Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [72]
As the reputation and moral authority of the military regime began to disintegrate, it established the first ‘public relations department’ in Asia. Initially it was used to monitor press opinion and to dispel rumours. Letters to Malay village headmen in the ‘best Malay traditional style’ helped damp down ethnic tensions. Then it launched campaigns of mass education to improve people’s diets and combat inflation: ‘A dollar is always a dollar. It becomes smaller because people are spending it in a ti-da-apa [carefree] way.’ The accompanying slogan – ‘Goods are coming. Don’t buy now!’ – was an easy target for satire: a better message, one Chinese newspaper suggested, might be: ‘Don’t eat now!’ or ‘Don’t live now!’.68 As the British became more aware of the impact of three and a half years of Japanese anti-Western indoctrination, they responded with exhibitions and lectures on the war, reading rooms, public address vans, travelling theatre and Chinese story-tellers, and even a film studio. Victor Purcell himself had run a smaller information bureau before the fall of Singapore. Many old Malaya hands, he complained, disapproved, calling it ‘meretricious, loud and ungentlemanly (which of course it was)’. This was a dramatic change in the way colonial rule manifested itself and ‘PR’ was now a permanent arm of government. The British saw themselves as impresarios of public opinion and in active competition with the local press and political parties. By early 1946 the department had distributed 140,000 posters and notices of a ‘political nature’. But the senior Malay officials involved felt they were a waste of effort. The people of Malaya were speaking very different languages of politics.69
A WORLD UPSIDE DOWN
‘When we arrived’, O. W. Gilmour observed, ‘everything had stopped. There was no money, no public transport, no Post Office services, no newspapers, no trade, no courts of justice, and to all intents and purposes no police protection.’ The Asian banks opened on 12 September and the British banks on 1 October. The Post Office ran a free letter service from 17 September – even the Singapore Museum reopened on 12 September. Much of this, as Gilmour claimed, was to the credit of the BMA, and achieved at the price of the ‘sickness and partial breakdown’ of many of its officers. When, on 5 September, he first turned on the switches and taps in the Singapore Municipal Building, there was light and water but the electrical power supply in Singapore was strained beyond capacity, and as Gilmour investigated further, he discovered that an entirely new system had come into being:
Inside many houses, long lengths of flex made spider’s webs connecting every type of electrical gadgets, wires in hundreds emerged from windows and doors to hawkers’ stalls and outside lights of every description. Many hundreds or thousands of people had connected their supplies to the mains outside the meters, and, over all consumption, there was a light-hearted irresponsibility. Wires lights and gadgets entwined buildings in the town with a gay abandon and one judged that many a suburban house had been combed to make a down-town display.70
A transfer of power had taken place, in all senses. For three and a half years, Malaya had its own form of black market administration.
The invisible cities that had arisen in the shadow of the old colonial towns had come into the light. During the war, the