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stations. The clinical language used to describe the process disguised a brutal reality. Families were irrevocably divided. In January 1949, at the Malacca camp, British observers found elderly persons and parentless children awaiting ‘repatriation’ to a homeland with which they had lost all connection.77 Of the individual detainees around 1,000 were Malay. In August 1948, the young Indonesian leader, Khatijah Sidek, was arrested and sent to Sime Road, where the European women had been detained during the war. She was seven months pregnant, and struggled on the diet of wild rice with scraps of vegetables and fish. She shared a cell with forty other women, mostly girls from the Chinese high schools. She cajoled them into sharing any extra food, such as biscuits brought in by visitors: ‘Before we ate, we each had to make a speech, and then we sang national songs – Malay, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese. Then we shouted the Malay word Merdeka and repeated it in Indian and Chinese, before eating the biscuits.’78

In early 1950, Mountbatten’s old confidant, Tom Driberg, visited Taiping camp, from which local journalists had been barred. Here the British experimented with a ‘rehabilitation’ programme for communists and their sympathizers. Driberg described it as ‘a kind of Wilton Park, or rather Macronissos of Malaya’; this was a reference to the controversial conditions of internment in wartime Britain, and to a notorious island camp used in the Greek insurrection. It was, Driberg wrote, ‘a disgrace to the British Commonwealth, to the Federation of Malaya and to the Labour Government’.79 He took up allegations of assault on detainees. The conditions, the deputy commissioner of police frankly admitted, were ‘now worse than that experienced by internees under the Jap regime’.80 In Klang there had been protests: ‘Various forms of obstruction were practised including sitting down, refusing to identify their possessions and generally adopting an attitude of complete indifference. Under certain conditions these persons had to be assisted to their feet and a certain degree of compulsion used.’81 In July 1950 there was a week-long hunger strike by 1,370 detainees in Ipoh, and when the Johore notable Wong Shee Fung visited Majeedi camp, ostensibly to inspect conditions, he was nearly scragged by inmates: two of them were shot. Many saw the camps as ‘nurseries of communism’. The new secretary of state, James Griffiths, felt there was a serious risk of a mass breakout. By the end of 1951 conditions at Taiping had improved, but Tanjong Bruas, in Malacca, was dirty and neglected; it was, in the eyes of the former head of the UK Prison Service, ‘a most distressing encampment’.82 There were more riots in Ipoh in June 1955, in which wardens opened fire, killing three people. It spread to the rehabilitation centre, where women were among those to resist the longest. The wardens, the coroner, concluded, ‘lost their heads’.83

In February 1949 the first 1,074 detainees were embarked on two ships for China.84 They had lost almost everything: family, home, goods, crops, pigs and fishponds. Privately, Gurney hoped to ‘repatriate’ as many as 2,000 people a month.85 But the system of appeals proved burdensome, and collective detentions had to be put on hold, although they continued in some key areas. The British then experimented with ‘voluntary repatriation’, but there were few takers. The whole business was a scandal waiting to erupt, and there was a small rebellion of civil servants against the policy.86 Nevertheless, by the middle of March 1951 10,140 people had been sent to China and 104 more to India and Indonesia. Banishments came to a standstill in 1950 with the fall of Nationalist China. But they resumed again in 1951 through the port of Hoihow on Hainan island; by April 1952 the total had risen to 13,317. A Norwegian vessel was used for the work; at one time the captain was arrested, and a British official had to buy him out of jail. The cost for each detainee was equivalent to a first-class berth on a P&O liner to Colombo.87 A British policeman