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in a kongsi hut and interrogated. Fearing an ambush by the communists, the Scots Guards hid watchers around the clearing in which the hut was found. The next morning the labourers in the hut, seeing only a few soldiers around, had made a break for freedom. The hidden guards, seeing the Chinese men run and not knowing what was happening, had called on them to halt, then, acting under standing orders, had finally opened fire.125 Many questions were asked about this incident at the time, by the Chinese press and by the Straits Times. Not least, how had so many guerrillas died leaving none injured, and at the hands of a small platoon of British troops? And how was it that the Scots Guards could have been so certain that they were guerrillas? According to one journalist’s account, Gurney called in one of the senior writers of the Straits Times to ask why the paper would not let the matter rest.126 The enquiry into the incident, which was undertaken by the Attorney General of Malaya, Sir Stafford Foster-Sutton, was never made public. In Britain, questions about Batang Kali were raised by the Daily Worker, which was now a tenacious opponent of the campaign in Malaya. When asked about it by Creech Jones, Gurney denied knowledge of the operation. He assumed, in his reply, that the reference was to the earlier controversial action at Kachau.127

The story resurfaced in the wake of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in 1968 and a comment by a Labour MP, George Brown, that ‘there are an awful lot of spectres in our cupboard, too’.128 On 1 February 1970, the People published a front-page story under the headline: ‘Horror in a nameless village’. In it, men from the Scots Guards came forward with a new version of events, and alleged that the twenty-five Chinese – some accounts say twenty-four – had not been running away. The story caused a sensation. Over the next few days British witnesses were grilled by the media. On 3 February 1970 Alan Tuppen, who was eighteen in 1948, was interviewed by Leonard Parkin on ITN’s News at ten

PARKIN: Did you fire?

TUPPEN: I fired, yes.

PARKIN: And hit someone?

TUPPEN: Yes.

PARKIN: Did you remember how many?

TUPPEN: No I don’t remember.

PARKIN: Can you tell me this: do you believe now that these men were trying to escape?

TUPPEN: Now, no, but even then there must have been a shadow of doubt. But I don’t think they were trying to escape.

PARKIN: Would you have been in a position at that time to know whether they were trying to escape, whether they’d left somewhere else?

TUPPEN: Well, the thing is if they came with us, this is a point I should remember, I know, but I don’t remember. If they came with us, well, that’s another story.

PARKIN: Can you tell me this: did you and the others fire in cold blood here?

TUPPEN: Yes.

PARKIN: Why didn’t you tell the story to the enquiry?

TUPPEN: Well, this is another thing I can’t remember, but it seems as though a story was concocted after this incident in the barrack room or somewhere, and I can’t remember any concoctions at all going on but, it must have gone on. Obviously we all told the same story.129

Other men corroborated aspects of Tuppen’s account, and said that they had been told that the men would be shot, and given the option of falling out. One man who said he did fall out, Victor Remedios, was left to guard the women and children who were in a lorry nearby. When shooting started, he told a BBC radio interviewer, ‘they were all screaming, shouting and screaming’. On returning to the village: ‘we found all these bodies round the streams like and blood all over the place’. He said that they were more or less threatened into lying at the enquiry.130

These were to be the only public testimonies from those involved. On 4 February the then Secretary of State for Defence, Denis Healey, told the House of Commons that there was a direct conflict of evidence and that he was considering whether the matter should be referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions. In the enquiries that followed many confused and contradictory versions of events emerged.