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In particular, there was debate as to whether the Chinese labourers were walking or running; as to whether the huts in the clearing were set on fire or not. One version, which was reported by an official historian who had access to government papers, was that the Scots Guards were accompanied by a guerrilla supporter under arrest who was identifying those who were supplying the communists with food. On first arriving in the rubber estate the troops encountered two Chinese carrying rice, who were shot. The larger incident, it was suggested, occurred when the huts were burned and this set off an ammunition cache, or more likely detonators used for fishing, which cause the soldiers to panic and open fire with automatic weapons at close quarters. There were tales too that, during the night before the incident, one man had been separated from the rest of the Chinese and put through a bizarre ordeal with a gun at his head. The trigger was pressed several times, but the gun did not fire. Variants of this story circulated at the time, among journalists and the villagers themselves: one suggested that shots were fired in the air, so as to terrorize the captives in the hut as they were contemplating what might be their fate.131

Enquiries within the Scots Guards in 1970 revealed that the soldiers were without an officer. A lance-sergeant was in command, accompanied by a Malay special constable and a Chinese interpreter. They were, for the most part, only a few weeks in Malaya; for some it was their first patrol. They were ‘drivers, sick men and at least one member of the Corps of Drums’. It was, the colonel commanding the regiment in 1970 commented, ‘most unusual’ for an officer not to be present. There were no standing orders for the jungle patrols at the time; although there was a standing government statement that those running must expect to be shot.132 Few contemporary records of the event seemed to have survived. ‘It would appear that there was NO military inquiry, at least NO inquiry amounting to an “Army Court of Inquiry” though the Adjutant remembers writing a form of summary.’133 This did not survive; nor was correspondence from Kuala Lumpur forthcoming. The sole communication from Malaya that surfaced, from Sir Alex Newboult to an official in the Colonial Office, dealt with the subject in oblique but chillingly defiant terms:

One of the difficulties of the situation is that we have a war of terrorism on our hands and we are at the same time endeavouring to maintain the rule of law. It is an easy matter from one’s office and home to criticize action taken by the security forces in the heat of operations and working under jungle conditions but not so easy to do the job oneself. Rightly or wrongly we feel here that we must be conservative in our criticism of the men who are undoubtedly carrying out a most arduous and dangerous job… we feel it is most damaging to the morale of the security forces to feel that every action of theirs, after the event, is going to be examined with the most meticulouscare.134

No original report to the Colonial Office could be traced. The two European police officers involved in the case were later killed. The Attorney General of Malaya, Foster-Sutton, it appeared, had visited the site with police officers and two of the Scots Guards: he saw the corpses, and took the view that the wounds in the backs of the dead Chinese supported the soldiers’ story that they were trying to escape. There was no other formal enquiry. Foster-Sutton told the BBC in 1970 that, ‘having satisfied myself that the statements were true, I made a statement to the press’. He remembered seeing some women about the huts, but did not interview them. The affair, he concluded, was ‘a bona fide mistake’.135

The official records relating to Batang Kali were, it seems, destroyed, under the terms of Section 6 of the Public Records Act, ‘as not being worthy of permanent preservation’. This was the fate of most files relating to law and order during the Malayan Emergency. The ‘report’ by the Attorney General was never found. It was