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inches from a piece which denounced people spreading wild rumours, meaning those who were blaming the British government.102 Crucially, the British were able to prove that the weapons and ammunition used in the murders were not those stolen from the Base Ordnance Depot.103 Meanwhile, the police investigation was making some headway. A number of members of Saw’s household had been forced to testify against him. Several of the assassins were supposedly identified and one was conveniently shot dead trying to escape from a police jeep which was conveying him to Rangoon.104 The plan was evidently to concentrate minds on Saw and not to try to unravel the rest of the conspiracy for fear of where it might lead. On 24 September Saw’s trial began; seventy-eight witnesses were to be examined. People in the street hooted and howled at him as he was transported to court.105 Throughout he expected to be bailed out by his friends in Britain who included, he said, ‘three ex-governors and many ex-ministers’. Dorman-Smith certainly intervened on behalf of the clever and likeable rogue who had so pleased him in 1941. But it was to no avail. Saw was sentenced to death by hanging, although the sentence was not carried out until after Burma’s independence the following year. In a letter from his condemned cell to Bingley, the British Council man, he wrote: ‘I took a grave risk, as advised.’ On another occasion, he told his jailer that ‘the governor was no use as he had already been bought by Aung San and Thakin Nu for 20 lakhs’.106 This must have come as news to Rance, whose idea of the good life seems to have been a night out at a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

By mid August the vacuum left by the assassinations had been partially filled. The immediate attempt to bring the communists into government had failed. What was thought to be an auspicious day was chosen and the governor was called away from the golf course to swear in Nu and his colleagues. Rance could not find the oath of office, but luckily Tin Tut, a member of the new cabinet, had memorized it.107 Giving up on the communists, Nu spent much of the next two months trying to assuage the Karens and other minority groups and to disarm the restive PVO bands. The task seemed all the more urgent as every day brought news of fresh massacres across northern India, where Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were engaged in tit-for-tat killing. There was unfinished business to do with the British, too. The agreement at the start of the year between Aung San and Attlee had not tied up the loose ends of independence, especially on the financial side. The details were important especially because the communists were continuing to make political capital out of what they described as the ‘rightist’ AFPFL’s compromise with the ‘imperialists’. In September, therefore, Lord Listowel, secretary of state for Burma, visited Rangoon, while in October prime minister designate Nu flew to London for a final set of talks.108

Listowel’s job was basically one of public relations. He took tea with Aung San’s widow, Daw Khin Kyi, and her son and two-year-old daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, and presented his condolences. He disavowed the neo-imperialist aims that the communists were imputing to the British. The hard negotiating was done by Nu and cabinet ministers in London. Nu found Attlee’s government wrestling with a host of domestic industrial difficulties and worrying about the rise of communism in China and Southeast Asia. They were privately assailed by feelings of guilt about the bloodletting in India. The Conservatives were offering little support. Churchill was on the rampage about Labour’s scuttling out of Burma. His father Randolph had been responsible for the conquest of the country in 1885–6; now he insulted and abused Attlee and Aung San in an ‘outrageous speech’ that did enormous damage in Burma, according to Gilbert Laithwaite.109 Ministers were keen to maintain intact as many British financial interests in the country as possible. They also confirmed that a British services or military mission would remain