Singapore Grip - J. G. Farrell [35]
Walter halted in his pacing: again he was aware of a cold, cynical, even bitter expression on the icing-sugar features of his former partner, as if that fruit-cake brain were now thinking: ‘This would never have happened in my day!’ Well, that was true enough. Malaya’s gigantic labour force had been docile in the old man’s day when there were always ships to be seen anchoring in the roads crammed every available inch with wretched, fermenting, indentured coolies. In those days there was always cheap labour to be had. It had been the Depression which in the end, here as elsewhere, had brought about a change. Faced with great numbers of unemployed among the Chinese the Government had spent some millions of dollars in repatriating them to China: this display of munificence had been generated by the shrewd calculation that the cost of relief would be even greater if they remained in Malaya. But it had not done the employers any good.
In 1933 the Aliens Ordinance had dealt another blow to the business community for it gave the Governor the power to limit the number of aliens landed in the Colony. Although the intention had been more to check the arrival of Communist subversives from the mainland than to limit the size of the labour reservoir, this had proved, nevertheless, to be its effect. The cost of recruiting in China plus an increase in shipping fares had made it less expensive to recruit free workers locally than to ship those cargoes of indentured coolies. The Indian Government in the meantime, in the belief that Malayan businessmen were exploiting its subjects, had taken steps to limit the flow of Indian workers into the country.
The result? Strikes had begun to break out in Malaya and the Straits Settlements with increasing frequency. The supply of cheap labour had become finite. Many of the estate workers and squatters on pineapple plantations, hitherto isolated from their fellow-workers, had managed to acquire cheap Japanese bicycles: now meetings of widely dispersed workers could be held and collective resistance to low wages had become possible.
‘And we didn’t even have the wit to sell them the bloody bicycles!’ reflected Walter with a wry smile at Mr Webb’s effigy.
There had been another development, too. Chinese women, deprived of employment by the collapse of the silk industry in China and not subject to the limitation of the Aliens Ordinance, had begun to arrive by the shipload, whereas before the Depression, apart from women imported by brothel-keepers to stock their establishments, there had been few or none. The result was a sudden sinking of roots. Women had begun to take the cooking and buying of food out of the hands of the Chinese labour-contractors. The workers, who had once been easily abused nomads drifting from one estate or tin-mine to another, had started to settle down and demand the rights of citizens. Old Mr Webb’s almond-paste lips might well curl in contempt at the way his younger partner had allowed the initiative to pass to his employees but could he himself have done anything to prevent it?
One of the first strikes, though isolated, had been the most serious of all. In the winter of 1935 Communist miners had taken possession of a coal mine at Batu Arang and set up a soviet to administer it. A soviet in the middle of British Malaya, if you please! Walter had been staggered to hear of it. Of course, it had not lasted long. Even if the Batu Arang mine had not been crucial for electricity and the railway it could not have been allowed to remain as an example to the rest of Malaya’s labour force. The police had wasted no time in storming and recapturing it. But the miners’ rash action (how naïve they must have been to think that they would get away with it!) had been like a sudden gust of wind which fills the