Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [204]
On the night of 6 October an estate manager in southwest Johore, Archie Nicholson, was driving home with his wife after a dinner with a planter on a neighbouring estate when he suddenly came up against a roadblock. He decided to accelerate through it, but lost control of his car and died as it skidded and rolled into a ditch. His wife was stripped of her jewellery and beaten by four armed men, but she survived. Nicholson had been resident in Malaya since the late 1920s and was a veteran of the Burma–Siam railway. The European community was badly shaken. ‘Physical fear’, declared The Planter, ‘is creating havoc amongst the inhabitants of Malaya once renowned for their complacency and general tranquillity’. The tragedy was one of many incidents of armed robbery at the time; but, in the minds of many planters, it was indistinguishable from the confrontations they were experiencing with labour agitators on their estates. After Nicholson’s funeral, a delegation of planters descended on King’s House for a tense audience with Gent, at which they called for the introduction of emergency measures: the death penalty, banishment, ‘and particularly of flogging’. Kuala Lumpur, they said, was ignorant of the scale of the problem; only planters could take the pulse of the ulu, the upcountry. They demanded arms to defend themselves.45 Gent had come to represent all that many planters detested about the post-war empire: effete officials, income tax and socialism. Whilst it remained an unwritten rule in the European clubs (in the words of Anthony Burgess) that ‘the hairy legs and shorts of the visiting planter should not be juxtaposed to the pressed linen slacks of the government man’, many policemen and civil servants were equally disenchanted.46 But Gent felt a personal obligation to uphold the Labour government’s policy of encouraging trade unions and refused to capitulate in the face of pressure from employers. He dismissed them as ‘alarmist’. A story did the rounds that Gent began one interview with European businessmen with the words, ‘Before you tell me your troubles I want to hear what you have been doing lately to improve conditions for your workmen.’47 Old Malaya hands in London lobbied for his immediate recall. The crisis was a full dress rehearsal for what would later come to pass.
But in 1947, the principles of liberal imperialism prevailed. In private, Gent and the Governor General, Malcolm MacDonald, like Mountbatten before them, were fighting a holding action against colleagues who were urging resort to arbitrary powers. At the height of the strikes in Singapore, the governor, Sir Franklin Gimson, demanded more authority to banish people. Without it, he warned London, ‘the prestige of the government would be so damaged that it might be unable to control the situation’.48 The pre-war legislation that regulated trade unions and societies was now revived. But throughout 1947 the legal status of the Federations of Trade Unions remained in limbo. So did that of the Malayan Communist Party. On 26 June 1947 MacDonald convened a top-secret meeting in Singapore to consider banning it. It was, perhaps, the first sally of the Cold War in British Southeast Asia. Communism, MacDonald declared, was ‘Enemy No. 1’. The nearest Russians, he conceded, were in Bangkok, but their allies were at work in Malaya and Singapore among the ‘gullible’ Asiatic masses. They were a potential fifth column in time of war, and ‘a very strong and coherent policy’ was needed to counteract them. The military chiefs demanded to know why communists were still at large: ‘Why was their activity not regarded as an act of sedition against the King?’ The wartime agreement in the jungle between Force 136 and the MPAJA