Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  Imperial power, in the British mind, was primarily a matter of prestige, sustained by force of arms if and when the British presence was challenged. Shared respect for the symbols of power sustained good relations between the British and the Malay princes who were bound to Britain by treaty. In 1933 the Colonial Office confirmed that Britain stood firm by the principle that ‘the maintenance of the position, authority and prestige of the Malay rulers must always be a cardinal point in British policy’.31 Although their powers were restricted – in the Federated Malay States ‘the British adviser ruled and the Malay ruler advised, it was said’ – the Sultans were not the helpless puppets they have sometimes been painted, particularly in the Unfederated States, which, according to Hugh Bryson, were ‘less under the “fetters” of Singapore’. Kedah, for instance, ‘was sometimes described as the place “where the black man ruled the white”’.32 In the interwar years Sultan Ibrahim of Johore was assiduous in defending his authority. He always addressed the High Commissioner as ‘Governor’, managing to intimate that, while accepting him as the head of a Crown Colony, the Straits Settlements, Johore’s position as a sovereign state was unaffected. A British official in Johore candidly observed that the Sultan ‘ruled his State with a rod of iron’ and did not always listen to the suggestions of Mr Walter Pepys CMG, his General Adviser. ‘A magnificent man and a magnificent monarch’, in Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown’s eyes, Sultan Ibrahim raised and commanded his own Johore Military Forces and ‘held a court in Johore Bahru of almost medieval splendour’ like a true autocrat.33

  Malay society, then, retained a hierarchical structure as much as British colonial society. ‘At the top was the Sultan, below him and usually related were the Tungkus,’ wrote Alan Morkill, who, as District Officer, came up against all levels of Malay society. ‘Below them were Ungkus (also known as Rajas), Niks, Wans, and Inches (Plain Mr.).’34 Europeans adopted Malay terms to denote status. Tuan Besar was reserved for top brass – the Managing Director, Senior Manager, Resident or Adviser, all of whom were treated with enormous respect, as Nona Baker realized when she reached Singapore and was accommodated in a sumptuous hotel. Tuan (‘Sir’) was the mode of address used for most Europeans, while the assistant or junior was TuanKechil. Recalling how it was in 1920s Trengganu, an official stressed that a car was the proof of authority.

  Even though there were so few miles of road, almost all the ‘top’ people had motor cars; it was … a sort of status symbol. The Sultan had a large yellow (the royal colour) American car in which he used to be driven along the road at about 15, maybe 20 miles an hour, and no one was permitted to overtake him, and we were all expected to pull into the side of the road if coming in the opposite direction, until His Highness was safely past.35

  As might be expected, there were times when matters of protocol were publicly aired. The same official, Hugh Bryson, remembered an incident of precedence over the opening of the Johore Causeway, joining Singapore to the peninsula, in 1924:

  The High Commissioner, Sir Laurence Guillemard, was to cut the ribbon; all the Sultans were to be guests of honour. Date, time, etc., all had been fixed when the bombshell fell. His Highness the Sultan of Johore would not attend and objected to all arrangements. What had happened was that the General Manager’s staff [Federated Malay States Railways Department] had sent out printed and numbered cards to the official guests; bad enough when dealing with Rulers but apparently the crowning insult was that the Johore invitation was number 65, or some such low down figure! The affair was postponed for some official reason and fresh formal invitations, written in the correct Court style in Jawi script [were sent] to each Sultan, and the Causeway was in being.36

  Being British did not necessarily protect a man from the Sultans’ wrath if he had plainly transgressed on a matter of protocol, especially if he was not a person of social standing in the European community. There was one occasion when a British official of the Posts and Telegraphs Department was hastily removed to assuage an alleged offence against the dignity of Sultan Ishmail of Kelantan and his family. As a Johore resident, Guy Hutchinson knew ‘He was a regular old Tartar was our Sultan Ibrahim.’37 Europeans who pleased him were encouraged to remain in the state. Erina Lowson recalled how her father, a doctor in the Colonial Medical Service, was transferred in 1933 from Singapore to Johore Bahru, and ‘because the Sultan liked my father, we didn’t get moved again’.38 But two cases of offending behaviour stuck in Hutchinson’s memory. The first concerned a European banished from Johore for singing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ during the Johore National Anthem; the sacking of a second European occurred because ‘he stood the Sultan’s niece a glass of sherry after she had been forbidden “alk” by the Sultan’. For his part, Hutchinson himself was careful not to transgress the Game Laws, in which the Sultan took a proprietary interest:

  It did not pay to ‘buck the Sultan’. He didn’t like us Europeans at that time and it was very definitely His State, and if he didn’t like you then he just ‘Deported you’, which was alright for the ‘Heaven-born’ – they could be moved about from State to State in Government Service, but the poor Planter had no choice as to where his Company had their estates or vacancies on them. So we had to lie low.39

  On the other hand, it was difficult to gauge the attitude of ordinary Malays, a naturally polite people, towards the ‘occupying’ British. The isolated case of a Briton being killed by a Malay running amok cannot be taken as evidence of ethnic hostility.40 In 1928 an outburst of lslamic-inspired unrest occurred in Ulu Trengganu, reminiscent of the Outbreak in Kelantan in 1915. The situation seemed briefly threatening when ‘a party of probably sixty Malays dressed for battle’, some with ‘old muzzle-loading guns’, converged on the penghulu’s house. Hugh Bryson, the local government officer, ‘had never seen Malays in such surly, truculent mood before’.41 But the insurrection quickly collapsed when Malay police shot a dozen of their attackers at Kuala Telemong, and the ringleader, a respected religious teacher, was banished to Mecca. On another occasion in the 1920s Alan Morkill, the District Officer, Tampin, had ‘an unpleasant brush with a local tungku’ over the young man’s attempt to subvert the course of justice and revive ‘the bad old days when the Tungku’s whim was law’. The resentful Malay hit Morkill on the shoulder with a heavy stick ‘for which he was carpeted and had to apologize in the presence of the British Resident’.42 But such happenings were rare.

  Soothing the sensitivities of the Malay princes was a function of senior officials. On a visit to London in 1924, the Oxbridge-educated Sultan of Perak, Alang Iskander, made waves by voicing his dissatisfaction to both George V and the Colonial Office: his particular complaint was that the State Councils in the Federated Malay States did not have the political teeth of those in the Unfederated States. In this instance he was being candid, not disloyal; indeed, his Resident described him as ‘a great gentleman and a great friend’.43 Another visitor to Buckingham Palace, the Yang di-Pertuan Besar of Negri Sembilan, impressed the King: ‘that splendid sultan … I shall always remember him’.44 ‘Full of common sense and humour’, the Yang Tuan was popular with British officialdom. He ‘was a picturesque figure and looked the part of a prince’, although he punctiliously consulted his major chiefs, the Undang, and ‘exercised his almost non-existent authority by force of personality and charm’.45 Sultan Ibrahim of Johore was regarded as the most politically astute and most Europeanized of the Malay rulers, bearing in mind his special penchant for the lights of London and Paris. He marked the Silver Jubilee of King George V with a contribution of £500,000 towards Singapore’s defences, and the royal palace at Johore Bahru contained numerous life-sized portraits of Queen Victoria and members of the British royal family, besides the legendary Ellenborough gold plate.46

  As a group, the Sultans behaved as capable, dignified, instinctively conservative Malay potentates. Though ‘they vary in capacity, generally speaking, they fill the position of Ruler very well’, observed one governor, Sir Laurence Guillemard, with
Anglo-Saxon condescension.47 His Excellency the Governor-cum-High Commissioner was in the best position to judge: he exuded authority and panache. His high-plumed helmet and gold-encrusted military-style dress uniform signified on formal occasions that he was both the representative of the Crown and commander-in-chief in Malaya, the effective head of the power structure. However, there were times when the competing dignities of His Excellency and His Highness devolved into an element of farce. When stationed at Kuala Pilah in Negri Sembilan in the early 1920s, Alan Morkill witnessed one such occasion.

  Early in his term of office the High Commissioner for the Malay States made a tour of the country. I was instructed to warn H[is] H[ighness] … of the impending visitation. A vote was included in the State estimates to meet the cost of the ceremony, by tradition a banquet …

  Protocol required that he be received with a salute of 21 guns and a brass muzzle-loading cannon had been set up on the hill behind the Palace and firing over its roof. After the first few rounds a shower of rain damped the powder and there was an interval. Meantime the High Commissioner was greeted by H.H. and the banquet, consisting of curried goat and rice washed down with warm creme de menthe – a concession to the alcoholic habits of the Europeans – reached the point at which H.E. rose to speak. By this time the powder was dry and the bombardment was continued. ‘Your Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the first occasion on which I …’ Bang! and down came a shower of dust and assorted coleoptera from the roof with a lizard or two for good measure on to the table below.

  Age long tradition demanded that H.E. must continue as if nothing unusual had occurred; British aplomb must be shown. ‘And I hope that it will not be my …’ Bang! The timbers of the roof trembled and down came a second instalment. Responding to an agonized look from the A.D.C. I left to stop the bombardment and when I returned the farewells were being said. All was quiet and smiles.48

  Whatever their private thoughts about the British, in these interwar years the Sultans played the game courteously with the authorities, both literally and metaphorically. They entered into European social life and shared the British passion for sport. Hugh Bryson recalled from his east-coast service in the 1920s that, in addition to the European golf course in Kuala Trengganu, the Sultan had a golf course of his own adjacent to his summer residence, and it was during games of golf that the good relations were cemented between Sultan Sulaiman and his British Advisers. Sultan Ibrahim of Johore had an unrivalled reputation as a sportsman: athlete, cricketer, tennis player, horseman and renowned big-game hunter. Others were keen but had more modest skills. The Yang di-Pertuan Besar of Negri Sembilan occasionally visited the club at Kuala Pilah, where he ‘enjoyed a game of Snooker which he described as bola sa-ribu (a thousand balls)’.49 The new Sultan of Perak in the late 1930s was a tennis enthusiast, and the Sultan of Pahang was a popular visitor to the European club at Sungei Lembing. ‘He … sported a considerable stomach, which did not, however, prevent him from donning a pair of white shorts and playing a strenuous game of tennis on our private courts,’ was Nona Baker’s recollection.50

  While sport brought about a certain bonding between the class of high-born Malays and British officials, it also helped to foster good relations generally. A young agency official found cricket and rugby a means of making friends with members of all races, whereas ‘Off the playing field one’s activities tended to be restricted to the European circle, which could be somewhat narrow.’51 Within the Civil Service, inter-district cricket matches were played, and Morkill’s experience of a multiracial cricket team has been noted. John Woods of the Ipoh legal firm of Cowdy & Jones, was known as ‘The Father of Malayan Badminton’ for organizing the sport on a multiracial basis, and his success earned him the admiration of the Asian communities.

  Changes in government policy to involve non-Europeans in government also helped to make Malaya a stable country in these years. British administrators solved their consciences by admitting a small number of educated Malays into the Malayan Civil Service – men such as Dato Mahmud of Pahang, Raja Uda and Dato Hamzah bin Abdullah, ‘honest, reliable, hard-working [men] who believed that their duty lay in serving the people’, as Hugh Bryson judged them.52 Yet this was a far cry from the introduction of equal opportunities, and in a frank assessment Marian Gent observed that senior British officials ‘could not believe that a Malay was as competent as his British counterpart, and firmly, if politely, prevented ambitious Malays from reaching their goals’. For instance, ‘Dr. Mohamed Said fought all his life for the recognition he deserved, and his resilience in the face of consistently unsympathetic treatment was remarkable – so also was the true affection that, in spite of everything, he and many Malays like him had for the British.’ As a medical student he was so brilliant that he became ‘something of an embarrassment to the British who rarely came across such a gifted Malay’; accordingly he was relegated for the best part of thirteen years to Pekan, a remote district of Pahang, on half the salary his European equivalent received, and it was not until the 1950s that his career took off – in politics rather than medicine. Dr Said was not alone in being confined to a subordinate position in the medical service.53

  Outside the sphere of government, however, some non-Europeans were able to progress in their careers. Two Malayan-born journalists, Lim Keng Hor and Leslie Hoffman, became respectively News Editor and Night Editor in the Tribune group of papers; and on the retirement of the European manager of Sungei Nyok Dockyard in Butterworth in 1919, Mr H. E. Ward, a Eurasian, was appointed ‘Number One’. Ward, his later Assistant Manager wrote, was a man ‘completely dedicated to his job, his employers and the British Crown. Nothing else mattered, and personal gain never entered his head.’54 This Assistant Manager, appointed in 1926, was an Englishman – an unthinkable relationship a generation earlier, but in fact the two men worked in constructive partnership for fifteen years.

  Niceties of power and ethnicity were illustrated in a vignette of rural Perak. Stuart Sim was a Customs and Excise officer at the little port of Lumut, where the District Officer was a genial Malay, a distant relative of the Sultan of Perak. In addition, Katharine Sim wrote, ‘the Forest Officer who lived by the estuary was a Eurasian; the Police Officer and the Engineer were Europeans; both were unmarried … The Government Doctor was a quiet, charming Indian … whom we grew to like very much … His hospital [was] on a hill to the west of the town, high up above the estuary.’ In fact, the houses of all the government personnel (except the forestry official) were built on hills behind the village, with a fine view of the estuary.

  On one was the District Officer’s house … Between the District Officer’s house and the Customs Officer’s house was a valley with a wild little golf course … The second hill was ‘ours’. The Customs Officer’s house was the top one, with the Policeman’s just below and beyond his, the Engineer’s. Our hill was two feet higher than the District Officer’s hill, therefore Oriental ideas of ‘departmental dignity’ required our house to be built just below the crest. It was a pity: our view would have been even more superb a few feet higher.55

  The Sims accepted their aesthetic loss: after all, the District Officer was Number One.

  In this arcane area of race relations there was no absolute consistency. S. N. Veerasamy, the first Indian on the Malay Federal Council, asserted that Malaya’s glory ‘was that men of diverse races and creeds live in peace, in unison and in harmony’.56 In this respect the country was far ahead of other parts of the Empire. Returning home on leave in 1939, J. S. Potter noted ‘The segregation of the races which we found in Cape Town was a shock to my fellow passengers and myself after our experiences in the East, where no such segregation existed.’57 The way Malaya’s population mixed freely in public places was significant. Even a child aboard the Butterworth ferry noticed the absence of barriers.

  Together everyone would hurry down the pier: local Malays, bearded Sikhs, Tamils and a few Gujeratis, Siamese, Sumatrans, Eurasians, pale-faced Europeans like oursel
ves, Straits-born Chinese … There were saris and sarongs, tutups and bajus, sun-dresses and cheongsams, pyjamas, trousers, shorts, singlets and loincloths … All kinds of people … the dirty, the scruffy and the stained … scrubbed, shining, starched, oiled, perfumed, elegant … the laden and the light-handed, the bowed and the carefree … an amazing human pot-pourri.58

  In the Unfederated States of Kedah and Johore, where British power coexisted with a staunchly Malay sultanate and culture, social contacts between Europeans and non-Europeans were a regular occurrence. According to Roger Barrett, who grew up near Sungei Patani, ‘normally pre – and post-war Kedah society, as I remember it, was more integrated racially than other states. As children we had friends of all races and a Malay doctor and his family were my parents’ closest friends until they died.’59 Agnes Davison had the same experience in Alor Star. ‘We got to know the Kedah Malays very well. Kedah Club was the centre of the social life. All the Tunkus and Malay Heads of Departments were members and joined in all Club activities. The most popular occasion was the Gymkhana.’ There were numerous formal occasions when the British and the Malays mingled, but Mrs Davison felt, more significantly, ‘many of them enjoyed coming to our homes and entertained us in theirs’. The younger Malays, in particular, ‘were full of fun and had a great sense of humour, and were very keen to learn some of our customs and to show us theirs’.60 In Segamat, Johore, Nancy Wynne also socialized with her Asian neighbours: ‘Yesterday’, she wrote home in 1940, ‘I went out to tiffin with two Chinese ladies, Mrs Eng and Mrs Lim, at a Malay lady’s house. She served a delicious Nasi goreng … Malay was the lingua franca.’61 In Port Swettenham, in Selangor, the Rawcliffes also counted Chinese and Indians in their circle of friends.