Out in the Midday Sun

by Margaret Shennan

  However, as the European population increased and concentrated in the main towns, there was a certain tendency to seek the company of fellow nationals, and European clubs were regarded as places to relax among peers and forget the conventional pressures of a ruling class. In Singapore, it was said, the ‘only social meeting places of Asians and Europeans were the three slightly disreputable entertainment parks, or “worlds’”; and George Peet, editor of the Straits Times, representing the new type of British expatriate, much regretted the increasing social polarization in the early 1930s. ‘Today in the towns of Malaya there is neither time nor inclination for the study of races and languages, and the commercial or professional European living in Kuala Lumpur knows little more about the Asiatic races round him … than he did before he left his own country.’62 Undoubtedly people’s experiences in the 1930s differed. Hugh Bryson was adamant that ‘The so-called Europeans Clubs admitted without distinction the senior Malay officers who were in the Civil Service or Police; the Selangor Club had several Chinese and Eurasian members; so had the Selangor Golf Club, the Singapore Cricket Club and the Singapore Golf Club.’ Furthermore, ‘once a man of different race had been accepted as a member, there was quite distinctly no sign of any discrimination’.63 In Perak the Sims generally played tennis at Lumut Club, which had both Asian and European members, but sometimes they went to the Asian club at Sitiawan, where they played with Chinese friends. Yet the evidence remains ambiguous. In many clubs ‘the majority of members were European and in much the same way the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian clubs kept their membership to their own people,’ Bryson also reported.64

  In the higher echelons of society, race was no bar to friendship. The Federal Councillor Choo Kia Peng, for instance, counted himself a personal friend of Sir George Maxwell, Chief Secretary of the Malay States, and, with a small cadre of prominent Selangor Asians, Choo helped to form the Kuala Lumpur Rotary Club, the first of many in which Europeans and non-Europeans co-operated. A British official recalled that ‘At official dinners or parties given by Chief Secretaries, Residents and such high-ranking officers the guest list covered all races without any sign of discrimination.’ In addition, ‘It was by no means uncommon to have dinner parties with non-European guests and their wives in my earlier days (viz.1920s).’ Later some difficulties occurred because neither the European newcomers nor the Malay women could speak the other’s language. There were also fewer Chinese guests at European houses, due perhaps to ‘some feeling of social difference – the Malays were the owners of the country, the Chinese were immigrants who had made money; they were upstarts and therefore socially not quite acceptable’.65 The Eurasian community, on the other hand, particularly in Singapore, was ‘strong, self-respecting and very prosperous’ by the 1930s, and as the English-educated Asian middle class increased in the interwar years there was regular socializing with Europeans.66 The Davisons regularly attended functions in the grounds of the Istana given by His Highness the Regent of Kedah. In 1939 Stuart Sim and his wife received invitations from the new Sultan of Perak to his installation ball at the strawberry-coloured palace in Kuala Kangsar, and shortly after, in May, to an official luncheon marking the opening of Lumut’s new mosque, where the late Sultan’s son, Raja Kechil Tengah, talked to Katharine Sim ‘of England and Bourne End and London’s policemen’.67 Sometimes the Sultan of Pahang stayed with the Bakers at Sungei Lembing, appearing before the locals ‘a vast figure swathed in gorgeous silks’.68

  Weddings in particular were occasions for social mixing, though guest lists, like club membership lists, reflected the social hierarchy. Guy Hutchinson, being a mere Senior Assistant, found himself socially excluded, despite having been educated at a well-known British public school:

  there were two functions that … I would have liked to have ‘got in on’, but as they were for Managers Only there was no hope. The first was a local ‘do’; the big Chinese Towkay who owned the Segamat Cold Storage married his daughter off to the bigger Towkay who ran the Aerated Water Works at Seremban. All the local Managers and Government Officials were asked and most went. We, the smaller fry, saw the elaborate lighting going up, in and around the Towkay’s house outside Segamat; he put up a couple of big Marquees and a stage and imported, not only a good Malay Ronging (Dancing) group, but a modern orchestra and a lot of the Dance-Hostesses from the ‘Worlds’ (Dance halls) of K.L., Malacca and Seremban. It was quite a ‘do’ … The other ‘do’ was much more Regal, in fact it was at the lstana (Palace) at Johore Bahru and was to celebrate the … 40th anniversary of the Sultan’s reign … a sort of answer to George V’s Jubilee. The leading Planter from each district was asked and H.B. represented our, Segamat, area. It was a most palatial affair.69

  For all his exclusion from these events, Hutchinson belonged to the small privileged class, in contrast to the layers of humanity making up the rest of the social pyramid. Among the excluded was a fringe of poor whites – unemployed, bankrupts, men whose occupations carried no prestige, such as prison warders and railway workers, and those who, voluntarily or otherwise, eschewed a European standard of living. The latter seemed somehow shocking. Encountering an elderly, barefooted Englishman in Malay dress, Katharine Sim felt ‘There was something at once pitiable and repulsive about him’, but he was ‘the only case of “going Native” that I saw’.70

  Even among the Asian workforce, hierarchical attitudes prevailed. The Malay syce with his starched uniform was socially superior to the Chinese rickshaw coolie, and it would have been thought beneath their dignity for the cook or (house) boy to do the king of sanitary chores performed by the tukan ayer. Similarly, although ‘the majority of Malays [were] still men of the soil … the younger generation has come under a further influence, that of vernacular education’ between the ages of seven and twelve, ‘and so the semi-educated youth … thinks himself a better man than his father’, with expectations of a ‘collar and tie’ job ‘in keeping with his learning’.71 In the opinion of a British officer, the political implications of this policy – in particular the creation of a Malay intelligentsia from the ranks of a peasant people – were not fully appreciated by colonial administrators, ‘who hurriedly stepped in to remedy illiteracy without considering what would be the result’.72

  During the 1930s, numbers of Malays – padi growers and fishermen by tradition – became clerks, policemen, chauffeurs and domestic servants, although they were overtaken numerically by the Chinese, who continued to dominate the commercial, industrial and clerical sectors of the labour market. The immigration of Tamils from southern India peaked in the second half of the 1920s, and they then exceeded the Chinese as industrial labourers on the railways and on rubber estates, though Indian labour tended to be more transient. While there were also small minorities of middle-income and wealthy Chinese, Sikhs and Chettiars, who could more than match the starting annual salary of £450 paid to a young British administrator, the broad base of Malayan society was paid a pittance compared with their European employers.73

  The Asians living in rural kampongs, kongsi houses, estate lines or congested urban shophouses had no prestige. Nor, for the most part, had they political ambitions. The only political opposition which the British community took seriously was the Malayan Communist Party, which the authorities dealt with in 1931–2 by imprisonment and extradition. The potential dangers from Malay and Indian nationalism remained outside the perceptions of the average European. There was an unthinking smugness in some British officers, who were certain that they had the affection and goodwill of the Asian races because the British had a sense of justice and took a kindly interest in society’s underdogs. The certainty ran deep. Even the Chief Security Officer, when assessing the political situation in Malaya from 1939 to 1941, disclaimed any organized anti-British movement and argued that ‘Malaya’s population as a whole presented … a sufficiently peaceful and loyal front, all parties working generally for the common weal and their own great economic benefit.’74

  8
/>   Officials and Unofficials

  Recalling his impressions of twenty-three years as a rubber executive, J. S. Potter noted that ‘In Malaya we were either Officials or Unofficials, regardless of race, colour or religion: at least, that was my experience.’1 He was, of course, alluding to a generally held distinction between, on the one hand, the administration – civil servants, officers, police and military, and specialists in the technical and municipal services – and, on the other, those in the private sector like himself – planters, mining experts, civil and marine engineers, lawyers, journalists, and men in freight and shipping, commercial companies and agency houses. The terms ‘Official’ and ‘Unofficial’ were part of Crown Colony vocabulary. To modern ears the word ‘Unofficial’ has a slightly pejorative ring, a hint of unauthorization compared with the ‘Official’. It was linked with the notion of the superiority of the government servant and the inferiority of commerce implied in the Establishment custom of referring dismissively to the man in trade as a ‘boxwallah’. These terms reflect a colonial outlook which made one despairing Malayan officer describe the whole system as ‘worthy more of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera than a modern community’.2

  Strictly speaking, the two labels, ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’, were used to distinguish members of the country’s governing councils. Throughout the colonial history of Penang and Singapore, there had always been tension between the administration and the commercial fraternity. However, as the commercial sector far outnumbered the administrators, leading Europeans, followed by a few prominent Asians, were invited to take a public part in government as unofficial members of the State, Federal, Legislative and Executive Councils. Potter, for instance, served as an unofficial member of the Negri Sembilan State Executive Council (the last European unofficial to do so, as it happens.) Vincent Baker, the General Manager of the Pahang Consolidated Company tin mine at Sungei Lembing, was one of the two European unofficial members of the Pahang State Council in the 1930s.

  The system was far from democratic. The senior officials sat ex-officio on the councils, while at all levels the unofficial members were nominated, not elected. After reforms were made in the interwar years, Hugh Bryson, then secretary to the Resident in Negri Sembilan, believed that the unofficials were satisfied with their power ‘to have some say in running local affairs’. They could ‘use their position in Council to voice criticism of Federal interference’, and serve, as ‘the mouthpiece of an organization – the European put forward the views of the Planters’ Association, the Chinese of the business men, and so on’.3 In the Straits Settlements, the Legislative Council was enlarged to give equal numbers to the officials and unofficials, but a proposal to extend this principle to the Executive Council was vilified in the Establishment press. It was made clear that all Legislative Councillors were ‘there to co-operate with the Government – to advise; to criticize; if necessary to oppose – but they in no sense constitute a regular opposition as in our Parliament at home’,4 while the retention of the Governor’s casting vote ensured that the Legislative Council remained ‘more an organ of government than a guardian of public interest’.5

  All Councillors of the Straits Settlements and the Federated States were styled ‘The Honorable’, which sometimes raised a wry comment – not least from Singapore’s best known satirist:

  The position was usually held by a merchant, but when there are not enough merchants of distinction falls automatically to a lawyer … The ‘F’s’ [Federal Councillors] have a supreme disdain for the ‘L’s’ [Legislative Councillors] and vice versa. Sometimes the twain meet, on a nice expensive yacht with sumptuous tiffins and a rare array of decanters … official business is the only fly in the ointment that soothes the life of an Honourable. The title itself almost makes up for that: then there is the satisfaction of always being noted as one of ‘those present’. Also, there are sundry dinners … providing fodder for innumerable letters and conversations with the introduction, ‘As His Excellency said to me’, or ‘As I said to His Excellency’ … 6

  Cheng Lock Tan of the Straits British Association sat on the Legislative Council in 1924–34 alongside Mohammad Eunos bin Abdullah, the father of Malay journalism and President of the Singapore Malay Union. Among the unofficials on the Federal Council in the 1920s were Choo Kia Peng, the Selangor tin magnate, S. N. Veerasamy and Raja Chulan, son of the former Sultan of Perak, who served from 1924 to his death in 1933, having retired from the Malayan Civil Service. Dr Noel Clarke was a widely respected Eurasian member of the Legislative Council in Singapore. The non-Asian unofficials were also men of substance. The British community was represented on the colony’s Legislative and Executive Councils by its most successful business moguls: Sir John Bagnall, Joint Managing Director of the Straits Trading Company from 1923, who fought for the interests of Malayan tin, Charles Wurtzburg, Chairman of Mansfield & Co. in 1933, ‘a wise man, with many interests, a public servant all his life … almost revered by those who worked for or under him’,7 ‘Jiddy’ Dawson, a shrewd and industrious Scot from Aberdeen, General Manager of Guthrie & Co., and F. D. Bisseker, General Manager of the Eastern Smelting Company in Penang and a critic of government defence policy in the 1930s. Members of the Federal Council between the wars included a leading Selangor rubber planter, E. N. T. Cumming (a man with Establishment connections – his brother was a major-general at Camberley Staff College), the journalist J. H. M. Robson, founder and Managing Director of the Malay Mail, Egmont Hake, a prominent spokesman of the agency houses, and Arnold Savage-Bailey, a well-known lawyer and judge (who had been at St Paul’s with Governor Clementi).8 Behind these individuals were pressure groups and ethnic associations, as Bryson had observed, but government in the 1930s was effectively in the hands of administrative experts, and officials went along with a situation in which ‘Malaya was unpestered by politics’.9

  Outside the government arena, the terms ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ were used loosely to distinguish between civil servants and people in the private sector – a division which has been played down in recent years. Between the wars the social composition, attitudes and behaviour of the European community changed. Malaya still attracted young public school men – Guy Hutchinson, the rubber planter, had been to Wellington, Vincent Baker, the mining engineer, was from Haileybury; John Woods, the barrister, from Shrewbury – but many of the new expatriates had lower-middle-class or skilled-working-class origins. They came out East to work in planting, commodities, mining, engineering and shipping, swelling the ‘unofficial’ majority in the European community but mixing on a par with local officials in the technical and municipal services, so that the distinction became blurred. The Rawcliffes of Port Swettenham had a typically mixed circle of friends from the Selangor Pilot Association, planting, commerce, customs, Public Works and the police. Sometimes clashes of interest occurred among unofficials: between planters and executives of the agency houses, for instance – those who worked ‘hands on’ and the penpushers. Not everyone approved of the ‘business man’s East’ and the new office class who dominated in places like Penang. In Kuala Lumpur, the Hutchinson brothers avoided white suits at Saturday tea dances at the Spotted Dog because ‘these were worn by the “Office wallahs”’.10 But distinctions were not just a matter of dress. Like many of the subtle nuances of colonial society, the difference between officials and unofficials was unconsciously observed in everyday speech. One young Malayan was intrigued: ‘I knew that my Daddy was “in shipping” … Then such-and-such was “in rubber” and so-and-so worked “in tin” … Some people we knew were “in Mansfield’s” … Another person was “in Holt’s”, someone else had been “in Jardine’s” and a third “in Boustead’s”.’ On the other hand, ‘Some people simply were things … I could tell … that being “in Straits” or “in Halt’s” was different from being straightforward “Colonial Service” or “P.W.D.” or “Army people” or “Harbour Board”.’11 The most patent divide was between senior members of the Malayan Civil Ser
vice and the mass of unofficials. As Hutchinson remarked with some feeling, ‘the “Heaven Born” … lived – or thought they lived – in a world apart’.12

  Since rubber planters formed the largest single group of unofficials in Malaya, they must deserve separate treatment (see Chapter 9). However, by 1912 half the world’s tin was also produced in Malaya, and by 1937 what had been a predominantly Chinese industry had been taken largely into European ownership and management. Mining and mine engineering were the preserve of a small number of hardy individuals, generally Australians or emigrants from Britain’s Celtic fringe – Scots, Welsh and Cornishmen. Their activities were vetted by state Wardens and Inspectors of Mines responsible for protecting the public interest. Most of Malaya’s tin was alluvial, and there were numerous methods of extraction, of which dredging and hydrauling had been developed by British operators, although the technicalities do not concern us here. However, the impact on the landscape could be dramatic. In 1928 at Kuala Lumpur, Guy Hutchinson ‘saw for the first time the Chinese open cast tin mine with its characteristic high pier like structure’; the residue of ‘the “tailings”, fine white sand … led off to form banks of waste land that took years to cover with vegetation’.13 Dredging was no kinder to the land: the vast machine, ‘anchored in its man-made lake of milk-white water, drags up the innocent mud’, and dredges, ‘like corrugated monsters from Mars, lumber over the northern plains of Malaya: sinister, rattling contraptions eating the heart out of the land’.14