were a confident, hard-working pioneer bunch mostly, free of the tight grip of respectability and correctness that held down so many other white men in the East. Engineers unashamed to wear dungarees were running the island’s ship repair business. Planters had the look of men whose agricultural knowledge came from fields. And ships’ officers whose home port this was, were the hard-bitten, salt-water men whose navigation had more relation to the sea than to trigonometry.49
Not all who came out East, however, were resilient and successful. For every affluent entrepreneur like Jimmy Irvine, others were defeated by the challenge. While in Perak, Isabella Bird came across two disconsolate-looking Ceylon planters, prospecting for coffee, but was unmoved: ‘An enterprising son of an Edinburgh “Bailie” has been trying coffee-planting beyond the Perak [river], but he has got into difficulties with his labourers, and is “getting out of it”.’ (A Malay or Chinese labour force could not be galvanized into working on remote estates; not until the introduction of Tamil coolies in large numbers was the problem resolved.) It was obvious to Isabella that only practical men with ‘Good sense, perseverance, steadiness, and a degree of knowledge of planting’ were likely to succeed. ‘The two “prospectors” look as if they had heard couleur de rose reports, and had not “struck ile”. Possibly they expected to find hotels and macadamised roads …’ she concluded dismissively.50 Bruce Lockhart knew several men who did not make it. Harry Cumming, the brother of a rubber magnate, had been a failure. (He was later blown to bits at Gallipoli.) There was also Robert Engler, a mystery German of good family, who had been an officer in a crack Cavalry regiment and had become a remittance man … He never did a stroke of work, but drank beer by the gallon.’ And there was the sad case of ‘Monkey’ Holland, who was too easy-going, kind, generous and hospitable to make a fortune from rubber planting.51 Good connections were no guarantee of success, for ‘Monkey’ was the brother-in-law of Lord Forteviot.
In the jungle, muscle was more important than brains. Yet muscle allied to an upper-middle-class background was considered the best combination. Those sharp distinctions of speech which were a feature of the English class system were brought into focus by the intimate lifestyle of the European community, but less so among the Scots, where difference in speech went unnoticed and everyone was acceptable. In English circles, however, accents and speech mannerisms were a subject of uninhibited comment and even affected job opportunities. As one public-school planter observed, ‘the unfortunate lad who drops an “h” can’t get on, no matter how good he is’.52 The police force was one of the few government departments where ‘the class standard was lower’.53 Back in 1880, Emily Innes remarked how tough Cockneys found employment in untamed Selangor as ‘English policemen of the rough-and-ready order, whose ‘arts were in the right place, according to their own account, but whose h’s were decidedly in the wrong’. She was mildly amused that ‘One of these who constantly acted as interpreter for the Resident, infected all the Malay rajas in the country, so that they began to talk and write Tuan Hinnes and the Hoffice.’54 Maurice Hillier, on the other hand, found it sad that stories should circulate about a Harbour Master of Malacca who had ‘difficulty with his aspirates’. A ‘sturdy pompous individual’ and ‘very much an old sea dog’ in his manner, he became a little garrulous at a Residency dinner attended by the Governor. Commenting on present and former residents, he observed, ‘It’s a curious thing but when I came to Malacca there wasn’t a haitch in the place; there was h’lrving and h’Isemonger and h’O’Brien and h’Elcum and h’Everingham: and now they’re all haitches ‘ere; there’s ‘Arvey and ‘Odge and ‘Ogg and ‘Ellier and ‘Owell and ‘Armer and a lot more: It’s very strange!’55
In the days before a modern civil service, the administrators were a mixed bunch. Most were military or naval officers; few understood Malay or the people of Malaya. Colonel Butterworth, for instance, an early Governor of the Straits Settlements, was a pompous eccentric, nicknamed ‘Butter-pot the Great’.56 Among the early Residents there were men whose bluff, insensitive manner offended the Malay code of politeness. Captain Bloomfield Douglas of Selangor was ‘tall, vigorous … with white hair and a florid complexion’ which belied his pusillanimity; he had an unfortunate habit of bawling at subordinates ‘in tones that would have done admirably well for giving orders during a storm at sea’.57 Like Captain Speedy, he was eased out of the service. Another officious type was ‘Mr. X.’, Acting Postmaster-General in Singapore.
He was of portly figure, had a shining red face adorned with white whiskers and moustache and somewhat resembled the ‘Indian Nabob’ of the early Victorian era. He was a good whip and made an impressive figure when he drove his pair of horses in a high mail phaeton round the esplanade of an afternoon, wearing a white top hat and having on the back seat two Indian syces clothed in gorgeous livery … One day a business man strolled into his office without having the politeness to take off his hat. ‘Can I speak to the postmaster?’ said he. ‘If you take off your hat,’ said X., glaring at him, ‘you can speak to the Postmaster-General. I am that person.’58
Yet there were also selfless and dedicated officers, such as Police Superintendent Haywood of Malacca, who was ‘very brave and used to danger’, and Mr Syers, who was later promoted to head the police force in the Federated Malay States, a fluent Malay speaker and Superintendent of Military Police in Selangor, a thoroughly efficient man, sensible and conscientious, with a concern to understand the people, the flora, fauna and geology of the Malay States.59
Of the early Residents, Hugh Low of Perak proved a model colonial servant, and the success of the Residential system was attributed to him. In thirty years’ experience in the East, Low brought
not only a thoroughly idiomatic knowledge of the Malay language, but a sympathetic insight into the Malay character to his present post. He understands the Malays and likes them … His manner is quiet and unpretending as can possibly be, and he speaks to Malays as respectfully as to Europeans, neither lowering thereby his dignity nor theirs … He is altogether devoted to the interests of Perak.60
Equally admirable was the first Resident of Negri Sembilan.
I do not think Martin Lister had an enemy in the world … He was a good man and did his duty in this world and was loved by every Malay in the State. When I told the Malay Sergeant-Major of Police yesterday [of his death] he burst out crying in the office and the Malays are slow to show feelings … the Malay Chiefs … all loved him. And so thought the Chinese of Kuala Pilah who erected an arch in his memory and carefully tended the little garden in which it stood.61
These early Residents were ‘jacks of all trades’, with onerous responsibilities but considerable autonomy. Captain Murray, resident of Sungei Ujong, regarded the state as his little kingdom over which he presided as ‘judge, “sitting in Equity”, Superintendent of Police, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Surveyor of Taxes, besides being Board of Trade, Board of Works, and I know not what besides. In fact he is the Government.’ In addition, he was also thoroughly honourable, and was both beloved and trusted.62 The District Officer also had a duty to know his patch. Denison at Telok Anson was a typically conscientious officer of the 1880s, described by his subordinate as ‘the most hard working man I have ever met’.63 He liked working in remote outposts, and enjoyed the compensatory perks. It was said of him, ‘Old D. of Telok Anson drinks nothing but champagne now, his allowance of whisky used to be at least a bottle and a half a day. He is about as hearty an old man as I ever met.’ And ‘I don’t think he ever sleeps; he is always out first thing after daylight with a little short stick under his arm poking into every nook and corner all over the town’. His position gave a District Officer both authority and independence. As one of them confessed, ‘the people are all more like my children than anything else, and when one is the father of some thousands of children it is hard to have to move’.64 It was the autonomy and self-reliance of these pioneers which probably explains the number of ‘characters’ litterin
g Malaya’s colonial past, for often there was a fine line between individualism and eccentricity, conscientiousness and obsession.
C. C. Brown, the British Adviser in Trengganu, was a case in point. An intense, scholarly Malayophile, he always insisted on conducting meetings in Malay, even when no Malays were present! One of the most colourful characters was a mine-owner and planter called Athelstane Braddon, known to everyone in Negri Sembilan as ‘the Abang’ (Elder Brother) as he had a younger brother, ‘Adek’, in Seremban, said to be the most brilliant doctor in Malaya and a pioneering researcher into beri-beri. Between them they lived in Malaya for close on a century. The Abang had been in Jelebu for as long as anyone could remember. He had a shrewd business head, sported a powerful Hupmobile (the only car in Kuala Klawang in 1913), built himself a five-hole golf course, and converted a rice-godown he owned into the local club. After fitting it with all amenities, he charged the members $5 a month. But such was the force of his personality that any peccadilloes met with amusement rather than disapproval.65 Braddon was a true Tuan Besar, as was Theodore Hubback, a handsome, rugged individual, son of a Lord Mayor of Liverpool, who began in the Public Works Department in 1895. Later he made his name as an expert on large fauna and protector of wild life. As honorary Game Warden of Pahang from 1920 and pioneer of conservation, he was involved in the politics of big-game hunting in conjunction with the Malay princes, agriculturalists and hunting enthusiasts.
Among the pioneering District Officers, Hubert Berkeley was considered unorthodox, even in the tolerant society of British Malaya. A grandson of the Earl of Kenmare and descendant of an ancient Catholic line, he ruled his fiefdom of upper Perak like a feudal prince. Berkeley was suspicious of any European posted to his district, but treated the young Financial Assistant]. W. S. Reid well once he knew he was not a Secretariat spy. ‘H. B.’ was, in Reid’s opinion, ‘a very great English gentleman’, albeit an eccentric figure in his sarong and baju of highly variegated tartan and his straw boater crowned with a ribbon inscribed ‘H.M.S. Malaya’.66 When Alan Morkill succeeded him as District Officer, Berkeley had been in Grik for twenty-one years. ‘He had woven a legend about himself and I had the impression that he saw himself as an old time Malay chief … Many were the colourful stories about him.’ One that was often repeated concerned Berkeley’s outside latrine, a two-holer, where he invited guests to sit alongside him while he belaboured them with earthy anecdotes and jokes. ‘I took over from him three riding horses and six elephants,’ observed Morkill; ‘there was also a barouche and pair in which he drove daily to a hot spring with his sais [syce – coachman] dressed in his family’s heraldic colours. When showing me round he pointed to the Courthouse and said, “Here we administer justice, not law.”’67
Berkeley worked tirelessly to promote local agriculture. In his long career he was unfailingly judge, counsellor and father-confessor to his people. Few Britons handled the Malays so well or were loved so much by them. He hated all reminders of urban civilization – modern communications, industry and machines – and identified totally with the time-tested Malay way of life. Cars were his bête noire: ‘Nasty, smelly things, not to be compared with a good horse.’68 His hostility to change was total, but he fought a losing battle, and when he finally left upper Perak the district ‘began to feel the hot breath of modernization … He was one of the last of a dying breed.’69 C. D. Bowen, who served in the Civil Service from 1886 to 1919, saw the dangers facing the pioneer who could not keep up with the times, admitting ‘I used to be a Raja in Selama, till the carriage road was finished and with that came civilisation.’70 Bowen identified two signs of economic progress: agricultural self-sufficiency and improved communications. From the 1890s he brought padi planters into Perak, and later as District Officer he supported agricultural improvements in the Port Dickson area of Negri Sembilan.
The credit for transforming Selangor and Perak, however, went to the Resident, Frank Swettenham, with the backing of British and American capital. The creation of a road and rail network to support tin production and a new rubber industry was the key to development, as Bowen observed:
Now Swettenham’s policy is to open this country as fast as ever he can with roads, railways etc., he has made Selangor as prosperous as Perak and it is a country that has not half the resources of the latter. Government in a country like this must help capitalists or they will not enter it; now the way to help them is to open up the country with roads and railways thereby providing transport.71
The construction of new port facilities on the Malacca Straits was the final strategy for modernization. Port Weld was the first of the new railway ports, built to receive the Larut tin for transshipment to Penang. James Richard Crawford, a locomotive engineer who helped to construct the eight-mile rail link with Taiping, drove the first train when it was opened in the presence of the Governor, Sir Frederick Weld, amid official fanfares. For the next decade Port Weld was Malaya’s leading west-coast port. With the opening up of the Kinta valley came another port development in the 1880s. Telok Anson was ‘a well laid out town of brick and plank houses of about 6,000 people with public buildings … [and] with daily steamer service to Penang and the coast ports south-wards ending with Singapore’.72 By 1892 a start had been made on Swettenham’s plan to link this port forty miles from the mouth of the Perak river with the tin towns of the interior. C. D. Bowen noted that
The railway from Telok Anson to Batang Padang and to Kinta is proressing rapidly and as it progresses the whole face of the country is changing. One can drive now where only three years ago one had to ride an elephant through jungle paths; there are now quite 200 miles of macadamised roads in Perak irrespective of bridle paths. The Europeans are increasing. When I first came [in 1886] there were about eighty or 90 Europeans in the State, now there are nearer 500. Very soon there will be a large planting population in this part of the country and Perak bids fair to be a second Ceylon.73
To complete the port structure of the Protected States two more outlets were developed. Port Dickson served the trade of Negri Sembilan, and by the early 1900s Port Swettenham replaced Klang as the port of Kuala Lumpur and Selangor after the rail link was built in 1889. The growth of inter-state communications accelerated after 1896. By that time it was clear that Kuala Lumpur would become the principal town, railway centre and capital of the Federated States. By 1900 good progress had been made thanks to an ambitious programme, started in 1888, which would embellish the town centre, surrounding the parade ground with palatial buildings. But rubber and railways guaranteed its prosperity, with central workshops, yards, offices and a spectacular railway station – a spatial ‘cross between an extravagant Oriental palace and a mosque’.74
The rail system was one of Britain’s major pioneering legacies to Malaya. By the early twentieth century there were a hundred stations in the peninsula. Some were more patently functional than Kuala Lumpur’s Tank Road station, the original terminus in Singapore, for instance, ‘had a tower which made it an aid to ships navigating the harbour’, and the terminus at Prai in Butterworth was a ‘clock-towered station in white stone’.75 By1906 some 350 miles of track curved its way from Gemas on the Negri Sembilan–Johore border to Prai, a projected new port opposite to Penang. Singapore had had its own system since 1903, and when the Johore line was finished in 1909 Malaya’s railway system was completed. Only the causeway link with the rest of Malaya and the extension to Siam had to wait until the interwar years.
The economic prosperity of the Federated Malay States after 1896 convinced Sir Frank Swettenham that Britain should extend her political influence to the rest of the peninsula. Promoted to Governor of the Straits Settlements and High Commissioner for the Malay States in 1901, he urged the need to rescind the 1826 Anglo-Siamese treaty which had guaranteed Siamese suzerainty over Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan and Trengganu – something that earlier governors like Clementi Smith had also wanted to end. His able successor, Sir John Anderson, was sympathetic to business interests which he fel
t would be advantaged by greater union between the Malay States and the Straits Settlements.
The northern states had long been within Britain’s sphere of trading influence, Kedah in particular. But the propensity of the rulers of Kelantan and Trengganu to grant dubious concessions opening north Malaya to French or German interference was unacceptable to British interests. The rajas, however, were jealous of their Islamic–Malayan culture and resisted being drawn into the Federated Malay States. Anderson introduced changes in the government structure of the Federated States, but his significant achievement was an agreement with Siam in 1909 that the northern Malay states should be transferred to the British sphere of influence. When the terms were revealed, the Malay rulers felt they had been betrayed. In Sultan Abdul Hamid’s vivid language, Kedah had been ‘bought and sold like a buffalo’.76 But the Sultans were powerless to affect events. Britain withdrew her extraterritorial rights in Siam and provided a generous loan for railway building in return for Siam’s concession. Kelantan, Trengganu, Kedah and Perlis entered a new relationship with Britain as the Unfederated Malay States. The Sultans retained their independence, but agreed to the presence of a British Adviser as a guarantee of British ‘protection’. This left Johore standing alone, but in the end the economic arguments for co-operation in the peninsula under a system of British advice and protection were persuasive. In 1914 the independent-minded Sultan Ibrahim agreed to join the Unfederated States and to accept a British ‘General Adviser’. Forty years of intervention had come to fruition. Despite its curious tripartite constitutional structure, all Malaya was, to varying degrees, under British authority.
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