by Boris Hembry
My time on Sungei Plentong was now getting short and I was counting the days to Barton’s return when I could go on my first home leave. Sandilands Buttery booked me on the Dutch liner Marnix van St Alldegonder, a far cry from the old Achilles, and I ticked off the days on my calendar.
During December I strove to harvest a record crop, and succeeded, a thoroughly tactless thing for an acting manager to do. Record crops were a manager’s privilege. In the event Barton was able to comment adversely about the condition in one of the tapping areas. I had been extremely worried about the amount of bracken which had been allowed to grow in this particular division. Bracken is a sign of acidity, and rubber trees do not like acid soils. I had called in Bill Ackhurst, an expert from the Rubber Research Institution, whose opinion was that the bracken should be slashed to ground level, which we did. However, this let in the other enemy of rubber trees – lalang. This is a twitch, similar to that which grows in England, but with roots that penetrate many feet down into the earth, with needle-sharp points that bore into the rubber tree roots. Bill Ackhurst should have known better, and I should not have been so keen to show my efficiency. However, everything else met with Barton’s approval, and I eventually received a £50 bonus from the London directors.
I had arranged with Bob Chrystal that he should join me for dinner at the Raffles, where I was staying the night before I sailed, and that we would have a night out on the tiles. The bedrooms, overlooking the famous lawn with its fan trees and canna beds, were off the wide verandah and were large, cool and airy. The bedroom was about 30 feet square, with a sitting area, a separate dressing room and a large bathroom, all marble floored, with punkah fans on the ceilings.
When at last the day of my departure arrived I drove to JB where I handed over my trusty Fiat to the somewhat reluctant Chinese merchant in lieu of the money I owed him, and hired a taxi to take me into Singapore. The initial thrill of the thought of leave had worn off. I now felt very tired. I had overworked my contract by over six months, and although comparatively fit because of the active open-air life I led, and the games-playing, the climate with its monotonously high humidity and heat, and, I suppose, the rubber plantation, obviously had a depressing effect on me. I badly needed a change of climate, scenery, and company. And to see Jean again.
So far I have hesitated to mention sexual matters. This because of both diffidence, and the firm belief that such matters should be of no concern except to the individuals concerned. However, having given my daughter-in-law Linda an undertaking that my memoirs would include ‘warts and all’ it is probably appropriate at this juncture to describe my experience to date.
In a word, nil. Because of my engagement to Jean I had been determined to impose discipline and celibacy, and, not without strain, I had succeeded. This was old-fashioned even for the 1930s, as well as appearing, no doubt, priggish. But there were very few single European women available and I remembered my father’s short lecture on the dangers of promiscuity, and I think this fear was never far from my mind whenever the temptation became strong or the opportunity arose. Remember, penicillin and other modern drugs were not available at the time, although, I think, M&B was, just. (May & Baker sulphonamide tablets, used to treat gonorrhea.)
It is a popular misconception in Europe that Asian women are more promiscuous than European women. After more than 25 years in the East I can say, without hesitation or fear of contradiction, that the very opposite is true. Asian women have a far higher standard of sexual morality and marital loyalty than their Occidental counterparts.
When I was in Kedah I had met Sir John Campbell, first cousin to the Duke of Argyll. Sir John, by then well into his 60s, was a great character, lived in Perlis and owned a tin mine. Whenever he drove down to Penang he invariably stopped off at the Sungei Patani Club for a sharpener or three. He had formed his own company of yeomanry during the Boer War, and because of my father’s service in the Imperial Yeomanry in South Africa at that time I was very interested in his reminiscences, and usually joined him. He looked very like C. Aubrey Smith, the Hollywood film star and one-time England cricket captain.
Sir John was living with a well-known Chinese lady, Juliette Loke Yew, whilst Lady Campbell lived with an Australian ex-jockey, Dick Campbell, in Penang. A real Somerset Maugham set up. Sir John and Lady Campbell had three daughters, the eldest married to a doctor in Singapore, the second to a schoolmaster, and the youngest, Marjorie, still living with her mother. During my last days in Kedah, before moving down to Johore, I took Marjorie out to dinner several times, and I enjoyed her friendship and sense of fun. I was also aware that Lady Campbell sometimes looked at me with a rather calculating eye, but whether in fear that we might become attached or hope that we would do so, I do not know. Jean and I used to meet Marjorie occasionally in Penang over the years.
Juliette Loke Yew was the sister of a Chinese millionaire, of which there were many even in the 30s, who intensely disliked the idea of his sister demeaning the family by living with a European, so, the story goes, gave her £10,000 to leave Sir John, which she did – but immediately went to live with another Scotsman, a planter named Carmichael, in Sitiawan.
The Raffles holds many memories for me over the years. Towards the end of 1934 I had been on a shopping expedition to Singapore with a friend, I think for presents to take home on leave, and we had gone to the Raffles for tea and to watch the dancers at the usual thé dansant. We recognised the Rajah Brooke of Sarawak, the Ranee, and their three daughters sitting at a nearby table. No one seemed anxious to ask the princesses to dance, so I went over, bowed to the Rajah and Ranee, and asked if they would permit me the pleasure of dancing with their daughters. The Rajah nodded, and I spent the rest of the time dancing with all three. They were very attractive girls. One married Lord Inchcape, the middle one married Harry Roy, the dance band leader, whilst the youngest married an all-in wrestler. Years later the Rajah’s nephew and heir, who was in military intelligence, stayed with me in my flat in Calcutta.
Bob Chrystal turned up and we immediately ordered several large stengahs, to get the evening off to a good start. We were chatting, deciding how we were to spend my last evening in Singapore, when we were approached by an elderly lady and a young man who asked if they could join us. About two weeks earlier I had been introduced to the couple, Lady Tichborne and her son Greville, who were travelling around the Far East, basing themselves in Singapore. The ‘Tichborne Case’ was a cause célèbre at the end of the previous century – I think involving a long lost cousin from Australia laying claim to the title.
The Tichbornes invited us to join them for dinner, which of course we did, and afterwards they asked if we would take them to the New World, an entertainment park full of dance halls, Chinese theatres, Malay wayang, shooting galleries, souvenir stalls, restaurants, satay stalls, pimps, prostitutes and perverts, ice cream stalls, anything and everything one could think of. And more besides. We walked around for some time before settling down in a dance hall to watch the taxi girls and their customers who were mostly British serviceman. The New World was almost the only place that other ranks (ORs), as non-officers were known in those days, could go for any entertainment. Officers would have the entrée into all the hotels, swimming clubs, restaurants and private houses, whilst ORs did not. A thoroughly bad system which was not to change until well after the Second World War.
We stayed at the New World until it closed in the early hours when Lady Tichborne said that she would like to go to a nightclub. I only knew of one, a sleazy dive run by a Tamil prostitute, where the Johore rugger team sometimes ended up after a match. I remember that the madame had a bottom waggle that was every bit as pronounced as Marilyn Monroe’s some 25 years later. We stayed there, drinking and dancing until after 4 am, when we left to take the Tichbornes back to their hotel. Bob, who was staying at the Europe, then suggested that we had a nightcap there. It was after dawn that I finally went back to the Raffles by rickshaw. Rickshaws could be hired at any time of the day
or night, the runners sleeping in them, springing instantly awake as soon as a potential customer came by.
As the boy was due to bring me tea and papaya at seven there was no point in going to bed, so I merely bathed and changed and did what little packing there was before having my breakfast and taking a taxi to the docks where the Marnix was alongside. I thus paid dearly for the privilege of staying at the Raffles on this occasion
Bob had promised to come aboard to see me off, but I was not a bit surprised that he failed to put in an appearance.
I find it difficult to adequately describe the unique feeling experienced by most people at the moment of departure for home leave, on a luxury liner, after long and arduous years spent many thousands of miles from home and family. In those days a contract for junior staff was for five years, and for senior three.
We sailed at noon. Most passengers stayed on deck, waving to the friends who had come to wish them Godspeed until they became a blur on the quayside, before drifting away to the bars or to their cabins to supervise the cabin stewards unpack. My cabin companion was an elderly sea captain going home on retirement from a lifetime spent in Far Eastern waters. He had first come out in a tea clipper in the 1880s, and was a fund of Conradesque reminiscences. My table companions were the Captain, a rather dull Dutch couple and two young French girls who were to disembark at Colombo. Conversation was rather stilted as the couple, most unusually for Dutch, spoke but little English, and the French girls none at all.
The first port of call was Belawan Deli, where I had disembarked almost exactly four years before. Seeing the dreary low-lying coastline again made me very thankful that I would still be on board when the ship sailed in a couple of hours. On leaving Belawan Deli I felt that the journey home had really begun. The passage to Columbo was quiet, calm and uneventful, and was always considered the ‘settling down’ part of the trip. Passengers sort themselves out, join the various on-board activities, and form friendships.
The Captain and I went ashore at Colombo to have lunch at the Galle Face Hotel, another famous hotel in the Raffles mould, which I was to get to know very well in the war years. Thereafter we called in at Port Said (the Marnix was oil-burning, so no Tamil coolies), Algiers, Genoa, and eventually Southampton. I had been away from England for more than five years.
Marriage & Managership (July 1935 – May 1936)
No words I have can adequately describe my pleasure at being at home. So many friends and relations to see. So much to tell and to hear about. And, above all, the joy at seeing and being with Jean again, and at learning about the preparations in hand for our wedding.
The first impression on arriving home was the smallness of all the houses compared to those I had been used to in Malaya. Even the quite large houses, by English standards, of my parents and friends, appeared tiny, and, above all, airless.
We celebrated my sister Molly’s 21st birthday at the old Holborn Restaurant, in London. It was good to be with my brothers Gordon and Bill and to learn about all they had done, at first hand, during my absence. Bill had joined Alfa Laval as a sales agent for their milking machines, covering Yorkshire and Lancashire, a position that he was to hold for the rest of his working life. He was by now a scratch golfer and playing regularly for the Yorkshire county team. Gordon had spent some time in Canada, where he had led a communist-inspired demonstration in Vancouver – not, I am sure, because of any political sympathy with the cause, but merely the love of a scrap, especially with the authorities. My father was managing director of Alfa Laval, and about to move to Walton-on-Thames, where he was building a house, to be nearer to the new factory and company headquarters he was developing at Brentford.
Jean’s father, Bruce Cuthbertson, was London manager of the tube manufacturer Accles & Pollock, and was to make a name for himself as instigator of the company’s sales slogan ‘Give us a tube and we’ll put another inside it’. An American company sent them a tube the size of a human hair. Accles & Pollock duly obliged. In the war to come he became the director in contact with the Ministry of Supply, and was responsible for the contracts for, amongst other things, millions of Sten gun barrels and many more millions of lengths of tubing for wireless aerials. From the latter he went on after the war to develop the world’s first all-metal fishing rods.
Jean and I went to Twickenham and saw England play Ireland, and later in the summer, after our marriage, we were frequent visitors to Lords, where I was able to watch Wally Hammond bat again. I presume that this was Gloucestershire against Middlesex, as I did not see the Test match against the South Africans, which they won, in spite of a very strong England team.
We were married quietly in Upminster church, with just the immediate family and very few friends present, and left immediately on our honeymoon. This cost only slightly more than £50 for the fortnight, during which we toured England and Wales.
The time went all too quickly, and before long it was time to say our goodbyes. I had called in at the London office to see Halliday, the company secretary, and he told me that Tuke, whose leave had coincided with mine, had complained that my name had appeared in The Straits Times as having played cricket not only on a Saturday, but on the Sunday too, and what had I to say about it? I merely replied that it was a two-day State match, Penang against Perak, and that I thought it very poor form, but well in keeping with his character, for Tuke to have waited more than 12 months to complain to the secretaries personally, rather than to have confronted me with my heinous offence at the time. For a relatively junior planter to criticise a senior manager in this way was almost unheard of, but it was a sign of the confidence that I now possessed. I thought that poor old Halliday would have apoplexy. However, he told me that the directors had decided to offer me the managership of Waterloo Estate, Padang Rengas, in Perak – a small estate some six miles north of Kuala Kangsar.
This was very good news as, apart from a step up the ladder in my chosen profession, Kuala Kangsar was an attractive little town, with a club, a nine-hole golf course, and shops. It was also the capital of the state of Perak, the centre of government, and where the Sultan had his Istana (palace) and royal mosque.
At the beginning of July 1935 Jean and I waved our farewells to our families and friends at Southampton, little realising, in spite of the fact that it was obvious that the war clouds were gathering, that it would be nine years before I was to return to England. In Germany, Herr Hitler had attained power, it is sometimes forgotten by democratic means, and it was reported that Krupps had launched a vast expansion in their armaments production. Mussolini was preparing to invade Abyssinia, and Japan, which had already occupied Manchuria, was shortly to attack China.
We sailed on the brand new German liner Potsdam, the more knowledgeable amongst the passengers recognising that the ship had obviously been designed as an armed merchantman. The Potsdam was captured by the British during the War, and renamed the Empire Fowey and served as a troopship for many years. When we passed through the Suez Canal we saw several Italian troopships. The troops jeered at British ships and cheered the German ones, of which there were many (presumably involved in stockpiling war materials).
The journey down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean was uneventful, except for the odd tropical storm, but was obviously a great new experience for Jean. She became an expert exponent of liar dice and ship’s champion at deck quoits. She was an excellent sailor, and we were to enjoy many happy sea trips together over the next 40-odd years, always preferring to take a ship rather than a plane.
On disembarkation at Penang, and after reporting to McAuliffe, Davis & Hope, I went to Borneo Motors and bought a brand new Morris Ten saloon, a first-class little car, into which we loaded our barang (luggage) and drove off to our first married home.
Waterloo was a small estate, very hilly, and fairly isolated (but not in comparison with Gajah Muntah). The rubber was in first-class condition, although the factory and machinery were antiquated – as one would expect with a Ridsdell estate.
We soon settled in to our new home, and Jean quickly made the bungalow attractive with curtains and cushions. We bought our own drawing room and dining room furniture, in place of the rather plain, poor quality chairs and tables supplied by the company. The wireless set given to us by Jean’s father gave adequate reception to both the Singapore and Empire Service stations. And, of course, we had my wind-up gramophone. After a little while the packing cases containing all our wedding presents arrived and we had great pleasure in unpacking everything, and seeing, for the first time, the complete set of Harbridge cut glass most generously given to us by a cousin. Only one sherry glass was to survive the war, which I found in a local dispensary in early 1946 being used for urine testing.
I gained my place in the Perak state rugger team, and scarcely missed an interstate match in three years. I transferred to the Perak battalion of the Federated Malay States Volunteer Force (FMSVF) and trained as a Vickers machine gunner. We paraded on the padang at Taiping, usually under the command of Lt Frank Vanrenen, a proprietary planter (that is he owned and managed his own estate) on the Chenderoh Road, down which the Japanese would make one of their lightning flanking movements in 1941.
Waterloo did not extend me. It was under a thousand acres, all mature rubber, with no jungle reserve into which to expand. Ted Wilkie, the general manager, who made periodical visits, told me bluntly that I should look around for another, better job in one of the bigger companies, and that he would keep his ears open. The effects of the Depression were wearing off, the demand for rubber was growing, mainly because of re-armament, so the price of rubber was rising quite quickly, but working for a somewhat moribund company, with little or no assets set aside for development, offered no challenge for an ambitious young man.
