Out in the Midday Sun
Page 34
Norman Bewick, meanwhile, also had difficulty with red tape – particularly with the BMA and the civil servants sent from London to deal with war damage claims – and he had the added problem of being officially listed dead on the casualty lists. He found he owned nothing. His demands were as incomprehensible to the government officer as the concepts of clothing coupons and plastic collars were to him. When he set about picking up the threads of his old life at Pekan – as the much-admired Secretary to the Sultan of Pahang – one irritation followed another.
I got things cracking, and then this fellow, a Colonel Dobson of the British Military Administration, came round to me and said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? You’re interfering with my Administration; I’m in charge of this District!’ I said, ‘You may be on paper, but I am in person – is that clear?’ Then he came with more and more abuses, so I went to H.H. and said, ‘Have him removed, Tunku. Have him removed!’ And he was gone from there in twenty-four hours! He was an objectionable type. The people the BMA sent out here, having been clerks in a railway station or something, and suddenly they were colonels, thought they were important. It was one of the problems of the BMA that the Sultans didn’t like them.28
This was not an isolated case. There is ample evidence of the unpopularity of the untried post-war administrators – civilians with military tides – among the pre-war generation. The mistrust was compounded in May 1946 when 258 seasoned men of the Parachute Regiment mutinied at Muar Camp in protest at their conditions (receiving heavy sentences which were later quashed on technical grounds). The sentiments of J. S. Potter of Guthrie’s would have resonated with many returning civilians whose personal possessions had been looted by British servicemen. ‘Postwar Malaya was another disillusionment’, he wrote:
The British Military Administration was in power and it was a great shock to find corruption rife at all levels … One of the reasons for fighting the war was surely to prevent corruption. I suppose British morals had declined in the long war years of restrictions and shortages. We, however, who had lost everything we owned in the war did not take kindly to our fellow countrymen filching what was not theirs. It was noticeable that the Japanese had taken care of property meticulously; those of us who had left valuables in the Bank generally got them back. Anything that the B.M.A. could lay their hands on was not seen again.29
By comparison, the loyalty of Asian domestic servants to their former employers was remarkable. Ali, the Kitchings’ syce, who had looked after their Morris car throughout the occupation, approached the authorities to return it to the family, since both Kitching parents were dead. The Winchester family’s cook and gardener were waiting on their return in 1946, as were the Rawcliffe’s cook in Port Swettenham and the Barretts’ servants in Sungei Patani. Returning in May 1948, Ursula Holttum was touched by the sight of familiar faces. ‘Even our old syce Bakri, very small and gnome-like now, pops up in the driver’s seat and grins most pleasantly at me.’ Then, at the house,
there was Ah Joon, out on the step to meet me, really pleased to see me again, smiling all over his face, and showing a great many gold teeth. I am truly glad to see him; he is an old and trusted friend. I engaged him over ten years ago, without any other character or reference than … that I liked his face.30
The Cullens’ amah, Ho Ah Yee, wrote to the family several times from Singapore after 1946, and even sent them a food parcel from Singapore for Christmas 1948. The concern of the Cullens’ Chinese friends was touching: ‘The terrible experiences of this war, especially the death of Tuan in Siam must have caused much unhappiness to you but we must let the dead past bury the past … We send you sincere greetings for Christmas and the New Year, and hope to see you in Singapore in the near future.’31
Malaya had too many memories for widows like Dorothy Cullen; she made a new life for herself in England. But the need to work brought many of the pre-war generation back East, and for some it was an emotional experience. From Singapore docks ‘we drove away, through the familiar streets, all shabby, some ramshackle, some scarred and pitted by bombing, but all teeming with life’, Ursula Holttum wrote. And at the sight of her old home beside the Botanical Gardens,
They were so many [impressions], so fleeting, so charged with joy, with astonishment … So much is there that I never dreamed of seeing again. After all, the house was not looted, and although shelled, not very greatly damaged … It was somehow touching to see the same old covers on armchairs and couch, with the faint design of soft brown leaves all over them … that I chose so long ago, and to think that they have survived so many and so strange tenants, in this house which is now ours again. How many people came back to their houses, to find nothing left.
Seeing everything shabby and dirty, Mrs Holttum spring-cleaned each morning, ‘red in the face, dripping with perspiration, my clothes sticking to me’, consoling herself that it was ‘marvellous to have any furniture left to polish. Three small blackwood tables, bought long ago, are still here … and the beautiful Chinese cabinet, carved all over with celestial dragons, has stood in its old place, ever since I went away in 1940.’32
The Holttums were fortunate that their home had escaped the predatory eyes of the military. Daphne Davidson, a tin miner’s wife, remembered that ‘when we came [in 1948) the reputation of the BMA was absolutely frightful’.33 But there was another reason for the authorities’ unpopularity, particularly with the Malays: the nature of Malaya’s new constitutional arrangements. It had been announced in October 1945 that Singapore would remain a colony with its own government. The nine Malay States, with the territories of Penang and Malacca, were to merge in a Malayan Union. The creation under the British Crown of this unitary state, which was to supersede the BMA from 1 April 1946, alienated the Sultans and galvanized the Malay people in an unprecedented way. In protest, the United Malay Nationalist Organization was formed under the aristocratic Dato Onn bin Ja’afar, Johore’s Chief Minister. Datuk Puan Halimahton, an early activist among Malay women, explained:
I was involved in UMNO since its inception in 1946. I fought tooth and nail against Malayan Union. That was the beginning of it; that was the time when everybody knew that something was wrong. According to that Constitution, our Rulers were to become sort of figureheads, only concerned with the Adat, the religion; and the tradition of the Malays … There was that feeling, Why? Why? Why? I managed to call everybody in Rembau – thirty thousand of them – they filled up the courthouse padang – to give them a talk about what had brought us all together … people were saying, ‘this is our country! Why should our masters want to disorganise it? No! No! No! That’s how UMNO was formed! 34
The Malays resented the loss of the Sultans’ traditional sovereignty and the privileged status of their community. Chinese and Indian shopkeepers and small businessmen also responded coolly, even though the new constitution promised democratic self-government and equal rights for all races under the British Crown. Lack of consultation was another source of grievance, and in an unprecedented show of displeasure the Sultans boycotted the inauguration ceremony of Sir Edward Gent as first Governor of the Union. As the implications of the Sultans’ action dawned, the Colonial Office was impelled to go back to the drawing board and consult the rulers and UMNO. The outcome was the constitution of the Federation of Malaya, headed by a British High Commissioner and based broadly on the old blueprint of the Federated States. This came into effect on 1 February1948.35
The first two years after the war were necessarily a period of reconstruction. The economy of Malaya had been the first casualty under the Japanese. Food – especially rice – was in desperately short supply. In 1946 the ration was a quarter of a labourer’s normal needs, and until 1948 Asian workers endured hardship and malnutrition of a kind they had not known before the war. Basic social services, anti-malaria precautions, hospitals, clinics and schools had to be restored. Among the pre-war doctors who came back were the Lowsons of Johore: Dr Winifred Lowson returned from Geelong to reopen the Women an
d Children’s Clinic with the help of her old team of Asian nurses and midwives. After nearly four years of neglect, a programme of repair to the country’s infrastructure of docks, bridges, telegraphs, roads and rail lines was imperative, against a background of shortages of essential goods, spare parts and equipment. As a small reminder of how inconvenient it was in 1945 for people in Penang and Bukit Mertajam, Brian Stewart, a captain in the Black Watch, noted that ‘the train journey from Singapore to Butterworth took four days of slow motion’.36
Britain’s post-war shortages were paralleled in Malaya. Accommodation, cars and electrical equipment, both industrial and domestic, were difficult to obtain, and salaries did not meet the inflated costs. European firms in Malaya, large and small, had obviously ceased all business during the occupation. Private schools had been forced to close, and as an internee in Singapore the headmistress of Tanglin, Miss Griffith-Jones, lost her livelihood. However, the demand for schools for European children revived after the war, and ‘Miss Griff’ returned to reopen hers. While visiting Cameron Highlands in 1948, Marjorie Soper wrote to tell her daughter that, ‘It really looks much the same as pre-war only more crowded, but the beds and cupboards are the same … There are 170 children at Tanglin now – 130 in the big school, which is surely more than you had, isn’t it?’
Large companies faced a major rebuilding challenge. Every director of Boustead & Co., for instance, had been interned in Singapore, and most companies had suffered gravely from loss of personnel and assets and the end of production. Guthrie’s had lost its General Manager, ‘Jiddy’ Dawson, in the evacuation of Singapore.38 Many of the Straits Trading Company’s senior and able executives had died from their wartime experiences. Demolition by retreating British troops in 1942 had ruined the Pulau Brani site, while the Butterworth plant, which had been used by Mitsubishi, had to be rebuilt. Sir John Bagnall’s successor as Managing Director, Sir Ewen Fergusson, confessed, ‘we had no office, no housing, no records, no transport, and worst of all, no smelter’. Plants belonging to the company’s subsidiaries had been similarly destroyed, but negotiations over the company’s claim to the-British government for damages of $10 million were to drag on for ten years, during which Straits Trading had to find its own salvation. For a year or two life in post-war Malaya was ‘harsh and uncomfortable’, but by 1948 the company was beginning to turn the corner.39
The disruption of tin smelting was paralleled in 1945 by the deplorable situation in tin mining, particularly the condition of the country’s 126 dredges. Having extracted large quantities of ore, the Japanese left the sites in chaos. In 1946 production was a mere 8,500 tons of tin, but an all-out effort with the help of the Mines Department more than trebled that figure in 1947, promising a continuing upward trend. At Pahang Consolidated’s mine at Sungei Lembing, six key European staff had lost their lives and the company office with its plans and records had been destroyed, making it extremely difficult to recall the workings in detail.40
Much the same occurred at Sungei Nyok Dockyard. The Eurasian Manager, H. E. Ward, who had remained at his post in 1941, had been killed by Chinese bandits during the war. Forced by the Japanese to continue construction work in 1942-3, the Chinese workmen were treated with gross brutality. When he took over the management in 1946, Bill Price found ‘the enemy had removed all records, both clerical and technical. Losing all drawing office records was a big loss since it is extremely difficult to carry on a drawing office without plans of previous ships built for guidance. Further, most of the foremen and quite a number of the more senior men had disappeared.’41 In these circumstances the completion of ‘the last and the best of the 75-tonners’, Renong, was much delayed, but on 23 June 1948 she was finally launched, watched by crowds who included the machine-shop foreman, Chin Ah Teck, who had worked at Sungei Nyok for forty-one years.
Labour shortages and disruptions affected the whole of the economy. Although rubber suffered less physical damage than other industries, labour problems and replanting needed to be tackled urgently. The Tamil labour force had been decimated after the mass deportations to Thailand, in some cases planters’ bungalows had been destroyed, and land was overrun by lalang, requiring labour-intensive rehabilitation.42 Even in 1954 there was still evidence of neglect on the older estates. According to John Edington of Tebrau Rubber Estates, it was ‘all work and no play’. Even so, competition from synthetic rubber kept prices low, and ‘it wasn’t until the Korean war [1950-3] had started, together with the devaluation of the £1 by a Labour Government in the UK, that funds from profits made became available to pay shareholders a dividend and acquire funds for replanting’.43 Thus 1951 was a record trading year for Singapore in both rubber and tin.
Well before this, however, planters and miners had become caught up in a new conflict: a protracted guerrilla war euphemistically called the Emergency. War veterans such as John Davis, John Creer and Bob Chrystal, who had lived among the Chinese Communists in 1942-5, knew that the ultimate goal of the Party was a Communist Republic of Malaya.44 Five years of economic chaos had produced a bedrock of sympathy for Communism among Chinese smallholders and squatters eking out an existence along the jungle fringes. And the British government laid up trouble in store by its determined policy of introducing trade unions into colonial territories, leaving estate managers to handle racial disputes and demands for pay and conditions that were often difficult to meet. In 1947 the furore over the Malayan Union gave opportunities for demonstrations, racial rivalries, rising crime, trade-union provocation and 300 strikes. Peaceful subversion, however, was not enough to give the Communists control of Malaya. The turning point came in early 1948, when Malaya’s Communists, in conjunction with those elsewhere in South-East Asia, were ordered on to the offensive at the international Communist Youth Conference at Calcutta. Consequently, under Chin Peng, the new Secretary-General, and Lau Yew, head of the Military Committee, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) turned to a strategy of violence, intimidation, sabotage and raids. Lau Yew formed the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army (which included old comrades of the MPAJA and was renamed the Malayan Races’ Liberation Army in 1949, to widen its appeal), while a civilian army of half a million Chinese villagers and squatters, known as the Min Yuen, supplied the necessary food, money, information and recruits – willingly or under coercion.
Against this backcloth, in October 1947 a Johore planter named A. E. Nicholson was robbed and killed. The attack came as no surprise to John Dalley, head of the pan-Malayan Political Intelligence Bureau. For some while he had told his friend Hugh Bryson of the MCS (whose Singapore house he was sharing) of political and criminal developments and the Governor’s reluctance to take firm action. Dalley left Bryson in no doubt that ‘serious trouble was coming to Malaya from Communist, or Communist-inspired, organizations’.45 After Nicholson’s murder John Theophilus, the rubber planter, received a visit from Dalley, an old friend from Dalforce days. They talked into the small hours.
He told me, ‘Tomorrow I’m going down to Johore Bharu’, where the Governor, MacDonald, and all the heads of the Services and the ambassadors of the area were having a meeting. He said, ‘John, I’ve written a treatise. There is going to be a great deal of trouble in the country, and I am sure they will not believe me’ – which, of course, roughly turned out to be true; and, having told the truth, poor old Dalley was sacked about a year later. It was June ‘48 when the nonsense really started. He foresaw exactly what subsequently happened: that the Communists would endeavour to take over the country!46
After Bryson was moved to Kuala Lumpur as Deputy Chief Secretary in May 1948, he accepted that senior police officers – Dalley included – were being blamed unfairly for deficiencies in anti-terrorist precautions. He was present at meetings ‘at which representatives of the planting and mining communities pressed Gent for firm action to protect the men and women living in isolation on mines and estates from attacks by armed gangs … but official help was given very unwillingly’.47 The planter Dato James Craw
ford blamed the colonial government for aggravating the situation by having insisted on the introduction of trade unions on estates, observing how the Communists manipulated the unionized workforce – resident Tamil labourers in particular – to resist change. In May 1948 when John Edington arrived in south Johore as an Assistant on Kulai Young Estate, he found it a remote and dangerous place, and there were suspicious developments afoot:
there had been considerable activity at night, both in the labour lines and on the estate road below the hill where the bungalow stood. Comings and goings of unknown people; all very sinister and unnerving to say the least, as the only weapon available to my senior assistant and I was an old Dutch carbine minus its bolt which rendered the weapon totally useless. So it was with considerable relief to us both when a detachment for ‘B’ Coy, 1/10 Bn. Gurkha Rifles arrived to set up their headquarters on the estate.48
On the day of their arrival the terrorist war began.
The Emergency, by common consensus, is reckoned to have started on 16 June 1948 in Sungei Siput, a mining township north of Ipoh, an area familiar to the Communist leader Chin Peng. Dato Crawford, who later took over the main estate involved, recalled what happened:
There had been a strike of Chinese tappers throughout Siput, but they had all been settled except those under Allison on Singai Siput [sic] and Walker on Elphil Estate. Then the local leader of the CTs [Communist terrorists] jumped the gun, and they shot Allison and Christian, who was only a youngster, just twenty-one. They tied their hands behind their backs and walked them up to the bungalow and shot them on the verandah; and Walker was sitting in the Elphil office, and one chap came up to the door and said, ‘Tabek, Tuan!’ (Greetings!) – and shot him in the back.49