Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [70]
At a fundamental level, British rule had lost its legitimacy. The first men ashore put a great deal of store in the spontaneous celebrations and the loyal processions that had greeted them. O. W. Gilmour rejoiced to be welcomed at his old house in Singapore by his gardener, his driver and his cook. That the leaden paternalism of the British was preferable to the arbitrary violence and psychological trauma of Japanese rule was a point few Malayans, of the middle classes at least, would dispute. For this reason, most of them deferred to the old hierarchy. But Asian civil servants resented that the fact that they had stayed at the posts, when the Europeans had not, was interpreted by their British masters as unquestioning ‘empire loyalty’. Malayans who had kept basic services going were roughly pushed aside. One leading Chinese doctor, Benjamin Chew, who had kept a tuberculosis ward going at Tan Tock Seng hospital in Singapore, was told by a British medical officer, ‘Chew, your cases can go into the streets.’ Dr Chew left the government service in disgust.50 The ‘colour bar’ was restored at its pre-war level. One of ‘sponsored civilians’ brought in from India by the BMA was the Selangor mining tycoon H. S. Lee. He was one of the first of the China-born towkays to be educated at Cambridge University, and had the honorary rank of colonel in the Nationalist Chinese Army. But on his first arrival back in Malaya he experienced crude racial affronts. As a BMA officer he was entitled to buy NAAFI goods at a service price, but was refused them on the grounds that he was Chinese. ‘I can hardly believe’, he wrote to Victor Purcell, ‘that racial discrimination still exists.’51 The general responsible was challenged on this. He did not deny the discrimination, his argument being, Purcell was told by a sympathetic colleague, ‘that whisky is not a natural part of the standard of living of a Chinese. I agreed with him that they preferred brandy, but as that is not obtainable they are prepared to put up with whisky as a second-best.’52 These slights would never be forgotten by the individuals who suffered them.
The second colonial conquest was more aggressive than the first. ‘The army’, wrote H. T. Pagden, ‘behaved as if they were in conquered territory.’ Singapore became a staging post for hundreds of thousands of men in uniform shipping to points further east, and this soon deflated any sense of elation that war was now over. At the beginning of December, at huge expense, Mountbatten moved the HQ of South East Asia Command to Singapore. He took the city’s landmark skyscraper, the Cathay Building, as his offices. It had many associations with the war, as a Japanese headquarters and where, in its auditorium, Subhas Chandra Bose declared a government of Free India. The supremo’s personal staff was regal in scale: the previous year it reached 7,000 people. The military requisitioned 2,227 houses and 51 institutions and clubs, and they took the best: navy officers messed in the Adelphi Hotel and the RAPWI organization at the Goodwood Park. Even the luxury department stores in Raffles Place – Little’s and Robinson’s – were taken over by the NAAFI; the elite Singapore Cricket Club became the Army YMCA. By contrast, Raffles Hotel was a dismal haunt for European refugees and ex-internees. The military soon became unpopular with the locals for forcing up prices still further. But the good life for which the Singapore garrison had been famous in 1941 began to revive: roadside cafés sprang up, with ‘singers and young girls acting as waitresses; and beer drinking. There were no holds barred.’53 The senior civil affairs officer on the island called