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Service, A. G. Blades, a pre-war policeman who had known Lai Teck. Pagden suggested that Lai Teck’s Kempeitai controller, Satoru Onishi, now imprisoned in Changi, be interrogated. ‘As an etymologist, however,’ he wrote some three years later, ‘I was not in a very strong position.’ Pagden was told in no uncertain terms to drop the matter and the Kuomintang, he believed, were pressured into silence and told to leave matters to the police. But Pagden sowed seeds of doubt: ‘The Malayan Security Service’, he told the Colonial Office, believed they knew ‘more about [Lai Teck] than anyone, but I am not sure that they do. They probably find him useful, but one wonders how useful this association with him may be to the other side.’95

By December 1945 the British were aware that Lai Teck was still alive. Once again, his story becomes obscured by a lack of sources, and by misinformation at every turn. But, from scraps of evidence in the official papers, it appears that knowledge of Lai Teck was confined to a small circle of initiates within the Malayan Security Service. A field security officer, Major R. J. Isaacs, opened a file on ‘The Wright Case’ and began to interview MCP members to discover what had happened to him, and to investigate his wartime activities. Members of the Kempeitai in British custody were asked to write down all they knew about the Malayan Communist Party. According to Onishi, Issacs visited him to seek his opinion.96 Then a key witness committed suicide at Isaacs’s house. With an impending inquest there was a danger that Isaacs and other witnesses might be put on the stand, and that information might come to light that would compromise the Security Service. It would also embarrass the British officers of Force 136 who, although they had known nothing of Lai Teck’s relationship with the Japanese, now had to confront the probability that they had inadvertently passed on military information to the Japanese. Force 136, too, was now a legend. At this point, the ‘Wright Case’ quietly dropped from view. It appears that it was not until early 1946 that Lai Teck was once more in contact with the British.97

The ‘secret’ army that Lai Teck had promised the Party in August did not exist. Everything was now staked on the ‘Eight Principles’. A further statement on the 7 November anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution extended these to nine, with a demand for ‘self-government’. But the underlying article of faith remained the same: ‘We still believe in the good things which the British government has promised us.’98 Notwithstanding any machinations on the part of Lai Teck, this credo still held good for many in the Party. Secret conversations between agents of the United States Office of Strategic Services and Party leaders in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur revealed that the MCP leadership believed that the moral authority of the San Francisco Declaration, the UN’s founding charter, together with world opinion ‘would force [the British] to change their policy’.99 But at this point, and not for the last time, frustrated rank-and-file took the responsibility of revolution into their own hands and went on the offensive. The catalyst was the closure of two leftist newspapers in Perak. The local military were so antagonized by hostile press reports of corruption and rape by troops that they argued it constituted a threat to the safety of its men, as defined in the proclamation of the BMA. On these grounds newspaper staff were arrested, tried in a military court and given sentences of up to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment; even the compositors were held guilty.

In the wake of this, on 21 October there were hunger marches in the main towns of Perak. One of the largest was in the small town of Sungei Siput, where a crowd of 5,000 assembled in the New World amusement park and marched to keep a midnight vigil outside the government offices. The British commanders, rough-handled by the crowd, feared for their own safety and ordered it to disperse within five minutes. The order was ignored and, for the first time in postwar Malaya,