In Singapore the planter from upcountry had the image of being an unsophisticated, cheerful, gregarious cove, but inherently suspicious of Managers, Visiting Agents, Secretaries and Directors. The planter was not unique in his liking for stengahs, and the average club made its profits from hard drinkers and a fair number of steady ones. However, Somerset Maugham’s assertion that the majority of rubber planters were rough and common men runs contrary to evidence, and, for cynically targeting the weakness of individuals and creating stereotypes which passed into historical myth on the strength of two short visits, he was never forgiven by the British community.55 While honest enough to recognize some truth in aspects of Maugham’s charge, Hutchinson was keen to put the record straight, wondering if the writer knew, for instance, that
In those days the Rev. Petter used to come over from Malacca [to the Segamat district] and hold a C. of E. service once a month in the evening … and then the next morning an early service … Mrs ‘Joe’ Allgrove of Maur River Estate used to play the piano for the hymns and we usually had a congregation on the Thursday evening of about 15 to 20 people, and that was Club Night and Government Servants’ Holiday Night too. So all Planters are ‘Whisky Swillers all the time!’56
Rubber planting, like Janus, presented two faces. One appealed to the idealist who saw himself as a member of a profession and for whom rubber was a lifelong enterprise, if not a vocation. In this context one thinks of men like Jack le Doux, who changed career from Estate Manager for a large company to become a modest owner-planter in close touch with Asian life (and who wrote under the pseudonym of Tuan Djak); or Rupert Pease, who, Cunyngham-Brown noted, ‘shared with his labour force the profits of his rubber estate down at Port Dickson; daily writing up the balance sheet on a blackboard in a manner that would have pleased Mao Tse Tung and dividing the profits equally among them all, including himself’.57 The other was the face of capitalism, which appealed to the pragmatists and fortune-seekers. Whether they embarked on this hard, profit-conscious, market-driven career through inclination or through force of circumstance, many knew they had been sent out East ‘to control their Employer’s interests to the best advantage’.58 Change is indigenous to market forces, and changes have come thick and fast in the second half of the twentieth century. Some have been for the better. ‘Present day planters have more creature comforts (including “real” wives!) … They are technically better equipped … Health has improved immeasurably,’ Joe Allgrove reported. But in the flux of economic life, rubber has lost out to oil palm, just as coffee, tapioca and coconuts once gave way to rubber; so the planter’s work ‘lies more in tree and palm care than in labour care which used to occupy so much time’.
Looking back over their experiences in the interwar period, the old hands saw special virtues in the planters of their day. Courage, integrity and honesty went with the job.
I have heard many Ex-Servicemen say, ‘I am used to handling men’ etc. But they forget that they had the whole Army behind them. A Planter was quite on his own, and if he was ‘made a fool of’ in front of his coolies, he lost their respect for him. If he showed fear, they knew it … you had to show that you meant what you said.60
As to the lure of money, ‘The reputed fortunes made were confined to the very few who formed an almost negligible proportion of the profession.’61 In any case, planters, like every other section of the British community, were to lose out heavily during the Second World War. In this respect Guy Hutchinson was no exception, though he was remembered long after as an unselfish comrade, ‘both a character and a gentleman’.62 The same, he would have argued, was true of many planters. ‘Now it is a funny thing,’ he mused, thinking of the two types, educated Scots and English public-school men, who dominated the planting community of Malaya:
For some reason they were [both] better than any other types in the Whole World at the ‘handling of labour’. I don’t know why, an inborn sense of justice, a fairness and determination that this should be given to all under them. They were not ashamed to take off their shirts and work, to give an example, and by and large they could be trusted not to drink to excess nor to womanise too much. There are of course exceptions to every rule … but on the whole the Planters were a very decent, honest, clean living and hard working lot.63
10
The Mem, the Missee and the Tuan Kechil
‘What was the poor Planter to do – stuck out in the East with no women of any kind?’ fumed Guy Hutchinson, and his frustration was echoed by hundreds of heterosexual bachelors in the interwar years.1 ‘There was very, very little female company in Kuala Lumpur. As far as I remember in that year 1931 there were only two unmarried British girls and they had already got fairly firm boyfriends,’ confirmed a young police officer. ‘You couldn’t get a look in.’2 The only hope came from ‘the “fishing fleet” of unattached ladies [who] came regularly up from Australia to Singapore, Malaya and Ceylon. They would have friends or relations here and they would stay with them. Most of them found husbands alright!’3
The Great War had marked a watershed in social conventions, including attitudes to sex. Asian mistresses with Eurasian children were no longer acceptable to the European community; the social pressure on employers to employ married men was growing, although the rule that men should not marry before thirty persisted, at least in theory. (Those with private incomes could always circumvent the ban, the planter John Theophilus recalled.) ‘After the big slump – from 1934 onwards – the number of European men was smaller and the number of wives greater, and the older generation’s daughters were beginning to come out.’4 Then, as the decade progressed, a visitor noticed a huge increase in the number of European women, which coincided with, and was facilitated by, modern developments like motor cars and railways, and electricity and refrigerators and radios, and also by the expansion of shipping lines such as P. & O. and Blue Funnel.5 ‘Everyone seemed to be getting married – the omens looked good,’ rejoiced Hutchinson as ‘the all-male society that had centred on the local clubhouse was slowly infiltrated by the gentler manners of the English and Scottish shires’.6
By 1931 women accounted for 28 per cent of Malaya’s European population – some 5,000, together with about 2,500 children, almost half of them resident in Singapore. By the end of 1940 the figures had increased to about 8,500 women and around 4,300 children.7 Whereas many of the older generations of immigrants remained unmarried, the new generation had partners who tended to be from similar commercial, technical or professional backgrounds to their own. They came from the middle-class suburbs around London or Manchester, Liverpool or Glasgow, or the industrial towns of northern England and Scotland. Wives had known their husbands from school days, as neighbours or family acquaintances, members of the same church, tennis club or social set. Thomas and Ethel Barnes both came from the Clapham district of London. E. Milroy Dickson of the Singapore Harbour Board had known his wife, Barbara, since childhood, as both families had lived in Brigham, near Cockermouth. While on home leave, Fred Snell, a quantity surveyor with Singapore Municipality, met his wife, Peggie, in Radlett, Hertfordshire, where she was a journalist. Kathleen King was a secretary at Vickers Armstrong’s shipbuilding works in Barrow-in-Furness when she met her future husband, Bill Price, a naval architect in the drawing office there. Of the generation of women whose marriage hopes had been blighted by the Great War or by post-war slump, some were probably beguiled by descriptions of Eastern life: ‘all the “best” clubs, golden nights in palatial hotels, shopping by motorcar’. ‘Well, the dear girl has no doubt been living modesty at Home,’ quipped a male journalist patronizingly, ‘not a bit averse to washing a window or lighting a fire’, until an exchange of letters with a bachelor in Malaya turned her into a ‘dizzy optimist’.8 And so the new Malayan wives, the mems, became the envy of ‘aunts and uncles who … never left Brixton or Paisley’ – though they were anathema to the old colonials as symbols of ‘lower-middle-class suburbia, generaled by a small coterie of determined, hard-faced females
who might have done better to remain in Surbiton’.9
Under the conditions of service for both officials and unofficials, marriage was delayed until the second agreement or term of service. Some couples seized on the opportunity to marry during the future husband’s first home leave, but others felt financially constrained to wait and endure inevitable separation.10 Since 1928 Hutchinson had kept in touch with a Scots girl from his home town of Bo’ness and
For my part anyway I was quite serious in my idea that if things had been good – pay, prospects etc., that I would have tried hard to get engaged during my home leave. But I now [1930] saw that this was hopeless, and I finally wrote to her explaining that my future was dim in the extreme and that she was, from then on, not to take me seriously.11
Occasionally engagements were whirlwind affairs, but generally they were long, and husbands and wives tended to be mature by the time they married. Only nineteen when she met Bill Price in 1925, Kathleen King was twenty-five and he was forty-one at their marriage. Facing possible redundancy in the era of disarmament, he left England in 1926 to take a post as Assistant Manager at Sungei Nyok Dockyard, Province Wellesley. She followed him out in 1932 at the start of his second agreement. William Price of Penang (no relation to the above) married at the age of forty while on leave in England. In 1908 he had joined his brother as a rubber planter, but in 1910 he changed career. Returning to Malaya in 1919, he rejoined his old firm, Whiteaway Laidlaw, and had risen to be Assistant Manager of the Penang branch when he married Mabel in 1929. Thomas Barnes, who joined Dunlop’s around the time of the Great War, waited fifteen years to marry. ‘My mother, whom he had long known in England,’ wrote his son, ‘sailed out to Malaya to join him in 1929’, when both were in their mid-thirties.12 Guy Hutchinson’s courtship of his future wife was also protracted, and he was in his middle thirties when he proposed. Although she ‘gave me a lot of “heart throbs”’, he admitted, ‘I had said nothing, nor written anything, to Jessie about getting married. I did not think that a fair way to go about things.’ Instead, he left it until his next home leave to ‘go “All Out” on the “Personal Relations” line’.13
Sometimes prolonged separation played havoc with relationships, and shipboard romances were a feature of the sultry run east of Suez. Guy Hutchinson knew of one planter who ‘got married to a girl he only met first on leave. He sailed for Singapore with her on a P. & O. When they got there she informed him that she was going on to Hong Kong with “that bloke”, another passenger, so poor old C.K. went ashore and … started divorce proceedings.’14 Arriving at Penang in 1928, Alex Cullen watched an eager fiancé dash prematurely up the gangway, pursued by a harbour policeman, in the rush to embrace his bride-to-be: a rash gesture which carried a $400 fine! And in another incident on Penang wharf a wife threw herself into the arms of a man she mistook as her husband, to the wry amusement of the watching crowd. But, despite these occasional mishaps, an increasing number of brides-to-be travelled out unchaperoned in the interwar years, to be married within a day or two of landing.
Outside the metropolis, European weddings added some spice to social life. Frequently the occasion would be organized by a mem, a married acquaintance of the husband, often the wife of a senior colleague in his company or department, who gave the bride away. Thomas and Ethel Barnes were married in Malacca on 18 June 1929 in Christ Church, the old rose-coloured Dutch church built in 1753. Their wedding had been arranged by the wife of the head of Dunlop’s, Malacca, Mrs Wiseman, whose daughter was bridesmaid. In Singapore the favoured venue was St Andrew’s Cathedral, where, for instance, Fred and Peggie Snell were married in March 1931, and their friends the Cannells in April 1932, while William Vowler recalled that his parents, aunts and uncles were all married there. All the European residents of Butterworth were invited to the marriage of Kathleen King and Bill Price, which was conducted by the Revd F. T. Loader at St Mark’s Anglican Church in March 1932. The matron-of-honour, Dolly Black, wife of a Harbour Board official, had organized the wedding and lent her spacious home for the reception. All the bridegroom had to do was to book the honeymoon at Fraser’s Hill. A decade before, Roger Barrett’s parents, rubber planters near Sungei Patani, had been married in the same little church, which served the scattered European families in Province Wellesley and south Kedah. Since Kedah was an Unfedrated Malay State, there was no Christian Marriage Enactment to allow Europeans to marry in Alor Star, but the Regent of Kedah ordered an Enactment to be passed for Wilfrid and Agnes Davison. ‘I was married from the Residency,’ Mrs Davison recalled,
and the Acting British Adviser, Mr. A C. Baker, and Mrs Baker, made our wedding a very happy and memorable occasion. All Government offices were closed, both Europeans and Malays attended, and the quaint little church was filled to overflowing. After a wonderful reception there was a noisy departure with Chinese crackers etc. and when the Residency car, with all sorts of old tins and boots etc., tied to it, passed through the town, the Malays thought the Orang puteh had gone mad.15
The suggestion that all colonial wives were immersed in a frivolous social whirl, oblivious to social problems, was a simplification of reality, although there was inevitably more understanding of social needs among the core of professional women – doctors, nurses, teachers, missionaries – who worked among Asian women and children. Staff of the Young Women’s Christian Association, such as Gertrude Owen, were active in social welfare. Mrs Ferguson-Davie, a medical doctor and wife of the Bishop of Singapore, had started the medical mission which became St Andrew’s Hospital. Mrs Helen Band was highly regarded not simply for her philanthropic work in Singapore, but for the all-pervading support she gave to the ministry of her husband, the Revd Stephen Band, who was head of the Presbyterian community in Malaya.
The demand for the services of British doctors and nursing sisters to train and work alongside Asian nurses was unremitting. Although most European mems did not work in the 1930s, an experienced theatre sister such as Sylvia Cannell was encouraged to leave her children in the care of their amah while she worked part-time in Singapore. Medical staff were well respected in the community they served: caring characters like ‘Houghie’, an Australian nursing sister, who had been sent in 1937 to start a children’s welfare scheme in the kampongs around Segamat, or Elizabeth Darville, whose ‘decision to go to Malaya was prompted largely by my longing to do pioneer work’, and who started up maternity and child welfare work from scratch in 1927 on Penang Island.16 After Dr Lowson of the Colonial Medical Service was posted to Johore Bahru, his wife, Dr Winifred Lowson, mother of four, ran the children’s ward in Johore Hospital and also the women’s and children’s clinic with Dr Margaret Smallwood.
However, medicine and the mission were not the only fields in which women of initiative were to be found. ‘By the 1920s there were a number of well-established English schools in Malaya that attracted a small group of teachers with high standards of devotion to their calling.’17 Among them were Alice Doughty and her sister, who worked in Malacca, Alice teaching in English and her sister in Malay. Another dedicated teacher, and the head of Pudu English School, was Josephine Foss, who began by establishing a new school on the site of ‘a discarded tin mine, full of large holes, huge tree trunks and with plenty of squatters in residence!’18 She also became involved in training Malay teachers, advising the Malay girls schools and helping on literacy courses for Malay women. Ada Weinman was a notable music teacher for almost sixty years from the 1920s. Her gift was to inspire the lesser stars, the local music and theatre enthusiasts. ‘She was like the Pied Piper, standing four-square in the doorway of her little school, welcoming small boys and girls, Malays, Chinese, Indians and Europeans alike, all armed with books, sheet music and recorders. Soon the sounds of music raised the roof.’19 Lillian Newton launched a successful children’s dancing school in Singapore during the 1920s. In 1939 her most talented pupil, Pahang-born Sally Gilmour, danced on the London stage with the Ballet Rambert. With her flair and family connections with musi
c and amateur theatricals, Lillian Newton stamped her individual style and enthusiasm on her pupils. Her friend and sister-in-law, Miss Griffith-Jones, continued the Newton tradition at her school in the Cameron Highlands. The craze for dancing and fancy dress spread wildly in the 1930s, encouraged by the success of child film stars like Shirley Temple. Penang’s popular children’s dancing school drew its pupils not only from the island but from Province Wellesley, presenting colourful displays to enthusiastic parents. Even in depths of rural Selangor the daughters of a rubber planter were taken to dancing classes in a nearby bungalow, where in pink frocks they performed ‘a loathsome number called Basket of Flowers to the tune of Tea for Two ground out of an old gramophone’.20
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