Malayan Spymaster

by Boris Hembry

  The main estate work consisted of obtaining supplies of rice and other necessities, and setting gangs to work to clear four years’ growth of weeds. I got local Chinese tinsmiths to make tapping knives, and potters to produce cups for collecting the latex, and it was with great satisfaction that we started tapping on Port Dickson Lukut Estate in February 1946, the first estate in the Guthrie Group, if not in the whole of Malaya, to go into commercial production.

  By February the bureaucrats had begun to return in large numbers to fill the civil service posts. One of their first acts made me extremely angry. They called in all the cars that we early birds had commandeered from the Japs. It did not matter whether the vehicles happened to be essential to the owner’s occupation, or that that occupation was to do with the economic recovery of the country. I appealed to the highest authority in the BMA, but to no avail. I was told that if I did not hand in my car I would be arrested and held in custody, as martial law was still officially in being! I must admit I was sorely tempted to call their bluff, especially as I knew that the man I was dealing with had spent his entire war in the Navy, stationed in New Delhi, hundreds of miles from the nearest sea! My car was confiscated, no doubt to be driven by some junior civil servant seconded from the Colonial Office. I could never understand why Guthrie’s did not put up more of a fight against this iniquitous ruling. I was required to drive my Studebaker into Seremban to hand it over; the civil servants were not even prepared to come out to collect it; I suppose it would have meant missing a few stengahs at the Sungei Ujong Club. I bought a clapped-out Austin Seven from a Chinese towkay, the only car I could find. On the way back to Port Dickson the rear end suddenly collapsed; the offside wheel had come off. Luckily I was near a Malay kampong and some of the menfolk lifted up the car while I refitted the wheel. I could not find the wheel nuts so removed one nut from each of the other three wheels, and drove the rest of the way at 20 mph. The estate engineer managed to keep the little car going until the following month when I went down to Singapore to pick up a brand new lorry for the estate, one of a batch recently shipped out from England.

  It was good to see Singapore getting back to normal. I was delighted to see my old friend Dan Wright in the Guthrie Singapore office, and very pleased to learn that he had been appointed as one of the three visiting agents. Outwardly he had survived his three years as a POW on the Railway remarkably well, but it was not something that he ever cared to discuss, even with his oldest friends. He had got off the ship from England that very morning. I delayed my return to Port Dickson so that we could enjoy quite a few stengahs together before he caught the night mail train to KL.

  My time in Port Dickson was getting short. Planters, old and new, were beginning to arrive in large numbers and I was able to hand over the estates one by one. I was anxious to get to Kamuning where I had officially been appointed manager. I knew from my brief inspection that it was in a far worse state than any of the Negri estates, and news I had received in letters from old members of staff who knew that I was returning to Sungei Siput was disquieting, especially about the temporary manager.

  So, early in March 1946,I sat down behind the steering wheel of another new lorry that I had collected from the docks in Singapore the previous week, and set off for Kamuning Estate. Four years and three months earlier I had driven a lorry in the opposite direction. After a break in KL to talk to Peter Taylor I drove northwards to Tanjong Malim. Royal Engineers had put up a Bailey bridge to replace that which their predecessors had blown up in January 1942.I passed the police station where Frank, Ronald and I had spent that last night before taking to the jungle, and stayed overnight with Harry Hays on the SOCFIN estate Lima Blas, talking well into the night, in spite of the early start that I had planned for the next morning.

  On my way again I rounded the bend north of Tanjong Malim where I had seen the Bofors gun, and passed the track which had led to the Chinese kongsi where all our stores had been stolen. I was to pass this way many times again and always had the desire to drive down the track to see whether our abandoned car and lorry were still there. But I never did.

  I lunched in the Ipoh Club but saw no one I recognised, and arrived at Kamuning in the middle of the afternoon. I stopped off at the office where all the old office staff and a number of the labour force were waiting to greet me. Although I had made a very brief visit back in October, this time I was expected, and it was a tearful reunion all round. We all realised that I had come home. The temporary manager (TM) from the BMA stayed in his office. I took an instant dislike to him.

  After the welcome, with speeches in English, Malay and Tamil, I took my leave and drove the short distance to my old assistant’s bungalow, as I had seen on my previous visit that the manager’s was uninhabitable. I had not been there for five minutes when I heard the patter of feet on the stairs and Alagamah, John’s ayah, burst in and flung herself into my arms, weeping. We both wept, she with joy and I with both joy and dismay at her wasted appearance and lack of clothing. Her sari was an old mosquito net. After a few minutes exchanging news of her husband and Jean and John, I gave her $20 to go straight down to the village to buy at least one outfit of clothes. I told her that she was once again my cook/ayah and that she must sleep at the bungalow until I had ascertained the current servant arrangements. We were both happy to be together again, and I knew Jean would be equally happy to hear of Alagamah’s return.

  Having driven the best part of 200 miles by lorry, followed by an emotional reunion, I decided to call it a day. My bed had been made up in the same room occupied by the TM, so I unpacked the few things I had brought with me and had forty winks before showering and changing for supper. At supper the TM told me, rather diffidently, that he had adopted a Malay boy and would I mind if he shared our bedroom. I told him in no uncertain terms that I minded very much, and that if he wanted to share his bed with his boyfriend he should move out and live with him in his kampong.

  The following morning I made my first sortie around the estate. My first impression left me intensely disappointed. I had expected to see it unhusbanded, but not to be in quite the derelict state it was. Two or three hundred acres around the central labour quarters, factory and bungalows had been felled for firewood. Only the main estate road to the Banda Bahru division was easily passable. The whole estate was under thick secondary jungle. But the rubber trees themselves, the revenue-producing capital asset of the estate, appeared in good condition. The TM had been on the property for nearly four months and it was impossible to see what he had accomplished during that time. When I returned to the office I made my thoughts abundantly clear. I spent that first afternoon in the office going through the accounts and was astonished to see that over $50,000 had allegedly been spent on clearing undergrowth and reinstating the roads. It was apparent that a monumental fiddle had been perpetrated.

  I told the TM to remove himself forthwith from the manager’s desk which I then promptly occupied, and told him that I expected him to leave the estate first thing the following morning, taking his ‘adopted son’ with him. He said that Mr Taylor would hear about this, to which I replied that he most certainly would and picked up the phone there and then and, in front of the TM, told Peter exactly what I had found, and that I was putting the matter in the hands of the police as a very obvious fraud had been perpetrated. Peter calmed me down and said, ‘Let’s have no recriminations,’ which I found surprising at the time, but not so when later I learned that he had appointed several similar misfits and charlatans to other estates.

  I was glad to find that practically all the old staff were available, including the Tamil headmen. I recognised so many of the old familiar faces and the genuineness of their welcome was most touching. I was back amongst friends. The old Chinese contractors appeared and we soon got down to agreeing contracts for clearing the undergrowth and eradicating the lalang from the areas that had been felled. Lalang did not normally thrive under the shade of mature rubber trees but ran amok when they were felled. It was eradi
cated either by forking or poisoning with sodium arsenite. We used to carry stocks of this sufficient to poison the entire population of Malaya.

  I was anxious to see the 1938 clearings which I had planted up under Humphrey Butler. From the roads I could see fine thick foliage, allaying my fears that the trees had suffered to any great extent, but I took the very first opportunity to visit the clearings, with the very same Main division conductor who had supervised the planting out eight years previously. The undergrowth was out of control but, as I had thought, the rubber trees were in good order. We were walking along a path under electricity power lines when I saw a loose wire draped across the path. I grabbed it to clear it away and turned to the conductor to ask what he thought it was doing there. ‘Tuan, drop it!’ he shouted. I did. ‘Tuan, you will live for a thousand years.’ He told me that only the previous week a young Gurkha officer, Lt Murray-Duncan, had seen a similar wire across his path, and had been instantly electrocuted when he had touched it. I felt sick and had to sit down. The conductor explained: with the reversion to secondary jungle, wild pig had come into the estate and the Chinese killed them for their meat by slinging a wire over the overhead high-tension cables, leaving one end trailing on the ground across a path that was being used by the pigs. With luck, two or three pigs would brush against the wire each night and be killed. Instant roast pork.

  When I got back to my office I telephoned Perak Hydro Electric and was told that the current had been switched off for line repairs at 8 am – 15 minutes before I had grabbed the wire. The engineer was most apologetic and hoped that I had not been too greatly inconvenienced. I assured him that I had not been. Murray-Duncan’s company of Gurkhas was camped in the grounds of the estate hospital and I reported the matter to their OC. He was furious because, following the death of one of his officers, he had expressly forbidden the local Chinese to use this method of trapping pigs. A few of his younger officers hatched a plan in my bungalow to take out some riflemen, lie in wait for the Chinese responsible, and to drive them on to the live wire. I was still very angry about my own experience and agreed to accompany them. But the OC got to hear about their intentions and, quite rightly, forbade it. However, I called in all the Chinese contractors and told them to pass the word around that this practice was to cease forthwith and that, because I was not subject to army discipline, I would most certainly put the subalterns’ plan into effect if ever it happened again.

  I had not been back on the estate for more than a couple of weeks when one middle of the night I heard footsteps mounting the steps to the verandah. I switched on the light and waited. I was not unduly worried as, whoever it was, they were making no attempt to be quiet. My bedroom door was flung open and there was Reid Tweedie. He had travelled up from Singapore on the night train, got off at Sungei Siput and walked up from the station. This was a wonderful surprise, and immediately called for a few celebratory stengahs, no matter the hour. We made up a bed in the spare room, and he lived with me until shortly before Jean’s return. I was very pleased to have Reid’s company and we had lots to catch up on. Furthermore, he was the first ex-POW that I had had the opportunity to talk to at length about life in a Jap prison. Actually, being a civilian, Reid had spent most of the War in the Sime Road internment camp in Singapore before being transferred to Changi, and to some degree had escaped the terrible hardships and atrocities suffered by servicemen. Of course his professional skills had been much in demand, and he had many stories to tell of bribing guards to bring him drugs and medicines, and of witnessing savage beatings and other atrocious behaviour on prisoners by the Japanese guards. Reid’s only possessions were the Persian rug mentioned before, which he carried rolled up under his arm, and a doctor’s bag with his instruments.

  As the weeks went by the estate gradually took on a more cared-for appearance, and more and more trees came under the knife. The undergrowth was being controlled, the roads cleared and the factory machinery and equipment overhauled and repaired. Charles Ross and my other European assistants, having recuperated in Britain, were returning, and Uncle Hannay was getting the tin mines back into operation. At the same time my building contractor, Yap Tong, was repairing the senior assistant’s bungalow, where I was living, and making it suitable for the manager of one of the major Guthrie estates. We used as much material from the demolished manager’s bungalow as we could reclaim, especially the marble paving and the beautiful hardwood floor from the verandah.

  Inevitably there was much lawlessness about. Savage Japanese reprisals were a thing of the past, so gangs of murderous thugs had been able to roam the towns and kampongs doing as they wished, getting away, quite literally, with murder. The three weeks between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of British troops at the beginning of September 1945 saw a spate of crimes committed against person and property. Personal scores were settled. Anyone under the slightest suspicion of having assisted the Jap was murdered. There was wholesale looting of factories, godowns and houses. With the arrival of the British Army and the Colonial Police the crimes decreased dramatically, but Malaya was never really the same again. Nearly four years of merciless Japanese military rule had almost completely destroyed the peace-loving, kindly and honest Asian way of life. But not quite. The elderly Malay, Indian and Chinese soon returned to their well-mannered, easy-going ways, but the youngsters, brought up in the inhuman days of the occupation, when it was every man for himself, could not readily adapt to a more civilised new way of life.

  I was in my office one afternoon when an Indian, scarcely out of his teens, walked in unannounced, sat himself down uninvited, and introduced himself as the secretary of the local branch of the Tamil Estate Workers Union. I recognised him as the office peon (postman). I told him to get the hell out of there, and to make an appointment to see me through the chief clerk. He started to argue, but beat a hurried retreat when I rose from my chair with a threatening look. I allowed him in again about an hour later as I was curious to learn what it was all about, for this was the first I had heard of an estates trades union.

  He opened the discussion with the words ‘ Jai Hind’ – Freedom for India. I told him that if he had come here to spout political slogans he had better bugger off, and that, so far as I was concerned, he was the office peon. Having cleared the air I was ready to hear what he had to say. He recited a whole lot of trades union claptrap of the sort brought to Malaya by John Brazier, a trade unionist sent out within a month or so of the surrender by the new Labour government in Britain, to organise union representation. When he realised that he could not bamboozle me we got on well enough, especially as he had been unable to recruit many members. Most of the estate labour seemed only too pleased to be earning a good living again, and to be free from the fear of summary execution or deportation to the Siam Railway for some minor infringement of Japanese martial law.

  Many old friends were returning to Ipoh and district, having recovered from the privations of imprisonment or internment. European women were appearing as well, and my thoughts were constantly of Jean’s return. This was governed by John’s school holidays – he had been at Milner Court, the prep school for King’s Canterbury, since May – the availability of a sea passage, and the completion of the renovations to the bungalow.

  In the early days I had to use the estate lorry to get into Ipoh or Kuala Kangsar and I had no compunction in using it in the evenings. Reid Tweedie and I sat in front with the driver, and quite often we carried staff and estate workers in the back, acting as a private bus service. The put-down and pick-up point was Ipoh railway station. In June I went down to Singapore to collect my new car, a Morris Ten saloon, which was to do excellent service until it was written off, bullet-ridden, following an ambush by terrorists on Kamuning in which Paddy Jones, my assistant, was severely wounded and his Special Constable guard was killed, in April 1950.

  The bungalow was fit to receive the mem besar at the end of July, and Jean was expected at the end of August, and I anticipated the actual date with rising e
xcitement. We had enjoyed less than four months together since December 1941. For the first time in her motherhood Jean was to be separated from her only child, and I know that they both felt the parting deeply. In July Jean was advised by Guthrie’s London office that they had secured a passage for her on the Dutch liner Oranje, sailing at the end of the month and due in Singapore three and a half weeks later. The Oranje was a luxury liner, built just before the war, but still converted into a hospital ship and used for ferrying back to the Far East as many Dutch and English passengers at a time as possible, so it was chronically overcrowded. Jean shared a cabin with four other women and two small children.

  Eventually the great day arrived. I had set off for Singapore a couple of days beforehand in my Morris, accompanied by my syce Yussof, staying en route in KL. I had to go to the Guthrie office in Singapore first thing to arrange to collect a car for someone else in Ipoh – hence Yussof – to provide the additional space for all the extra luggage that Jean would be bringing, containing replacements for many of the essentials that we had lost in 1941. The office paperwork delayed me and I was a little late in getting to the ship. Jean was naturally rather upset at my apparent lack of enthusiasm for her homecoming.

  As soon as the cars were loaded we set off to drive to Tanjong Malim where we stayed the night with Harry Hays and I was able to introduce Jean to my number two for so long in ISLD. Harry was a great curry eater and had laid on an extra hot one for dinner, which appealed to neither of us. Worse still, we had the leftovers for breakfast the following morning, straight from the refrigerator.

  We lunched in Ipoh, where Jean did some shopping, and arrived back on Kamuning in time for tea. Jean received the expected emotional greeting from Ayah. I have mentioned her reaction to the Chinese carpet I proudly showed her. It had, of course, been looted from some other European’s bungalow, so we made some rather half-hearted enquiries locally in case the rightful owner had returned, but without success.