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this had not been known to happen since 1929. In that year, 850 people had been banished. Nor was the Colonial Office moved. But the supremo, now in Australia, where he failed to persuade Australian trade unionists to call off their blockade of goods for Indonesia, refused to endorse the deportations. ‘I am not thinking of my own name, or even of the good name of the military administration, I am solely imbued with the desire to act in a manner which I consider in the true interests of HMG, and which history in ten years’ time will vindicate.’48 The civil government, due to take over at the end of March, must deal with the issue. The problem was, as the growing number of hardliners – now including Purcell and Hone – well realized, that although civil government could reintroduce banishment it would also have to reintroduce habeas corpus. ‘It is’, Mountbatten concluded, ‘precisely because the civil government is unable to detain these people legally that I am being asked to take action.’49 The general feeling of the British in Malaya was that Mount-batten was determined ‘not to let himself in for any unpleasant political consequences’.50 He wished to be remembered as a liberator. ‘I do not really think he believed that the Chinese communists were really communists,’ Hone reflected later. ‘He thought that they were just decent left-wing chaps who valued freedom of speech and freedom of association as much as we did and that if they were properly handled by the administration generally, they were 100% British.’51 On the first day of civilian rule, Hone reported, in one of its first acts, the new government ‘despatched ten little nigger boys homeward’.52

Victor Purcell was also about to depart. His own progress had been extraordinary: from tribune of the liberal imperialism to one of the leading advocates of preventive detentions. A personal turning point, he recalled twenty years later, had been on 29 January when the servants in the residence he and Ralph Hone shared refused to serve them. It was clear then that ‘we must prevent them taking charge of the country or abdicate’. The illusions of liberal imperialism were exploded. Purcell was, like many British officials, unable to live with the consequences of his own policy. Democratic opinion that had emerged in the Malayan Spring appalled him, so too had the very idea of ‘the people’. ‘The ideal human being boils down to the moronic’, he wrote in one of the last of his journals, ‘the adenoidal, the unwashed, the scrofulous, the naked, the illiterate, the dumb and, above all, the passive and the victimised.’ This was not a ‘people’, Purcell seemed to say, on which a progressive colonial policy could be based: ‘until Malaya produces her own leaders and her own sense of civic responsibility (which sometimes seems a thousand miles away) we must continue to accept the responsibility of governing’.53 For Malayans, the Spring was a chance to explore the meaning of freedom, and most had rejected the freedom that was on offer from the British.

Apparently, the democracy demanded by the people in the past few months differs a great deal from the democratic system as specified by the British Army. Hence ‘democratic’ tragedies have occurred incessantly. Perhaps the BMA may accuse the people of abusing ‘freedom’ over the past few months, but they must reflect on that which they promised the people. How may the people use the freedom so as to conform to the government specifications? There is no definite statement, and so the random use of force is inevitable.54

Over the coming months, ‘the laws of 1941’ would begin to return. The Malayan Spring was an epochal and tragic moment. It was a period when the people of Malaya, for the first time under colonial rule, began to taste political freedom and debate the meaning of their Merdeka. Never again in Malaya’s history would intellectual and political activity be subject to so few legal restraints.

HANG TUAH AND HANG JEBAT

It was at this stage that the greatest political challenge came from where it was least expected. On 22 January