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that was to tar him as a Tory reactionary, the character he plays in Aung San Suu Kyi’s memoir of her father and also in Fergal Keane’s 1990s television documentary on Aung San’s assassination. Certainly the Dorman-Smith of 1946 was not the genial Irish observer of nationalist movements who had soothed Tin Tut’s ruffled feathers in Simla three years before. His health was rapidly deteriorating. He was in the grip of his fourth attack of amoebic dysentery since his return to Burma. The season was terrible and conditions were poor even for a governor. He had difficulty in understanding the massive changes that had overtaken Burmese politics since 1942, used as he was to the likes of Paw Tun and U Saw. He was also truly horrified by what was now coming out about Axis atrocities. He was haunted by images of the sook ching massacres of the Chinese in Malaya by the Japanese in 1942, their torture of Major Seagrim and the Karen special forces in 1944, the Burma–Siam railway and, more distantly, the Holocaust. He was horrified by the brutal treatment of the Burmese and Anglo-Indian Christians of Rangoon, among whom he had once felt at home. Aung San and his colleagues were indelibly painted in his mind as JIFS, Japanese-influenced forces, as ‘quislings’ and ‘fascists’. He was also deeply at odds with the Labour ministers in London, pining for his old expansive relationship with his ‘wonderful boss’,126 Leo Amery, rather than the stiff and self-righteous left-wingers who now held power. Attlee’s government seemed to embody dither and interference in about the same degree. Dorman-Smith once drafted a telegram to Attlee: ‘I had a dose of Eno’s [liver salts] last night. May I please be allowed to go to the lavatory tomorrow?’127

Some weeks after the plans to arrest Aung San were shelved, the security of the country deteriorated markedly. Aung San was building up his strength in the villages and small towns, aware that he might still need to stage a show of force against either the British or his communist ‘allies’. The drilling, marching and counter-marching of more than 80,000 volunteers became feverish in the weeks after the first anniversary of the BNA’s revolt against the Japanese. Then came the crisis. On 18 May a fatal shooting took place at Tantabin in Insein district, a small town with a mixed Burman/Karen population. A band of local volunteers was moving through the town protesting against the Defence of Burma rules. These prohibited quasi-military marching and arms drill, even when carried out with dummy weapons. The exact sequence of events is unclear, as defence and prosecution witnesses flatly contradicted each other,128 but there had evidently been ill feeling for some time between local leaders of the PVO and the police sub-inspector, Maung Gale. The authorities believed that the nationalists were collecting arms. Some people deposed that leaders of the crowd were carrying dummy weapons. The yebaws, or volunteers, allegedly told people to resist the police if they attempted arrests during the demonstrations: ‘Let the masses surround the authorities and forcibly take back the persons arrested.’129 On the day of the shooting, things had got out of hand as people converged on one of the main teashops in the town. The police started to beat members of the crowd with their rifle butts. The crowd attacked the police with bamboo poles. The police then discharged at least sixty live rounds, killing five people and wounding many others before the crowd retreated. Three hundred yebaws were arrested, but it was never clear if the order to disperse was actually given to or understood by the crowd before the firing began.130 As in so many incidents in British imperial history, from Ireland through Egypt to India and beyond, a relatively minor but bloody police action galvanized people’s perception of British rule as irredeemably repressive. An ominous feature of the situation in Tantabin was that the crowd was composed of villagers, not students or ‘agitators’. They were protesting because of demands for the repayment of agricultural