Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [166]
Before the war, the British had tended to see Malaya as ‘a Tory Eden in which each man is contented with his station, and does not wish for a change’.96 Now planters had to come to terms with the fact that their coolies would not dismount from their bicycles when a European passed by. As the mems began to return they were given detailed advice by the Colonial Office on the changed manner of life.
They were warned that they would have to make do with army-style camp beds, ‘whilst your Kebun [gardener] or the Boy’s Wife rejoice in almeirahs and other items of household equipment’. They were advised to bring out their own car; otherwise they would have to use tricycle rickshaws, ‘a widely used Japanese innovation, or walk’. But there was worse. ‘If you are lucky enough to have the ruins of a tennis court (most were dug up for vegetables) you are unlikely to get the labour to restore it, or even keep your garden tidy.’ They were, above all, warned that they will be seen as ‘useless appendages of a decadent civilisation’, and would have to face criticism ‘in a way that has no pre-war parallel’. The Colonial Office, faced with the problem of recruiting staff, was appalled at the frank tone of this memorandum: ‘Is all the horror strictly necessary?’97 But returning British residents discovered that they had indeed lost almost everything in the wreck of 1942. Visiting journalists, attending a cocktail party in their honour in Singapore, were shocked when one of the first guests walked across the room and claimed two of the pictures on the wall.98
Even before the war the British community in Malaya was becoming increasingly divided by class and income, and old Malaya families were contemptuous of birds of passage. Now these divisions became more sharply defined and instrumental. Most returning civil servants abhorred the Malayan Union and the superficial democratization of colonial life. They never forgave the governor, Sir Edward Gent, for his role in the debacle. Gent became an aloof figure: ‘a slight, tense little man’, wrote John Gullick, who arrived in Malaya with the BMA and was to become one of Britain’s most notable scholar-administrators, ‘concentrating on what he had to do and giving little attention to anything or anybody else’.99 For his part, Gent was very open about his desire to bring the ‘Heaven born’ of the Malayan Civil Service back down to earth. He treated them as bureaucratic subordinates; no more, no less. The war itself was another bitter divide. An ex-POW and internees’ association was soon formed. But even within it there were subtle, vicious distinctions. As the journalist Vernon Bartlett reported:
You will be told, for example, that Smith is a very decent chap, but that he was one of the ones who got away… You will also be told that Jones is a very decent chap, but that he was one of those who stayed on, spent his time in internment and won’t let you forget it… Brown, you are told, is a very decent chap, but his attitude at camp was so provocative that it led to Japanese reprisals… Robinson you will be told, is a very decent chap, but his efforts to get milder conditions for people in the camp came very near to collaboration…100
The police force in particular was crippled by resentments. Some officers had, in the confusion of the fall of Singapore, escaped. Two of the senior men involved had served with distinction in Special Operations Executive, and one had died in an aircraft crash at the end of the war. The Colonial Office viewed the matter as closed. But internees had had a long time to brood on their resentments in the camps, and demanded that those who had escaped be called to account.101 When some of the offenders – ‘the seventeen’, as they