In The Footsteps of Stamford Raffles

by Nigel Barley

  * * *

  To look at the Raffles Collection in the British Museum is to gain another picture of the man. There is the history, right enough, in the large and exquisite assemblage of Hindu metal-work that hearkens back to lost splendour and forgotten gods. It is housed in the Department of Oriental Antiquities.

  Another Raffles emerges in the Ethnography Department. There is the gamelan orchestra, each type of instrument with its representative, building up the greater whole. Raden Rana Dipura, Raffles’ Javanese protege, gave solo concerts on the instrument called the gambang kayu for the delectation of European scholars. An eminent musicologist, Dr Crotch, attended and stoutly declared Javanese music closely to resemble the most ancient airs of the Scots.

  There are the sets of Javanese puppets, of various kinds, the masks, some in miniature. Within each genre are the different characters, all painstakingly labelled in what may be Raffles’ own hand. (Apart from the lacy ‘R’, it resembles that of the Raffles cigarette packet – a harmless joke from the Marketing Department perhaps.) There are the carvings depicting Javanese social types, the lady’s maid, the farmer. In short, it is the work of a naturalist, a butterfly collector, obsessionally classificatory with its types and sub-types, each one notionally pinned to a board that is the social whole. It is an extravagant exercise in learning a culture as one would learn an illustrated dictionary. It is a testimony to the belief in science and typology.

  * * *

  ‘It is a gamelan orchestra,’ Agus said proudly. ‘It is not only the people of Yogya and Solo who have gamelan orchestras. We Sundanese have them too.’

  ‘Are you Sundanese?’

  ‘My mother is Sundanese – well, sort of Sundanese.’

  We were in Bandung, at a wedding. A woman from the top of the hill was marrying a poor boy from the bottom. There was a lot of social disapproval in the air and much talk of how much land she had inherited. In Raffles’ day this was the Preanger Regencies, an area of direct Dutch rule, the home of the coffee plantations with their compulsory deliveries at fixed prices. But the Dutch had been expelled long ago.

  It was also the Day of Heroes, when Indonesians commemorate those who fell in the Revolution, especially those who fell in the Battle of Surabaya against the British or, rather, Indian army. It was that confused period at the end of the Second World War when the Japanese had surrendered and Indonesia had unilaterally declared its independence to an unheeding world. The British accepted the Japanese surrender but had no idea where to put it. Japanese troops under British officers policed an Indonesia that was nominally Dutch. The British should have learned from Raffles’ experience that there was no future in this, that they would end up in the middle, execrated by both sides, but most of the British had heard nothing of Raffles in Java. He was merely the man who had invented ‘Fortress Singapore’. British disgrace in the Far East was somehow Raffles’ fault.

  Mutual distrust had culminated in a fierce battle at Surabaya. The British had bombed the city flat, sustained heavy casualties from passionate Indonesian guerrillas and swiftly withdrawn with hearty cries of ‘Over to you now, lads!’ before a returning Dutch presence. But a group of Scottish gunners had found themselves more in sympathy with the agreeable guerrillas they were supposed to be fighting than their ‘Haw-haw’ English officers and gone over to the other side, becoming gunnery instructors in the Indonesian army and marrying locally. With great tact, my hosts had adapted my pedigree to link me with the Scots rather than Surabaya.

  ‘English?’ they said. ‘Then you will know the men who helped us in the Revolution. Yes, yes, they still live here, though very old. Perhaps you are related?’

  It was very rough gamelan, the Javanese tinkles fine filigree, the Sundanese crashes and bangs basic metalwork. More, it has a definitely raunchy quality. The dancers were not the deft and wasp-waisted ladies of the royal palace, they were village girls, mostly children, with powerful thighs from the hauling of water. The men and boys did their dance, inevitably a martial dance, half tag-wrestling, half pointy-toed ballet. But this is the centre of the Indonesian rag trade, so they did it in jeans.

  From the dance floor we could see where they worked in the suburb of Bethlehem and, when the sun shone, it glinted off the extraordinary architecture of the jean boutiques a mile or so away. Indonesian architecture is fairly conservative, but any frustration this must cause in the building community is worked off in the jean boutiques. There are ancient Egyptian pyramids; Dutch sailing ships; on the first floor of one a yellow cab is frozen as it crashes through the wall and plunges into the street; a shark leaps, multi-fanged, through the roof of another.

  Inside the house, the young couple simper with modestly downcast eyes and greet their guests in whispers and the tenderest of handclasps. Outside, the dirty comedian is starting up, accompanied by the odd ‘boom, boom’ from the gamelan to press home the punch line. Married ladies adjust their headscarves and thin their lips in disapproval. But there is nothing they can do; this is traditional. The comic, paunched, greasy, twirls his moustache with travelling-salesman macho and leers lubriciously at the microphone. No pop star could do it more suggestively. His delivery is astonishingly wet. He seems to have more saliva than is strictly necessary.

  I don’t speak Sundanese. It should be unintelligible to me. But by some strange Pentecostal miracle I can follow all the jokes. They emerge unimpaired through the blur and blot of language and culture, as though I am listening to some pub comedian at home.

  ‘There is one thing a wife will never forget about her wedding night!’

  Cries of ‘Tell us about it, then!’ from the orchestra.

  ‘She will never forget the tickling of her husband’s moustache.’ Pause. ‘But which moustache? The upper orrr … the lower!!’ Boom, boom. Clenched fist waved in phallic redundancy. There is a cannon like that in Jakarta.

  Over it all, on the flagpole that normally demonstrates the family’s devotion to the Indonesian state, flies a pair of elaborately soiled underpants, the sign – an anthropologist would think – of the licensed bawdiness of a rite of passage, the dissolving of all conventional norms as a new married status is about to be fixed. Not so, for these are the rainman’s underpants. These seamy Y-fronts are stopping rain spoiling the ceremony.

  ‘Is he good, the rainman?’ I ask Agus.

  ‘The best,’ he whispers back. ‘These people are landowners. They’ve got influence. They’ve borrowed him from the irrigation department. He’s built into the five-year plan. There are times in the building of irrigation works when rain could ruin a whole year’s labour. So they hire him to make sure there is no waste of money. He’s the one they used when your Lady Di came. It stopped raining an hour before she landed and there wasn’t a drop of rain till she left. The Pope refused to use one. The rain poured on his head day after day all the way from here to Flores. Still, I don’t suppose it would have ruined his visit to get his hair wet.’

  * * *

  Raffles was to pass some sixteen months in England before moving on to Bengkulu. He arrived, ‘wretchedly sallow, with a jaundiced eye and shapeless leg’. The time was spent in typically energetic convalescence. His first act on touching English soil was to go down a Cornish mine. You never knew when such knowledge might be useful, and perhaps he still had hopes of hanging on to the tin of Bangka.

  In the short time he would be home, Raffles wrote and published his monumental History of Java, kitted himself out with a new wife and a knighthood, extracted some sort of a grudging exoneration from the Company, did the Grand Tour of Europe, hectoring the King of Holland in the process, and met and charmed many of the most influential people in England. He arrived a sallow and emaciated failure and left as a knight, Fellow of the Royal Society, in high spirits and fine feather with a floating ark named The Lady Raffles.

  * * *

  There is a portrait of him done at the time by George Joseph, owned by the National Portrait Gallery. It shows Raffles, a still-young thirty-five,
beefier-jawed than we shall see him again, hair still thick and brown. There is a suggestion of jowly truculence, almost squirish self-righteousness about the mouth that will soften, in later portraits, into disillusion. The pose is ramrod straight, the hunch has been dissimulated to signify probity. Behind him are generic Hindu antiquities and an inkwell. The presence of the latter is further explained by papers, arranged with deliberate casualness on tabletop and knee. It is the History of Java. He is an author in spate. Every picture must tell a story. He wrote a section of the book every morning, and it was sent off to the printers and ready in proof form by dark. When he returned from the social whirl late at night, he would correct the proofs. The whole thing was done and in the shops in seven months. It is an incredible hotch-potch, a ragbag of personal knowledge, a mere promissory note hastily issued on future scholarship. Yet it is the point from which all subsequent research had to start. Raffles always saw himself as merely clearing the decks for others who would follow after.

  Portraits of the period often tell us more by what is in the background than by what the face of the sitter reveals. Lord Minto’s portrait had him athletically snapping the instruments of torture before the port of Malacca. Over Raffles’ shoulder is a classical pillar, part of the solidity of learning, and, beyond, a pall of flame and smoke – wait – no, not flame and smoke, not the spume of Javanese volcanoes, but fluffy English clouds.

  Raffles dreamt of dukedoms, and later of standing for Parliament. He hangs now, on loan, in the Committee corridor of the House of Lords, amongst other illustrated highlights of the Dictionary of National Biography. He looks down on television monitors announcing the sober, serious work of worthy committees seeking to improve the lot of the natives. He must at last feel very much at home.

  * * *

  ‘“We have this area where all the prostitutes are. Periodically, we spot-check the district because it is our duty to keep them under constant surveillance. Yesterday, a team went in to inspect the conditions and do you know what they found? They found your photo, Pak. Right on the wall … looking down on … the whole thing. What shall we do? Shall we remove your photos from the walls?”

  “Certainly not,” I said. “Leave me there. Let my tired old eyes look!”’

  – C. Adams, Soekarno: An Autobiography

  * * *

  ‘If Marriage a Lottery is call’d

  As all calculations it baffles;

  Think of one who thus risks, unappalled,

  All her future fortune in Raffles.’

  A London newspaper of the time greeted Raffles’ new marriage in verse. He himself announced his wedding to Sophia, the Editor, in one of the most ungallant letters ever penned:

  ‘My Dear Cousin, – you will, I doubt not, approve of the change I have made in my condition in again taking to myself a wife; and when I apprise you that neither rank, fortune, nor beauty, have had weight on the occasion, I think I may fairly anticipate your approval of my selection. The Lady, whose name is Sophia, is turned of thirty; she is devotedly attached to me, and possesses every qualification of the heart and mind calculated to render me happy …’

  * * *

  ‘One of his [Raffles’] first visits was to his aunt, for they were very fond of each other. He left his equipage, which was a splendid one – and private carriages with rich liveries were not so common then as they are now, and were indeed a great rarity in the quiet corner of London in which my father lived – and, walking the length of Princes Street, knocked at old No. 14, and on opening the door went at once into the sort of parlour-kitchen where my mother was, busied as usual about her household affairs. “I knew well,” he said, “where at this time of the day I should find you,” and taking his accustomed seat in an old armchair by the fire-side, where he had often sat, made her at once by his affectionate and playful manner, quite unconscious of the elevation to which he had attained since he had last sat there. “Aunt,” he said, “you know I used to tell you, when a boy, that I should be a Duke before I die.” “Ah,” she replied, “and I used to say that it would be ‘Duke of Puddle Dock’”, which was a proverb in London of that day, referring to a wretched locality in Wapping, and with which aspiring lads, who had great notions of the greatness they should hereafter attain, were twitted …’

  – Dr T. Raffles

  It is in rare asides like this that themes crystallize out of the mix of Raffles’ life; for example, his great yearning for the reassurance of honours and recognition that he will then set lightly aside in the name of common humanity. Once he has been given viceregal powers, he loves to sit and eat with the natives. Given a palatial ballroom, he adores to receive junior officers. But he desperately needed to have that title and power, that palace and the liveried carriagemen of his eminence.

  * * *

  Raffles was to have a number of nicknames in the corridors of power. He was sometimes referred to sneeringly as the Tide Waiter (a minor customs official) or the Golden Sword (a title bestowed on him by the Sultan of Aceh). He had always coveted nobility from his Duke of Puddle Dock days. While still a nobody in Penang, he had urged his cousin to look into Sir Benjamin Raffles, an obscure baronet of the seventeenth century, to see if there was the basis of a claim to his arms and title. From now on, in the Calcutta ministries, he could be called ‘Sir Knight’. In snide civil service fashion, it turned his elevation into denigration.

  The dubbing occurred at the hands of the Prince Regent, to whom he had dedicated his History of Java. Rumour had it that ‘Prinny’ was jealous of Raffles’ flourishing new friendship with his daughter. Otherwise, he would have been a duke, a proper one.

  This Other Elba

  ‘If, however, he [Raffles] is acquitted of those charges in which his moral character is implicated, still there is no reason why he should not be employed in a situation of minor responsibility and of more strictly defined duties, of which description the Residency of Bencoolen [Bengkulu] may be considered.’

  – Lord Moira

  Bengkulu was a dotted line of British possessions on the barren west coast of Sumatra. Of all the botched British colonies, it was the worst. To end up here after Java was a dreadful comedown, a Siberian posting. It had been founded in 1685 in what was simply the wrong place, like Penang, in the false belief that it was on the direct route to China, and had ignored geography ever since. It had fierce malaria, a dolefully wet climate and a dangerous coast, to which Man had added slavery, Indian chain-gangs, forced delivery of pepper at fixed prices and savage repression. It lost £100,000 a year and the population was running away. The Company’s agents were astonishingly slothful, corrupt, feared and detested. It had attained a terrible reputation in every single particular. The only appeal of Bengkulu to Raffles could be as a reserve of natural history. The Indonesian volcanoes that would rumble dyspeptically at the birth of Bung Karno belched and roared at the accession of the new Lieutenant-Governor.

  ‘This is without exception the most wretched place I ever beheld. I cannot convey to you an adequate idea of the state of ruin and dilapidation which surrounds me. What with natural impediments, bad government, and the awful visitations of Providence that we have recently experienced in repeated earthquakes, we have scarcely a dwelling in which to lay our heads, or wherewithal to satisfy the cravings of nature. The roads are impassable; the highways in the town overrun with rank grass; the Government House a den of ravenous dogs and polecats. The natives say that Bencoolen is now a tana matt (dead land). In truth, I could never have conceived anything half so bad.’

  –T. S. Raffles

  Even before Raffles’ brutally frank reports, Bengkulu was a known hellhole. Governor Collet wrote of society there in 1712:

  ‘And for the Ladies, I’ll tell you in what Condition we are. There are but five White Things in Petticoats upon the Coast, one I am sending away with her husband, tho’ she petitions to stay behind in the Quality of Nurse alias Bawd. Another is sent away by her husband with my consent because she is so free of Tongue, Tale
and Hand that the poor man can’t live in quiet with her. A third is non-compos and actually confin’d to a dark room and straw. A fourth is really a good Wife and a modest Woman but the malicious say that her person never provok’d anyone yet to ask her the question. The fifth is a young Widow suppos’d to have a little money, of the right St Helena breed, as well shap’d as a Madagascar Cow, – and so much for Women.’

  Raffles, however, had brought the sturdy Editor and his first child with him. He refused to ‘eat the bread of idleness’ and set to work at once.

  * * *

  ‘It is difficult to get to Bengkulu. It is summer. All the planes are full.’ It is a familiar story, but told by officials as if fresh and new. All the planes were booked solid. They are always booked solid. Should you manage to get on one, however, it will be half empty. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Barley.’ I pronounced it ‘Bali’, as close as Indonesian will allow you to get to the original. The airline official looked at the flight list and shook his head. A group of young men in light-blue uniforms laughed kindly.

  ‘Bali?’ they said. ‘Then you are one of us.’ They whirled round revealing the same word stamped on their blousons. It was the Bali University football team. They were not the bunch of sullen, hunched louts an English football team would have been. ‘We had to give him 20,000 rupiahs to get on the plane, though we are booked. It is a scandal. There is a football tournament. Wait.’ They went into a whispering huddle with an older man who was clearly the manager. He looked at me, sighed and made an addition to the list of names. ‘There,’ they said. ‘It’s fixed. Give us your ticket. Now you’re listed as our foreign trainer. It will scare the other teams to death. We will go to Bengkulu together.’