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hero. His most savage critic was the architect of the Malayan Spring, Victor Purcell, who was also a history don, at Cambridge, who returned to Malaya in 1953 as an adviser to the Malayan Chinese Association. He wrote a series of articles and a polemical book, Malaya: communist or free?, in which he accused Templer of authoritarian, even quasi-fascist methods: ‘a terrifying mixture of crassness and voodoo’.16 Their feud was bitter and personal, although Purcell was merely articulating what many Chinese leaders such as Tan Cheng Lock thought but felt unable to say directly and publicly. From this Templer emerges perhaps more plausibly as a useful if limited man, favoured by fortune and riding the tide of achievement of his predecessors; in the words of one Malayan civil servant, ‘a facile princeps’.17 Templer embodied Britain’s counter-insurgency in a way that Gurney had been unable to do. In his hands – as both high commissioner and director of operations – was concentrated more power than had been possessed by any British general since Oliver Cromwell. He used it to create a new integrated system of command and a functioning intelligence system, to cut through red tape, official parochialism and jealousies and to facilitate new specialist initiatives. He was constantly in the field, where his presence was likened to the charismatic dynamism of Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny in Indo-China, and he took strong stands against diehard employers and colonial prejudice.18 In a hallmark incident, he threatened to run the committee of the elite Kuala Lumpur Lake Club out of town when they barred the Sultan of Selangor, as an ‘Asiatic’, from attending a St George’s day function in his own realm.

But Templer was a blunt instrument. One of his first actions following his arrival in March 1952 was to direct personally a draconian collective punishment operation against the town of Tanjong Malim, the scene of heavy guerrilla activity where recent government casualties had included a hero of ‘the wooden horse’ POWescapade, Lieutenant R. M. C. Codner. Templer would descend on truculent resettlement areas to parade and berate their inhabitants. In one famous incident he began, ‘You are all bastards.’ A Chinese interpreted: ‘His Excellency says that none of your parents were married.’ ‘Well’, continued Templer, ‘I can be a bastard too.’ ‘His Excellency says his parents were also unmarried.’19 But as he himself admitted, Templer was building on the foundations of the work of Gurney and others. The key component of the campaign – resettlement on a mass scale – had been begun in earnest in Gurney’s time by Sir Harold Briggs, who was pulled out of retirement after his campaigns in Burma to become the first director of operations. He developed a plan to ‘roll up’ Malaya from the south.20 This began in, as those responsible admitted, an experimental and ‘rough and ready’ fashion in June 1950 in Johore. As one European resident put it: ‘This fair land is now, it would appear, in danger of becoming infested with a series of untidy, shabby shanty towns: a succession of inferior Butlin’s camps but lacking the amenities.’21 The programme was largely completed by the end of 1952. What Templer achieved was co-ordination of Emergency work with the everyday business of government. He also possessed a stronger mandate from Whitehall, and a clearer appreciation of the impending advance of self-government. This added a new dynamism to local politics that had been paralysed by the Emergency. Again, there was little new in the letter of Templer’s statements on the transfer of power delivered on his installation in Kuala Lumpur; the commitment was already there. But Templer set about executing it with the briskness of a country solicitor winding up a heavily entailed estate.22

The counter-insurgency regime created by the British in Malaya was perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of any colonial state. In the ‘New Villages’ – which became the new official euphemism – health services, sports halls and village councils were introduced; propaganda acquired a