Forgotten Wars (47 page)

The old Anglo-Malay entente also revived. After the heady public displays of the BMA period, this was achieved comparatively quietly and almost behind closed doors. On 18 June the Malay political leaders and the rulers met together with Gent and MacDonald for the first time to establish the terms of their reconciliation; on 24 July the rulers and UMNO submitted their own proposals for a federal constitution. Whilst recognizing the need for strong central government and a wider citizenship, the ‘individuality’ of the Malay states and the ‘special position’ and rights of the Malay people were now acknowledged as paramount. From early August to early November an Anglo-Malay Working Committee – representing the same three parties – finalized the agreement. There was still much mistrust between them, and – as the British acknowledged – the threat of bloodshed overhung the entire proceedings.
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Gent continued to impress on London that a clear and quick acceptance of the Malay position was necessary, even before the proposals became public and other communities were consulted. The new Malay political elites strengthened their ties to administration when the British relaxed rules that forbade government servants – in which category most of UMNO’s leaders fell – to participate in politics. The Malay courts regained their equilibrium and many of the rebel commoners of UMNO took office in the state governments. In October, Dato Onn bin Jaafar became
mentri besar
, or chief minister, of Johore. His
relationship with Sultan Ibrahim was never to be free from friction, but he exploited his ruler’s patronage and these months marked the height of Onn’s pre-eminence as ‘sole spokesman’ of the Malays. UMNO was not yet a political party; it remained an umbrella organization without a direct membership, and Onn’s personality, projected through constant public speaking, dominated the national movement. But he became subject to increasing antagonism from those excluded from the constitutional discussions: from those in his own party, the Malay left and the non-Malays. The leaders of the Malay Nationalist Party and API also toured the
kampongs
. They never forgave Onn for his rejection earlier in the year of a greater free-Malay nation. By the end of 1946, from as far away as Mecca, Malay residents of the holy city of Islam attacked Onn as ‘Indonesia’s enemy No 1’.
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A battle was beginning for the hearts and minds of the
kampong
Malays. And when the new proposals were finally made public on Christmas Eve 1946, a storm of non-Malay protest would be unleashed.

But for the British in Malaya, in dramatic contrast to Burma, the last months of 1946 were a time of consolidation. The new federal proposals kept much of the impetus towards a strong central government, whilst placing a great deal of power within the states in the hands of the rulers’ chief ministers. The objective remained ‘a real coherence which will make possible progressive political development’, as Arthur Creech Jones, the former head of the Fabian Colonial Bureau who replaced Hall as Colonial Secretary in October, told Gent.
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By the end of the year, Creech Jones was able to reassure the cabinet that they had achieved the substance of what they wanted to achieve in the Union. Beyond Malaya, Britain’s outposts on Borneo were also coming under more direct colonial control. Vyner Brooke, the third White Rajah of Sarawak, whose private fiefdom extended some 730 kilometres along the western seaboard of Borneo, agreed to pass his rights to the crown. There were protests from his nephew and heir, Anthony Brooke, and from some of his people. With a small group of courtiers in Singapore, Anthony remained pretender to the throne, but a century of Anglo-Malay kingship had come to an end. The affairs of the British North Borneo Chartered Company were wound up, with generous compensation to its shareholders, but there was to be no relinquishing of British rights there in the face of the
territorial claims of the neighbouring Philippines. With Malcolm MacDonald’s appointment the British struggled to find a convenient shorthand for this melange of empire. The term ‘Malaysia’ – used from the later nineteenth century by missionaries and revived in the 1930s by an American social scientist – seemed likely to alarm the people of Borneo; any move by the British to appropriate the old notion of ‘East Indies’ was likely to annoy the Dutch and the French. The idea of a ‘Governor General’ was also something of a misnomer, as MacDonald did not, strictly speaking, govern anything. A compromise phrase, ‘British South East Asia’, was felt to be ‘uncouth’. To Bevin it had a ‘somewhat “imperialistic” ring’. But, for want of a better alternative, it stuck.
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There was a growing ‘surfeit of Excellencies’ in Singapore at this time. In addition to the Governor General of British Southeast Asia and the governors of the Malayan Union and Singapore, responsible to the colonial secretary, there was now also a special commissioner for Southeast Asia, responsible to the Foreign Office. This was further recognition of the centrality of the region, and of the way in which its nationalist politics were intertwined with each other. This post began as a plan for a resident minister, but memories of the unhappy time of Duff and Diana Cooper in Singapore before the fall, were too tender. The appointee was Miles Lampson, Lord Killearn, a senior diplomat who had recently completed eight years’ service in Cairo. Killearn was also unhappy with his job title, considering it ‘reminiscent of the Salvation Army’, but he had a formidable brief which ranged from tackling the food emergency to acting as an honest broker in Indonesia. Killearn was a big man – 6 feet 5 inches tall and 18 stone – and was an imposing presence in every sense. He had a massive personal staff of 300, excluding a considerable number of drivers and maintenance men, which cost the British taxpayer £326,000 a year. When coupled with his strictures on the necessity for patience to people waiting for rice, this opened him up to attack. In August, the
Straits Times
printed a skit telephone call to his office:

ODATE
: Hello! Is that you Killearn?

VOICE
: No.

ODATE
: Has he been recalled?

VOICE
: Eh? well… er… who are you?

ODATE
: Insignificant self is Odate – Siego Odate.

VOICE
: What do you want?

ODATE
: I wish to congratulate Killearn. You see, when I was Mayor of Syonan, I could never reduce the rice ration to under six
kati
for men. I was warned of trouble and black market.

But Killearn was, his driver recalled, very careful with money. He smoked long Burmese cheroots, and at parties at Bukit Serene he would serve cheap Thai whisky from bottles of Red and Black Label.
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Through Killearn’s role, the idea of ‘South East Asia’ as a distinct regional entity began to acquire an enduring substance.

In the Indian summer of empire, more Britons were involved in it than at any time previously, and often in entirely new roles. The large establishment was in part a reflection of the Labour government’s commitment to an imperialism of the welfare state. To the district officers, planters and policemen of the pre-war era were added new levies of doctors and midwives, social researchers and ethnographers, welfare professionals and educationalists. British Southeast Asia became a unique laboratory of empire. Under the aegis of Lord Killearn, a ‘Social Welfare Conference’ in 1947 voiced the premise that ‘the findings of Sir William Beveridge for Great Britain are also applicable to Southeast Asia, namely that the total resources of the community by the redistribution of income are sufficient to make want needless’. Social and economic research was commissioned. The British trained a new generation of Asian technocrats. For many women it was their first experience of administration. A social survey of Singapore in 1947 brought to prominence a young economist, Goh Keng Swee, who would later design Singapore’s grand strategy for economic development.
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But it was made clear that there were no resources for anything resembling a ‘welfare state’; communities were to be taught to help themselves. A pressing target of reform was youth. The British believed that the region’s social crisis was in large part created by the general ‘disintegration of morals’ of the young during the war, particularly in the towns. Singapore made a special claim on the Colonial Development and Welfare Council for youth centres, citizen’s advice bureaux and community care as the British desperately
tried ‘to divert energies in socially desirable channels.’
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In the paternalistic writings of the time, radical nationalists appear as disturbed adolescents, and young communists, criminal delinquents.

The agenda of liberal imperialism was kept alive by the Labour government’s particular commitment to trade unionism. Edward Gent acknowledged that the BMA’s attempts to keep down inflation had been the overriding cause of strikes, and he took the unusual step of approving a back issue of strike pay for government labourers. On the basis that 90 per cent of BMA labour had struck for an average of ten days, the bill for their half pay on those days came to $270,000 .
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John ‘Battling Jack’ Brazier, as trade union adviser, enjoyed Gent’s strong backing and Malcolm MacDonald argued that, once the constitution squabble had been resolved, labour was the dominant issue facing British Southeast Asia. But although they went to great lengths to protect Brazier’s independence, his role was ambiguous and invidious. He was to be a ‘guide’ and ‘friend’ to trade unions, but in their eyes he was clearly a government official. He provided model rules for unions, and undertook to explain to employers that ‘Ramasamy’, a stock name for an Indian labourer, ‘is waking up but so few seem to realise it’. But Brazier was unpopular with both the plantocracy and conservative officials who were unreconciled to unions in principle, and flabbergasted that an imperial functionary should be actively encouraging their formation. Brazier, it seems, was acutely sensitive about the paternalism implicit in this role; in enforcing the distinction between ‘political’ and ‘economic’ trade unionism, he was not unmindful of the history of struggle of the British labour movement, in which politics had needed at times to come to the fore in the interests of labour. He seems to have been aware that his encouragement of the moderates did not always strengthen the movement, or promote the best men. The MCP argued that establishing unions on a British model in a Malayan context often meant establishing them on communal lines. Brazier was determined to help local people ‘avoid the suffering and restrictions and the bloody battles that trade unionism had had to face in other countries’. But ultimately his presence in Malaya could also legitimate repression. His deputy in Singapore, S. P. Garrett, openly chafed at the constraints of his position, and was more outspoken in his attacks on employers and closer to the General
Labour Unions. And although Brazier had some notable success with moderate unions, it was the General Labour Unions that continued to win their battles in 1946 .
¹¹³

The January general strike had brought home to both the government and the Malayan Communist Party the power of organized labour. In the later part of 1946, the Party continued to move away from its semi-open structure, and its cadres were ordered to embed themselves in the workforce. Only main party offices in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore now remained, and the ‘Singapore Town Committee’ became a somewhat nebulous organization.
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The Party’s leading public spokesman on the peninsula was now the editor of the
Min Sheng Pau
, Liew Yit Fan. The mood was less openly confrontational; for the Party it was a time of consolidation. But the strike weapon, as the Singapore General Labour Union argued when reviewing the events of the BMA period, was the most effective way of extending its organization. But in the wake of the ‘February 15th incident’ in 1946 when the British intervened to prevent marches commemorating the fall of Singapore, it resolved that it should act more cautiously and systematically: ‘Only the most pressing demands of the movement should be raised, without making a comprehensive claim, in order to concentrate on one’s target, secure the sympathy of the public, and make victory easy to attain.’
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In the year after April 1946, 713,000 man days were lost through industrial action in Malaya and 1,173,000 in Singapore, where imperial strategic assets such as the Harbour Board and the Naval Base experienced prolonged strikes. Across the peninsula, in rubber and other industries, unions began to band together. Tremendous pressure was placed on the workers who stayed outside them: they complained of packing of meetings, of accusations of malpractice aimed at them, of intimidation and worse. Yet, at the same time, in a climate in which the conditions were dire and employers weak, the big unions won major successes: disputes, whatever the range of demands that they voiced, remained ‘rice strikes’. The dilemma for the government, as it reintroduced registration of labour unions in July 1946, was how long it would allow these unions to continue to operate legally. To anticipate this, the General Labour Unions organized themselves into federations which had a stronger trade basis. But the government in Malaya was gaining ground: the
‘laws of 1941’ which the left so derided, were being reintroduced. On the industry frontier, the state was being rebuilt; land and forest offices were reopening and employers were impatient to re-establish their authority.

Meanwhile there was a constant round of rallies and parades: for the first time in early March, International Women’s Day was celebrated in Singapore and Penang, followed in quick succession by the anniversary of the 1919 peace conference, the birthday of Karl Marx and May Day, a somewhat muted affair after the earlier arrests and banishments, and there were large anti-war rallies in May and June in Singapore and many peninsular towns. The memory of the war remained deeply divisive. On the first anniversary of VJ Day in Singapore, the Chinese Chambers of Commerce and the Kuomintang paraded in the morning as part of the official event. Then the left paraded in the afternoon.
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It was a massive show of strength: a procession a mile long snaked through the city, led by veterans of the forgotten armies, of the Chinese fighters of Dalforce still demanding back pay. Some 130 other associations followed: the New Democratic Youth League, the MPAJA ex-Comrades, the trade unions, the Malayan Democratic Union and many more. A year after the end of the war, the demands were still the same: for rice, clothes and freedom, and an end to crime and violence. The parade was, as the local press pointed out, an act of thanksgiving for the end of Japanese tyranny, but it was not a sign of rejoicing. As the second colonial conquest of Malaya finally began to put down roots there, it was to be tested by a new and potentially fatal wave of opposition. Despite all the setbacks it had faced, by the end of the year the Malayan Communist Party proclaimed that its organization was larger now than during the Malayan Spring: ‘This time there are more participants and there is unanimity in their actions.’
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