbey. The notion of paying to enter a church troubled Yet, transported to London by the dark ways of the academic mafia. It was clearly wrong if you were a Christian, and if a Muslim it smacked troublesomely of sloppy offering at the wrong address. He was not happy with all these images and reacted like an Ulsterman in the face of high Popery. He edged nervously past them, taking care not to touch.

  ‘It is,’ I said, ‘like the Taman Prastasi, in Jakarta, just memorials. Here there are not even bodies.’

  We paused before Raffles, myself saying nothing, waiting to see how he would respond. With what I had learned of the many griefs of Raffles’ life, the enigmatic smile now looked less like patrician serenity and more like a pale European version of the Javanese shit-eating grin. He had been no child of the dawn – rather, one of the setting sun. Yet paused, smiled, looked up and read.

  ‘Wah! Someone from Indonesia! So this is why we came here. What does it mean, gone to the place where only his harmonies are surpassed?’

  ‘No,’ I corrected. ‘That’s not Raff-lesh, that’s another one, Purcell, a musician. They put it over his head because there was no room.’ He looked blank. ‘Too many great men.’

  ‘Oh.’ He ran his hand over Raffles’ foot in a gesture that looked like affection. ‘The foot,’ he alleged, ‘has been broken and mended.’ He sounded like an appraiser about to deliver a low valuation.

  I looked. He was right.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he twinkled, ‘if I pray to Raffles, he will mend my sore feet as Bung Karno’s well-water mended yours.’

  I pouted sceptically.

  He peered at the date. ‘Today is his birthday.’ I had not noticed.

  ‘Happy Birthday to you/You belong in a zoo.’

  Yet grinned. ‘Ah yes. It is like our lanjut umurnya. You sing it for birthdays. But why was Raff-lesh so important?’

  It was hard to know where to begin. Should I speak concretely of Singapore, the pearl of the Eastern Empire, or abstractly of social justice, the ending of slavery, freedom of trade and the duty to govern for the good of the governed? Crawfurd had written, with an author’s bitchiness, that Raffles was not an original thinker. There was some truth in that. After all, neither the Javanese land reform nor the Singapore Institution had been entirely new. But what would have been grandiloquent Empire-building in others seemed in Raffles to rest upon human sympathy. He never lost the ability to see himself in his subjects. Sukarno wrote somewhere that revolutionaries were either destroyers or builders. He, he pointed out, had been trained as an architect, therefore had the soul of an architect. Well, Raffles had the soul of one too. Not knowing which of these to speak of, I spoke of them all. Some Japanese, true children of the dawn, gathered, whispering, to listen.

  ‘Wrong,’ said Yet.

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Wrong. I see the importance of Raff-lesh every time I walk down the street. We drive on the left. The Dutch drove on the right. That is Raff-lesh. He bothered to work out the traffic regulations. The Dutch didn’t. So, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, we all drive on the left.’

  There came an angry poking at my elbow.

  ‘Oi, you. Can’t you read?’ It was a uniformed attendant, red of face, indicating a ‘No lecturing’ sign, puffing outrage. The sign was a nice piece of work of polished wood, lettered in gold, firmly jointed. ‘You’re causing a blockage. Move on. If I catch you again, I’ll have you removed.’

  Yet was delighted. ‘Where shall we go now? But please, no tombs, no bodies, no Raff-lesh.’

  Good Lord Minto was further along there somewhere, lurking undiscovered in the shadows, but perhaps Yet was right. Too much necrophilia.

  ‘It’s a nice day,’ I observed innocently. ‘Too nice to be indoors. Let’s go to the zoo. They have lions.’

  A Bibliographical Note

  The most complete study of Stamford Raffles is C. E. Wurtzburg’s Raffles of the Eastern Isles (Hodder and Stoughton 1954, OUP paperback 1986). Raffles’ papers have become widely scattered as the result of his prodigious correspondence and Wurtzburg, a former Singapore shipper, did more than anyone else to bring them together. The book, pruned down for publication after Wurtzburg’s death, has all the virtues of an archive, but somehow loses the sense of Raffles as a person.

  The bedrock of all Raffles studies must be Demetrius Boulger’s monumental The Life of Sir Stamford Raffles (London 1897). Boulger came to the subject after meeting a member of the Raffles family in a London fever-hospital and making his own vow to the deity to write such a book if spared. It is clear that he had access to family material now lost, but the work is hopelessly biased in favour of ‘Raffles as Hero’. It is biography as penitential, memorial architecture.

  Best by far of the ‘lightweights’ is Emily Hahn’s Raffles of Singapore (Doubleday, New York 1946). It is lively, chatty and speculative, while drawing on important Dutch published m
aterial that is ignored by most academic biographers. It homes in on ‘Raffles the Man’. As an American Singaporean, Hahn brings a welcome breath of fresh air to a subject heavy with colonial piety. Since Hahn, Raffles has attracted several popular biographers, but none has anything to add to her.

  For contemporary insights into Raffles we rely heavily on Sophia, Lady Raffles, the Editor. Her Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles: F.R.S.:&c. (London 1830) is the original source of many later interpretative works. Unfortunately, she sticks almost entirely to ‘Raffles as Public Figure’, steering clear of exactly that priceless personal information only she could have given. It is largely through this work that we know her, as she piquantly describes the erratic and eccentric life foisted on her by a man she clearly adored, in formal, costive, slightly puzzled prose.

  The foremost scholar on British involvement in the East Indies is John Bastin, who has brought together a number of invaluable sources that shed light on Raffles and the era in which he worked. Memoirs of the Raffles Museum, 4, 1957 contains the journal of Raffles’ assistant T. Travers. The Native Policies of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in Java and Sumatra (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1957) and The British in West Sumatra (University of Malaya Press, Kuala Lumpur 1965) are fundamental to any assessment of Raffles as administrator. Also, J. Bastin and M. Archer’s The Raffles Drawings in the India Office Library London (OUP, Kuala Lumpur 1978) and J. Bastin and P. Rohatgi’s Prints of Southeast Asia in the India Office Library (HMSO, London 1979) contain useful pictures of many of the places he visited.

  The indispensable work of Raffles himself is his History of Java (London 1817), an amazing jumble of miscellaneous knowledge. It shows us a man of omnivorous learning but little time, with an eighteenth-century faith that it is possible to learn everything. Through what he holds to be facts, Raffles shows us some of his most strongly held opinions. Many of these were shaped by Lord Minto, who is most usefully represented by his own letters home from India, collected as Lord Minto in India: Life and Letters of Gilbert Elliot (London 1880) and published by his wife, the Countess of Minto.