The largest operation in the country and the only underground-lode mine (except for the Australian Raub gold mine) was at Sungei Lembing, a remote site in eastern Pahang. By 1930, Pahang Consolidated Company had some 8,000 workers there, of whom only twenty-nine men (eight married) were Europeans. The General Manager, Vincent Baker, a clergyman’s son, was an enlightened benefactor, ‘a king and father’ to his people. His ambition was to create a lasting community in the tradition of the Welsh valleys he had known. He ensured there was an eighty-bed hospital and good housing for the workers, with decent schools for their children and good amenities for the European staff. When, following the worldwide economic collapse, tin output was restricted by international agreement in 1931, he diverted men to road building to avoid making redundancies.15 Life in this secluded, paternalistic and enclosed community ‘can be paralleled nowhere else in the Malay peninsula’, G. L. Peet reported in the Straits Times:
The European staff live in comfortable bungalows, supplied with water and electricity and set amidst pleasant gardens. The ‘mems’ do their shopping at a sort of department store run by the Company … a remarkable place with shelves loaded with goods of every kind … For recreation there is a European club, with sports ground and tennis courts, and in the native town there are a cinema and a theatre. A wireless station receives the day’s news from Rugby, in far-away England, and keeps the town in touch with Kuala Lumpur.16
In addition to the mine complex, which included a modem mill, power plant and engineering shops, there were a post office and a police station, and twice a day steamers sailed upstream from Kuantan to a riverside terminus where a light railway made the fifteen-mile run to Sungei Lembing – all provided by the Company. Concern was taken for the engineering staff and miners, who went ‘many hundreds of feet underground, alternately streaming with sweat and exposed to chilly draughts’ on work which was ‘highly skilled, costly in machinery and labour, and occasionally dangerous’. In economic terms it was Malaya’s most efficient mine, giving an output of over 27,000 tons of tin to the value of £3,755,000 for the Pahang Consolidated Company in 1929–41.17
A smaller-scale operation, yet one that was typical of the tin-mining industry, was Lingui Tin Ltd of Johore, owned in the interwar years by Sime Darby (who remained as agents after Lingui Tin was bought by the Anglo-Oriental Co., based in Perak). The complex consisted of two main mines, Lingui and Tengkil, about three miles apart, with a number of minor outcrops. Steam-operated engines drove water at high pressure to sluice the tin-bearing soil, separating the tin dust from the waste. The tin was then dried and bagged for shipment. Hainanese coolies supplied the labour, and only the Chinese clerk, William Ong, spoke English.
When W. S. Edington took over the management in the early 1930s (having been Assistant Manager since 1919), he and his family were the only British residents in a remote jungle area, thirty miles upriver from Kota Tinggi, the nearest town. There were really no neighbours. Even Kota Tinggi … was a pretty wild place in those days. The only person I can remember’, said his son John Edington (who left at the age of six in 1932), ‘was an elderly Dutch trader, called “Uncle Peter”, whose bungalow was located near the landing stage’ from which both people and the bags of tin dust were transported by river to Kota Tinggi.18 There the Lingui tin, like the ore from Sungei Lembing, was taken by boat to be smelted on the island of Pulau Brani, adjacent to Singapore’s Keppel Harbour. It was here, and at the Company’s other smelter at Bagan Luar, Butterworth, that the Straits Trading Company produced its world-famous ‘Straits Tin’, its only rival being the Eastern Smelting company based in Penang. But the world restriction on tin output hit the Straits Trading Company as much as the mining companies, and in the Butterworth smelter was closed down, forcing a reduction of the European staff from sixty-one to thirty-five in 1935. To counter recession, Sir John Bagnall began a bold diversification policy in 1938. A group of subsidiary companies was formed in Malaya, Siam and Britain to launch separate smelting, mining, tin-production and rubber-planing enterprises. By 1940 the Straits Trading Company was buoyant again, and in 1941 the Butterworth works reopened.19
The Straits Trading Company had also become part of a large interlocking commercial-shipping empire based on Singapore, whose employees formed a sizeable body of unofficials. From 1924 Straits Trading was based in Ocean Building, Singapore, the prestigious waterfront offices of the shipping agency Mansfield & Co., which managed the Straits Steamship Company, a subsidiary of the Blue Funnel Line. Carrying tin ore became bread-and-butter business for the Straits Steamship Company, a household name in Malaya, for it had operated coastal services out of Singapore since 1890. After the Great War, in the hands of its dynamic Managing Director and Chairman H. E. Somerville, Straits Steamship underwent a period of expansion. Within the period 1922–32 it took over a number of ailing shipping concerns, thus extending its operations from the South China ports to Rangoon, East and South Sumatra, the Riau archipelago and Borneo. Its prime takeover was the Penang-based fleet of the Chinese Eastern Shipping Company, together with its Butterworth dockyard at the confluence of the Sungei Prai (River Prai) and Sungei Nyok (Coconut River) facing Penang harbour.
When the Legislative Council permitted vessels of under 75 tons to be manned entirely by native crews in 1922, the Straits Steamship Company seized the initiative, modernizing Sungei Nyok Dockyard to build 75-tonners, beginning with the Rengam in 1924, thereby greatly extending its coastal trade. Despite the impact of the Depression on company profits, the Dockyard Manager, H. E. Ward, and his Assistant and naval architect Bill Price, with a willing labour force of some 200 Asian workers, completed another dozen ships by 1941.20 With black, blue and white funnels and white hulls and superstructures, the Straits Steamship Company’s White Fleet was known throughout the East. Its regular services conveyed a diverse array of passengers and Eastern produce, from tin ore to pineapples, palm oil to coffee, machinery and car tyres to beer and cigarettes, fish to racehorses. Many of the little ships, like the Kuala and the Kedah, would play a proud role in the war with Japan in 1941–2.
However brief this glimpse of British commercial enterprise, it underlines Malaya’s important contribution to the imperial economy and Britain’s maritime dominance in the Far Eastern trade routes. It also reminds us that a relatively small number of European managers, technical and support staff – unofficials – helped to generate that wealth. On the other hand, the officials of the Malayan Civil Service, who ran the country, were also few in number. Malaya was a convivial posting. Following a major (and overdue) review of its pay structure, the Civil Service was mollified by a generous rise in salaries and allowances in 1920, which gave it a new esprit de corps. From that time its members were personally insulated against economic recession and constituted a secure, well-paid elite under the Governor. For Councillors and unofficials, ‘Naturally, an invitation to Government House is the highest social honour attainable.’21 Otherwise, the Governor’s main duty was ‘to keep the colony in peace, prosperity and security’.22
Sir Laurence Guillemard was fortunate that the international situation enabled him to keep faith with this last pronouncement for his seven-year term from 1919 to 1927. He was lucky, too, as a former Treasury high-flier, that, although ‘there was lots of work to be done’, there was also ‘plenty of money to do it with’; and with that typically English faith in pragmatism he saw it as a special advantage that he knew ‘little or nothing about the colony to which I was going or the particular problems and difficulties to be faced’.23 He soon discovered that the country’s political organization was shot through with complexities. He set his sights on tackling the centralizing trend which had reduced the power and purpose of the state governments in the Federated Malay States and had confirmed the resistance of the rulers of the Unfederated States to joining the federation. But in taking modest steps towards decentralization, giving the Malay aristocracy a role as unofficial members of the Federal Council and proposing the abolition o
f the position of Chief Secretary of the Federated States, the Governor became locked into a fierce personality clash with the holder of the post, George Maxwell, and met the stern disapproval of European and Chinese business members of the Federal Council. Hugh Bryson, an Assistant Secretary in Kuala Lumpur at the time, watched the unedifying spectacle as
This disagreement over constitutional matters before very long became public knowledge and the European community … divided into the pro-Maxwell and the pro-Guillemard factions … The pro-Maxwellites, like my humble self, were inclined to see the move not as de – but as re-centralization with power shifting to Singapore where we feared the big commercial interests with their London control would exercise too much control over the Malay States.24
When Guillemard’s stormy period of office ended, the Colonial Office appointed as successor the Governor of Ceylon, a man whose familiarity with Malaya was calculated to reassure everyone. Sir Hugh Clifford was a respected but slightly eccentric patrician with a towering physique and a larger-than-life personality. As a young cadet in the 1880s he was a man of action who had stormed successive jungle stockades in the Pahang rebellion. Now, he had the aura of an enlightened autocrat, but his triumphal tour of Pahang in 1928 was thought by some to be more appropriate to the age of imperial adventure of his youth than to an era of rising interest groups. Many stories circulated about Clifford – a number of them involving his addiction to fast cars, physical danger and attractive women. After less than two years his mental health gave way and he retired. A distinguished figure, he spoke sincerely and in the grand tradition of Britain’s role and responsibility for progress, but he represented the political past rather than the future.
Clifford’s successor, Sir Cecil Clementi, was another charming patrician and another colonial Governor – of Hong Kong – when he was appointed to Malaya in 1929. But he was a man of a very different mettle – an ‘awesome figure with a doom-laden reputation for thinking the unthinkable about imperial disengagement’, as one historian has put it.25 With more determination than Guillemard, he took on ‘the buffalo of integration’ to bring all the Malay States into a federation, decentralized and supported by a customs union. Clementi’s time coincided with the world economic depression – a difficult backcloth against which to implement controversial changes such as a protective tariff and controls against the Chinese Communists and Nationalists, or to introduce more Malays and other Asians into the administration. While he succeeded in pushing through some measures of decentralization to devolve powers to the Federated State governments, his notion of an enlarged federation of all the states was unfulfilled (although it was to be revived thirty years later).
Clementi’s pro-Malay stance won him support in the Malayan Civil Service, but others found his mode of championing Malay rights too patronizing. In the end, blasts of protest from the business community, echoed by retired Malaya hands like George Maxwell, confirmed the mistrust of the Colonial Office, who effectively sacked Clementi in 1934. The Malayan press was also critical: Maurice Glover of the Tribune considered him to have been ‘dogmatic and immovable’.26 However, press barons tend to see their role in provocative terms, and Glover rated Clementi’s successor no better. Sir Shenton Thomas, Governor of the Gold Coast, ‘was too old and out-of-date’; he was ‘a one-man system’ who ‘made mistake after mistake’. His unwillingness to unbend served only to antagonize opinion against British rule and a system that was too bureaucratic.27 On the other hand, Thomas prided himself on his man-management, and he succeeded in winning over many in the business community by his genial manner and down-to-earth approach. According to the Superintendent Engineer Leslie Froggatt, a shrewd, apolitical observer, ‘Our Governor … was a very mild sort of person, could make witty speeches, and we had a certain affection for him.’28 To the insiders in the Colonial Service he was judged to have governed well. He continued Clementi’s decentralizing plans and presided over the smooth running of the administrative machine. But, as Glover indicated, not everyone was taken in by his affability, and many outside the Civil Service thought he lost touch – and respect – when he and his wife went on a long home leave in 1940.
Governors, of course, came and went. Under their command was the Malayan Civil Service, the permanent administrative machine of some 200 British officials, drawn from the public-service class of Britain – sons of clergymen, army officers, doctors, bankers, members of overseas civil services, schoolmasters and lawyers – and an additional group of around forty high-born Malays. This core body of public-school men and Oxbridge graduates was assisted and advised by another l,500 Europeans and other races in the technical services – dealing with health, medicine, education, mines, fisheries, agriculture, customs, police and public works – and by a subordinate Malay Administrative Service giving mainly clerical support. In other words, throughout the interwar years the whole country was effectively governed by fewer than 2,000 officers.
Subtle changes were taking place in the 1930s. The Residents had lost their political independence and were now overseers of a bureaucratic apparatus rather than movers and shakers as their predecessors had been and the chief of staff, the Secretary to the Resident, had an important co-ordinating role. But the District Officer was still the all-rounder in the field. ‘As D.O. I was a veritable Pooh-Bah,’ wrote Victor Purcell, listing an incongruous portfolios of duties.29 Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown, too, felt quiet satisfaction as he surveyed his ‘kingdom’ of Jasin in South Malacca, ‘a hundred thousand people, nine mukim (parishes), twenty-miles-by-twenty of hill-and-dale’.30 In fact the reputation of the service rested on the District Officer’s performance.
In his office the D.O. was … assisted by a clerical staff that was quite sizeable in the bigger places. These included Malay assistant collectors in land offices, chief clerks who were often Chinese, and hosts of subordinates drawn from all three of the main racial groups … Nothing was more essential to sound administration than constant touring throughout one’s district, acquiring intimate and comprehensive knowledge of the people and their lives and devoting thought and time to their welfare.31
European officials were also expected to play a social role. ‘The presence of the D.O. added a social cachet to weddings, to spinning contests, ronggengs etc. and few days passed without a sireh tray being dumped on the office table by way of invitation,’ recalled A. B. Cobden-Ramsay, who served in Alor Gajah, Malacca.32 When Mervyn (later Mubin) Sheppard arrived there in the mid-1930s to be District Officer, he was treated as a kind of universal aunt: ‘the people expected him to do everything, quite simply because the D.O. always had done, as far back as anyone could remember’.33 One responsibility was to ensure that cadet officers were integrated into the system. Some District Officers had a reputation for being indifferent towards beginners. In 1928 Sheppard’s superior at Temerloh, deep in Pahang’s interior, was a dour Aberdonian who could not even raise a smile of welcome. ‘This first formal interview was totally devoid of human kindness,’ Sheppard recalled.34 On the other hand, from the moment Hugh Bryson disembarked at Penang he met with kindness and hospitality. His posting was selected for him by chance – ‘Batu Gajah [in Perak] wanted a cricketer, preferably a bowler. The other man didn’t play; I did, but certainly wasn’t a bowler. I went to B.G.’ He soon realized how lucky he was. Junior administrators did not always receive training on the ground but learned from observation and experience. Bryson found
The Batu Gajah Land office, under the direction of [T. S. Adams] the Chief Assistant District Officer … was probably one of the best places in the country for a young Cadet to learn his job. In the office I was often given bundles of files and told to make precis of the matters there discussed, and to sort out the important facts concerning the application for a new mining lease or rubber lands. This entailed references to other files very frequently, to maps and plans … Some of this work may have been what might be called original research, but much of it was T.S.A.’s method of training his young recruits.35
The Land Officer’s work included keeping records, supervising and registering land changes, collecting rents, hearing devolution suits, and carrying out fieldwork. Bryson found that the purely office side of his job had its own attractions, but going off into kampongs with the Malay Settlement Officers was a particular pleasure, for he met the smallholders and learned, as he put it, ‘about the happy ways of Malay peasantry and Chinese shopkeepers’. Bryson also recalled another side of their work: that ‘We all had to study the law books, the statute laws of the Federated Malay States, and to pass examinations in them before being gazetted as Magistrates of the First Class … later … I realised more fully the vital importance to the peace and well-being of a district if it was to have justice quickly and impartially administered.’36
Since all-round competence was looked for in young officers, they could expect to be moved around to test their potential. Bryson held seven different jobs in his first tour of duty from 1921 to 1925:
Cadet attached to the Land Office, Batu Gajah … until about May 1922. Then a year or less as Financial Secretary to the Senior Medical Officer in Taiping. A couple of months as Assistant in the Land Office, Taiping. Three months as Assistant Secretary to [the] Resident, Negri Sembilan, during which time I was posted to deputise as District Officer, Port Dickson, while the incumbent went into hospital with malaria. Three months as Assistant Supervisor of Customs, on preventive work connected with rubber smuggling, at Kota Tinggi, Johore. Then the remainder of the tour in the Federal Secretariat in Kuala Lumpur, in charge of the confidential records. I found interest in all these jobs.37
Similar expectations were made of cadet officers in the Chinese Protectorate and the Labour Department. The former was a crucial department, as the government’s main window on Chinese activities. Victor Purcell found that as Assistant Protector and later Protector of Chinese in Penang, he had to carry out a multitude of jobs, as magistrate, prison visitor, controller of labour and secret societies, arbitrator of disputes, protector of women and girls, supervisor of Chinese education, city councillor, company registrar and liquidator, and, finally, Deputy Registrar of the Supreme Court. Proficiency was required in the language of the Asian community for whom officers were responsible, although some were inherently better linguists than others. However, the ethos of the Service was staunchly pro-Malay, and Malay was the principal language spoken by officials. When Walter Stark, who was trained in Tamil for Labour Office work, was moved to Jelebu as Acting District Officer, he knew his Malay was barely adequate; he was mildly amused when the local headman afterwards praised his successor, H. T. Martin, for his fluency: ‘pandai chakap Melayu’.38 In addition to knowing Tamil and Telegu, Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown was directed to learn Malay by his superior in Penang. He spent two years with the Emigration Commission before being moved around as Deputy Controller of Rubber in Kuala Lumpur, a Magistrate in Singapore and later Seremban, District Officer in Malacca, and Controller of Labour in Johore.
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