Across the region, men in arms once more dictated political futures. Fresh levies from Europe began the long journey east. The Grenadier Guards came straight from ceremonial duties at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. They sailed from Liverpool in August 1948 in an old wartime troopship; it was a four-week journey through the last outposts of the British Indian Ocean. They were met with the usual jeers – ‘Get your knees brown!’ – as they passed the British garrison at Great Bitter Lake on the Suez Canal. But now there was no period of acclimatization in Bombay; the troubled situation in Egypt made it difficult to give men shore leave at Port Said. On arrival in Malaya the men were plunged into an exotic tropical world, and a war for which they were unprepared. They were issued with unfamiliar gear – mosquito nets, jungle green and jungle boots with canvas tops and rubber soles – and had to acclimatize quickly to the heat and humidity; the ‘bashers’, (bashas) or open-sided huts, and squat toilets, and the terrors of the undergrowth: the snakes, scorpions, centipedes and fire ants. Within two weeks they were on long marches in the forest with tattooed Iban ‘head-hunters’, a first taste of the ulu, a Malay word for upriver which now became British military argot for the back of beyond. Between 1 January 1949 and 30 May 1950, 4,500 national servicemen were despatched to Malaya.30 By October 1950 twenty-one infantry regiments, two armoured car regiments and one commando brigade were deployed: a total of 50,000 men. This was more British soldiers than were in Malaya at the time of its fall to the Japanese.
Not all of them were fighting men. The military remained a massive consumer of men and materiel, a provider for thousands of locals who worked in the naval bases or the NAAFI. The sharply finessed black-market scams of the BMA period were revived; in one case, in 1953, six soldiers were convicted of stealing two bulldozers, a tractor, and a three-ton truck, together with a generator, cutting plant and six winches.31 New cantonments were thrown up at Nee Soon and Ulu Pandan in Singapore, and at Port Dickson and Sungei Besi, just outside Kuala Lumpur. For many men, they were a comfortable billet. ‘There’s too many vested interests in this Emergency,’ one Kuala Lumpur lawyer was overheard to gripe. ‘In fact, it’s no Emergency at all. It is a racket to find jobs for British officers.’32 The rankers at Nee Soon had a chorus:
We’re a shower of bastards,
Bastards we are…
We’d rather fuck than fight,
We’re the pay corps cavalry!33
Leslie Thomas, who arrived in early 1950, christened himself and his comrades ‘the virgin soldiers’: ‘idle, homesick, afraid, uninterested, hot, sweating, bored, oversexed and under-satisfied’.34 For them, barracks life was ‘as peaceful as a suburb’; its ennui only occasionally disturbed by transit of men from the jungle war: ‘The garrison soldiers would examine them with curiosity, at a distance, as though looking for bullet holes… There was a dullness about the infantrymen’s eyes, a redness about their faces, so that they looked like labourers or country boys.’35
For a colonial society still obsessed by prestige, there was the perennial problem of how to keep in line thousands of poor whites whose very presence transgressed the racial code. Handbooks of military Malay marked out the boundaries: ‘By a Malay, or by a Malay speaking Asian, the European male is addressed as “TOO-AN”… Master.’36 But the new arrivals discovered that few of the expatriates they were there to protect would have anything to do with them socially. The planters upcountry were more hospitable, but most of the clubs in Singapore were barred to men in uniform. A functional Britannia Club was built opposite the opulent Raffles Hotel, to keep soldiers out of trouble. But the native city had a compelling lure. Kuala Lumpur was invaded by serviceman as never before. Police lieutenants held wakes for fallen colleagues at Nanto’s on Batu Road; they would put up nearby at the Coliseum Hotel, which was, and still is, famous for its baked crab and steak. The bars and cafés thrived. As one Gurkha on military police detail remarked of British soldiers, ‘I had a lot of working to do to keep them apart on a Saturday night from their drunken fights and away from the brothels in Kuala Lumpur. I couldn’t understand why they were so worthless.’37
The soldiers lived at a remove from the locals. Leslie Thomas was later to recall that he did not once eat Chinese food during his tour of Malaya. Local businessmen catered to English tastes. The local stout, brewed by Carlsberg, was increasingly popular, and remains an enduring legacy of empire. For Alan Sillitoe, an RAF signaller, an evening out in George Town was ‘a meal of rice with an egg on top at the Boston café, then to see a film such as “Cato” or “Watch on the Rhine”, followed by an evening with taxi-dancing Eurasian girls at the City Lights’.38 The cabarets were a rare opportunity to talk to local girls and to practise ‘bazaar’ Malay; the men paid 30 cents a ticket to dance with them for five minutes. The new sensation was the joget modern, a mixture of the samba, rumba and conga fused with the swaying local sound of the ronggeng. In Kuala Lumpur there were three joget ‘parties’, the ‘Sentosa’, the ‘Lucky’ and the ‘Chendramata Joget’ in Bukit Bintang amusement park. The star turns became famous; Rose Chan’s python dance was legendary. But the cabarets generated great moral unease. Girls as young as twelve were to be found working in them. Welfare officers campaigned to raise the minimum age to fifteen, in the hope that a girl would then be ‘quite robust to stand any strenuous job and is quite matured mentally to understand the tricks and traps laid out by a man in his attempt to spoil her morality’. It was at least, the argument went, an alternative to prostitution.39 The best-selling Malay novelist of the day, Ahmad Lufti, combined frank accounts of the fall of young women with a sharp moral and religious commentary. His novels were pornographic to some, but they portrayed an acute sense of the vulnerability of women who had since the war been forced to consort with soldiers, of ‘a courage stemmed from the torments of the devil’.40 Suicide was on the rise in Singapore, and an incidence of 31.2 per 1,000 was estimated in the entertainment industry, not least among dance hostesses.41
The war had now retreated from the towns, and the enemy was largely unseen. For British and Gurkha troops, the campaign was a succession of long, exhausting ‘jungle bashes’, broken by sudden, furious combat. In the dense undergrowth, adversaries might not spot each other until they were almost face to face. A Gurkha, Jasbahadur Limbu, described an encounter with a guerrilla: ‘We looked at each other. He did not have his weapon ready, but mine was. He smiled at me and I smiled at him. I then shot him dead…’42 But direct skirmishes constituted only 10 per cent of incidents in the early stages of the Emergency.43 The most deadly encounters were ambushes on the roads. An incident in Sungei Siput on 31 December 1948 was typical: a troop of A Squadron of the 4th Hussars, in three vehicles, was attacked by around seventy guerrillas. Of the nineteen British soldiers, seven were killed and nine wounded. In what was a chaotic firefight, the Hussars’ radio malfunctioned and they could not call for assistance. As the survivors tried to escape they saw the guerrillas firing lethal rounds into the wounded they had left behind.44 In 1949 the guerrillas killed 229 and wounded 247 security forces personnel. This sowed fear and dismay, but the communists failed to convert it into more substantial gains. On 1 February, in an attempt to claim patriotic legitimacy across all communities, the guerrilla force was renamed the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).45 Its commanders still looked to create a ‘liberated area’ in the Pulai and Gua Musang region. Two fighting units around 200 strong, and one more 100 strong, were concentrated in the old resistance stronghold of the Cameron Highlands, where there were ready supplies from Chinese vegetable farmers who had colonized its elevated valleys. It was also Malaya’s most popular hill station; but now the roads up to it were designated ‘red routes’ and the few intrepid golfers needed military escorts to reach the fairways. At the same time the other large concentrations of guerrillas in Johore pressed northwards towards Tasek Bera in Pahang, a large inland lake that nestles at the southern end of the central range. This was the dead centre of the peninsula: a point from where the MNLA could launch diversionary attacks on the main north–south railway, and its northeastern branch line, while the northern force created a ‘little Yenan’ at the railhead at Gua Musang. In Party annals these treks would be known as ‘the little Long Marches’.
Both operations were aborted. Gurkha operations unsettled the Gua Musang area, and there was no repeat of the occupation of mid 1948. The tropical rainforest is sparse in natural provender and commanders faced acute difficulties in keeping large units together for more than a short period of time. The communists turned to the aborigines, the Orang Asli, for supplies, but they had little to give and the big battalions had to be broken up. The convergence on Tasek Bera failed for the same reason. Smaller bands of guerrillas were pushed deeper into the jungle interior and further from the villages. In the meantime Chin Peng had left the Cameron Highlands in December 1948 to fulfil his original objective of creating a Party military HQ in central Pahang. With a five-man bodyguard, he moved into the Kuala Lipis region, travelling about sixty miles as the crow flies towards Raub; but, finding his way blocked by the security forces, he then swung to the east and south to a place known as ‘Ten Milestone Village’, on the road just east of Mentekab. But such was the tortuous nature of forest communications that he arrived there only in May 1949. Half an hour’s trek from the road, a camp had been prepared for him, and he was reunited with his old friend and deputy, Yeung Kuo. The following month the full MCP Central Committee assembled for the first time since the declaration of the Emergency. A year had passed. The goal still remained a liberated area, but Party leaders now acknowledged that attacks on the British would have to be smaller in scale. The mood, however, was confident: ‘The more difficult or complicated the situation becomes’, Central’s new directive read, ‘the more our attacks should be positive and active in the sense of holding the initiative.’ And whilst Chin Peng was on the move, Chiang Kai Shek had fled to Taiwan and the armies of the Chinese Communist Party had entered Shanghai. The East was red.46
From February 1949 until the second half of the year there was a lull in the fighting, as the MCP began to build up its mass organization, the Min Yuen. Local units took on a multiplicity of forms, but their functions were similar. There were the unarmed ‘self-protection units’ – the collectors of food and subscriptions, the couriers and propagandists in the villages and towns; an armed ‘protection corps’ for industrial sabotage and small ambushes, and a spectrum of smaller Min Yuen committees or cells of sympathizers.47 Shopkeepers, kongsis and contractors would pay a cess to the Party; labourers would make subscriptions. A Min Yuen cadre was a higher grade position than that of a guerrilla fighter; a higher percentage of them were full Party members. This remained, in the words of a captured leader, ‘a highly coveted honour and not lightly bestowed’. They were more or less in the full-time service of the Party, and were a more regular presence in the villages than any government official. In the village of Semenyih in Selangor, for example, the man in charge of the area adopted various disguises, sometimes as a rubber tapper, sometimes as a coffee-shop worker, even dressing as a coolie woman.48 The British saw all rural Chinese as potential supporters of the MCP.
It was only by the early 1950s that the British began to collect detailed data on who the communists actually were. These surveys were based on intensive interrogations and were conducted for ‘psychological warfare’ purposes, rather than to gather social information. But there are few alternative sources on the background of the fighters. A study of internees at one of the largest rehabilitation camps, Taiping, in 1952 revealed that a high proportion of the Chinese – 36.5 per cent – were of the Hakka dialect group. This was a community of manual labourers, well known for their traditions of self-help and self-government and, throughout Chinese history, for making rebellion. But otherwise the sample was a fair cross-section of the Chinese population in Malaya.49 A survey of 104 surrendered communists in 1953 revealed that 85 per cent were workers, 61 per cent of them rubber tappers, who were a particularly rich source of recruits because their work gave good cover on the borders of the jungle. Forty per cent of those interviewed had aided the communists before joining up; but two-thirds said that fear of arrest or conscription was their primary motive for taking to the jungle. Not only the Emergency Regulations but the repeated arrests of MPAJA men since 1945 weighed heavily in their decision.50 A more in-depth interrogation of twenty-five surrendered guerrillas revealed that all but two had been born in Malaya, or had left China before they were sixteen. Most were too young to have served in the war. Their connections to the MCP came through the New Democratic Youth League or the trade unions, where they had been approached individually, and then drawn into performing tasks for the Party. The report concluded that they came from ‘a section of society that was very poorly structured’. The British writer was here thinking in terms of formal social institutions; there seemed to be little social life for the young beyond the village coffee shop or the workplace. He saw the recruits as disaffected with life, and the appeal of the Party in its ability to formulate their grievances for them and give them scope to act.51 A young American scholar, Lucien Pye, was also given access to sixty detainees. He saw them as upwardly mobile young people (their mean age was twenty-three) who were more educated than their peers. But in these uncertain times they saw their advancement in terms of aligning themselves to a group, in following opinion-makers and in each becoming ‘a party faction man’. They seemed desperate to align themselves to anyone who looked to possess power, and were hungry for any extra knowledge that might help them to anticipate how larger events might affect them. The mood of obsessive secrecy within the MCP suggested that it possessed a ‘secret doctrine’ to light the way forward. Pye saw the Emergency as a disorder of modernity, a rebellion of those who had been exposed to its upheavals, but ‘have not yet found their place in it’.52
The British, for the most part, saw the MCP’s hold on its supporters in terms of the ‘secret society complex’, and people’s motives for joining the rebellion as stemming from confusion or anomie. They tended to play down the ideological commitment of guerrillas, and this impression was reinforced by the fact that those captured tended to plead that they acted under compulsion of one kind or another. But as one woman fighter, Huang Xue Ying, was later to recall, the role of the cadres in rural communities was very wide-ranging, particularly among the young. These confident young men and women represented a dramatic broadening of horizons, in which the revolutionary mood of the times was transmitted through the villages. In the early days of the campaign the MCP placed great emphasis on political education. In peacetime this had taken the form of organized outings, night classes and public readings of newspapers and pamphlets. In Huang Xue Ying’s words:
At that time I hardly understood a word; so it was like playing music to the bull, so to speak. They taught us that women were the most oppressed class… they awakened our consciousness. They told us they wanted to improve our lives, we all had to work hard. Those with money must contribute money, those who had none, could contribute their labour… I joined the guerrillas because I knew they were good people. My family life was hard; I had no chance to study. The Communists taught me a lot. I felt that this was the path I should take to have a different future. These comrades were loving to us and very concerned about us.53
The British never really understood the village and small-town loyalties around which the MCP mobilized. Its recruits were not necessarily rejecting traditional family or community life. Often, they sought to strengthen it where it was under threat. Where families, communities and livelihoods were insecure, the tight networks of kinship and friendship in the villages and workplace took on a compelling significance, and the MCP’s cadres were able to enmesh themselves in this. The threat of coercion was never far away, but equally, by this time, two generations of squatters had identified themselves with the MCP’s resistance to the Japanese and to colonialism. This was sealed by a succession of personal tragedies as families became separated by killings, arrests and deportations.54Now that the MCP was pushed out of the towns, and the trade unions decimated, all its hopes were placed in the squatters. The expectation was that, in the wake of guerrilla actions and government operations, production from mines and estates would begin to break down. The ranks of the squatters would swell, and so too would their support for the rebellion. Led by the MNLA, the people would then take over the industrial areas, and run them on a co-operative basis. The old practice of ‘self-tap, self-sell’ would become the powerhouse of the insurrection.55 The guerrillas believed that the first removals of squatters had played into their hands: ‘It allows the people to see how heartless government is. The bandits realise that government cannot remove all squatters.’56 This was a crucial assumption, and on this the success of the revolution rested.
The British army was determined to keep on the offensive, and continued to make big ‘sweeps’ in areas where the guerrillas were believed to operate. General Boucher had such scant information on the MNLA that he had little alternative. For example Operation Leo in October 1949 launched twenty-four platoons from a ‘start line’ into 74,000,000 square yards of jungle, with aircraft bombing and strafing ahead of them, in a systematic attempt to box guerrillas into a confined area. But there was no contact; the insurgents slipped easily between the government units.57 The ‘yo-yoing’ style of patrolling along ridges favoured by the army and the general low visibility were disorienting for troops; maps were notoriously inaccurate – they dated from around 1928 and did not always show crucial features like tributary rivers. The MNLA jungle camps were well camouflaged, even from the air; atap lean-to huts were hidden beneath the forest canopy, and scattered over an extended area so that no more than one building could be seen on the ground at a time. Chin Peng’s camp near Mentekab housed around 300 men and women; it was ringed by a mini-stockade, and was quickly evacuated when security forces attacked it by air and land. The trails to the camps were well guarded; paths were strewn with dried foliage that would snap underfoot, and British troops were soon observed and easily heard. They were soon smelt too, by their cooking fires and hair oil. Nor was large-scale bombing – by 1950 this involved Lincolns with 1,000lb pounds bombs – as effective in Malaya as it had once been against Iraqi villagers. Gullies provided natural cover, and many bombs exploded in the trees; the biggest danger was from falling branches. It did not break morale, which was its main purpose. Instead, it seems to have even raised a mood of defiance, not least when bombs hit civilians. In one incident in Johore in early 1950, five children were killed in their schoolhouse. Although the army could harry the guerrillas from place to place, it could not bring them to battle. The shooting war had reached stalemate.
The ulu remained a fearsome place for British soldiers, and the stories they swapped of the Burma campaign did not diminish its horrors. They were ill equipped: the much-vaunted jungle boots were said to last six days, and they let in sand and leeches. In the early days troops wore 1943-issue webbing, and the standard-issue Aertex underpants rode up and withered in the heat to create embarrassing rashes. Most of the campaign was conducted not in the primary rainforest, where the high canopy restricts the light and there is little undergrowth, but in disturbed, secondary jungle, belukar, which was often impassable – a dense mass of shrubs, bushes and spiky creepers. To move off a path meant hacking with ‘tree-basher’ machetes that soon blunted. The Gurkha units viewed 5,000 yards in one day as good going; often progress fell to a mere 2,000 yards.58 A patrol through the clean, regular lines of rubber trees was no less enervating in its way. Over time, commanders and their troops became grounded in jungle lore but the first interrogations of captured guerrillas made it clear that the British were not staying in the jungle long enough to worry the MNLA. The exceptions to this were the ‘Ferret Forces’, which were a vital sign of the presence of government in some areas. But even here contacts were few and far between. One unit, in twenty-four days of operations in Perak in September 1948, made sixty-nine day patrols and eleven night patrols; they met guerrillas on nine occasions, wounding two and capturing seven others. Ferret Force was dissolved in November 1948: it was unpopular with the regular army, and its skilled personnel were needed elsewhere. Tensions between the police and the army remained high. In the first year of the Emergency there was little co-operation in intelligence matters, and although the army was acting in support of the civil power, police were not always present on its operations. This was one reason some soldiers felt unconstrained by civil considerations in the screening of squatters. Under relentless pressure, Gurney insisted that martial law should not be declared. The irony of this was that soldiers were less restricted than they might have been under the law of war. ‘It is most important’, Gurney stressed, ‘that police and soldiers who are not saints, should not get the impression that every small mistake is going to be the subject of a public enquiry or that it is better to do nothing at all than to do the wrong thing quickly.’59
The police continued to act as a paramilitary force. One young lieutenant stationed in Campbell Road, Kuala Lumpur, described his first encounter with a jungle squad of Chinese detectives, of which by the end of the year there were 230: ‘All wore black shirts with black shorts or long trousers, and trilby hats, always inclined to the right. The style of headgear was probably copied from actors seen in countless American B pictures shown nightly in the Cattle Shed, an affectionate name for the open-cinema in the Lucky World Amusement Park.’60 The chief of police, Nicol Gray, was under increasing attack for his methods, not least from his own officers. Gurney accused the Old Malaya contingent of a campaign of ‘deliberate disloyalty’ against Gray, and lambasted them in turn for neglecting to tackle the corruption which was rampant in the force.61 Some of the bitterest disputes were over intelligence and its uses. The British were engulfed by an information panic. The Malayan Security Service was dissolved and its functions devolved to the Special Branch, but it had, in 1948, only twelve officers and forty-eight inspectors; most of them expatriates or Malays. Only 5 per cent of the police force was Chinese, and even the translation of captured materials was a problem.62 But from this, lessons were being learnt. A police mission visited Malaya at the end of 1949: it recommended a return to normal police training and methods and, above all, the need to recruit Chinese into the force.63 Slowly, some of the key elements of a counter-insurgency programme were being identified, if not yet fully implemented.
The new state arm of ‘public relations’ moved to the heart of counter-terrorism. In 1949, 51 million information leaflets were produced, many of them dropped in the jungle; government spokesmen toured villages, in the manner of local story-tellers. But the message was indistinct. The early leaflet campaigns were mercenary in their appeal – ‘Give information to the police. Get good rewards. Live happily with your family’ – or platitudinous in their tone – ‘Communism is the enemy of honest workers’.64 Visual propaganda was often brutal: photographs of dead guerrillas were circulated, notably of Liew Yao. But this could be counter-productive. Broadcasting the acts of terror of the MNLA merely seemed to increase its notoriety; it added to the mood of menace, to a sense that the government was losing its grip.65 The British dismissed communist propaganda as semi-literate and crude. As Chin Peng admitted, ‘Our pronouncements were largely unadorned and straightforward. What you read was what you got.’66 Yet they often possessed what the voice of the colonial government lacked: an ability to appeal directly to rural communities, in their own idiom. Detained communists spoke of ‘propaganda’ as a positive and empowering force: ‘After you have had their fierce propaganda, you can’t do without it. It gives you so much strength, you feel weak when you don’t have it.’67 Despite the difficulties, the MCP ran a network of underground presses, roughly cyclostyled productions such as the Humanity News in Perak, the Vanguard Press in Selangor, the Battle News and Combatant News at Pahang, and other ephemeral titles. They served as internal newsletters for isolated jungle units and their supporters, but they also reached out to the general population. The message was often effectively wrapped around recent local events. Allegations of rape were common and these fed popular rumour and fear of the security forces; the MCP constantly evoked memories of Japanese atrocities. One report just after Chinese New Year in 1949 was typical: ‘The British and Indian soldiers came to Chin Lin San to create a disturbance. They were like beasts. They raped every female in the village from 13 to 45 years of age…’ Paper notices were pinned to trees or scattered at the scene of an assassination: ‘Tonight this Conductor Maniam has been shot dead by a gun of the people. Everyone of you, Brothers and Sisters! Think deeply for what reason he has been shot dead.’ And from deep inside the forest, the Party still attempted to respond directly to speeches and broadcasts by ‘the white monkey leader’, Malcolm MacDonald.68
Gurney felt that the time was right to increase the psychological pressure on the guerrillas by announcing an amnesty on 6 September. The terms, however, were vague. They stated that those who surrendered and had ‘managed to avoid becoming assassins or committing the other more dastardly crimes’ would not face the death penalty. To fighters in the jungle this appeal seemed naïve, and it was mistrusted. Above all, as one captured guerrilla reported, ‘it does not clearly state what punishment you will get for which offence’.69 The amnesty encouraged the communists to keep its recruits well blooded; few guerrillas seemed to qualify for leniency and, in the last months of 1949, only 155 of them came forward. They presented the British with an acute dilemma. In the court of the public opinion, the colonial government could not seem to be lenient, but equally it had to offer some incentive to people to come out of the jungle. The British, at this stage, could only advertise their intentions indirectly.70 In the twelve years of the Emergency, 226 people were executed, most of them in the early period.71 Capital offences required a public trial and these proved to be deeply controversial. It was dangerous to give Asian nationalists an opportunity to defend themselves in open court, and in full view of world opinion. The conviction in Kuala Lumpur of the former president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, S. A. Ganapathy, on a charge of possessing arms led to Nehru’s personal intervention and put India’s continuing membership of the Commonwealth in jeopardy.72 The World Federation of Trade Unions called it ‘murder’. The British were shocked when the keynote speaker at a conference of local moderate trade unionists, orchestrated by the trade union adviser, John Brazier, paid tribute to Ganapathy: ‘His sincere services to the workers for a long time cannot be forgotten. In appreciation of these services it is but right to express our sympathy to him in his dark days.’73 But Ganapathy’s plea for clemency was refused by the Sultan of Selangor, and on 5 February 1949 he was executed.
It was better to detain and deport suspects in private. In January 1949 the notorious Emergency Regulation 17C was amended to require detainees’ families to leave with them. A new provision, 17D, allowed for collective detention – an old tool of empire first employed against the Boers. Between January and October 1949 it was used sixteen times against a total of 6,343 people. The detainees had a right to appeal to committees of review, but the rule was that, in the event of doubt, a person was to stay in detention. Between April and December 1949 162 appeals were heard and sixty people released. This was felt to be ‘too lenient’ and the procedure was strengthened by the creation of a Review Commission, which was so constituted, the British Cabinet was told, that ‘there can be no danger that instructions issued to it by the Federation Government will not be fully implemented’.74 By May 1950 7,644 individuals were held and another 3,076 were under collective detention orders.75 By mid January 1952, a total of 26,741 detention orders had been signed.76 Officers were recalled from the UK to assist in screening. The facilities were overwhelmed; some were hastily erected and others, such as St John’s Island in Singapore and Pulau Jerejak off Penang, were former quarantine stations. The clinical language used to describe the process disguised a brutal reality. Families were irrevocably divided. In January 1949, at the Malacca camp, British observers found elderly persons and parentless children awaiting ‘repatriation’ to a homeland with which they had lost all connection.77 Of the individual detainees around 1,000 were Malay. In August 1948, the young Indonesian leader, Khatijah Sidek, was arrested and sent to Sime Road, where the European women had been detained during the war. She was seven months pregnant, and struggled on the diet of wild rice with scraps of vegetables and fish. She shared a cell with forty other women, mostly girls from the Chinese high schools. She cajoled them into sharing any extra food, such as biscuits brought in by visitors: ‘Before we ate, we each had to make a speech, and then we sang national songs – Malay, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese. Then we shouted the Malay word Merdeka and repeated it in Indian and Chinese, before eating the biscuits.’78
In early 1950, Mountbatten’s old confidant, Tom Driberg, visited Taiping camp, from which local journalists had been barred. Here the British experimented with a ‘rehabilitation’ programme for communists and their sympathizers. Driberg described it as ‘a kind of Wilton Park, or rather Macronissos of Malaya’; this was a reference to the controversial conditions of internment in wartime Britain, and to a notorious island camp used in the Greek insurrection. It was, Driberg wrote, ‘a disgrace to the British Commonwealth, to the Federation of Malaya and to the Labour Government’.79 He took up allegations of assault on detainees. The conditions, the deputy commissioner of police frankly admitted, were ‘now worse than that experienced by internees under the Jap regime’.80 In Klang there had been protests: ‘Various forms of obstruction were practised including sitting down, refusing to identify their possessions and generally adopting an attitude of complete indifference. Under certain conditions these persons had to be assisted to their feet and a certain degree of compulsion used.’81 In July 1950 there was a week-long hunger strike by 1,370 detainees in Ipoh, and when the Johore notable Wong Shee Fung visited Majeedi camp, ostensibly to inspect conditions, he was nearly scragged by inmates: two of them were shot. Many saw the camps as ‘nurseries of communism’. The new secretary of state, James Griffiths, felt there was a serious risk of a mass breakout. By the end of 1951 conditions at Taiping had improved, but Tanjong Bruas, in Malacca, was dirty and neglected; it was, in the eyes of the former head of the UK Prison Service, ‘a most distressing encampment’.82 There were more riots in Ipoh in June 1955, in which wardens opened fire, killing three people. It spread to the rehabilitation centre, where women were among those to resist the longest. The wardens, the coroner, concluded, ‘lost their heads’.83
In February 1949 the first 1,074 detainees were embarked on two ships for China.84 They had lost almost everything: family, home, goods, crops, pigs and fishponds. Privately, Gurney hoped to ‘repatriate’ as many as 2,000 people a month.85 But the system of appeals proved burdensome, and collective detentions had to be put on hold, although they continued in some key areas. The British then experimented with ‘voluntary repatriation’, but there were few takers. The whole business was a scandal waiting to erupt, and there was a small rebellion of civil servants against the policy.86Nevertheless, by the middle of March 1951 10,140 people had been sent to China and 104 more to India and Indonesia. Banishments came to a standstill in 1950 with the fall of Nationalist China. But they resumed again in 1951 through the port of Hoihow on Hainan island; by April 1952 the total had risen to 13,317. A Norwegian vessel was used for the work; at one time the captain was arrested, and a British official had to buy him out of jail. The cost for each detainee was equivalent to a first-class berth on a P&O liner to Colombo.87 A British policeman accompanying one batch described their arrival at a port under Kuomintang control:
When the launch came alongside, the soldiers who were armed to the teeth, swarmed abroad. Since, as far as I was concerned, the banishees were my responsibility until formal handover was completed, I posted sentries outside the doors where the formalities were being carried out, and mounted a Bren gun covering the top of the gangplank. The atmosphere was tense… Rumour had it that the KMT gave the ex-[Communist Terrorists] the choice of donning their uniforms and proceeding to the front or else.88
At ports such as Swatow, each adult was given twenty-five Straits dollars and $10 for each child, as well as a blanket, a pair of trousers, a pullover and a pair of rubber shoes for the children.89 British reports admitted that the vast majority were women and children. On one occasion, a nine-month pregnant woman was shipped; families were put in different ships or sent to the wrong location; in the words of the deputy chief secretary, ‘far from their homes and in a war-torn China where some may be left to starve and not reach their villages at all’.90 The new Chinese government took up their cause: ‘The inhuman tortures which were used by the Japanese fascist pirates during their rule in Malaya are also being employed.’91 There were mounting protests. After the communist takeover the Nan Feng Jin Pao carried lurid reports of children abandoned, of sexual harassment and beatings, including the case of Chen Chin Chu a teacher in Perak, who at the time of her arrest was two months pregnant and had to leave behind four children with no one to care for them. She alleged that her baby was killed by the British: ‘When I was giving birth to my girl, the British imperialists did not give me anything to eat for a whole day, and after the baby was born I was only given a small piece of bread every day. The most cruel thing was that many female prisoners had to give birth to babies in the corridor of the hospital, and the British imperialists even forced them to drown their own babies in a cess pit.’92
This was one of the last official interventions by China in Malayan affairs. The fall of Kuomintang China was a moment of decision for the local Chinese. Tan Kah Kee played a significant and symbolic role in the new People’s Political Consultative Conference. His overt support for Mao so exasperated the British that they considered arresting him, or depriving him of his British citizenship. But they drew back from this: Tan Kah Kee’s status was now effectively that of a minister within the new regime. When he left for China in late May there were persistent rumours that he had been deported.93 These events left the Malayan Chinese divided and uncertain. When the Double Tenth national-day celebrations arrived there was a ban on public meetings. A battle of the flags broke out in the towns. In Chinatown in Singapore the banner of the People’s Republic was openly on sale but, on the day, only fifty ‘five star’ flags were seen in the city, mostly in trade union offices and schools; only fifty-two were counted in Penang; none in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh or Taiping. Possession of this kind of paraphernalia was now dangerous. There were muted celebrations by one of the last vanguards of leftist influence, the Mayfair theatrical troupe in Singapore, which put on a rousing play called The Volunteers’ March. Its signboard was tarred. By contrast, a cocktail party by the consul of the nationalist regime in Taiwan was attended by 600 representatives of Chinese associations.94But below the surface there was considerable elation at the communist victory. It boosted the MCP’s cause in the countryside and kept alive a sense of expectancy, so much so that Party propaganda had to dismiss as ‘wishful thinking and completely divorced from reality’ rumours that a victorious Red Army was about to sweep into Malaya.95 The colonial regime was in a bind. The whole logic of Britain’s economic and strategic interests demanded that the new People’s Republic of China be recognized. But Gurney believed that the arrival of communist Chinese consuls would be a ‘suicidal folly’, equivalent to reinforcing the guerrillas by an entire division. He made the issue a resigning matter, and prevailed.96
Gurney was becoming increasingly impatient with the Malayan Chinese. He believed that the insurrection was financed by payment of protection money on a massive scale, and that this practice reached into the highest echelons of the business community. He chose first a softer target: a number of Chettiyar businessmen were arrested, many of them absentee owners of rubber estates. In 1949 the British estimated that they had lost control of a quarter of an estimated million acres of estate land. Their payments to the MNLA varied from $ 50 to $5,000 a month and a cess on the rubber produced. There was a small exodus of Chettiyars as they closed their estates and moved their persons and their capital back to India. They were still counting their losses in Burma and smarting from the British anti-INA witchhunts of 1945. Remittances abroad by Asians rose from US$16m in 1949 to US$130m in 1951.97 But Gurney’s real target was the Chinese towkays: the individual sums estimated to be changing hands here were astronomical: $100,000 a month or higher. The guerrillas in the jungle were awash with cash: ‘Our people said at that time’, recalled Chin Peng, ‘we had… a haversack full of money… but we can’t get a bit of food.’98 Gurney saw this as all one with ‘the whole vast racket of black-marketing, smuggling and commercial corruption that go to make up Chinese business methods… To these people banditry pays, because the police tend to go off looking for the bandits and have not so much time for the supervision of rubber dealers, or, as Lord Mancroft puts it, issuing dog licences.’ Gurney now looked for ‘one or two really big towkays’ to prosecute as an example. The son of Tan Cheng Lock, Tan Siew Sin – still a federal legislative councillor and a future finance minister of Malaya – was pulled in. But, Gurney wrote, ‘though he appears shaken we have not yet enough evidence to pick him up’.99
Gurney was well aware of the fragile, divided state of the Chinese community, and this stayed his hand somewhat. In early 1948, at a dinner to celebrate his CBE in the New Year’s honours list, H. S. Lee had called for a unified body of all Malayan Chinese. But he had then been away from the country for nine months of the year, and nothing had happened. The subject arose again at a dinner party with Gurney on 15 December 1948. Now the high commissioner actively encouraged the mostly English-educated Chinese leaders on the Legislative Council to take the initiative. But it was a delicate undertaking. The obvious choice of figurehead was Tan Cheng Lock. He had ruminated on the creation of a ‘Malayan Chinese League’ since the war, but as an anglophone Straits Chinese, he did not command the large personal following of the China-born magnates. Yet the depth of the crisis, and their sudden isolation from China, drew the big men of the Chinese community together as never before, and on 27 February 1949 a Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) was formed. Tan Cheng Lock saw its role as educating the Chinese in a ‘Malayan’ consciousness. But, as a quid pro quo, he argued, the British must acknowledge the Chinese stake in Malaya. As he told the MCA in October: ‘A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a state which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a state which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government.’100 Tan saw multiracialism as the natural state of man, but in terms of practical politics the MCA was a communal counterpart to UMNO.101 Its core following – by the end of December 1950 a paper membership of 170,000 – was summoned up by the Chinese-speaking, China-born leaders who commanded the Chambers of Commerce and the clan associations. The MCA was the Kuomintang resurrected in all but name, led by nationalist stalwarts such as H. S. Lee in Selangor and Lau Pak Khuan in Perak. The MCA included some of the wealthiest men in Southeast Asia and, over time, they used it to restore their traditional patronage networks. For example, businessmen now began a concerted campaign to get control of school management committees and oust left-wing influence. In such places, some of the most crucial battles of the insurrection were fought.102
A stated aim of the MCA was ‘to promote and assist in the maintenance of peace and good order’. Gurney insisted on this: he had originally wanted to use the word ‘collaborate’, but this had evil connotations with the Japanese occupation.103 Gurney saw an opportunity for the state to make a direct connection with its Chinese subjects. The number of ‘Chinese affairs officers’ grew in number, and MCA leaders were co-opted onto ‘Chinese Advisory Committees’. These were the scene of bitter exchanges: businessmen complained of their lack of protection compared to the European mines and estates, and that when they gave information no action was taken.104 The ‘distrust and dislike’ of the police was universal. But, crucially, the MCA was now able to press the cause of squatters and detainees.105 More controversially, some MCA representatives began to embed themselves in screening operations. They selected squatter representatives who would then become MCA representatives in their villages. In turn, the government tried to give special priority to the security of MCA areas.106 Some major figures in the MCA wanted to go further. Leong Yew Koh, a former colonel in the Chinese nationalist army, suggested that 10,000 men be recruited to Malaya from the Kuomintang armies in Taiwan or from those interned in northern Vietnam.107 Tan Cheng Lock rose in the esteem of the British, after their execration of him a year earlier for leading the united front. Gurney, Malcolm MacDonald recollected, had called him ‘gaga’ (Tan was sixty-six years of age). But now both men recognized Tan’s skill in bringing the various factions together and interceding for the community. At a meeting with Gurney at the beginning of April, Tan petitioned for some squatters at Kajang, south of Kuala Lumpur, as ‘good and blameless people’. Gurney asked him if he was leaving to return to Malacca that evening, and ‘he said no, he thought that it was too late in view of possible dangers on the road. I asked him where the dangers lay, he said “Kajang”. Let it be to his credit that he also laughed.’108 Within a few days, on 10 April, Tan Cheng Lock was seriously injured, along with the leader of the Perak mine owners, Cheong Chee, by a grenade attack on the Perak MCA office at the Ipoh Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Tan, the British reported, ‘displayed a brilliant sense of occasion, and some may even suspect that he has enjoyed himself immensely’. His journey back to Malacca was a triumphal progress. He was met at each stage with well-wishers and special escorts to protect him. He kept his bloodied shirt as a memento. But his health never recovered from the injury.109 This was one of several attacks on MCA targets; in December, at the funeral of the mother of Cheong Chee, another grenade killed three mourners and injured Lau Pak Khuan and Leong Yew Koh. They ‘knelt before the British bandits, wagging their tails to beg for pity…’, announced the MNLA: ‘shameless “country-selling” thieves. They are racial traitors.’110
But the British had now found a way to hurt the communists. As plans for the mass deportations of squatters looked like collapsing in late 1948, the government began to think in more radical terms: the resettlement en masse of the rural Chinese on the peninsula. A federal committee on squatters was set up in late 1948, and reported in January 1949. Approaching the issue more as one of efficient administration rather than security, it argued that squatters should be settled where they stood. This was a dramatic shift in policy: it proposed giving land wholesale to Chinese peasants for the first time. But the plan ran into a quagmire of opposition from the State governments, in whom control over land was vested. Some Malay bureaucrats argued that squatters should be evicted and left entirely to their own devices. After pressure from the central government, and with large financial incentives, a number of trial initiatives were launched, but they were driven solely by the strategic imperative to remove people from the jungle fringes. One was at Titi, in Negri Sembilan, an area that was virtually an autonomous communist republic during and after the war. It was a site of massacres of villagers by the Japanese, but the district officer, C. E. Howe, looked to emulate some of their methods: ‘The Japs put barbed wire around Titi and Pertang, garrisoned these towns with troops and made all Chinese of the locality live within the defended areas…’, he observed. ‘Could we not try the same idea?’ He immediately had an answer from the local guerrillas, who spread rumours of mass repatriation and extermination camps. The newly formed branch of the MCA was enlisted to help manage the scheme, but its leaders had nocturnal visits from communist guerrillas and all of them withdrew or left town ‘on urgent business’. But at the end of the year the army and police moved in and more than 600 families were uprooted from outlying villages into the town area. Where some tried to remain in their homes they were forcibly ejected and their huts burnt. The resettled farmers had to camp in the streets and build their own shelter with discounted timber. Much of the promised aid did not materialize. They received little help from their new neighbours, who tried to make money out of them. Titi was now a rural ghetto. The process was taken inexorably to its conclusion when much of the surrounding countryside was declared a ‘no human area’.111
Another early scheme was a colony of around 326 detainees from Majeedi detention camp near Johore Bahru, who were settled at Mawai. There were only ten men aged between twenty and forty among them. The people had no agricultural or household equipment. The MCA had opposed the scheme: it was built on poor soil, close to the jungle’s edge, and they doubted it could be defended. But they gave $100,000 as a token of good faith to support it. In 1951 it was closed. The people, said Tan Cheng Lock, ‘were being treated like cattle’.112 Perhaps as few as 5,000 Chinese were resettled by the end of 1949. But it was the prelude to a vastly more ambitious programme. In Kinta alone 94,000 squatters, that is a third of the population and half of the country folk, were targeted for resettlement. In the peninsula as a whole, by 1954 572,917 people were resettled in 480 ‘New Villages’ and 560,000 more would be ‘regrouped’ on towns and rubber estates. This was the largest planned population relocation in recorded history.
Resettlement was accompanied by a host of new restrictions on persons and on movement: there was a standing curfew from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. which could be extended to all hours if there was trouble; there was no travel except in restricted areas, and no bicycles on public roads after 7 p.m. ‘Food restriction’ areas imposed strict controls on commodities.113 The impact of this was immense. To begin with, not all of those moved were squatters; many had been legitimately occupying land. Squatters who had lost their crops struggled to find work, and when they did it was hard to reach it under curfew conditions. It divided and scattered families, and broke up old communities: the Chinese of Pulai were resettled three times. Reciprocal relations with kampong Malays were severed. As a Malay writer, Keris Mas, described it in his short story, ‘A row of shophouses in our village’:
We are to be shifted. We, our families, our livestock, our rice, our loves and our hatreds. Everything.
They say we have been helping the terrorists, helping our young men in the jungle. The shops are the pride of our village, yet they accuse us of setting fire to them so that we would distract the security forces from their pursuit of our boys in the jungle last night.
We are as powerful to meet their accusations as a beautiful woman in the hands of a terrible giant. We have lost all that we love best, all that we have lived for.114
In the new settlements people often had little in common, not even a shared language. The trauma of removal did not encourage the formation of new community ties, whether through dialect associations, clubs or temples. Social trust was deeply damaged. In this state of anomie, other forms of assistance and protection reasserted themselves, in particular, the triads. In Titi, a society known as the New Kongsi was quickly established. It provided ang pow, gifts of money wrapped in red envelopes, for the resettled people, and helped in the construction of houses or by lending money and goods. It then moved into gambling and illegal lotteries. The police, however, had other worries, and the triads were, at least, a potential check on the communist underground.115
As the MLNA moved back from the squatter areas, it moved closer to the forest dwellers, the Orang Asli. These shy peoples became the object of the imperial gaze as never before. In 1947, the census officials had tried to count the Orang Asli, at least those who were two to ten miles away from roads, rivers or villages. But some communities remained forest nomads in inaccessible areas, such as the Negrito of Ulu Kelantan. The official count was 34,737 Orang Asli, of whom 29,648 were designated ‘nomads’.116 The larger communities of the north and central parts of the main range were the Senoi peoples – the Semai and the Temiar – who followed shifting cultivation around a cycle of sites, but who also traded with other communities. Before the war, as with the much larger ‘hill tribes’ of Burma, a few British officials and ethnographers build up a close and protective relationship with the Orang Asli. They were fascinated by their ‘primitive socialism’ and, in the case of the Senoi, by their peaceful ‘non-violent’ way of life. The chief authority was H. D. ‘Pat’ Noone, a Cambridge-trained anthropologist who became the first Protector of Aborigines in Perak. He took a Temiar wife, and during the Japanese occupation went to ground with them in the forest. The leaders of Force 136, John Davis, Richard Broome and Spencer Chapman, met him from time to time. But Noone had tended to go his own way, protected by his Temiar bodyguards. He had helped the communists during the war to liaise with the forest communities, and even imparted ethnographic techniques to them. The MCP’s connection with the Orang Asli kept its resistance alive during one of the grimmest periods of the war. But Noone broke with the MCP in mid 1943, and nothing more was heard of him after the later part of that year; it was assumed that he had perished from malaria.117
The loss of Noone cast a long shadow over British relations with the forest peoples. Not everyone accepted that he was dead. One of the last men to see him was Lau Mah, the principal MPAJA liaison with the Orang Asli. In mid 1946 he visited London as part of the Malayan contingent for the victory parade, and Noone’s father interviewed him over tea at the Savoy. It seemed that he had nothing to add to what Force 136 had reported. In late 1948 Lau Mah was again a senior commander of the MNLA forces in the Kelantan–Perak watershed. The same year, the High Court in London ruled that Noone was deceased, but the Royal Anthropological Society demanded a search for him, not least to try to recover his valuable ethnographic notebooks. In Malaya there were persistent rumours of a white man at large in the jungle, and that it might be Noone still co-operating with the MCP in order to protect the Temiar. It was conceivable that he had survived. In October 1949 the Gurhkas stumbled upon one of their own men, Nakam Gurung, who was living quietly in the jungle. He had been there since 1941, when, ill with malaria, he had been left behind in the British retreat down the peninsula; he had been living off a small plot of vegetables and raising some pigs ever since. He was discharged with seven years’ back pay.118 But the Temiar had placed an impenetrable taboo over the entire affair of Noone, even over his name. After a long search his wife, Anjing, was found in August 1950, but she was very ill, and just as friends of Noone reached her, she died and took any secrets she possessed with her. It took several years for Noone’s brother Richard, now his successor as government adviser on Aborigines, to lift the taboo and piece the story together. Noone had been killed by a Temiar companion who was in love with his wife. But what precipitated the break between them was anger at the danger which Noone had brought to the community by involving it in political struggles beyond the forest.119
This episode marked the beginning of a cycle of violence through which the Orang Asli were brought into the mainstream of Malaya’s political struggles, and forced to take sides in them. In July 1949 MNLA guerrillas attacked a Semai settlement at Kampong Krikit in Perak; two Semai women were killed, and others abducted. Some of the Semai had been serving as Special Policemen at a nearby mine, and the guerrillas wanted food and weapons from them. This normally peaceable community took bloody revenge on a neighbouring Chinese settlement at Bukit Pekan: fourteen Chinese were killed and thirteen more wounded.120 Another incident involved a group of Semai who had taken work at the Boh Tea plantations in the Cameron Highlands. As they trekked from their settlements and approached the estate they met guerrillas who warned them that police were in the area and moved them on. For reasons that are unclear, perhaps because they were suspected of spying for the authorities, the Semai were taken to a hut and the men tied up. From the testimony of a small boy who escaped, it appears that thirty-four of them – men, women and children – were strangled and buried in a rough fashion nearby. Some days later, the boy reached safety and reported the incident to the estate manager. More time elapsed before the army investigated and unearthed the bodies. There were testimonies to similar incidents, but it is not clear if the full extent of the violence ever came to light.121 In the Boh estate massacre, a notorious Semai guerrilla known as Bah Pelankin was at the scene. He had a brutal reputation and terrorized the area; the Orang Asli never referred to him by name, but as ‘The One’. These incidents were all the more shocking because they seemed to challenge the Semai’s status as ‘the most peaceful society known to anthropology’. The psychological trauma experienced by these communities was profound.122 Some communities managed to stay out of the way of the war, but for most its consequences were irreversible. After 1950 the British recruited Orang Asli into a Perak Special Areas Constabulary and the MNLA organized leagues of young Orang Asli based on an understanding of forms of social organization gleaned from Noone’s earlier fieldwork.
The military saw the Orang Asli as a vital link in the MNLA’s chain of supply. Resettlement of them began even before large numbers of Chinese were moved. The fragments of evidence that survive from this suggest that it was a hasty and largely unplanned process whereby forest peoples were uprooted and sent to concentrated settlements in lowland areas. The effects were catastrophic. The Orang Asli were confronted with an unfamiliar diet, and exposed to diseases to which they had no natural resistance. They succumbed to the heat, to malaria, to infection and to mental depression, and died at a shocking rate. When 1,485 Semai from the Ulu Bertam area of the Cameron Highlands were settled at Bukit Betong in Pahang, they were, it was reported ‘dying off like flies’; 213 deaths occurred to only thirty-eight births in the fifteen months after November 1949. Amongst Temiar resettled on the Plus river there were sixty-four deaths and only eight births in a four-month period. At Semenyih, sixty died within two and a half months. Not only was the restriction of camp life profoundly disturbing for a forest people who had always been free to roam, but it was a ritual practice within many communities to move whenever a death occurred. Now they were tormented by the unsettled spirits around them. There are no reliable statistics for the total number of Orang Asli who died in the camps. It seems that the British did not think to tally them fully. The higher estimates suggest that 5–7,000 of 25,000 resettled Orang Asli perished.123
The Orang Asli lacked any kind of voice. Only two them, it was said, spoke English. There were ‘Protectors of Aborigines’ in some states, but all but one were part-time. In Perak it was seen as a job for the game warden. At the end of 1949 another Cambridge anthropologist, Peter Williams-Hunt, was appointed as federal adviser on Aborigines. He had few real powers, but he tried to instil into military commanders an understanding and respect for these forest communities. He wrote a series of memoranda on how to conduct contacts, which counselled soldiers to talk to them in an unhurried way, ‘rather as if one is dealing with semi-trained animals’.124 But he was in an invidious position. His welfare responsibilities sat uncomfortably with his role in prosecuting a war. In one of his first interventions in resettlement matters he urged soldiers to be sensitive to the religious beliefs attached to houses; but this was juxtaposed with the advice, ‘Let the aborigines destroy their own houses. They might as well get some fun out the evacuation.’125 British soldiers saw him as ‘a strange character’ and ‘a bit of a crank’. They were fascinated by his relationship with his Semai wife; his accounts of the sexual practices of the hill people were an inspiration for salacious doggerel (‘When Temiar stay up too late / They’re somewhat apt to fornicate…’).126 But Williams-Hunt exercised an impressive personal sway over the Orang Asli. His reputation in the community would survive his death in 1953, from a fall in the forest, and the newborn son he left behind would emerge as an Orang Asli leader in the 1980s.
The paternalism of Old Malaya survived in curious places and, in a sense, was strengthened by the Emergency. On the rubber estates the planters, backed with arms and police powers, reclaimed their fiefdoms largely unchallenged. The trade unions were devastated, particularly among Chinese workers. Activists lived in fear of arrest and the moderate trade unionists faced MCP reprisals. On some estates managers relied on the old system of temple committees, and when trade unions revived, they were chiefly a vehicle for Tamil ethnic consciousness. Management took full advantage of the weakness of labour. In Singapore the major employers reduced wages in a way that would not have been possible before June 1948. There were only three strikes on the island in 1949. Special Branch openly attended union meetings and the RAF police terrorized trade unions on their bases in Singapore.127 But this was not merely a story of reaction. A retired planter such as ‘Tuan Djek’ would take up the plight of squatters in his newspaper column. District officers continued to nurse their ‘parishes’ in the old way. Christopher Blake had arrived in Malaya with the British Military Administration; in November 1948 he was sent to one of the most isolated districts in Malaya, the borderlands with Thailand in upper Perak. The area had a mythic status in colonial lore. Its district officer from 1895 to 1925 was an Anglo-Irish adventurer, Hubert Berkeley. He epitomized the Malay Civil Service tradition of protection by encouraging Malay settlement in the ulu and keeping the modern world at bay. He lived, in effect, as a white rajah, surrounded by a small army of liveried Malay retainers. The story goes that when his superior, the British Resident of Perak, attempted to visit, he would find the road blocked. When forced himself to visit the state capital, Berkeley would descend with a procession of elephants. His spirit still permeated the district at all levels ‘as if they had lived in some kind of Arcadia’. Some of the elephants survived, as did his monogrammed crockery and thunderbox, as well as several unusually fair-skinned Malays (it was said that he had exercised jus prima noctis on young girls from the local orphanage). Berkeley was survived by his great friend Jimmy Kemp, who had, extraordinarily, made it through internment and still, at the age of ninety-one, worked his own mine. Blake took to consulting Kemp on land use and tin. But more than this, in fighting the Emergency, he also drew on ‘the spirit of Berkeley’ for small-scale initiatives – such as a fish-drive and agricultural show – to restore local confidence.128
The sharp brutality that marked counter-insurgency in 1948 and 1949 was slowly being blunted. The scruples of the Labour government were never wholly allayed. The plight of labour was kept alive by their brother trade unions in Britain and by a concerted campaign by international bodies. The Attlee administration in London and MacDonald in Singapore had to take it seriously. By the end of 1949 a new national body modelled on the British Trades Union Congress was established under close British tutelage. It was a shadow of the old Federations of Trade Unions129 but, driven by the needs of the Emergency, social initiatives took on a new urgency. Welfare state imperialism acquired new teeth. Over the coming years even private initiatives – the British wives in the Women’s Institutes, Scouting and Guiding, Christian mission work revived in the resettlement areas – were harnessed to counter-insurgency. It would create a police state with a paternalist veneer that would become the hallmark of British counter-insurgency and would later be called ‘winning hearts and minds’. Or, in the words of a senior police officer, asked in 1954 what was the biggest difference between the Emergency then and five years earlier: ‘Less beating up.’130