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By Root 4317 0

officers, who were also new to empire and to Asia, and who had received only a crash course in local topography, the Malay language and the Indian penal code at a police college in Wimbledon.13 By this route, in the final years of British Asia, new kinds of men and women entered imperial service, who had a different class and educational outlook to the ‘high born’ civil servants of the pre-war days. But the local knowledge that was acquired in the first few weeks began to drain away once demobilization began in November; the new temporary drafts were often disinterested and disillusioned by their role. And by its very nature, military government proved to be a wholly inadequate agent of liberal, democratic reform.

The charter of the BMA was to prevent the outbreak of ‘disease and disorder’. But it was overwhelmed by the magnitude of Malaya’s crisis. The devastation began at the dockside. The naval base at Sembawang in Singapore lay in ruins, incinerated in the Allies’ scorched-earth retreat of 1942. The 50,000-ton floating dock was lying on the bottom of the Straits of Johore with a tanker sunk inside it: it would take over five years to rebuild it.14 Inland the landscape was, at every turn, scarred by war. Fearing the escalation of air raids on Singapore, the Japanese had burrowed tunnels deep into ridges and hillsides. All available land – the public parks, playing fields and tennis courts – was given over to vegetables and rows of tapioca, the ubiquitous, despised staple food of the war years. Other open areas had become vast dumps for looted or destroyed equipment. There were hoards of incongruous commodities. As the civil engineer O. W. Gilmour made an inventory of the island, he discovered in a rubber plantation some sixteen brick warehouses, each 100 feet long, by 24 feet wide and 20 feet high. They were full of leather saddles, bridles, straps, holsters and harnesses, enough ‘to equip all the cavalrymen and cowboys left in the world, and that in a country where a horse is a curiosity’.15 As the Japanese struck camp, few buildings were left guarded, and looters moved into abandoned houses and offices. Upcountry, the pickings were richer: stockpiles of food, rubber and tin were collected by armed gangs.

Peninsular Malaya had taken a step backwards from the industrial age. None of the great tin dredges were working; Chinese mine-owners complained that their businesses were stripped of machinery and motors. Much of the rubber plantation land was overrun by either food production or weeds. At the liberation Guthrie, one of the largest rubber companies, had only six experienced planters to husband over 155,000 acres of rubber trees.16 Electricity supplies would not meet demand until 1949 and transportation had all but broken down. The east coast was cut off from the rest of the country because the railway line from Kuala Lumpur had been stripped of track to lay the Burma–Siam railway. This left Kelantan virtually isolated in the monsoon season. Outside the towns, the roads were pitted and unsafe. Cars and lorries were at a premium; the army was forced to issue orders that its men should not drive out alone, because so many of their vehicles were immediately stolen when left unattended. For most people cheap Japanese-made bicycles were now the only viable form of transport. The British estimate of war damage was a staggering £127 million, the total costs incalculable.17

At every turn, the British were confronted by the human debris of war. Thousands of people were without shelter, or stranded far from home. Javanese romusha (forced labourers) haunted Singapore, they gathered around the railway station, in the eyes of one witness, ‘half dead like skeletons… like in Germany, half-starved like. And some of them, their legs dangling, sitting down, their legs hanging down the sides of the train, and load[ed] like sheep inside.’ By the end of 1945, there were still 18,000 of them in Malaya.18 Singapore was dangerously overcrowded, and life was a constant scramble for space. Even before the war its urban population density