by Boris Hembry
Humphrey Butler made a point of going around part of main division every Tuesday and Thursday. We would meet at the office at 6 am, walk around the division until nine, back to the bungalow for breakfast, meet again at 10 for another couple of hours of walking and inspecting until about 12.30. I would then usually go back to the manager’s bungalow for a beer and a chat with Humphrey and Sheila, before returning to my own. After tiffin and a lie off we would meet again at the office at about three for a couple of hours of paperwork. The junior assistants would be working on the check rolls and discussing their problems, and receiving advice and orders. As senior assistant it was also my job to see that forward contracts were ready on the due dates and despatched by lorry to Sungei Siput railway station. In essence the duties of a senior assistant on a large estate were similar to those of a regimental adjutant or the first officer on a ship. The captain’s right hand man. In fact, Humphrey, with his nautical background, came to refer to me as his ‘flag lieutenant’.
Humphrey Butler was a great character, a planter of the old school. A strict disciplinarian, he could relax completely off the estate. He was well into his mid-50s when we first met. After leaving Bedford School he had joined P&O as an apprentice and was proud of the fact that he had sailed around Cape Horn in a windjammer. Having attained the rank of fourth officer he had left the merchant navy to become a tea planter in Ceylon, but thinking that the newly developing rubber industry in Malaya offered better prospects, had joined the Dunlop Rubber Group in 1910. He became general manager in the early 1920s, then probably the most coveted appointment in the Malayan rubber industry. He could rightly claim to be one of its pioneers. He resigned on a matter of principle, but often said to me that on reflection he was sure that he had been over-hasty. He was quickly taken on by John Hay of Guthrie’s and, after a few years on an estate in Johore, was appointed to Kamuning in 1928.
Humphrey and Sheila were a formidable team. They also formed a comedy duet and performed in many amateur shows. He served on the Federal Legislative Council, and was formally to be addressed as ‘The Honourable Mister’. This certainly appealed to Sheila, who was a very dear friend but something of a snob, and never failed to remind one that Humphrey was first cousin to the Earl of Hereford, and that she had been educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Humphrey had been married twice before, but the third marriage, to Sheila, was long and happy. They had three boys, aged 37, 17 and 7 at the time of our first meeting, the youngest, Tony, by Sheila.
The great day arrived when I fetched Jean and John home from Penang. Jean had now completely recovered her health and was able to cope with both the new baby and with settling in to her new home. With our new car she was able to visit friends on neighbouring estates, and to go shopping in Ipoh, where nearly everything that could possibly be needed could be bought. There was an excellent branch of Singapore Cold Storage for food, including, for example, pheasant and partridge from China. Cookie went every morning to the market in Sungei Siput for fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs and chickens, and household stores. A far cry from Atjeh.
I forget who recommended them, but Jean had not been back for many days when we engaged Alagamah as ayah for John and her husband Soopan as cook, thus establishing a happy relationship that was to survive the war. Unlike most house servants, who were either Malay or Chinese, they were Indians, although Jean spoke to them in Malay. As with many young European children, because of his ayah’s influence, John was to become fluent in Malay almost before he was in English, even occasionally having to translate for Jean. Soopan was destined not to survive the Railway, but, as will be related, we were reunited with Alagamah after the War, and she stayed with us until we left Kamuning in 1951 when she returned to India.
In 1937 we felled and cleared 68 acres of jungle reserve to form the Sungei Buloh division, on the other side of the main north-south road and railway, and planted different clonal rubber plants in small blocks replicated eight times for experimental and comparison purposes. The plants were supplied by the Guthrie Central Experimental Estate at Chimera, where a lot of the research for the rubber industry was undertaken.
In the early years of the century, when most of Kamuning was under either pepper, coffee or jungle, illegal tin prospectors excavated many pits in search of the mineral. Some of this prospecting resulted in pits many feet deep, and while some had been filled in over the years, there remained many, covered by undergrowth, that had not been. These presented an ever-present danger to the unwary. Some such pits were discovered during the 1937 jungle clearing on Sungei Buloh. One day Donald Gray, who had stayed the previous night with us following a Negri Sembilan vs Perak rugger match, Humphrey and I were walking along a terrace when we suddenly came across one of these mining pits. When we looked down to the bottom, about 20 feet below us, we saw the floor to be a heaving mass of snakes, mostly kraits, probably the most venomous snakes in Malaya. Needless to say the pit was back filled that very day.
Another incident was even more alarming. Ford had left and Paddy Jackson was the Sungei Koh assistant. One morning a breathless coolie rushed into my office with a message that the Tuan Sungei Koh wanted a long rope most urgently. I asked why and was told that someone had fallen down a hitherto unknown mining hole. I sent the rope but to my astonishment the coolie returned an hour later with another message; the rope was not long enough. I found this difficult to believe, but sent out another one of similar length, with instructions that the two ropes should be knotted together. My curiosity aroused I accompanied the coolie back to the scene, to find Paddy and a gathering of distressed-looking Chinese coolies and Indian conductors. The pit was only about six feet across, but the depth must have been well over a hundred feet, as the two rope lengths only just touched the bottom. Quite how it was dug and the soil removed is a mystery. There was complete silence from the unfortunate man below. I considered that it was unfair to ask anyone else to volunteer to descend the depths and I had no intention to do so, so after a couple days vigilance with no sound from the bottom, we presumed that the coolie was dead. In all probability his death had been instantaneous.
A Coroner’s Inquest was required, but there was no body, so it was held at the scene of the accident – one’s nose provided all the necessary evidence that the man was dead. Immediately after the inquest Chinese death rites were performed and the hole filled in. This took over a week. The whole matter received some adverse comment from the Coroner and was extensively reported in the local press so a determined effort was made to find and backfill other pits.
The first five years of our married life were full ones. Quiet evenings alone together were welcomed for their rarity. Entertaining for the mem was simple, requiring only the planning of the menu and the seating of the guests. We held weekly bridge fours in each other’s bungalows, and played the new game Monopoly whenever possible. Whilst I played rugger I was in strict training, so mid-week drinking was usually restricted to ayer limos (lime and water). But, of course, the post-match parties on Saturday evenings, and the curry tiffins on the Sunday, more than made up for my mid-week abstinence.
My old friend from Johore, Forbes Wallace, had now been posted to Kuala Kangsar as OCPD, and he strengthened the state pack. Our centre was T. M. Hart, an Oxford double Blue (rugger and cricket) and Scottish International. Together with our wives we made a lively sextet. John’s christening was performed by Nigel Williams, who was also the state scrum half. I had first met him at rugger practice at Taiping and, packing in the back row, was on the receiving end of the scrum half’s shouts of ‘let it out, you buggers, let it out’. On enquiring who the scrum half was I was rather surprised to be told that it was the local padre.
On one of our earlier visits to the Ipoh Club we were joined by my old acquaintance from Johore, that giant of a man Professor Van Steyn Gallenfels. He was digging for Neolithic remains on Phin Soon Estate, near Sungei Siput, with Pat Noone, who was the Government ethnologist. I shouted ‘boy!’, ordered a beer for the professor, and was only a little s
urprised to see that it came in a chamber pot. He drank about half in one noisy gulp, and the rest in two. Remembering the story about the one hundred Bols gins, I ordered another ‘mug’ and beat a hasty retreat.
As Phin Soon was close to Kamuning, we visited the dig, and met Pat Noone for the first time. Pat was deeply interested in the aboriginals of Malaya, mainly the Semai and the Temiar tribes, who lived in the Perak jungle. Even 10 years later, during the Emergency, they still only very rarely ventured out of the deepest ulu. I was sitting in Pat’s bungalow in Taiping one early evening when to my surprise several Sakai (as the aboriginals were generally known throughout Malaya) filed on to the verandah, squatted on the floor and just stared at us without saying a word. Of course I stopped talking and waited for one of them to speak, but they did not. The silence was uncanny. Eventually Pat explained that I was a stranger, so they would not speak until I had left, which I did immediately.
Pat married Anjang, a Temiar girl, the daughter of one of the headmen, and we used to meet them on Pulau Pangkor, the beautiful island off the coast of Perak. She used to swim in the nude, although very discreetly. She certainly had the most beautiful figure I have ever seen. Pat evaded capture in the war and lived in the ulu for many months with the aboriginals, before being murdered by, it was rumoured, a member of Anjang’s family.
At that time Kamuning had three open cast tin mines, leased to a Chinese kongsi (company). Each month the recovered tin was weighed – another of the senior assistant’s jobs – so that the estate’s share could be calculated. The mines were overseen by a Sikh, Sohan Singh, a tall, fine man who was totally fluent in English, Malay, Tamil, several Chinese dialects and, of course, his own Punjabi, and was employed by Kamuning to look after its interests. Sadly, soon after the end of hostilities in 1945 the local Chinese resistance killed him on the suspicion, I am sure groundless, that he had been a collaborator with the Japanese. He was shot on the railway bridge leading to the Sungei Buloh division, and for a long time it was rumoured that Sohan Singh’s restless spirit was still abroad. Certainly Jean used on several occasions to have a feeling that she had company when she crossed the bridge on her early morning walks.
In addition, we employed Harry Hannay as our mining consultant. ‘Uncle’ Hannay was a tall handsome Scot who had gone out to Malaya soon after the Boer War, so that when we first met him in 1936 he must have been in his 60s. I know that when he saw us off at Penang on our way home to retirement in 1955 he was 83, still ramrod straight and agile, despite having been imprisoned by the Japanese in the Sime Road Gaol, in Singapore, for four and a half years. On his release he had gone straight back to re-open his mining consultancy in Ipoh. When we said our last farewells he had not been ‘home’ for 40 years. Malaya was his home.
Hannay was a great character. As a young man he had been what was then called an adventurer. He was one of only a very few men to hold the Polar Star. He had served in both the Boer Wars, and the Great War. Charles Martine was his nephew – hence the ‘Uncle’ – and it was generally considered within their family that he was the original for Richard Hannay of John Buchan’s novels. There were certainly coincidences. Uncle Hannay was a mining engineer, a Scot, had spent time in South Africa (where he had met Buchan), and had undertaken intelligence work for the Government – all of which also applied to Buchan’s fictional Hannay.
When we were living in Kedah in 1954, Uncle Hannay and another old friend of his from the pioneering days of the early 1900s, Pop Cunningham, who was about the same age, and had raised the Sarawak Rangers, stayed with us for a night. I was, of course, fascinated by their tales, and only wish that I had been able to record them. The following day, after Hannay had left to go north, Pop whispered to me, so that Jean would not hear, ‘If you ask me, Boris, I don’t think Uncle is in the least bit interested in his Perlis tin mines – I think he has girl problems.’All I could think of saying was: ‘Well, Pop, I hope I can be accused of having girl problems when I am 83.’
Jimmy Egan was another character. An Irishman, he was inclined to get rather pugnacious in his cups. He was responsible for the elephant patrol along the Lintang to Jalong road. Once a month he would mount an elephant and patrol the 20-foot-wide path cut between the jungle and the cultivated land to observe whether there were any traces of wild elephant having crossed the cleared strip. In which case Jimmy had to report the fact to the Perak state game warden, who would then track them down and try to turn them back into the jungle. I used to accompany Jimmy occasionally on these patrols and bivouacked for the night in the jungle – again, little realising that I would be doing the same thing, but in even less comfort, only five years later, behind enemy lines.
In 1938 I was selected with two other volunteers to represent the Perak Battalion in the Malayan Command Skill at Arms competition. I was never much use as a rifleman but did become more than competent with the Vickers machine gun, and although only a private I was appointed the company instructor. The gun had a crew of three: the Number One to aim and fire, the Number Two to feed in the ammunition belt, the Number Three as stand by. Each in turn served in the different positions. In the competition we had to fire at least 75 rounds in 30 seconds, 25 rounds a man. This had to be done four times and the results of the 300 rounds fired assessed. The four targets were about five yards apart, at a thousand yards. The beaten zone at this range was about five yards. All went well and the Perak Volunteers were as good as the regular army, until it came to the final shoot.
We wore the standard British Army issue ‘Bombay bloomers’, the wide-legged khaki shorts that came down to the regulation inch above the knee. The stockings came up to an inch below the knee. The Number One sat on the ground with his legs bent up astride the gun, so that he could aim by the sights on top of the barrel. Halfway through my final shoot I felt a searing pain at the top of my inner thigh. Letting out a yell I released the trigger and grabbed at the red-hot spent cartridge that had just been ejected from the machine gun and disappeared down my trouser leg. We were, of course, disqualified, but, in view of the fact that Jean had come within a cat’s whisker of having grounds for divorce, my teammates were sympathetic. However, the colonel was unamused and I was carpeted for having let down the battalion, and denied promotion to lance corporal, I thought unfairly.
Late in 1937 we started to make plans to fell and clear 1,200 acres of reserve jungle, and to terrace the hillsides, and construct the roads for the new Sungei Buloh division, which was to be planted up the following year. This was exciting work. Not many of my contemporaries would have had the good fortune to be involved in such a project. Few estates had jungle reserves and fewer still the necessary financial resources to be able to undertake such major expenditure, on which there would be no returns for at least seven years. Not only would there be the initial investment, but also the mounting annual expenditure of husbandry, weeding, road maintenance, etc to bring the trees to maturity.
In 1938 Jean became pregnant again and we looked forward to a sister for John. But it was not to be. Following a course of quinine injections for a bout of malaria, she was admitted to Batu Gajah Hospital where she miscarried. At that time there was no alternative to quinine for treating malaria.
It took Jean some time to get over this disappointment and to regain her health. She had now been out in Malaya for three years and, in addition to the malaria, which at any time can be extremely debilitating, and the miscarriage, she was finding the monotony of the constant heat and humidity getting her down. We arranged for her to go home for a spell of leave, so she and John sailed on a new East Asiatic Line ship, which took 31 days to get to Tilbury. We chose this Danish line as the fare was cheaper than on the usual P&O or Blue Funnel ships, and because each cabin had its own bathroom.
She was away for nearly six months and greatly benefited from the change of climate and for seeing her parents and family and friends. I was very glad to have her back in Malaya as it was obvious to all that we would soon be at war with Germany – in
spite of all the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ of Chamberlain to see Herr Hitler – and Malaya, or so we thought at the time, would be far safer.
During Jean’s absence I led the usual grass widower’s existence. I played cricket most weekends. I had also taken up golf fairly seriously, although I was never to reach the same level of excellence as my brother Bill. Local club cricket was of the same high standard to be found in most of the main towns in Malaya, with the usual sprinkling of Blues and Services caps. At Ipoh we also had the famous fast bowler Lal Singh, who had played for India in five test matches against England. I once had the privilege of opening the bowling for Perak with him.
Training for the Volunteers became much more serious in 1938. The parades became more frequent and could no longer be looked upon as a pleasant couple of hours prior to a session in the bar. Our annual camp at Port Dickson was now run by the regular army, which introduced a sense of realism. At least realism for a war in Europe. There was no question of jungle training. I was commissioned just before the annual camp, after which, as a brand new second lieutenant, my Volunteer duties increased to the extent that I was involved in training in one form or another on most Sundays: not even the prospect of war was permitted to interfere with an Englishman’s games-playing on Saturdays. I was given command of a rifle platoon, the platoon sergeant of which was a stalwart Malay called Eusuff, who also came from Sungei Siput, so I often used to give him a lift into Kuala Kangsar or Ipoh on drill days. The close relationship that I built up with this fine man was to stand me in very good stead some 10 years later, at the start of the Emergency. I attended many tactical exercises without troops (TEWTs) run by regular army officers, most of whom had only recently come out from England, or Egypt, or India. The problems set by these officers were still very definitely orientated to war in Europe, the desert, or the North West Frontier. I do not remember having even one discussion about jungle warfare; modern armies evidently would not be able to stray very far from the main roads. Even then I thought this a bold assumption.
