history 22-2.htm

The Return

Despite the great loss of ‘face' after their headlong retreat down the Peninsula and their humiliating surrender to the Japanese in Singapore in 1942, the British returned in 1945 unabashed. For the colonials nothing had changed; the masters were back and the sooner the natives remembered that the better

We are told by Lee Cheng Fai, in his book Force 136, that even while in India the Chinese operators, who were to be their comrades and collaborators in the dangerous mission being planned - to land by submarine, found the manner of the old colonial hands rude and offensive.

We saw a display of the typical colonial arrogance when the leaders of the Malayan Democratic Union, a political party formed of the English educated to demand Commonwealth status for Malaya was summoned by the British Military Administration. We had issued a statement on police brutality in breaking up a demonstration on the Singapore Padang. Philip Hoalim Sr, John Eber and I (the delegates) were received by Col. Broom in his vast office where he stood silhouetted by the tall windows of the City Hall. We saw only his profile as he stared at the wall and admonished us with "Brigadier McKerron is displeased" before ushering us into the presence of the officer administering the government, now dressed in the resplendent uniform of a Brigadier. After a brief lecture on how wicked it was to defame the police he dismissed us. We were not even offered the courtesy of chairs and were made to stand like naughty schoolboys facing the wrath of the headmaster. When one remembers that Philip Hoalim Sr was a leading lawyer and John Eber a member of the so-called local aristocracy - his mother was English and she was a pal of the chief justice and his wife, the impact of the insult can be imagined.

Another incident showed that we had not gone very far forward from 1930. The British had offered to appoint me a member of the Singapore advisory council. I rejected the offer and asked that the MDU should do the nomination. They would not hear of it. That way back in the 20s the Straits Chinese British Association, Penang, was permitted to select its representative to sit on the Municipal Commission was but a forgotten memory.

We were soon to learn that the British had their own agenda. The People's Constitution adopted by the powerful AMCJA-PUTERA coalition was rejected out of hand. (Michael Stenson in his Occasional Paper on The Communist Revolt in Malaya describes the British response as "intransigent, even aggressive"). Yet this was the document that the British owned Straits Times described as "the first attempt to put Malayan party politics on the plane higher than that of rival racial interests and the first attempt to build a political bridge between the domiciled non-Malay communities and the Malay race" (September 23, 1947). No discussion of Malaya's future was tolerated until approved locals could be found to "negotiate" with.