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either kept in Malaysia as a so-called ‘legacy’ document, or destroyed when Malaya attained its independence. In 1970, the affair had passed the time limit still to be regarded as a military matter, and was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who passed the available information to Scotland Yard. An investigation in the United Kingdom ensued, led by the man who hunted down the Great Train Robbers, Chief Superintendent Frank Williams. But in June 1970, following a change of government in London, his planned visit to Malaysia was called off. There was, the Director of Public Prosecutions told the new Conservative Minister of Defence, ‘substantial conflict among the soldiers who were present’. In light of the lapse of time, given what he saw as the unequivocal nature of contemporary statements and the unlikelihood of new evidence coming to light, he did not ask the police to pursue the case.136 On 9 July 1970, the Conservative Attorney General told the House of Commons that the Director of Public Prosecutions would not take the matter any further. The file was closed, or rather it had been closed a long time before 1970.137

The charges resurfaced in a 1993 BBC documentary, In cold blood, which claimed that Frank Williams had, in fact, secured sworn testimony by a Scots Guardsman to the cold-blooded shooting. In the wake of this, in Malaysia, witnesses came forward: the Malay policemen; a male survivor, Chang Hong; and two women who had witnessed the shooting from the lorry. Chang Hong had fainted and survived among the dead bodies. He was later arrested and released, and his escape may explain the discrepancy in numbers. The survivors filed a police report, and the Malaysian Chinese Association, a party of the ruling coalition, petitioned the British government to reopen the case. The women – and indeed the oral tradition of the village – spoke of harrowing scenes; of how the men were led out of the hut in small groups of four or five; how they were then told to turn round and were shot in the back. They described the mutilated bodies, left for days in the sun. One of the women who came forward, Foo Mooi, saw her husband killed.138 In 2004 the matter was raised again after Chin Peng had published his own account of events. He alleged – on the basis, it seems, of what he had heard on the Party underground – that Batang Kali was ‘a premeditated massacre’. The following year a veteran Malaysian opposition leader, Lim Kit Siang, took up the case of the by then 77-year-old Chang Hong and two eyewitnesses, Tan Moi, 73, and Foo Mooi, 86. The Malaysian government’s own investigation, begun in 1993, was completed in 1997, but has yet to be published. Again it was argued that no legal redress was now possible. But Lim Kit Siang argued that this was no longer the main issue. ‘No one expected any one of the Scots Guards responsible for the Batang Kali massacre 56 years ago to be identified, let alone to be prosecuted. The issue, however, is whether there was a massacre of the 24 innocent rubber tappers and the righting of such a 56-year historic wrong and injustice.’139 Chin Peng’s charge met with a storm of protest from veterans of the Scots Guards: their collective memory was that, in the words of Major General Sir John Acland, ‘there was a very strong feeling in the battalion that nothing wrong happened’.140 But neither had the incident been properly explained.

When the story re-emerged in 1970, the prime minister of Malaysia was Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Malay aristocrat who in 1949 was a director of public prosecutions in the government legal service. ‘I thought it not fair to rake up the old wounds’, he remarked. ‘It is sad that such a thing happened but war is war… Why not bring up all the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the occupation? There are millions of them.’141 Although much of what happened at Batang Kali remains obscure, the incident reveals a great deal about the public memory of these events: of the resistance to a full post-mortem on empire in Britain; of the divisiveness of the Emergency in contemporary