Once the crisis of 1915 was over, however, the residents of Malaya saw how fortunate they were to be far removed from the theatres of conflict. They threw themselves into patriotic fund-raising. Mrs Lee, wife of the Chinese millionaire Lee Choon Guan, devoted her time to organizing fêtes in aid of the British Red Cross and raised a substantial fund from the Chinese community. Among Britons the war became a raison d’etre for amateur-dramatic enthusiasts. The revue My Word which was performed in Singapore’s Victoria Theatre in December 1915 before the Governor, Sir Arthur Young, and officers of the armed forces, ‘played to a packed house bubbling with enthusiasm … like a firework show with a fizz and a whizz, with any amount of verve and elan’, and the Amateur Dramatic Committee was able to hand over £600 to the Officers’ Families Fund. Following their next event, in 1916, it was the turn of the Star and Garter Homes for Disabled Soldiers and Sailors to receive a cheque. But such annual events were crowned in April 1918 by the ‘Pageant of Empire’. Given in aid of the War Emergency Fund, this was an ambitious celebration of the traditional music and dance of member countries presented by the ‘Children of the Empire’.59 Those who took part in, and supported, these lavish theatricals had the satisfaction of doing their bit to keep up national morale.
The war years were a catalyst for change: new opportunities and changes in the economy, transport, the role of government, social habits, dress, and experience of women as well as men threw into relief the old regime of pre-war Malaya. Not all these developments were welcomed by people who remembered pre-war days. T. P. Coe, returning as a veteran in 1919, was shocked by the social tensions, the effects of war-weariness and inflation.
The country seemed to be in a parlous condition. Wages and prices, but not salaries, were up double. Standards were up accordingly, e.g. a respectable European could no longer ride a push-bicycle. Rice control was complicating Government finances and domestic life – even the Sunday curry had become a matter of conscience … Above all there was the great gulf between those who had not been to the War … and those who had.60
Many other European men felt the same. They had worked throughout the war without leave and were tired. They had seen their salaries frozen or their earnings fall, and had expected better of colonial life. Captain William Brown was typical of the old guard. He dubbed these the sad years, for they lacked the camaraderie of the past: wives were driven back to England by Penang’s dullness, so there was no one to organize social evenings at home. Penang life was far different from the pleasant social activity of pre-war years.
In 1917 a new threat reached Malaya: the killer epidemic of influenza. ‘I first heard of the ‘flu in the papers when conditions were described in China where pneumonic plague was said to exist,’ C. R. Harrison recalled. He was by now a prominent rubber planter in Selangor.
At that time Chinese labour was being recruited for work in France behind the Front. They were sent by ships which travelled all over the world to dodge the submarine menace and when the recruits became ill on board they were dropped at the nearest port of call for treatment. This in my opinion is the chief reason for the spread of the disease throughout the world. When the influenza arrived in Malaya it spread very rapidly and soon there was little or no work done on the estates.61
Harrison’s methods for dealing with it were pretty crude, but the results were satisfactory in reducing fatalities. He isolated sick rubber workers, gave them blankets, and fed them on brandy and milk, until he himself went down with influenza, double pneumonia and malaria, which he was lucky to survive.62 Meanwhile, ‘Death stalked through the island [of Penang]. It affected all the people of Malaya equally, cut down strong and weak, old and young … The treatment among them for the hot fever and aching bones was bathing in cold water. It was fatal. Families were wiped out in a day.’63 Reaching Europe in 1918, the grisly march of so-called Spanish flu decimated the ranks of exhausted veterans, who died in France while awaiting mobilization. One was Lillian Newton’s only brother, Willie. He had been in the war from the first day, and had risen to the rank of Captain. Still in uniform, he succumbed to influenza on 22 February 1919.
When at last it came, the Armistice was greeted joyously by all the races with bells and sirens and happy chanting. St Andrew’s Cathedral was the setting for a moving Armistice Day service. Just as at home, Malayans commemorated the dead on war memorials. The old generation retired or, feeling themselves outsiders, kept a lower profile. Youthful newcomers introduced a mood of optimism. Peace spurred an immediate post-war boom, boosting Malaya’s staple industries. In 1919 Singapore celebrated the centenary of its foundation as a British territory. The city seemed to symbolize renewal and to offer Malayans the hope of a new era of prosperity and development in the 1920s.
Golden Years 1920-1940
6
Halcyon Days
Looking back over the 1920 and ’30s, there was a special quality to the life of the European community in Malaya, and many who experienced it felt in retrospect a warm glow of remembrance and gratitude. Time and again old Malay hands, like Harold Tomlinson, spoke of the magic of the country that held them in thrall. ‘Malaya casts a spell over the susceptible and may never let them go,’ he wrote, recalling his life in Singapore after the Great War.1 And that idiosyncratic personality Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, posted in 1932 to Negri Sembilan, would never forget
It was here [in Seremban] … that I first fell under the spell of Malaya that has held me ever since. My time there was short … but it was enough for me to fall for everything: for the mountains and plains and the streams, and the empty coasts of sand so golden in the dusk; for the charm of the inhabitants … the elegance of their gestures, and when young, the ineffable grace of their physique.2
In applying to the Civil Service after graduating from Cambridge in 1933, John Peel had no higher ambition than to follow in the footsteps of his father, Sir William. ‘As I’d been born in Penang … I knew what a delightful country it was … quite frankly, it was one of the ace countries of the Empire, so I put Malaya first and was lucky enough to get it.’3 Leslie Froggatt, an experienced marine engineer working for a subsidiary of Alfred Holt’s Blue Funnel Line in the 1930s, also quickly felt at home in the land of the Malays, whom he regarded as Nature’s gentlemen (an expression much loved by English colonials). He savoured the feeling that his feet were ‘squarely planted on the sun-baked soil of Singapore’.4
Initial impressions were deeply indelible. ‘One seldom forgets the first sight of Malayan shores,’ wrote Mrs Gun Munro: ‘low shores … lying on the edge of deep blue water … a land of perpetual summer.’5 The approach by water lay between ‘the mountains of Malaya as blue, as languorous, and as majestic as my fancy ever pictured them’; and Pulau Pinang, the offshore sentinel of the peninsula, a long curved hump rising from the sea, as if it were the half-submerged back of a water buffalo, ‘a small sleepy version of Hong Kong set in the Indian Ocean’.6 Against the backdrop of Penang Hill and the screen of luxuriant vegetation, the bustling streets of Georgetown – the walls of Fort Cornwallis, wharves, shops and pagodas – appeared cocooned in a mass of coconut trees areca palms and sugar cane. Beyond the commercial centre lay bays and beaches, residential avenues of angsenas, ‘from which tiny blossoms fell gently to the ground like golden snow’, and flame of the forest curving upwards as if the talons of a dancing girl.7 Marine Drive, in particular, lingered in the memory of one old-time planter: to him it was quite simply one of the most beautiful roads in the world. Ainsworth’s sentiments were echoed in 1927 by a journalist glimpsing Penang for the first time. ‘I did not think I had ever seen anything so beautiful in my life before, not even in cherry-blossom time in Japan’; he was overwhelmed by the ‘white sandy beaches, coconut-palm fringed, with the green-blue sea caressing them gently, rhythmically, soothingly’.8 A few years later, in 1934, another newcomer recalled the unchanging scene: ‘Bright sunshine, blue sky and white clouds above a bright green fresh foliage glistening after recent rain.’9
‘Penang was a place that never failed to delight,’ enthused Katharine Sim, one of many English women who cherished memories of happy times there.10 Mabel Price lived in the East for thirty-three years from 1929, most of this time in Penang, where her husband, William Price, was Manager of Whiteaway Laidlaw’s spacious store on Bishop Street. She recalled:
I don’t know another island in this world where life went along more like a song … It was, and still is, I think, a beautiful island, known to many as the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ … A paradise where life for all creatures was easy, while no calamity or disaster had stalked … within the living memory of the oldest inhabitants. Where the poor man could live in security and happiness without fear of the unknown; where the ambitious found an easy outlet for his endeavours to the mutual advantage Halcyon Days of himself, his family and the community of which they were happy members.11
To drive around the island was like doing a tour of the whole of Malaya. ‘Past beaches of white sand with black-humped “elephant” rocks and bending palms, little cliffs and Chinese temples, sampans and fishing stakes and kramat (holy) places.’12 And, away from the rocky coast, ‘the usual Malay kampong village with fruit trees and the high-gabled attap roofed houses. Only in Penang and Malacca are they still to be seen at their best, with richly carved woodwork. Then up over a pass through a patch of jungle and through some Spice Gardens where a few nutmegs and some cocoa was still grown. Down the other side we came on paddy land, with water buffalo wandering about tended by tiny naked Malay boys.’13
On the northern coast nestled Tanjong Bungah, a picturesque settlement housing ‘the most ideal bathing place I have ever seen’, wrote an old-stager, ‘even when compared with Waikiki Beach, Honolulu’.14 The setting of Penang Swimming Club had natural beauty and character: ‘the Clubhouse is the old rambling wooden house by the Pagar on the beach, but the new Pool has been formed by building a retaining wall among the rocks below the low cliff. To sit beside the pool is to be sitting among the spray … A lovely place.’15 Another visitor recalled how
Sometimes we went to swim in the salt-water pool, twenty feet or so above the sea, where from a terrace full of scarlet salvias, balsams and gay zinnias, the view across the Straits to Kedah Peak was enough to melt the stubbornest heart – to annihilate thought to a coloured ecstasy. We stayed in the warm water for hours. When the sun had set the Peak glowed gold and, as the light swiftly vanished, it melted in the brief tropic twilight to a delicate blue line, a pale mountain of the moon, like a Chinese drawing in silk.16
Malaya was noted for such spectacular views, and even this vision from Tanjong Bungah was surpassed by the scene from the summit of Penang Hill:
Kedah Peak and the pale, silvery paddy lands of Province Wellesley lay across the Straits: out to sea the sun shone through the clouds on some fishing boats, and before us, vivid against the dark, misty blue of distant mountains, were the great scarlet-gold cups of a tulip tree. At dusk going down in the train, we watched the lights coming out in the town beneath and the moon rising above the clouds. Cicadas screamed and whirred, like Chinese food clappers and electric bells, while all the tree frogs boomed. Penang was so beautiful.17
Everyone had their favourite places. ‘Each town in Malaya has its special setting and charms – Penang has its Crag and seafront … Taiping is like a lovely park with its neat drives and stately residences brooded over by the Larut Hills; Kuala Kangsar is uniquely placed on the banks of the Perak River; and Kuala Lumpur queens it with her spacious maidan, palatial government offices, and her numerous-crowned hills.’18 One of Taiping’s popular attractions was the bathing pool of cold, clear water which nestled at the foot of Maxwell’s Hill. Surrounded by ‘a riot of vines and flowers’, with ‘attap thatched houses for dressing rooms and an open bar beside the pools’, it was a
truly spectacular Swimming Club. There were a string of pools, stepped, so that the water ran through them all. They were fed from a small river which ran down beside the pools, and far upstream, in the jungle, you could see an impressive waterfall. The top pool was reserved for a shute, down which you came seated on a heavy wooden sledge-like device which could accommodate up to four adults … The main pool, with spring board and diving platforms, was on the bottom step.19
Ipoh, lying in a great semicircle of limestone cliffs, was also known for its striking setting: ‘looking down … towards the Kinta river, one cannot fail to be impressed by the beauty of the distant mountain scenery. Chabang with its conical peak (5,600 feet) cuts the skyline on the east like a cobalt edition of Fuji-Yama without the snow-cap.’ As for the town, it had solid public buildings, ‘comfortable shady bungalows … a select Malay suburb’ and a ‘Chinatown, a fascinating place with its … kaleidoscopic colour and movement, spicy odours, and exotic street stalls’.20
However, for capital-dwellers like Leslie Froggatt there was nothing to compare with Singapore. Its facilities overshadowed anything else in Malaya: the new 1920s buildings, public gardens, first-rate hotels, fine European shops, much-vaunted defence installations – and the equally compelling attractions of the Orient in North Bridge Road and Change Alley, where cheap-jacks sold all kinds of goods for next to nothing. Singapore was in fact a Chinese city, with 400,000 Chinese inhabitants by the 1930s. But Europeans saw it differently. ‘If you are English, you get an impression of a kind of tropical cross between Manchester and Liverpool’, though Bruce Lockhart qualified Roland Braddell’s verdict: ‘an international Liverpool with a Chinese Manchester, and Birmingham tacked on to it’.21 There were always temptations and choices galore: champagne and oysters, moonlight matinees or moonlight picnics, subscription concerts, and the Swimming Club – with five shining cocktail bars, terraces resplendent with sunny umbrellas, a perfect dance floor and a blue-tiled pool worthy of a film set, where the ‘costumes of the women lose nothing by comparison with those of Paris Plage and Deauville and iced-beer softens the rigours of sun-bathing’.22 No week was complete without a little outing or makan angin, east to the beaches beyond the Sea View Hotel or westward to the Singapore Gap to take in the panorama across the harbour. Here was escape from the stew of Oriental smells once emanating from the river and the shanties of Old Singapore, though much had changed for the better by the 1930s, and it had become ‘a gloriously clean city’.23 ‘Singapore is one of the sweetest smelling spots I’ve known,’ claimed Leslie Froggatt:
There is nothing evil in the smell of the East … At first it loses heavily in comparison with the wild and garden flowers that go to make the scent of England, but gradually it seeps in, at once fascinating and repellent … It is a mixture of garlic and temple flowers, durian and incense, teak wood swelling in the river and Yardley’s talcum powder so popular with the Indians.24
Katharine Sim, young and recently married, spoke with equal enthusiasm of the little coastal backwater in Perak where her husband was a customs officer, as she revelled in the sunlight and peace of Malaya and her artist’s eye imbibed the natural colour around. ‘Those Lumut sunsets were never to be forgotten and they flame now in my memory, framed as they were in the “golden gates” of the two western headlands … the colours rioted madly, changing every second in breath-taking glory, from rose to blood, to gold and bronze and copper-green … We could not speak, it was far too beautiful.’25 Even a down-to-earth expatriate like Guy Hutchinson, who had every right to be waspish about the rotten time he and other Selangor planters had had during the Great Slump of 1930–2, could not wait to get back in 1934: ‘I, for one, gave thanks’, he wrote, ‘for the pleasant times and places that my lot was cast in.’26 And in 1931, from the ranks of that cynical breed, the visiting British politician, came paeons of lavish praise for Malaya’s undying charms, the very ‘apple of the eye’ to ‘an efficient and far-sighted administration’.27 To conclude, here was ‘as happy a land as one could ever hope to find – a Tory Eden in which each man is contented with his station, and does not wish for a change’.28
Visiting
the Far East in 1922, Charlotte Cameron put her finger on the reason for this contentment. ‘The Europeans’, she observed, ‘have a very good time.’29 In a society where a white man was treated as a minor god, few questioned the rights and wrongs of their assumed superiority. On the other hand, British Malayans did accept the need to ‘do their social bit’ in return for a standard of living that was more lavish than they could normally expect in Britain. ‘Malaya is rich, and can afford to pay her sons well for their work. So they live well,’ the visitor from the Houses of Parliament remarked.30 He seemed unaware of the slumps of 1922 and 1930–2 that had hit the salaries and prospects of white planters – and of the fact that the Chinese community included entrepreneurs who were far wealthier than Europeans. (There was no European equivalent to the Chinese Millionaires’ Club in Kuala Lumpur.) But the fact remains that the standard of living of most Westerners rose in the interwar period, and the Far East continued to lure British men and women with its profitable, vibrant, titillating image. To paraphrase an American observer, what was noticeable by the late 1930s was not how few Europeans lived luxuriously but how few did not.31
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