The proponents of the New Villages believed that a secure environment could create a sense of community and isolate the terrorists, but at first the process was hampered by financial and manpower problems, and by the end of 1950 only 12,000 people had been moved. ‘It was not easy to persuade the farmer resettled miles from his farm on the jungle fringe, that he was better off than he had been living on his farm at the mercy of the Communist terrorists … The farmer was gravely inconvenienced,’ admitted Brian Stewart, ‘but so was the Communist terrorist movement, which now had to struggle to keep supplies flowing to their jungle camp.’26 Pearl Cox, painted a similarly honest picture of the lot of Chinese rubber-tappers and tin miners.
So few people knew about the New Villages, why they were there, and how they were created. The original idea was that each village should eventually be an ordinary village, but some were so isolated and in such horrible places – like tin tailings where it would be very difficult to do anything with the land – that they became a community cut off from everybody else, and with barbed wire around them. The workers were allowed to go out rubber-tapping in the morning, but they had to be back in at night, under guard, and they had no contact really with the real world at all … Of course, the reason they were put there in the first place was that they were like nomads, people who didn’t really belong anywhere.27
In such areas it was small wonder that a disorientated people would be troublesome. To Pearl Cox ‘One of the worst villages I ever went to was north of Sungei Siput. I thought it was an absolutely ghastly place. Those children grew up in a strange, segregated environment, and now [in the 1950s] they are causing all sorts of problems.’28 Bad resettlement was often due to bad co-ordination between government services, but Communist accusations that the villages were concentration camps were roundly denied by the British. In Perak a group of villagers were sufficiently grateful to the army unit in charge of their resettlement as to name their new home Kampong Coldstream!
The rehoused squatters needed protection and practical help, and suitable officers were seconded by the government; for instance, Ted Browne, Assistant Manager of the Rubber Research Institute Experimental Station, was brought in to resettle Chinese jungle squatters into the New Villages of Sungei Buloh and Subang, in Selangor. Daphne Davidson, wife of the local mine Manager, found herself involved in the Rawang area:
Special officers were asked to establish these Villages. They were go-ahead chaps, all expatriates. They would go out with the Police, find these people and round them up. Of course it was a sad business; they had to leave their homes, and they didn’t like that very much. They were brought into the Villages and set down in brand new houses. There was probably very little land to grow anything, and they were behind barbed wire … There were patrols all round them at night; their own people set up a sort of Home Guard … They weren’t guaranteed work, but I think most of them found something. A saw-mill was set up; and, of course, later the Cement Works was a help.
We used to go down and see to the children. We would go round the Village and collect up anybody that we thought needed medical attention, and send them to the doctor, either in K.L. or Kuala Kubu; and then later we got one of the Kuala Kubu doctors to come and visit Rawang once a week. There was also this Baby Clinic that I managed to set up with a few people. It was a sort of post-natal clinic. It was a thing we did entirely on our own, and it was later taken over by the Welfare Department.29
After 1952 the New Village programme accelerated under Templer. Most of Brian Stewart’s career in the Malayan Civil Service during the 1950s was as Secretary for Chinese Affairs in Malacca and latterly in Penang. He was acutely conscious of the sensitive political nature of his work in providing a bridge between the Chinese community and the government – especially in Malacca, where his predecessor and his Assistant had been ambushed while leaving a New Village. ‘We tried hard to provide decent accommodation, better schools than they had before, playing fields, entertainment, shops and clinics … So my job had major elements of town planning, social welfare, education in the rural areas. In the “city” of Malacca the job was to get to know the leaders of the Chinese community.’30
It was very gratifying to twenty-seven-year-old Stewart that Gerald Templer backed his Malacca activities warmly, enabling him to set in motion the ‘White Area’ policy. In particular, the General co-operated
in a series of Civics courses which I inaugurated in Malacca for rural leaders from all our Districts. They came to town for a week or so and at the end of their lectures were taken by bus to King’s House in Kuala Lumpur, where Lady Templer gave then tea! This may not sound very dramatic, but it was a major event in the life of a villager from Malacca, and it is difficult to conceive of a civil servant-High Commissioner allowing a junior officer to exploit King’s House in this fashion! The Psychological Warfare effect was incalculable, and the General was an Intelligence expert and aficionado and so saw the point immediately. Others would have worried about setting precedents.
In the event, by September 1953 it was possible ‘to “declare a victory” in Central Malacca, announce the Emergency had been won … due to the energetic co-operation of the Chinese community, and therefore the draconian Emergency measures such as resettlements, food control, and curfews would not be imposed on Central District. The experiment worked!’31
Stewart showed that, where social welfare was taken seriously, a district could return to normal and be designated ‘white’. Observing the way the people set up their own committees, started schools, raised funds and brought in teachers finally convinced Pearl Cox that the New Villages idea worked. But she saw how vital it was that the soil was good, so that inhabitants could grow vegetables and settle down:
In Pahang, Charles Corry, who was the British Adviser … was very keen that a certain New Village that was created there would become, and remain a proper Village. He gave them good land, and they grew bananas, and they are still there now. They were given a chance; and this allowed them later on to mingle more easily with the town, and the local Malays too.
Another good example of the same thing can be seen along the road to Bentong. There is a very big valley before you get to Genting Highlands. It is like a little bit of Switzerland, all neat market gardening. Now that was originally a New Village. It was put in a place which was well-protected and with good land, and it has remained part of the country’s agricultural system. If more thought had been put into the scheme, every New Village would have been like that.32
In addition,
The British Red Cross were asked to do the Nursing and Medical side. Each New Village had a nurse who lived there. When they first started they had one nurse assigned, and one Welfare Officer. The two girls lived in a little house in the New Village, they had an amah, a Landrover and a driver. They did a tremendous job. They didn’t only run the clinics; they also took part in the village work and tried to help the schools too. This is where I came in. We were trying to get schools to do Red Cross work and Health work and to make the children feel more a part of the community. I would run competitions and we would get the New Village schools to come up to our competition centre. There they met more people, mixed up with the Malays and other groups. This was terribly important.33
That was also the view of Margaret Wheatley, a teacher who answered Gerald Templer’s appeal for Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance volunteers to come to Malaya. She worked from 1953 to 1955 in the field of health education, first in Kuala Lumpur and then in Johore, and was involved in various initiatives, including the setting up of a blood bank. But her primary job was to train local people on health matters – especially the young, who were easy to motivate. Since her Malay was limited, older children in local schools happily acted as interpreters. Even the Communist terrorists respected the neutrality and beneficial nature of the Red Cross, as they did the Women’s Institutes, which were non-political and non-sectarian.
The Women’s Institutes were the brainchild of Lady Templ
er, a response to her husband’s urging that she should take the initiative in involving the women of Malaya in public life. If Malaya was to develop into a successful and confident nation, Templer saw that it needed a cultivated middle class with leisure. One of his decisions on arrival was that there ought to be a National Museum in the capital: ‘hardly the sort of thing you’d expect of a general coming out to win a war’, observed the administrator, John Loch. But Templer was ‘very conscious of the aesthetic side of life’, and he encouraged the formation of the Arts Council in Kuala Lumpur, which introduced symphony concerts and exhibitions, for which he and Lady Templer took responsibility for entertaining visiting international celebrities.34
Both of the Templers saw the development of Women’s Institutes as valuable social-welfare measure: a way of fostering a sense of communality among women of all the races, a route to raising their educational and cultural awareness. There was also another benefit, which Margaret Graham, one of the professional WI organizers sent out from England in 1953, addressed in a speech she gave in Kelantan early in 1955: ‘the organization and structure of the movement is democratic throughout and as such it provides a useful training for the understanding of democracy which is so necessary for a country approaching self government’.35 Mrs Barton (nee Graham) recalled that ‘Lady T. was very forceful … She had enormous energy and very considerable vision’, and she saw the potential of Women’s Institutes for the ‘hearts and minds’ programme.36 She used her drive and her unique position in Malaya to gain access to all levels of society; she had no compunction in weaning European women away from their bridge parties to become involved, or in approaching members of the Malay royal families for their help, since they were the natural patrons of traditional Malay craftsmanship.37 ‘In one or two of the states – Kelantan and Negri – where there was a very well-educated, go-ahead ruling family, they were very much more able and willing to see what was needed, and to set about seeing it was done.’38
The example of Kelantan’s Arts and Crafts Department had already encouraged Margot Massie, wife of the Legal Adviser, Trengganu, to launch a similar venture to stimulate traditional crafts there. In 1949 a workshop was opened in Kuala Trengganu with a small shop attached. Its success was proved when in October 1950 the workers won the commission to produce a new mace for the Supreme Court in Penang, designed by Mrs Massie herself. She also found that the female members of the royal family, and Mrs Aminah Kameruddin, the wife of the Mentri Besar (Prime Minister), were keen for her to teach them knitting and tatting, while she in return gained useful practice in speaking Malay.
By 1953 there were 220 Women’s Institutes grouped into forty-five districts, and they were operating in Malay kampongs as well as the predominantly Chinese New Villages. After travelling all over the Federation in her official capacity as organizer – on one occasion, from Kuala Lipis to Kuala Krai in a strange little railway vehicle known as the Wickham Trolley – Margaret Graham was able to take stock. The skills of the membership varied considerably: ‘Some were expert in traditional crafts, some were uneducated and unskilled, some were highly sophisticated and very capable.’39 However, the opening of so many institutes on a countrywide basis – a policy which had been initiated by Margaret Herbertson in 1952 and developed by her successor, Viola Williams – introduced ordinary Chinese, Malay and Tamil women to a variety of activities – sewing, dressmaking and knitting classes, arts and crafts, cookery and elementary home economics. ‘Knitting was very, very popular,’ said Mrs Daphne Loch, then based in Kuala Lumpur. And ‘we used to teach cooking – how to make biscuits, which they loved. They have a passion for sweet things, and one had no moulds, but lids of cigarette tins were a perfect size.’ (She discovered, too, from entertaining the village headmen and police with her husband, John, that a favourite drink was cherryade with condensed milk!)40
Margaret Graham even found that the tricky process of communication could bring unexpected benefits in spontaneous co-operation. For example,
I went to a New Village in the middle of Johore – I was doing a demo in patchwork. I was speaking English and there was a Chinese who could make herself understood to the Chinese and also to some of the Malays and also there was an Indian who could understand either a bit of what I was saying or a bit of what the other was saying. It was a complete mixed community and we had about four languages going. Fortunately, demonstrating patchwork doesn’t require a great deal of talk!41
The Girl Guide movement set itself similar social objectives to the Women’s Institutes, according to Margaret Mackenzie, wife of a senior planter in Johore and District Commissioner for the Guides in that state in 1948. She recalled how ‘guiding brought girls out of their homes and girls there were not allowed out of their homes much’.42
The enthusiastic involvement of European women in voluntary and in paid professional work suggested that the 1950s generation had a more developed sense of social responsibility than their pre-war counterparts. ‘It was gradually growing, but it was given a kick start by Lady T.,’ in Mrs Barton’s opinion.43 Most of these women saw their role as temporary: they were preparing Asians to take over for themselves. The Women’s Institutes were merely one outlet for voluntary work. An English woman who worked with abandoned blind children at St Nicholas’ Home in Penang recalled how much the Home relied on voluntary helpers during the time of the Emergency. ‘There were a lot of Army people out there, and so the wives gave us all sorts of help. Some taught English, some taught music, some did PE – any of the skills they could offer.’44 Margot Massie, who learned to speak Malay from scratch but became fluent, took classes in Malay for wives newly arrived from the UK, teaching them also about Malay customs and culture. In addition to helping Lady Templer with the Women’s Institutes, Daphne Loch became involved in starting baby clinics for Asian families. In 1955, a planter’s wife, Deirdre Edington, was asked by the Officer Superintending the Police Circle to help with clinics in the resettled villages in Johore.
This meant travelling in an armoured vehicle with escorts, and when we arrived at the villages we weighed babies, gave them milk (because every tin was searched), and so we saw that they were all quite well and we also attended to the school children’s heads. Later in 1956-57 in Johore Bahru they started TB clinics, because it was a rampant disease at that time. I helped Dr Elizabeth Comber (Han Su Yin) with her clinics, and then a rehabilitation centre was set up to give these people employment.45
Among the new generation of British women to arrive after 1945 were more qualified women and graduates, nurses and teachers, whose professional expertise was invaluable in Malaya. Mrs Kerr-Petersen, a physiotherapist who came out to Malaya with her husband in 1947, found her skills were much in demand. She did voluntary work at Kuala Lumpur Hospital and in Malacca, until she was eventually pressed to take a full-time job at the Malacca General Hospital. Her first priorities in Malacca were the little children hit by a polio epidemic, and she set about ‘begging and borrowing’ for the urgently-needed equipment to treat these young victims.46 Mary Anderson of the Queen Elizabeth Overseas Nursing Service arrived in February 1947. She started and finished her fifteen-year career across six Malay states in the General Hospital, Johore Bahru, where she began as a Sister and ended as Matron, latterly the only European on the medical staff.
After working in the New Villages in the West, Pearl Cox volunteered to go to the backward east coast, where the Malays still ‘led a very, very simple life … In ’53 the road up to the east coast was just a mud road. It was either dusty or thick, thick mud!’ Against a background of social and economic deprivation, she tried to prepare the Malays for change. She recruited locals to work with the Red Cross, hoping that through this experience they would imbibe the idea of community service and take responsibility for welfare. As she said, ‘We were trying to get the idea of self-help over to the people’:
I went to the schools, and ran all the occupational therapy in the hospitals; and I got the local people to start forming t
heir own committees – trying to help the women, and the people generally, to take part in their own welfare … We went round all the little village schools, which were literally four posts and a bit of atap roof, and a few benches and a sand floor. The children would trot off there every day, but if it rained they didn’t go to school because the roof leaked!47
The Red Cross held weekly clinics for women and children in the kampongs, where one of the common diseases was yaws. ‘Their little fingers would be stuck together with these sores!’ Pearl Cox found. ‘Their legs were stuck together! Oh, it was really horrible trying to clean them up! They nearly all had worms
too.’ And
We had a leper ward in the General Hospital in Kuala Trengganu. I got them doing occupational therapy. The children would go and pick the bamboo and clean it up so that the lepers could make baskets. It was a simple arrangement, but it was a beginning, I think, to give them the idea that they should help themselves and each other … The leper ward had three or four doctors, mostly Europeans.48
The problems in rural Kedah were equally severe. As Marian Gent wrote, ‘The volunteers could do little more than scratch the surface of a daunting social problem, but by their example they may have laid the foundations of an enlightened attitude towards health care and self – help.’49
The Emergency, meanwhile, had taught both British conscripts and British civilians to be resourceful and resilient. The young matured quickly. Many of the patrols sent into the jungle on search-and-kill operations were led by National Service Second Lieutenants, who ‘served there with commendable bravery and tenacity in arduous conditions’.50 Civilian Norman Price was in his teens when he ‘learnt to fly in the Penang Flying Club and this eventually led to a career as a professional airline pilot with BOAC. During the bandit troubles, I carried out pay-drops (supplying money by air) to tin mines and rubber plantations. I also joined the Malayan Auxiliary Police to “do my bit” during the Emergency in the early 1950s.’51 Jim Winchester, a young planter in Selangor, Pahang and Perak during the Emergency, admitted that, as civilian and security-force casualties dropped to under 200 in 1955, people tended to get a bit blasé, even though
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