• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4377 0

first called upon the senior ruler, Sultan Ibrahim of Johore, who had reigned since 1895 in a proud and independent manner, retaining his own army, administrative service and many of his own European advisers. He was, according to Sir George Maxwell, the only sultan who really governed his state. Ibrahim had a reputation for sympathy for the Japanese before the war, receiving imperial honours for his protection of Japanese business interests in his state; he had hunted big game with princes of the Japanese royal family. A vigorous man who sired a child in his seventies, between 1898 and 1927 Ibrahim had no fewer than thirty-five tiger kills to his name. Willan travelled from Singapore over the short causeway to Ibrahim’s capital at Johore Bahru. But Willan had some difficulty in finding him; his sumptuous palaces seemed deserted. Eventually Willan ran to ground Ibrahim and his Romanian consort at one of his minor residencies. He found the sultan in emollient mood: the Japanese had ousted him from his principal palaces and he resented them bitterly for it. Allied intelligence appraisals accepted that his relations with the Japanese had been driven solely by a desire to protect the independence of his state, and that they had soured swiftly during the war. With rare humility, Ibrahim offered to serve under the BMA. The British placed tremendous weight on Ibrahim’s acquiescence in the new constitutional agreements, and there was much relief at his state of mind. The sultan asked for permission to fly the Union Flag on his car on his way to the surrender ceremony in Singapore, and for assistance in taking passage as quickly as possible to his other residence, at Grosvenor House on London’s Park Lane, where he had cut a colourful figure in happier times.112

The life of the Malay courts came to a standstill as they awaited the verdict of the British. To the surviving rulers of the pre-war period, Willan gave nominal recognition but to Japanese appointees he was, on occasion, unforgiving. In Selangor the Japanese had deposed the reigning sultan, Alam Shah, and installed his elder brother, Musa Uddin, a man who had been disinherited by the British in 1933 on the grounds of ‘personal misbehaviour’. Musa Uddin foresaw what was coming: in a speech on 10 September he warned that ‘the air has been thick with rumours’ about the future for him and his state.113 Three days later he was taken away by Indian Army officers and, with three servants and two suitcases, sent to his Elba, the Cocos and Keeling Islands, a remote Allied staging post in the southern Indian Ocean. The state regalia and Rolls-Royce were returned to Sultan Alam Shah. As news of these events circulated, some Malay courts acted to anticipate the British. In Trengganu, the legitimate sultan had died during the occupation and his eldest son, Raja Ali, had taken over. But before the war, it was said that Raja Ali had alienated both the British and local opinion through a misalliance with a woman of low reputation. During the war, he had entertained Japanese officers at his palace, and had shocked the local notables by asking them for ‘presents’ and by leasing out land for an amusement park where heavy gambling took place. Seeing their opportunity, the Trengganu State Council, using the authority of the state’s constitution, deposed Raja Ali. But many Malays would be increasingly uneasy that the adat, or customary law of succession, was not being followed.

These tensions came out into the open with the arrival in Malaya on 7 October of Sir Harold MacMichael, a former high commissioner of Palestine, as His Majesty’s special representative. He carried with him full powers to sign the treaties and to make or break kings by granting or withholding British recognition. His mission began, like Willan’s, in Johore and ran from 18 October to 21 December. It was conducted in a slow, stately fashion and, as MacMichael admitted, subject to careful ‘stage-management’. Accompanied by a small retinue, he again began with Sultan Ibrahim. Impatient to leave Malaya, it seems, Ibrahim handed