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By Root 4380 0

been incarcerated, had been singled out for pay cuts and persecution by the Kempeitai. For them, ‘Singapore was one large prison camp’. For the first time, the middle classes marched in protest. They were eventually made a raised offer of three and a half months’ pay, but the damage was done.29 As one former student at Singapore’s elite Raffles College observed: ‘My education in the unfairness and absurdities of human existence was completed by what I saw in the immediate aftermath of the war. If three and a half years of Japanese occupation had earned me my degree in the realities of life, the first year in liberated Singapore was my postgraduate course.’ The young Lee Kuan Yew would soon sail for England to complete his formal education at Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge. He would return to dominate the island’s politics for over fifty years. The attitude of his generation of colonial students would be dramatically different from an earlier elite generation who had returned, in Lee’s words, ‘overawed and overwhelmed by English values’.30

The ‘English-speaking brain-workers’, as they termed themselves, now began to organize, and a circle of them established Singapore’s first political party, the Malayan Democratic Union, in December 1945. The MDU included some of the most privileged young Malayans. Its first secretary, Lim Hong Bee, was educated at Cambridge on a King’s Scholarship, together with another member of the party, Lim Kean Chye, a son of one of the oldest and most illustrious Straits Chinese families of Penang. An older London-trained lawyer, the Guyana-born Eurasian Chinese Philip Hoalim, was chairman, and his money seemed to keep the small party afloat. The Malayan Democratic Union set up an office above the Liberty Cabaret in New Bridge Road, and the dance floor became a setting for political debate.31 The intellectuals’ vision of ‘Malaya’ was formed out of the cosmopolitan urban world of Singapore. It was inclusive and internationalist. Its manifesto announced that the MDU did ‘not take the stand that Malaya should break away from Great Britain. Indeed, Malaya with full democratic self-government will benefit most if she remains within the British Commonweath…’32 This was, by the standards of the time, a very moderate platform. But it attracted little sympathy from the British. Many of the Union’s leaders, including its most well-known figure, the lawyer John Eber, came from the Eurasian community, and they were subjected to condescending racial prejudice. Eber’s anti-colonialism, it was muttered, was grounded in resentment that while his English mother could mix with the colonial elite, his Eurasian father could not. But Eber had been largely brought up by his mother’s relatives in England, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and on returning to Singapore had joined the exclusive Tanglin Club and Singapore Golf Club. As his friend and fellow Cambridge graduate Lim Hong Bee put it, he was ‘in no way seen to display any of the obsessional traits of inferiority… He had no need to.’ The British reaction to him was pathological and hostile, Lim suggested, because Eber was ‘an acute embarrassment – so much like them in form, yet so different in substance’.33

The leaders of the Malayan Democratic Union were inspired by a socialist critique of imperialism. They argued that the British had created communal tensions in Malaya by building up the non-Malays as middlemen, and they looked to overcome this by a programme of nationalization and rural development. A central concern was to develop a system of ‘social security’ on the New Zealand model. In education, they looked beyond their own anglophone bias to the creation of four national language streams; the Malayan Democratic Union’s newspaper, The Democrat, gave unprecedented coverage to Malay affairs and to the Malay Nationalist Party. Again, and as Victor Purcell later admitted, this was no more dangerous than the socialism of Sutan Sjahrir or Aung San, but the party’s relations with the British were distorted entirely by its relationship with the MCP. The Malayan