Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  Luxury was gauged in several ways. Privately owned cars were certainly one indicator, and from the middle of the 1920s men on renewed contracts, whose salaries warranted the expense, proudly sported their Rover, Buick, Hillman, Ford, Vauxhall or Morris, or occasionally a showy Chevrolet. The automobile, even second-hand, was ‘in my time a sort of status symbol’, wrote Hugh Bryson of the Malayan Civil Service, who worked in rural Trengganu in the late 1920s. ‘Even though there were so few miles of road almost all the “top” people had motor cars.’ As an official – he was then Settlement Collector in the state – Bryson felt entitled to have his own vehicle, but as well as status it brought a practical benefit: it was ‘a godsend in the monsoon weather because there was no other means of covered transport from house to office’.32 It also enabled men and women in rural districts to take part in club life and other entertainments in the main towns. In addition to a car, a retinue of domestic servants sustained the kind of privileged lifestyle which had disappeared from middle-class Britain. The married European generally had a cook, a ‘boy’ or two to clean and run the household, a syce or chauffeur to drive and look after the car, an amah or ayah as nursemaid for the children, and, lower in the pecking order, a gardener or kebun, a dhobi or laundryman and a tukan ayer to take care of water and sanitary needs – all for a salary bill in 1930 of no more than $150 to $180 a month, less than an average monthly budget for food and drink.33

  Except in the most remote estates and mining areas, the choice and quality of food improved in the 1930s with the growth of refrigerated transport. ‘Today’, gloated Bruce Lockhart in 1935, ‘Singapore gets fresh meat from Australia, fresh butter from New Zealand, swede turnips from Sumatra, potatoes from Palestine, tomatoes from Java, rhubarb from New South Wales, oranges from China’, and a dozen other items from elsewhere, such as Edam cheese and Droste chocolates from Holland.34 Although the ubiquitous pale-blue tins of Crosse & Blackwell were still in demand (with surprising contents such as Oxford sausages, kippers and cheese), gone were the days when stuffed eggs, mulligatawny soup, scraggy chicken and ikan merah (red mullet) formed the staple menu of every gala dinner. Instead, by the 1930s international cuisine was standard fare in the main establishments. At Singapore’s Sea View Hotel, a visitor could dine off ‘an excellent petite marmite, homard à l’américaine, and roast pheasant’, complemented with bread sauce and pommes pailles – a feast that left little room for pêche Melba and angels on horseback. ‘Here was a revolution’, the same visitor concluded: cold storage, electricity, the automobile, and air conditioning for Singapore’s plutocracy – all inventions that removed life’s main discomforts in the tropics.35

  In general, people accepted unavoidable irritations with a shrug – the mould-inducing, enervating humidity, mosquitoes and prickly heat. They acknowledged Malaya’s deficiencies: for instance, in many areas the absence of antidotes and blood transfusions in the event of accidents, and the dearth of picture galleries and serious theatre – though it was untrue, as one ex-Malayan wrote, that ‘music, drama and the arts [were] entirely missing’.36 When these were weighed against the benefits, Leslie Froggatt felt there was much to be thankful for:

  There’s no denying it, it was an easy life, and a pleasant one. Food was varied, plentiful and cheap. Liquor and cigarettes came in practically duty free, so that we drank whisky and smoked and thought nothing of it. If you had money to spend, you had the finest selection of English, American and oriental merchandise imaginable, embroidered silks and tapestries, carved teak furniture, and leering black wood buddahs, fine egg-shell china hand-painted in the most extravagant designs, long ivory back-scratchers and masses of ornaments and curios in ebony, jade and moonstone, pewter mugs, bright hand carved silver from Siam, and skin bags of every kind. We had everything we could want from East and West.37

  Singapore in the 1920s was as gay and bohemian as any Western capital. In modern terms it was a swinging city, where the nouveaux riches and spoilt darlings of the world of Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter or Noel Coward blotted out memories of the Great War by ‘having fun’. These years marked the start of America’s cultural influence over British Malaya. Up to this time, before westernization of the East removed a lot of the local colour, it was the Orient which symbolized mystery and glamour. Europeans were intrigued by traditional Asian arts: by the Chinese lion and dragon dance and the Malay wayang kulit, the shadow play of moving puppets, often depicting heroic tales from the ancient Indian epic of the Ramayana. On special occasions a ronggeng would be performed with great suppleness, a communal friendly dance and ‘the soul of democracy’. ‘The Girls … dance around by themselves and the Males come up, at intervals, and dance in front of them. There is a sort of “game” in that the Girl must not let herself be touched by the Man’ on account of the Muslim ban on physical contact.38 And, despite the glamour of America, Europe still determined much of colonial taste in the 1930s. In Singapore the dance bands were composed mainly of Austrian and Russian players. Gramophones churned out Richard Tauber, John McCormack and the lilting cadences of Heykens’s Serenade. Brass bands delivered medleys of Delibes, Hahn, Auber, Edward German, ‘and the most tum-pety-tum medleys from Gilbert and Sullivan’.39 Expatriates dreamed of home and flaunted their national pride with their extravaganzas on St Andrew’s, St George’s and St Patrick’s Nights.

  America, however, projected unselfconscious wealth and novelty. (Among the memories of two young English boys living in Malacca in the 1930s was a neighbour named Rita Williams, ‘a rather glamorous American who used to wear sun glasses and tied silk scarves around her head. She owned a large Alsatian … We used to pretend it was a tiger.’)40 The USA was also Malaya’s biggest customer, buying over half the country’s rubber and tin by the mid-1930s, by which time Americans exceeded the French, Danish and Dutch as the largest non-British white group in the Federated Malay States. The impact of American dynamism was felt in the fields of popular culture – jazz, musical shows and Hollywood films – sustained by the transatlantic craze for commercial advertising. After talking pictures superseded silent films in the 1930s, the cinema claimed its weekly or bi-weekly attendance, as even Malaya’s small townships acquired a fleapit or ‘tin tabernacle’.41 The small town Segamat in north Johore, for example, boasted ‘a very good little cinema, with the back half-dozen rows, the $1.50s, with rattan armchairs. These were quite comfortable provided you did not go in shorts: if you did you got badly bitten by “rattan bugs” … It was the great time of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers films.’42 A few years later, a new resident wrote home enthusiastically, ‘Segamat is only a small place and there are only 12 Europeans here … We have had several good pictures here lately, including “The Wizard of Oz”, “The Lady Vanishes”, “Good Girls go to Paris”, and “Fast and Loose”. The last was very enjoyable, with Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell.’43 The large towns offered film-goers a choice. Singapore had the Capitol, Atheneum, Alhambra, Pavilion and Cathay cinemas; Kuala Lumpur the Coliseum Theatre and the Prince’s Cinema, where England’s outstanding film hits competed with Hollywood’s MGM productions. In the streets of Singapore, billboards made a powerful impact, from alluring posters of Mae West in I’m No Angel to bold multicoloured street signs pushing Tiger Beer, Tiger Balm, Gold Flake, Capstan and old Storage freshly baked bread. The American obsession had struck eastward: ‘Singapore possesses a number of first-class advertising agencies … Singapore is the home of hand-painted hoardings … both striking and pleasing to the eye.’44

  The post-war hunger for ‘making whoopee’ produced a rage for dance halls. They sprang up everywhere, in poor imitation of those in the New World in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur’s Bukit Bintang Amusement Park. Once through the huge, flashing neon-lit gateway of the ‘world’, as such entertainment parks were known, customers of all classes and all races entered a magical, vulgar campus of deafening noise and mass entertainment, theatres, opera, cinema, dance hall, sideshows, booths
, refreshment stalls and a stadium. Dancehall cabarets were much in demand among unattached European males looking for a Chinese or Eurasian partner.

  In Penang, weekends were the time for stepping out, as the planters, like the cowboys of the American West, came into town from nearby Perak and Kedah. During the 1930s the Runneymede Hotel acquired a high reputation. Guests revelled in deep fresh-water baths and foyers bright with flowers: ‘banks of hydrangeas and hollyhocks, and on every table, sweet-scented, old-fashioned red roses. The rooms were constantly filled with the gentle sough of the waves and the whispering of the casuarina trees which grew along the low sea wall.’45 But a man could choose to go to the big, white Chinese dance hall, the Elysee, or the old palatial E. & O. Hotel, which in those days had professional dancers known as ‘taxi-girls’, some of whom doubled as illicit prostitutes after the Great War.

  However, Singapore led the way in providing pleasure, as in most things. ‘We danced at the Tanglin and the Coconut Grove …’ Katharine Sim recalled. ‘We danced at the Raffles … under the stars … the little tables under the dome of the night, the soft lamps, the tall palm trees waving gently against the velvet blue sky.’46 Whatever your taste, ‘If you wanted to turn night into day, and set your candle burning at both ends, Singapore was as good a place as any,’ according to Leslie Froggatt.47 A resident recalled the high jinks of the 1920s:

  Dancing, from the tango to the Black Bottom, was the order of the day. Singapore’s four major hotels provided tea and dinner dances every week of the year; and the magnificent ballroom of Raffles Hotel was renowned throughout the East. There were several good dance bands in the city and others visited the Colony from time to time. The popular tune of the day was ‘Bye-Bye Blackbird’, and the Charleston was to be seen in full jiggle on every dance floor. An American, Dick Adamson, came with his band from San Francisco to give us a new song, ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. Prudery was no longer the order of the day …

  Among the hotel orchestras of that day I recall a very good Filipino band … One of the more exotic musical entertainments of 1929 was provided by Madame Kaai’s Hawaiians … like the rest of the audience, I found myself enchanted by the atmosphere of the show and much impressed by the quality of the singing. This kind of entertainment, would, it seemed to me, have proved a great success in London and elsewhere in Europe.48

  A different experience was provided by the travelling companies which came on tour in the interwar years. Probably the best-known was the Manila Show, with its lively and witty impresario, Hiram Schramm, ‘the first showman to bring the “Fire Dive” and “The Wall of Death” to the Far East’. Schramm was a regular visitor to Government House and was extremely popular among both Asians an Europeans alike.49 A group that played upcountry in the small townships like Segamat was Harmiston’s Travelling Circus, which included excellent wire acts, some Malay clowns, and a gifted Filipino juggler. But, in preference to this rather unsophisticated form of amusement, the residents of the Straits Settlements had other treats. On Sunday evenings the resident orchestra gave popular concerts on Penang’s E. & O. Hotel lawn. Meanwhile

  Singapore was regularly visited by professional theatrical companies, both English and American. Then there were the occasional visits of internationally famous artists, among them Fritz Kreisler, [the pianist] Josef Hoffman [sic], Anna Pavlova and Clara Butt. One of the most distinguished theatrical companies was the Charles Macdona Players which produced a whole series of Shaw plays, including St. Joan. The quality of the acting was as good as anything to be seen in London and several of the younger actors and actresses of this company afterwards achieved great success in London and New York.50

  At the same time, in contrast, Malaya’s flourishing amateur tradition continued in its irrepressible way. The amateur operatic societies of Penang and Singapore gave regular performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, supported to capacity by friends and admirers, and self-made amusement went on much as it had done in the pioneer days. An executive with Guthrie’s was pleased to find that Kuala Lumpur had a music club, and his neighbour, a stockbroker, possessed an organ in his bungalow, which he played every evening. One of the leading lights of Ipoh in the interwar years was a gifted Irish lawyer, John Woods, who had a fine singing voice and helped to organize the dramatic and musical societies, the concert parties, and the social and cultural programmes of the Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A. Malayans did not advertise their talents. Amateur artists such as Renee Parrish and Katharine Sim drew and painted for their own pleasure. Rupert Pease, a rubber planter from Port Dickson, was ‘a water-colourist equal only to Russell Flint and might even in time have surpassed him’.51

  The gregarious found their outlet in partying. It was easy to condemn their domestic treadmill of parties, but, when home was so far away, the ritual of celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, reunions and farewells, or indeed any kind of Hari Besar (Big Day), was comforting. ‘On 18th December, 1926, Eleanor’s birthday, we invited all to a house-warming’, wrote a Pahang planter:

  Our Chinese ‘cookie’, Tan Po Sing, had excelled himself, and what with a brace of pheasants brought … from Kuala Lumpur Cold Storage, meringues which Eleanor had taught him to make, and Peche Melba, with lashings of beer, Bristol Milk sherry, gin and whisky, we had a rousing good party. Before dinner one always serves pahits – gin and bitters or sherry – together with makan ketchil or hors d’oeuvres including ground-nuts fried in oil. Pahit parties are a feature of Malayan life.52

  There were many variants of these ‘jollies’. Evening parties were so frequent in Singapore that, as one visitor found, ‘if you are at all agreeable and appreciative you cannot have other than an enjoyable time’, being plied with gin-slings, stengahs, and million-dollar cocktails, ‘frothy with white of egg and streaked with creme de cacao’.53 At weekends there were get-togethers for tennis, picnics, swimming, golf or Sunday curry parties. Upcountry entertainment might bear no comparison with the formal decorative balls at Raffles or the Runneymede, but could still be fun. Guy Hutchinson recalled a Christmas Eve bachelor party for Waifs and Strays without families in 1930s Johore, a roaring success thanks to a tree loaded with presents, a borrowed gramophone, a huge turkey and plum pudding, and a case each of champagne and whisky and two of beer. After the concentrated feasting, the organizers were happy to spend Christmas Day playing golf and making do with cold snacks. Fancy dress was all the rage. John Woods of Ipoh wrote in a letter home in April 1926:

  We had an Old English Costume dance on the Saturday night, at which a lot of the local people were got up as Inn-Keepers and bar-maids (all men) in old English costume and they did all the serving themselves, and an old Inn was built up in one corner of the dance hall in Telok Anson Club. The Band of local talent was also old English, in uniform, white trousers, red coats and very tall hats. A most picturesque show altogether.54

  Any event was a good excuse for a party. When the circus arrived in Segamat, Guy Hutchinson revealed, ‘we got most of the European performers to come out to the club for a drink and it was a most cheerful party’. Normally people from the district gathered once a week on Club Nights for a chat, some supper and a little harmless gambling.

  On Club Nights there were usually two tables of Bridge mostly supplied by the wives … Some folk used to go home after games on a Thursday but usually 15–20 would stay on and I would supply ‘Sausage and Mash’ or ‘Melton Mowbray Pie’ with plenty of good cheese – we had a name for giving good measure for both eats and drinks at Genuang. Russian Pool was the great game at the Bar. Tommy Despard was our leading light … [Robbie] Bell and Tommy used to play every Thursday and ‘almost to a full house’ as they were both good, amusing and heavy betters on the results, it was good to watch. After grub those who were left usually played Poker Dice for drinks and cash – it was before ‘Liar Dice’ came to the fore.55

  The club was the hub of British Malayan society, John Soper recalled:

  There existed a sort of club fetish: unless one was content to l
ead a very secluded and quiet life it was almost essential to join at least one club wherever one happened to be stationed. In outstations the local club usually catered for games and social activities, but in the large towns there might be separate clubs for golf, other sports, and swimming, all of which would offer other facilities for entertainment.

  Between 1936 and 1941, while serving in northern Malaya, Soper ‘joined nine [clubs] and this was by no means exceptional’; when Tom Kitching, Singapore’s Chief Surveyor, took a count, he found that he had been a member of twenty clubs in the course of his career.56

  Civil servant Victor Purcell was a member of Penang’s Turf and Hunt Clubs, the latter an unlikely import in a country lacking both hounds and wide open spaces. But horse riding was a passion for some British Malayans. The cost of maintaining a horse in Malaya was not heavy – around £1 a week – and Sir William Peel, for instance, rode every day of his life in the tropics. As British Advisor, Kedah, he got up at six and would go out for a pre-breakfast ride with the Regent of Kedah. Together they would settle the affairs of state on horseback. Another first-class horseman was W. S. Edington, a Scottish farmer’s son who had served with the cavalry in the Great War. In 1919 he came out to Johore as a mining engineer with Lingui Tin, and, though the Tengkil mine, where he was first Assistant and then Manager until 1942, was in the heart of the Johore jungle, he always maintained at least two horses for his personal use.