3

1945: A Second Colonial Conquest

In 1945 imperialism was down but not out. Japan’s dream of a great East and Southeast Asian empire had been crushed flat in the ruins of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. But the British seemed determined to retain a dominant influence in the region. As British armies fanned out across Burma, Malaya, French Indo-China and Indonesia, a more intrusive and authoritarian form of administration seemed to be taking shape in place of the distant paternalism of the old Raj. Yet not all the signs seemed to favour renewed imperialism. A new British Labour government had been voted into office by a landslide as the European war ended in mid 1945. Prime minister Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps, its dominant personalities, had always displayed an interest in India’s independence, or at least dominion status under the British crown. But both men were paternalists rather than liberators, and in the dangerous new world which followed the bomb many of their colleagues believed that a powerful military position in Asia was essential to guarantee Britain’s worldwide security. Clement Attlee personified his party’s awkwardness about imperial authority. In 1945 he made a speech to Americans insisting that British ‘socialists’ were not ‘against freedom’: ‘We in the Labour Party’, he said, ‘declare that we are in line with those who fought for Magna Carta and habeas corpus, with the Pilgrim Fathers and the signatories of the Declaration of Independence.’¹ But this freedom was not to be of an untrammelled nature; elsewhere he lamented the fact that ‘man’s material discoveries have outpaced his moral progress’. By implication, most people would benefit from a strong and morally assured guiding hand. Such beliefs flowed from his sense of the injustice of poverty, which far more than any belief in the principles of scientific socialism had drawn him into the Labour Party.

Attlee and his generation were really nineteenth-century Whigs and their colonial policy was conceived in this vein. By no means convinced of the inherent value of territorial empire, they were none the less sure of the doctrine of the white man’s burden. Pondering the possibility that Britain might be forced to take over some of Italy’s colonies after the war, Attlee wrote: ‘Why should it be assumed that only a few Great Powers can be entrusted with backward peoples? Why should not one or other of the Scandinavian countries have a try? They are quite as fitted to bear rule as ourselves. Why not the United States?’² The even-handedness of this thinking towards Europeans is as striking as its insistence on the category ‘backward peoples’. In a similar exercise of doublethink, Herbert Morrison, the rumbustious foreign secretary, had declared: ‘we have ceased to be an imperialist race’, whilst adding in the same breath that Labour was a great friend to the ‘jolly old Empire’. Arthur Creech Jones at the Colonial Office reckoned that the continuation of British imperialism was not problematic because America effectively had an empire in the West Indies, Hawaii and the Philippines, ‘not to mention her internal race problem’.

Labour’s paternalism was not undiscriminating. Government ministers took it for granted that Indians deserved more respect than other Asian peoples, especially Burmese and Malays, let alone Africans. They had mixed with the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru and Krishna Menon, the Indian National Congress’s roving ambassador, who were Fabian socialists like themselves. Stafford Cripps was committed to constitutional change in India, since this had been the message during his abortive mission in 1942 when he had sought to bring the Congress into the wartime government. Attlee’s connections went back even further. He had been a member of another ill-fated constitutional investigation, the Simon Commission of 1927–9, which had similarly ended in mass civil disobedience. Yet even in the case of India, the Labour ministers still seem to have expected that the country would remain a dominion of the crown, and one with which Britain had continuing military ties. As for other peoples – Burmese, Malays, Arabs and Africans – they might well require decades more imperial tutelage before they could emerge into the light of freedom and democracy.

In the two years following the end of the Second World War socialist paternalism was in the ascendant in Britain. But other, more conservative shades of British opinion also helped maintain a fragile imperial consensus. This was the era of moral rearmament and Christian service was to be an ever-present if often unacknowledged motivator of the Empire’s war against communism and radical nationalism in several parts of the globe in the later 1940s and 1950s. The adjutant-general of the post-war Indian Army endorsed a paper on ‘Religion in the army’ by its chaplain-general. It was essential to teach religion to British personnel in India because, it stated, the ‘effect on the spirit of empire as a whole will be immense’. On Christianity would depend the ‘future of our race’.³ In the Colonial Office, civil servants contemplating the rebuilding of empire in Southeast Asia invoked ‘the Stewardship which God has entrusted to our Nation’. Was not the British Commonwealth an expression of the ‘Brotherhood of Man’?⁴ Secular reform was couched in terms of a ‘civilising mission’. But there were problems with this kind of language. In 1945 the British Empire governed more Muslims than any other power in history.

The Conservative opposition to imperial retreat was even more adamant. Churchill, the valiant fighter for the free nations of Europe, had never believed that that freedom should extend to the coloured races. Privately he had specifically excluded them from the Atlantic Charter of 1941, that great Anglo-American clarion cry for freedom which had so raised expectations across the colonial world. Churchill had mused to Wavell about the possibility of dividing the Indian empire into ‘Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan’, the last an amalgam of India’s princely states. The first and the third of these entities would remain within the British Empire no matter what happened to the ‘Hindoo priesthood machine’ and its commercial backers.⁵ Churchill’s parting shot to Wavell, on the viceroy’s visit to London in August 1945, was ‘keep a bit of India!’⁶ Anthony Eden, a powerful Conservative foreign relations expert, feared that the loss of Malaya with its rich resources of tin and rubber and of Hong Kong with its strategic position would reduce Britain to the status of a ‘bagman’ east of Suez. Far from believing that British rule in India was inevitably coming towards its end, many Conservative politicians, quite apart from the obdurate Churchill, believed that the Raj should continue to function in one way or another. Harold Macmillan, a man later considered a moderate Tory, thought that national servicemen might be sent to hold India. He recorded in his diary his astonishment that the viceroy considered that British rule could be re-established in the subcontinent with a mere five divisions of troops and 1,000 extra administrators. This was nothing to what the British were doing in ‘Germany, Trieste, Greece and Palestine’, where large new administrations had been put in place.⁷

With many Labour and Liberal MPs undecided and the Conservatives generally opposed, the political consensus in 1945 for Indian independence was fragile. Only with hindsight has it seemed a sure thing. This helps to explain why the Indian National Congress was so suspicious of British intentions, a suspicion that ultimately led them to accept the partition of India rather than trust British good offices. Even if successive British cabinets had made vague promises about freedom after the war, the senior leadership of the Congress, especially Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, were wholly unconvinced. They believed that the British were still playing a game of ‘divide and rule’ and that Wavell was privately building up Mahomed Ali Jinnah’s Muslim League against them. The result would be a ‘Balkanization’ of India into a host of fragments that the British could easily manipulate: some kind of Muslim ‘Pakistan’, semi-independent princely states with treaties with the British crown and, possibly, an independent Bengal.

If Britain’s grip on the subcontinent should weaken, the great arc of empire could still be anchored in Southeast Asia. On this, if nothing else, the consensus in Westminster was solid. The region was now crucial to Britain’s Great Power status. Malaya was the ‘dollar arsenal’ of the sterling area, and Singapore was destined to become more of a ‘fortress’ than ever it was before the war. But reconstruction was not seen in solely material terms. Britain had to rebuild her moral authority: the humiliation of 1942 was to be redeemed by the creation of new model colonies. For over a decade Malaya and Singapore were to be subjected to some of the most ambitious projects of political development and social engineering in British imperial history. As a first step, reform-minded civil servants in Whitehall seized the opportunity to realize a long-cherished ambition: the ten different authorities which constituted British Malaya were to be ruled directly for the first time. A Malayan Union was to be created, under the British crown, and united by a common citizenship. At a stroke, this overturned the founding principles of British Malaya: that of the sovereign independence of the Malay rulers and the privileged position of the Malays. With the memory of the final squalid exodus from Singapore never far from the surface, the new watchword was ‘multi-racialism’.

One of the few senior Malayan civil servants to be included in these discussions was Dr Victor Purcell. Aged forty-nine, he was an influential voice in the Malayan Planning Unit in London that developed the new policy from mid 1943, and adviser on Chinese Affairs to Mountbatten’s military administration. ‘The rigid pro-Malay attitude’, Purcell wrote, ‘was more often than not a paternalistic feeling towards the Malays (and occasionally it was homosexual)’, but it was not universally shared. The Malayan Civil Service was ‘virtually split… into two camps’.⁸ Purcell was a scholar-administrator of a special kind: as a cadet he was sent to Canton to learn Chinese dialects and put to work in Malaya as a ‘protector’ of Chinese. This was a personage unique in British colonial history; the protector acted as tai-jin, a great panjandrum to every level of Chinese society: banqueting with tycoons, suppressing secret societies and traffic in women, even mediating in marital rows. From Purcell’s perspective, the ‘fiction of a “Malay” Malaya had become a farce’. At the last census of the peninsula in 1931, of a population of 3.79 million, 49 per cent were classified as Malays, as against 34 per cent Chinese and 15 per cent Indians. If the overwhelmingly Chinese city of Singapore was included, the Malays were reduced to only 44 per cent of the population. They were, as Malay poets lamented, a minority in their own country. British patronage, Purcell argued, was a ‘gilded insult’ to the Malays and held them back. The system whereby the Malays were governed through sultans, and the Chinese and Indians hardly at all, merely encouraged their ‘separatist tendencies’. As one of the leading advocates of change put it: ‘We want to fully develop the plural society.’⁹Assuming that Mountbatten would have to fight his way back into Malaya, the Colonial Office for the first time was making an active bid for the support of the non-Malays.

The Malayan Union was seen as a first step to ‘self-government’, if not full independence. The time-scale of what Labour ministers called colonial ‘partnership’ was entirely open ended. It was axiomatic to the British that before the war there was no local patriotism in Malaya. Dressed in the borrowed robes of nationalism, the British would now create it. After 1945 the fashioning of a ‘Malayan’ national identity became the lodestar of imperial policy. Until this point the term ‘Malayan’ had no legal status; it was neither a census category nor a synonym for ‘Malay’. Yet the word had taken on a more fixed meaning in the inter-war years to refer to those people who were locally domiciled and who did not perhaps retain any overriding loyalty to their country of origin, and it was adopted in particular by English-educated Eurasians, Straits Chinese and some Indians.¹⁰ As the future of Malaya was debated in London, the European ex-residents of the Association of British Malaya also staked their claim: ‘For all intents and purposes we are Malaya.’¹¹ What was now called ‘nation-building’ was taken up with an evangelical fervour by a post-war generation of British officials and educators.

But it was unclear as to what a ‘Malayan’ nation might be founded upon. The idea seemed not to relate to any one ethnic group, but had to encompass all of them. The British tended to see it, as they preferred to see all colonial nationalism, in terms of the culture of a responsible middle class, united by English education and the values it carried. The language of Shakespeare, the King James Bible and the Atlantic Charter was the key to multiracial harmony and to colonial peoples’ continuing loyalty to the British Commonwealth. This vision was to collide violently with other nations of intent. But it was a bold experiment: Victor Purcell was adamant that the ‘utmost freedom’ be allowed so that political parties could emerge and ‘achieve a balance of power amongst themselves’. The draconian laws that controlled speech, publication, assembly, societies and trade unions, were all to be suspended. This was to herald Britain’s liberal intentions. But, as Purcell made clear, it was also to honour the bargain struck in the jungle between John Davis and ‘Chang Hong’. For the first time in its history the Malayan Communist Party was coming out into the open.

‘BLACK MARKET ADMINISTRATION’

The British Military Administration (BMA) of Malaya was a khaki-clad revolution in government, the most direct form of rule that Malaya had experienced in its history. It united Malaya and Singapore as never before and took on functions that were entirely novel in a colonial context: refugee and relief work; food rationing and nutrition; social welfare and public relations. Yet for 208 days after 4 September 1945, the BMA operated in conditions where in many places the apparatus of state had all but broken down, or where people had opted out of it entirely. Ralph Hone, former head of the Malayan Planning Unit and now Chief Civil Affairs Officer, was to claim that ‘no single problem arose when Malaya was occupied which had not already been considered by the planning staff’.¹² Yet he was desperately short of resources and expertise. Hone himself, although he had been legal adviser to a government of occupation in Italy’s African colonies, which he took as a model, had never visited Malaya, nor had much practical experience of administration. His team was reinforced by junior army officers, who were also new to empire and to Asia, and who had received only a crash course in local topography, the Malay language and the Indian penal code at a police college in Wimbledon.¹³ By this route, in the final years of British Asia, new kinds of men and women entered imperial service, who had a different class and educational outlook to the ‘high born’ civil servants of the pre-war days. But the local knowledge that was acquired in the first few weeks began to drain away once demobilization began in November; the new temporary drafts were often disinterested and disillusioned by their role. And by its very nature, military government proved to be a wholly inadequate agent of liberal, democratic reform.

The charter of the BMA was to prevent the outbreak of ‘disease and disorder’. But it was overwhelmed by the magnitude of Malaya’s crisis. The devastation began at the dockside. The naval base at Sembawang in Singapore lay in ruins, incinerated in the Allies’ scorched-earth retreat of 1942. The 50,000-ton floating dock was lying on the bottom of the Straits of Johore with a tanker sunk inside it: it would take over five years to rebuild it.¹⁴ Inland the landscape was, at every turn, scarred by war. Fearing the escalation of air raids on Singapore, the Japanese had burrowed tunnels deep into ridges and hillsides. All available land – the public parks, playing fields and tennis courts – was given over to vegetables and rows of tapioca, the ubiquitous, despised staple food of the war years. Other open areas had become vast dumps for looted or destroyed equipment. There were hoards of incongruous commodities. As the civil engineer O. W. Gilmour made an inventory of the island, he discovered in a rubber plantation some sixteen brick warehouses, each 100 feet long, by 24 feet wide and 20 feet high. They were full of leather saddles, bridles, straps, holsters and harnesses, enough ‘to equip all the cavalrymen and cowboys left in the world, and that in a country where a horse is a curiosity’.¹⁵ As the Japanese struck camp, few buildings were left guarded, and looters moved into abandoned houses and offices. Upcountry, the pickings were richer: stockpiles of food, rubber and tin were collected by armed gangs.

Peninsular Malaya had taken a step backwards from the industrial age. None of the great tin dredges were working; Chinese mine-owners complained that their businesses were stripped of machinery and motors. Much of the rubber plantation land was overrun by either food production or weeds. At the liberation Guthrie, one of the largest rubber companies, had only six experienced planters to husband over 155,000 acres of rubber trees.¹⁶ Electricity supplies would not meet demand until 1949 and transportation had all but broken down. The east coast was cut off from the rest of the country because the railway line from Kuala Lumpur had been stripped of track to lay the Burma–Siam railway. This left Kelantan virtually isolated in the monsoon season. Outside the towns, the roads were pitted and unsafe. Cars and lorries were at a premium; the army was forced to issue orders that its men should not drive out alone, because so many of their vehicles were immediately stolen when left unattended. For most people cheap Japanese-made bicycles were now the only viable form of transport. The British estimate of war damage was a staggering £127 million, the total costs incalculable.¹⁷

At every turn, the British were confronted by the human debris of war. Thousands of people were without shelter, or stranded far from home. Javanese romusha (forced labourers) haunted Singapore, they gathered around the railway station, in the eyes of one witness, ‘half dead like skeletons… like in Germany, half-starved like. And some of them, their legs dangling, sitting down, their legs hanging down the sides of the train, and load[ed] like sheep inside.’ By the end of 1945, there were still 18,000 of them in Malaya.¹⁸ Singapore was dangerously overcrowded, and life was a constant scramble for space. Even before the war its urban population density had been between 500 and 900 persons an acre; now it took ‘tea money’ of $100 to secure a lease for a room, $1,000 for a house. And still more people were arriving, as Chinese fled from ethnic fighting in Johore and Indonesia.¹⁹ Soon after his arrival in Singapore, the agent of the government of India, S. K. Chettur, made a ‘hurricane tour’ of the west coast of the peninsula, visiting rubber estates and interviewing Indian labourers by the wayside. After the general collapse of industrial exports Indians had been easy prey for Japanese forced-labour schemes. Of the estimated 72,204 labourers sent from Malaya to Burma and Thailand, 29,634 were reported to have died and 24,626 ‘deserted’; many of this number were lost in the jungle, or disguised in the statistics of fatalities in the camps. The impact on small estate communities was traumatic: over 40 per cent of the labour in rubber areas such as Selangor had vanished, and everywhere Chettur reported the absence of menfolk who either ‘never returned or returned broken men’.²⁰ A ‘citizen’s advice bureau’ in Singapore, staffed by local community leaders, was inundated with thousands of appeals from desperate families; it despatched Chinese businessmen with experience of trading in Thailand to locate refugees. But by the end of 1945 there were still believed to be 6,500 Malayans in South Thailand and another 23,000 around Bangkok.²¹ Some took years to return.

The missing haunted the post-war years, their suffering unrecorded in the official documents. It is clear that the British were aware of forced sexual slavery in Japanese-occupied Malaya and Singapore: escapees spoke of it, as did reports from local police officers.²² Soldiers began to find more evidence, but the Japanese were covering their tracks. At the hill resort of the Cameron Highlands, for example, some girls were found in a former convent: the Japanese colonel passed them off as convalescent pulmonary tuberculosis cases, but it was clear that they were there under coercion as ‘comfort women’. In cases like this, British soldiers would transport the women to the main towns, but then they often disappeared from view. Press pictures sent home to Britain of Malayan women and their babies liberated in the Andaman Islands had a description of them as ‘comfort women’ excised by the military censor.²³ Half a century later, the full story of the ‘comfort women’ had yet to be told. Many of the girls, recruited locally, could not return to their families for shame of what had happened to them and fear of rejection.²⁴ The social welfare officers who arrived with the BMA were aware of these women, but the military were unable to discern the nature of the ‘comfort women’ system, and unequipped to deal with mass rape. They saw the problem as one of ‘rehabilitation’ of prostitutes. But an attempt to use welfare homes run by the Chinese community for the ‘reclamation’ of fallen women, the Po Leung Kuk, collapsed because victims were repelled by the stigma it carried. The British fell back on the view that those who were not going into prostitution had rehabilitated themselves and that the others were already prostitutes.²⁵This abandoned many young girls to the insidious free market in women. As Victor Purcell acknowledged, ‘the facts, as known, would bring the government into grave disrepute. Girls of 10–15 are suffering from venereal disease.’²⁶

The experience of war was etched in people’s faces. With the collapse of food exports from Burma and Thailand, Malaya’s rice bowl was broken. The British shouldered the massive responsibility of distributing and rationing supplies, through relief in cash and kind and public canteens on the lines of the spartan wartime ‘British restaurants’ at home. But the government failed in one of its most fundamental tasks: it could not import enough rice to feed its people. By December the average individual ration was a mere 4.5 ounces a day, and not everyone received it. The British, like the Japanese before them, campaigned to get people to eat more tapioca and grow more food. But as it was, Malay peasants said that they could not bring in the harvest as the women who did most of the work had no clothes to wear. The opening up of new land often meant encroaching on the forest, and the forest could strike back: marauding boars and elephants ruined rice crops. The rare Malayan tiger was more often seen. In one village in Malacca, eighteen people were taken by crocodiles in one year. Pioneers opened up badly drained areas where the Anopheline malculatusmosquito thrived and malaria was endemic. There was, doctors warned, little point asking people to open up land for food crops ‘if it was merely to provide a grave for the occupants’. In the towns the need for food was such that there was even a brisk market in ‘night soil’ – human waste – as fertilizer for vegetable farms. Fragile mechanisms of disease control were breaking down: there were outbreaks of cholera and doctors felt a rise in tuberculosis might be ‘the worst aftermath of war’.²⁷ S. K. Chettur enraged local opinion by reporting back to India that famine did not exist in Malaya. This was technically true, but the full effects of the shortages were disguised. Nutritionists reported that Indian labour was incapacitated by beriberi and tropical sores. Malaya escaped the horror that was visited upon Bengal in 1943, but by a narrow margin, and lived with its effects for many years. The growth of an entire generation was stunted – little difference could be discerned between children aged 6–9 and those aged 10–14 – and there was ‘permanent damage to the working capacity of the population as whole’.²⁸

The military now demanded vast regiments of local labour for the docks, airfields and roads. But families could not survive on wages set at a pre-war rate, when cheap food had been taken for granted. European employers complained that workers had lost the habit of toil, and turned to old methods of recruiting and disciplining them, particularly by engaging them through labour contractors. This was bitterly resented: contractors took a cut of their workers’ pay, and ensnared them in debt for the supply of their basic necessities. People remembered the contractors who dragooned labour for the Japanese, but the BMA took them on with few questions asked.²⁹ By the end of the year it had become the biggest single employer Malaya had ever seen, with some 102,000 people on its books in Singapore alone.³⁰ Such was the demand for labour that 1,500 Indian, brought back to Singapore from the Burma–Siam railway by the military, were classed as ‘essential persons’ and put back to work in the shipyards.³¹ As an incentive to toil, the BMA took the extraordinary step of importing 50 million grains of opium into Malaya for issue over a six-month period. This was classed as ‘a military necessity’. The opium appeared in early October in the form of distinctively coloured tablets, marked as a government monopoly.³² This was a clear breach of international agreements; the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal would put great emphasis on Japanese culpability in the Asian narcotics trade. The illegal traffic also revived. In mid November one smuggling syndicate staged several days of theatrical shows in thanksgiving for the arrival of three ships bearing over 3,000lb of opium. ‘There is a sigh about the lack of rice’, a Chinese newspaper correspondent commented, ‘but the “black rice” which is strictly forbidden by the government seems to be able to come in continuously… This is indeed Heaven helping the lucky man.’³³

Fortunes were lost and made overnight. One of the British government’s first proclamations was to announce that the Japanese wartime currency would not be recognized. This was an exceptional step, intended to sow confusion behind Japanese lines; it reaped chaos for the people of Malaya. In the interregnum, the Japanese money kept some of its value as people hurriedly sold off hidden hoards of Straits dollars to pay off debts in the Japanese ‘banana money’.³⁴ But when Japanese themselves offloaded their freshly minted notes, it soon became worthless: ‘Everywhere’, one Chinese trader observed, ‘you find the Japanese notes everywhere – along the roadside, five-foot ways, people just throw them away.’³⁵ A petition to the government described the resulting hysteria: ‘Many civilians have registered their names with the lunatic asylum, commit suicide and daylight robbery due to the non-recognition.’³⁶ The Malayan Communist Party was reported to have lost most of its funds. Mountbatten was furious: the policy was, he said, ‘un-British and disastrous to our reputation for fair play’.³⁷ The British put Straits dollars into circulation by issuing cash relief and advances on salaries, and a surprising amount of pre-war money came out of holes in the ground. The transience of wealth was inseparable in the popular imagination with the proliferation of open gambling in the streets. But a more abiding legacy was a lingering suspicion of paper money, particularly among peasants who were reluctant to part with their rice crops for cash at the low official prices; they bartered or put it on the black market. Weimar-proportion price inflation resulted: rice was now at thirty to forty times its pre-war price, and banana and sweet potato skins were sold as staples in the markets.

The black economy eclipsed the old colonial economy almost entirely. It was a parallel world that reached from maritime trade to industrial production on the forest frontier. Quiet tropical islands such as Karimun, just southwest of Singapore, suddenly became chaotic ‘free ports’ for the smugglers’ trade from Thailand, Sumatra and Java. Pirates staged audacious raids on Penang island. Taking advantage of the liberal policy towards societies, the Ang Bin Hoay brotherhood united the notorious gangs of Penang and, by the end of the year, mass initiation ceremonies – involving hundreds at a time – were held in the Relau hills. Lorries cruised through the streets of George Town, picking up men with cries of ‘This way for the Show!’ and ‘Any more for the hills?’³⁸ During the BMA period, 600 murders were reported and 470 instances of gang robbery, as against thirteen in 1939. Before the war the British had governed this volatile world at a distance. Labour had been controlled principally by employers and contractors. But the European managers had disappeared and many Chinese industrialists fled abroad. Those who remained had found it difficult to refuse to join Japanese-sponsored community organizations, and now carried the stain of collaboration. They lost considerable prestige; some retired from public life altogether, or had to struggle to regain their standing in the community. The power of the towkays was weakest in the countryside, where, for a time, the rule of the bosses was broken.

The production of strategic commodities such as rubber, tin and timber was taken over by the informal economy. Rubber was collected on a ‘self-tap, self-sell’ basis. An everyday sight around mining pools was large numbers of women panning for ore, a process known as dulang washing. There were violent confrontations when the police tried to stop it. Gangs of ‘democratic workmen’ elected their own bosses and demanded logging rights. Chinese peasants moved onto disused plantation land or forest reserve. The first British visitors to reach these areas were grudgingly impressed. ‘Although these people may be given to gang robbery’, a forester wrote in his diary, ‘they are nevertheless remarkably good gardeners.’³⁹ Townsfolk were almost entirely dependent on their terraces of vegetables and tobacco. Many labour and forest departments and district and land offices had ceased to function. But to the British these people were illegal ‘squatters’, and as order slowly returned they came into conflict with the colonial regime and European rubber planters. Foresters were ‘constantly being threatened with calamity’, and in October two were killed trying to prevent some Chinese from felling timber.⁴⁰ For the first time the squatters – slash-and-burn farmers, freewheeling tappers and loggers, ‘wild rat’ miners and charcoal burners, illicit distillers and wild-game hunters – had political muscle and military backing. Kuomintang guerrillas still controlled most of the routes across the Thai border, and in the squatter hamlets and small towns it was the fighters of the MPAJA who were the law. Those towkays brave enough to restart their business paid them ‘taxes’. Large tracts of the peninsula – including much of the central range – were no-go areas for Europeans: a state within a state. There were around half a million ‘squatters’ in Malaya, one in five of the population.

The British were desperate to put the legitimate economy back to work. They flew in leading Chinese financiers from exile in India as ‘sponsored civilians’ to reopen the banks. The European businessmen who were still awaiting repatriation resented their head start. The old network of Teochew merchants revived the junk trade with Siam. Although loans were scarce, for a businessmen with cash there were tremendous new opportunities. By the age of twenty-five, the Chinese trader Ang Keong Lan had acquired $50 million by trading pigs for copra and castor oil with the Japanese. He was slow to sell on his ‘banana’ currency, and had to exchange it at $10,000 to the Straits dollar. Still he managed to bounce back: he obtained a motorboat and, with the connivance of customs men, was able to trade flour and cigarettes from Singapore to Penang, where they fetched a much higher price. It was slow business, but in this way Ang laid the foundation of a business empire – the Joo Seng Group – that would extend from trade to banking and insurance.⁴¹ The Japanese military government was staffed by businessmen and run for profit, and had brought the worlds of money and administration closer together. After the liberation, commercial success remained conditional on squaring police officers and customs officials.

The BMA evolved into a form of what was later to be called ‘crony capitalism’. In its transit camp in India, officers were overheard to regret the delay of Operation Zipper because ‘there would not be any loot left’.⁴² Wherever British and Commonwealth troops were deployed, graft followed them. The Sydney police warned British commanders in Japan that Australian criminals were enlisting solely to get at the black market opportunities.⁴³ Ralph Hone himself later admitted that his officers were among the systematic offenders. Many British businessmen from the pre-war days were now in uniform, and in this, as one Penang newssheet remarked acidly, ‘they have found an ideal combination’. New arrivals cheerfully accepted treating and pleasing from local businessmen, and some connived in local scams. Military stores and ‘rehabilitation’ goods disappeared en route to Malaya, or were landed in the wrong place; in the docks, goods vanished, invoices never appeared, or when they did, charges were paid three times over. This was known locally as ‘the multi-million scandal’ and, when an audit report finally appeared two years later, the scale of the losses from short deliveries, looting and pilfering was over $15 million. The BMA officers’ mess at Fu Court in Singapore was, reported one old Malaya hand, H. T. Pagden, ‘full of such loot’.⁴⁴ The British practice was to give a commodity to a company to distribute, and there were kickbacks right down the line to the distributors’ agents and salesmen.⁴⁵ Competition between suppliers forced up the price of sweeteners. Even when BMA supplied its own transport to move vegetables to break the black market, food control officers charged for access to the lorries, and the drivers charged ‘tea money’ to the suppliers. Yet traders were still willing to pay as there were profits of 1,000 per cent to be had.⁴⁶ The NAAFI was notoriously venal; one case alone – which was prosecuted – involved the robbery of £20,000 worth of cigarettes; service goods were sold openly in the market at Petaling Street in Kuala Lumpur, and Indian soldiers levied a toll on the transport of pigs and other foodstuffs to Singapore.⁴⁷ It was reported in Ipoh that merchants could not even get their calls connected at the telephone exchange without being asked for a ‘loan’ by the operators.⁴⁸The notoriety of the ‘banana colonels’ and ‘banana majors’ of the BMA struck a savage blow at the reputation for clean, impartial government that the British were so anxious to maintain. It gave further encouragement to people to avoid government altogether. As the Chinese proverb observed: ‘Don’t enter a government office with no money even if you are right.’⁴⁹

At a fundamental level, British rule had lost its legitimacy. The first men ashore put a great deal of store in the spontaneous celebrations and the loyal processions that had greeted them. O. W. Gilmour rejoiced to be welcomed at his old house in Singapore by his gardener, his driver and his cook. That the leaden paternalism of the British was preferable to the arbitrary violence and psychological trauma of Japanese rule was a point few Malayans, of the middle classes at least, would dispute. For this reason, most of them deferred to the old hierarchy. But Asian civil servants resented that the fact that they had stayed at the posts, when the Europeans had not, was interpreted by their British masters as unquestioning ‘empire loyalty’. Malayans who had kept basic services going were roughly pushed aside. One leading Chinese doctor, Benjamin Chew, who had kept a tuberculosis ward going at Tan Tock Seng hospital in Singapore, was told by a British medical officer, ‘Chew, your cases can go into the streets.’ Dr Chew left the government service in disgust.⁵⁰ The ‘colour bar’ was restored at its pre-war level. One of ‘sponsored civilians’ brought in from India by the BMA was the Selangor mining tycoon H. S. Lee. He was one of the first of the China-born towkays to be educated at Cambridge University, and had the honorary rank of colonel in the Nationalist Chinese Army. But on his first arrival back in Malaya he experienced crude racial affronts. As a BMA officer he was entitled to buy NAAFI goods at a service price, but was refused them on the grounds that he was Chinese. ‘I can hardly believe’, he wrote to Victor Purcell, ‘that racial discrimination still exists.’⁵¹ The general responsible was challenged on this. He did not deny the discrimination, his argument being, Purcell was told by a sympathetic colleague, ‘that whisky is not a natural part of the standard of living of a Chinese. I agreed with him that they preferred brandy, but as that is not obtainable they are prepared to put up with whisky as a second-best.’⁵² These slights would never be forgotten by the individuals who suffered them.

The second colonial conquest was more aggressive than the first. ‘The army’, wrote H. T. Pagden, ‘behaved as if they were in conquered territory.’ Singapore became a staging post for hundreds of thousands of men in uniform shipping to points further east, and this soon deflated any sense of elation that war was now over. At the beginning of December, at huge expense, Mountbatten moved the HQ of South East Asia Command to Singapore. He took the city’s landmark skyscraper, the Cathay Building, as his offices. It had many associations with the war, as a Japanese headquarters and where, in its auditorium, Subhas Chandra Bose declared a government of Free India. The supremo’s personal staff was regal in scale: the previous year it reached 7,000 people. The military requisitioned 2,227 houses and 51 institutions and clubs, and they took the best: navy officers messed in the Adelphi Hotel and the RAPWI organization at the Goodwood Park. Even the luxury department stores in Raffles Place – Little’s and Robinson’s – were taken over by the NAAFI; the elite Singapore Cricket Club became the Army YMCA. By contrast, Raffles Hotel was a dismal haunt for European refugees and ex-internees. The military soon became unpopular with the locals for forcing up prices still further. But the good life for which the Singapore garrison had been famous in 1941 began to revive: roadside cafés sprang up, with ‘singers and young girls acting as waitresses; and beer drinking. There were no holds barred.’⁵³ The senior civil affairs officer on the island called the extravagant public entertainments ‘nothing short of criminal’, and Mountbatten was compelled to issue draconian standing orders for a curfew on other ranks, the closure of service bars and clubs by midnight, a ban on meals or drinks in civilian-run establishments and detailed checks on bad traffic discipline.⁵⁴ This was mostly on the part of Indian drivers who had learned to drive in the desert of North Africa or the dirt-tracks of Burma, but it seemed to symbolize the arrogance of the new regime. In the words of one Chinese newspaper, people saw military vehicles ‘as snakes and scorpions, and streets and thoroughfares as hells’.⁵⁵

Attlee took a personal interest in the morale of army personnel. The BBC Home Service was urged to broadcast encouragement to people to keep a constant flow of letters posted to serving men who now had time on their hands, time to brood. One of the first units into liberated Malaya was an advance party of ENSA, the armed forces’ entertainments association. By the fourth day of reoccupation they were giving an impromptu performance to the POWs in Changi: Gracie Fields appeared there on 1 October. They reclaimed the Victoria Theatre on Singapore’s Esplanade – killing around 5,000 swallows who had roosted there throughout the Japanese occupation – for John Gielgud to perform his Hamlet.⁵⁶ But what was on offer fell far short of what was desired by weary, frustrated men. Malaya’s allocation of 15–16,000 barrels of beer a month was well below the target of 25,200 for the NAAFI canteens.⁵⁷ Soldiers turned to other diversions. One unit in Ipoh discovered an antiquated provision in the King’s Regulations for fodder for horses, and they used this to resurrect the Perak Turf Club. The first race meeting was on Boxing Day 1945. It drew a bigger crowd than the victory parades, and made a considerable profit for the British ‘owners’ of the horses.⁵⁸ But such events made a mockery of the BMA’s calls for people to be patient in the face of scarcity. ‘We ask for bread’, the Malaya Tribune remarked, ‘and we are given… horse-racing!’⁵⁹

Men gravitated to the dance halls and to the kupu-kupu malam, the ‘night butterflies’, who were everywhere to be seen in Malayan towns. The dramatic post-war increase in prostitution was rooted in coercion, trafficking and poverty. It was perpetuated by a lack of education and alternatives, and aggravated, particularly within the Malay community, by chronically high levels of divorce.⁶⁰ It was now seen by military commanders as ‘a real danger to the health of troops’. In 1943, casualties from VD within SEAC were sixteen times greater than those in battle. By early 1946 the rate of infection in the military peaked at 7.2 per cent. Some service chiefs wanted to revive the nineteenth-century Indian Army remedy of regulating the trade in controlled lal, or ‘red’ bazaars, but welfare workers argued that the only course was to raid the brothels and bring more women to treatment.⁶¹There was some success in this, but in the long term, police officers were unwilling to take responsibility for it because ‘there was too much money to be made by junior police officers’.⁶² Women were often the first victims of war, and now among the first casualties of peace. People noticed that there was a discomforting continuity between the sexual violence of Japanese occupation and the new red-light economy and air of sexual predation in the garrison towns. From October the Chinese press published a catalogue of reports of robberies and rapes around Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur and Klang. Stalls were attacked and taxi drivers beaten up by drunken soldiers. Many of these incidents involved British servicemen, but the worst of the accusations fell on common outsiders: Indian soldiers. They were increasingly unpopular, especially when the British used them to break strikes. Indians called in to maintain the coal mine at Batu Arang were accused by the communists of molesting women as they tended to their food crops.⁶³ There were other reports: for example, of a man shot trying to stop a rape in Morib; women attacked cutting timber, and of a reported ‘unnatural offence’ against a young boy in Ulu Salong.⁶⁴ Near Taiping, it was said that a Chinese girl was taken in a lorry and repeatedly raped in a barracks. She, like others it seems, was afraid of coming forward.⁶⁵ By the end of the year only one case of sexual assault had gone to courts martial. Victor Purcell confronted military commanders with this, and warned them that the incidents were being covered up.⁶⁶ The public came to their own bitter conclusions. As the leftist Kuala Lumpur daily Min Sheng Pau put it: ‘Now there is no distinction between Japanese fascists’ outrages and those of the present Indian soldiers.’⁶⁷

As the reputation and moral authority of the military regime began to disintegrate, it established the first ‘public relations department’ in Asia. Initially it was used to monitor press opinion and to dispel rumours. Letters to Malay village headmen in the ‘best Malay traditional style’ helped damp down ethnic tensions. Then it launched campaigns of mass education to improve people’s diets and combat inflation: ‘A dollar is always a dollar. It becomes smaller because people are spending it in a ti-da-apa [carefree] way.’ The accompanying slogan – ‘Goods are coming. Don’t buy now!’ – was an easy target for satire: a better message, one Chinese newspaper suggested, might be: ‘Don’t eat now!’ or ‘Don’t live now!’.⁶⁸ As the British became more aware of the impact of three and a half years of Japanese anti-Western indoctrination, they responded with exhibitions and lectures on the war, reading rooms, public address vans, travelling theatre and Chinese story-tellers, and even a film studio. Victor Purcell himself had run a smaller information bureau before the fall of Singapore. Many old Malaya hands, he complained, disapproved, calling it ‘meretricious, loud and ungentlemanly (which of course it was)’. This was a dramatic change in the way colonial rule manifested itself and ‘PR’ was now a permanent arm of government. The British saw themselves as impresarios of public opinion and in active competition with the local press and political parties. By early 1946 the department had distributed 140,000 posters and notices of a ‘political nature’. But the senior Malay officials involved felt they were a waste of effort. The people of Malaya were speaking very different languages of politics.⁶⁹