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that most of the European officers of Force 136 had reappeared in police uniforms; they had, he believed, been planted deliberately to make use of their knowledge in peacetime. Ho retired from politics, deeply disillusioned. He believed that most of his comrades, even the most fanatical communists, now wanted above all to get a job, take a wife and raise a family. Ho had lost some of the best years of his life. For him, the demob parade ‘represented the culmination of over three years of wasted struggle, the risks we had taken and the suffering we had undergone.’106 The MPAJA, Purcell believed, ‘had been treated like interlopers… without regard to their rights or dignity’. The British deliberately played down the communists’ role in the jungle war. Purcell had argued unsuccessfully for a bigger bounty for them; if it would have prevented what was to follow, he later observed, it would have been ‘cheap at the price’.107

‘MALAYA FOR THE MALAYS, NOT THE MALAYANS’

As wartime alliances disintegrated in Malaya, on 10 October the Labour colonial secretary, George Hall, rose to his feet in the House of Commons to announce the grand plan for a Malayan Union. Mountbatten had urged the government to release its plans long before this, to give an unequivocal signal that the British intended to reward the Malayan Chinese for their loyalty. But by the time Hall’s statement came, if the British still expected plaudits from the Chinese they were bound to be disappointed. Reaction was at best lukewarm or indifferent, at worst hostile. The news that Singapore was excluded from the Union astonished most non-Malay observers: it was Malaya’s natural capital, and the heartland of ‘Malayan’ sentiment. But the British were anxious not to jeopardize Malay opinion too far, and wanted to keep a tight grip on their ‘fortress’. Singapore’s precise constitutional status was entirely undecided. In the longer term, this separation was to be the most enduring legacy of the grand design.108 Suspicion mounted when it became known that the next step towards the implementation of the Malayan Union would be consultations in private with the Malay rulers. Homer Cheng, a Chinese civil servant working under Victor Purcell, summarized the problem: the local-born Chinese, he wrote, ‘claim to have as much right as the Malays to be regarded as the sons of the soil. They contend that the Malays are technically and anthropologically as much immigrants and intruders as the Chinese.’ The indigenous people of Malaya were the aboriginal Orang Asli. The Malays had forfeited their claim to preference in the war. ‘Malayan nationality was an insult’, Cheng concluded. ‘Few would feel proud of being the subjects of Sultans.’109 The terms of the debate had moved on a long way from the question of citizenship. ‘The Union will go through without opposition or enthusiasm from the Left,’ Victor Purcell wrote. ‘Their interest is solely one of representation.’110

The Malay rulers were approached first in order to sign new treaties that gave the British crown the necessary legal jurisdiction in their states to establish the Malayan Union. In one of the first acts of the BMA, a former Malayan Civil Service legal officer, H. C. Willan, was to instruct field security officers to investigate the record of individual rulers during the Japanese occupation, and label them as ‘white’, ‘grey’ or ‘black’. Only five of the pre-war sultans remained in office, four others who had acceded during the Japanese occupation had yet to be recognized by the British government. The Malay courts well remembered the deposition by the British of the Sultan of Perak in 1874, an act that precipitated the first conquest of the Malay states. Mountbatten had all along worried about the propriety of this. It would, he warned, be ‘psychologically questionable’ to secure the rulers’ agreement under the shadow of ‘overwhelming force’.111 But, once again, the nature and extent of the local reaction took the British entirely by surprise.

Willan broke the news to the rulers like a bank manager refusing credit. He