Malayan Spymaster

by Boris Hembry

  Soon after our arrival on KMS I was elected president of the Kedah State Cricket Association. I was also an honorary member of the Gurkha Depot officers’ mess, and went to all their mess nights and cocktail parties, with or without Jean as appropriate. They certainly worked hard and played hard. It was interesting seeing how quickly the young men from Nepal could be turned into disciplined, trained fighting men, surely the best ever. They practised patrolling on the estate and we would see them every day. I gave the company commander permission to ambush me on the estate, at a given time and place one day, and promptly forgot all about it. At the appointed hour, to my initial horror, rounding a bend on the road I was subjected to a fusillade of small-arms fire, and several ‘grenades’ – thunder flashes – whilst I cursed myself for having left my Luger at home, and for being so careless in travelling along the same road at the same time each day. Then I remembered. The patrol returned to the bungalow where our cook made tea for all the riflemen and NCOs, and the officers sank a few well-earned cold beers in the bungalow.

  Menon John had been on the estate for many years. He had been a clerk on Bukit Lembu Division when I had arrived on the neighbouring Sungei Gettah Estate in December 1931. He was now an entrepreneur, with interests in a pawnbroker’s and a pharmacy in Sungei Patani. I saw no reason why he should not be able to have outside interests, so long as there was no conflict with his position as my assistant. But I did have a different attitude to Pennefather on several matters of policy, particularly to the standard of living quarters, from my own, to the Asian clerks and conductors, and the resident labour force. Old Penny was a planter of the old school; had been through the Depression years of the early 1930s, and was not inclined to spend more money than strictly absolutely necessary. Consequently, I took over a lot of inferior buildings. I laid down an annual replacement programme for all the old and decrepit buildings, and improved the water supplies, especially necessary on Bukit Lembu Division. I had always believed that a happy workforce had a better chance of being an efficient workforce, and, in those troubled times, a loyal workforce.

  KMS had the inestimable advantage of having been managed by Bob Chrystal from 1924 until 1939, when he had been transferred to Kamuning, and all subsequent managers had benefited from his conservative tapping policies, which resulted in first-rate bark reserves and the consequent maintenance of relatively high yields. If I had a criticism it would have been that the older rubber had not been replanted to the extent that it should have been, and that the proportion of older plantings compared to the younger, higher-yielding budgrafts was out of balance. I set about redressing the balance.

  Altogether KMS was a first-class estate, easily run, so that I was not extended; on reflection the reason that I was there. After a month or two adjusting to the new situation I stopped being bored and began to enjoy the lack of excitement and challenge. It was almost like a planter’s life prewar. Not once did I arm myself or travel in an armoured vehicle. I handed my carbine over to the police for safekeeping, and retained only my Luger, which I hid amongst my socks in my dressing room. This part of Kedah had been declared a ‘white area’, that is to say free from terrorist activity, mainly because it was predominantly inhabited by Malays which gave little scope to the Chinese Communists to ‘spread the word’, and made it well nigh impossible for them to obtain succour. But we were well aware that other parts of Kedah, most notably inland, along the mountain range, were still as dangerous as ever.

  Only on one occasion did I hear of bandits in the area. Apparently a small party of them had passed through the nearby Sungei Patani Estate and had questioned some Malay tappers about me. I am sure that it was a gang that operated in Perak, and were either on their way up to Siam for a rest, or on their way back afterwards. But it showed that their intelligence, the Min Yuen, was as good as ever.

  John flew out to visit us for his school summer holidays in 1953 by Comet, then the first jet airliner to enter regular airline service in the world, by several years. As so often happens with pioneers, the designers at De Havilland had not fully understood the dangers of metal fatigue, with the result that the planes disintegrated in midair. It so happens that both aircraft that John flew in crashed shortly afterwards, after which they were withdrawn from service. The Americans benefited from the lessons learnt when designing the Boeing 707, which then collared the market that should have been the Comet’s.

  John enjoyed what was to be his last school summer holidays, playing much cricket, including two matches in the Kedah state side, against Selangor and Perak, driving the Jaguar around the estate roads, cataloguing what was by now our extensive gramophone record collection, and playing with Pedro and Greta. He and Pedro seemed to establish a close affinity.

  Soon after John’s departure Sir John Hay arrived in Malaya. Guthrie’s had arranged for him to take the SOCFIN bungalow at Port Dickson for a couple of weeks during his stay, and he let it be known that he would like Jean to act as his hostess. I was, of course, included in the invitation, in fact a royal command, but I pleaded pressure of work and went down to PD for the second week only. Gibby had retired, so Sir John’s new private secretary, Esther McWilliam, was there to handle the business side of things.

  Sir John was in great form, and when not visiting estates locally would spend many hours on the beach dictating letters and memoranda to all and sundry. For reasons I cannot recall, Jean was required to inspect the Gurkha guard on several occasions. On reflection, these were most probably retired soldiers who had stayed on in Malaya after being discharged at the end of their service, to act as night watchmen. Whilst not armed with firearms they would all have retained their kukris, so would have been formidable opponents should anyone have been foolish enough to try to get into the bungalow compound. I drove down to PD by way of KL and the Guthrie’s office.

  During my stay, Jean had to arrange two formal parties. The first, in the evening, was for General Perowne, I think the director of operations who had succeeded General Briggs, his ADC, and Charles Thornton, Guthrie’s number one in KL. We had met the General on several occasions on his visits to the Gurkhas at Sungei Patani. The conversation, which mainly concerned the Emergency, where we had gone wrong in the past and how we were now getting things right, went on till the wee hours. The CTs were beginning to surrender in quite large numbers, as the Briggs Plan was working well and they were finding it increasingly difficult to get food and help, and the army had learnt by now to operate deep in the jungle in small patrols, so were getting many good kills.

  The second was purely a Guthrie affair. Sir John had expressed a wish to entertain all the Guthrie planters and their wives who could get to PD and return home by curfew time, about 60 guests in total. This was a buffet lunch in the garden, under the trees, and was a great success.

  On our way back to Kedah we met Sir John again at the Lake Club in KL when he presented Jean with a pair of Kelantan silver salad servers. It was during this dinner that he let slip that he had just disposed of most of his private investments in Singapore for $3,500,000, no mean sum in those days, so he was full of beans.

  Whilst it was a relief to get back to KMS and our dogs and to be living in an area at relative peace, I would have to admit that I missed the excitement and personal satisfaction of being at the centre of things, on the Federal War Council, and general manager of the largest estate in the whole of Malaya. But Guthrie’s always treated me as one of their most senior managers, invited me to attend many of their Group policy meetings in KL, and always asked my views on matters of estate security.

  From time to time my heart caused problems, but I did not disclose this to Guthrie’s. On one occasion I collapsed at the wheel of the Jaguar and only just managed to stop before passing out. This gave both Jean and me a nasty shock, and the problem was further exacerbated by my having forgotten my TNT pills. Thenceforward Jean assumed the responsibility of ensuring that they were always with me.

  Early in 1954 we made up a party to spend a long wee
kend on the island of Langkawi, which I had last visited by submarine in 1944.

  We drove up to Perlis from where it had been arranged we would take a government launch over to the island. Unfortunately it had been forgotten that the day we had intended travelling was a Muslim religious festival so that the Malay crew were not available. Rather than delay our crossing we travelled over on the ferry, little more than an outsized fishing boat, very smelly, with no amenities except the usual two planks over the stern. The other travellers, all Malays or Chinese, were not used to seeing Europeans using this ship and eyed us first with suspicion and then with amusement. Before long I was deep in conversation, explaining about my last visit, when one of the Malays listening suddenly jumped up and said that he had been one of the fishermen in the fishing fleet that we had come across, and how the headman had ordered, on pain of death, that no one was to mention having seen the tuans paddling by when they returned to port. The headman had died, but I asked the man to thank, on my behalf, any other survivor of that little episode for their loyalty.

  The voyage took only a couple of hours and we were soon ensconced in the government rest house, typically with wide verandahs, clean and comfortable, the large old-fashioned bathrooms complete with Shanghai jars, and excellent food cooked by the Chinese chef. We spent the days walking and picnicking along the beaches and in jungle clearings, the evenings talking about our plans for the future, aspirations, failed hopes and disappointments, and how lucky we all felt we were to live and work in such a wonderful country with such wonderful people, and how, when independence came, we were sure that Malaya would make a go of it. We had taken our own liquid rations, so we were a cheerful party.

  I tried hard to identify exactly where I had landed, but having narrowed it down to one of three beaches, was unable to be certain, as they all looked the same. Perhaps I should have approached them from the sea. On the southern side of the main island are several smaller ones, one of which is called Pulau Dayang Bunting – The Island of the Pregnant Princess. We hired a boat to take us over to it, and then walked through the jungle to its centre where there is a freshwater lake rumoured to be the home of a great white crocodile, into which the princess had been changed for getting pregnant out of wedlock. We picnicked nearby, but not too near the water’s edge just in case the legend was true. A truly beautiful place, and one that had never been visited by more than a handful of Europeans. We felt privileged. I understand that all these islands have now been ‘developed’, and are teeming with hotels and tourists from the world over. Progress?

  We frequently weekended in Penang, usually staying with Jean and Laurie Brittain, or at Reid Tweedie’s beach bungalow out at Batu Feringgi, with the view across the strait to Kedah Peak that I had first seen in 1930. We attended the usual St Andrew’s and St George’s nights’ festivities at the clubs, although my reeling days appeared over as I experienced heart pains after only a little such violent physical activity. Slow waltzes and foxtrots were now all I could manage. The weekly cricket matches became social events in themselves, and, in my capacity as president, we did quite a lot of entertaining of the visiting sides.

  The weeks slipped by; the Emergency scarcely concerned us, the war in Korea was many thousands of miles away and increased the price of rubber, and therefore our commissions. Very few of our Kedah friends knew what it was like to live under curfew, under constant threat of being ambushed and killed, with the movement of food strictly controlled, night attacks, staff and labour force being murdered, obscene or threatening telephone calls – all the normal daily experience of the planting community in other parts of Malaya.

  Jean and I had now been together since February 1952, the longest spell since November 1941. Unfortunately, this happy state of affairs was not to last much longer as Jean began to feel distinctly off-colour in the latter part of 1953, and I began to have grave doubts as to how much longer she could tolerate the uncomfortably hot and humid climate before another spell at home. She had regular bouts of fever and dripped with perspiration, even in the cool of the bedroom, with the overhead fan, and a portable one aimed straight at her, going full blast. Dr Dunlop, our regular medico, was on leave so we called in the locum, a retired government medical officer. He duly arrived, took her temperature and remarked that she appeared to be sweating profusely, stating the all too obvious. He told me to get Jean into the Georgetown Hospital as quickly as possible, which I did that same afternoon. But they were perplexed, so I telephoned Reid Tweedie, explained the symptoms and asked whom I should consult, and he recommended Dr Allen, a mutual friend. After tests he diagnosed B. coli infection and treated her accordingly, and strongly recommended a trip home as soon as possible.

  It so happened that we had recently received a letter from Jean’s mother’s doctor in England suggesting that Jean should try to get home as soon as convenient, as the old lady was far from well, and that we should be prepared for the worst. We flew down to Singapore, where, without the usual round of socialising, I put Jean on a KLM flight home, at the end of March 1954. Granny Cuthbertson was to live in the best of health for another 22 years, dying peacefully in her sleep in her 93rd year.

  Jean had not been home for more than a few days when she found herself in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, in London, by the express instructions of my old ‘friend’ Dr Gregg, the Guthrie doctor. The problem was eventually diagnosed as something caused by the hysterectomy she had had in 1944 when, I suppose, that operation was not quite so much a routine procedure as it was to become. She made a complete recovery from both this and the B. coli infection, was able to be with John for the few weeks after his final summer term at King’s awaiting to go into the Army for National Service, before flying back to Malaya in September.

  Jean’s return to Malaya coincided with John’s call-up. She left a boy, and when we all met again, a year later, we met a young man about to receive his Commission in the Royal Artillery.

  Living alone was not unusual for me, but the older I became the more I realised how much I depended on Jean, not only for the loving companionship, but also for her encouragement and support, let alone for the smooth running of our home.

  Pedro and Greta were great companions. Whilst travelling in the jeep Pedro had to be chained up on the back seat to prevent him from jumping out to attack any stray pie dog or goat we happened to pass. He was by now quite notorious throughout the district, both as a character and as a killer. He was very powerful, without an ounce of superfluous flesh, and with the usual bull terrier’s jaws that locked on to the prey. It was noticeable that he never attacked any well-bred dog, whether they belonged to friends or strangers, but pie dogs were clearly anathema to him. I once saw him throw a cow, but fortunately I was able to drag him off before he killed it. At about six each evening I would speed off in the jeep along the estate roads, on a fixed route that Pedro came to know, and he would hare along behind, sometimes taking short cuts through the rubber, to meet me further along the way. After a mile or so I would stop and wait for him, before repeating the ritual. He would then hop in next to me, apparently too exhausted to bother about any ‘game’ we happened to come across on our way home.

  But sometimes he would arrive at our rendezvous first, and when this happened he would use my absence as an excuse to dash off into the nearby jungle to chase monkeys. When this happened it would usually be at about nine, some three hours later, when we would see the rascal slinking in, trying not to be noticed, to lie under my chair. He would be covered in slimy mangrove mud, streaked with blood from the razor-sharp mangrove roots, and stinking to high heaven. As soon as he saw me looking at him, he would wag his tail and quite literally give a broad grin. And the more I scolded him, calling him a smelly, horrible bastard, the more he would grin and wag his tail. I would then take him out to the back of the house, hose him down, and rub antiseptic ointment into his wounds. Chasing monkeys could be dangerous, because if a pack had decided to come down from the trees and attack, as they have been known
to do, even a bull terrier of Pedro’s strength and courage would not have stood much of a chance.

  One day, soon after Jean’s return, I was driving along the main road to the Bukit Lembu Division, with Pedro and Greta as usual in the back, when as we drove into Sungei Patani I became aware of much shouting and gesticulating from the pedestrians that we passed. I stopped to see what the fuss was about and saw, to my horror, that I had been dragging Pedro along by the chain on his collar, at a good 30 miles per hour, along the metalled road. All four paws had been ripped to pieces and were dripping with blood. He had almost been strangled and was gasping for breath. I picked him up, held him in my arms and wept. He wagged his tail, smiled, and licked the tears from my face. The government veterinary department was only five minutes away and, luckily, the vet was there. After cutting off the loose claws he bandaged all four paws, injected an antibiotic, and sent us home with instructions to carry him out into the garden so that the battered old friend could answer the call of nature. The vet gave little hope for his recovery.

  Thank God we were near the town when he had obviously seen a dog and jumped out to give chase. Jean was as shocked and distressed as I was. She nursed him with great tenderness and loving care, changed the blood-soaked dressings many times a day, and applied the antibiotic ointments prescribed by the vet. In a week he was hobbling, but still in pain, in three he was stumbling out into the garden unaided to ‘perform’, and in five it was almost as if nothing had happened. Jean’s constant nursing and his own indomitable spirit had brought him through. And, perhaps, the knowledge that the Chief of Police, the Gurkha Depot Commander, the Mentri Besar, and a host of friends had all telephoned to find out how he was. We were sure that Greta’s companionship and obvious concern had also helped. A prince of dogs. And quite the most affectionate and most loyal friend that Jean and I ever had.