Forgotten Wars (20 page)

Fortunes were lost and made overnight. One of the British government’s first proclamations was to announce that the Japanese wartime currency would not be recognized. This was an exceptional step, intended to sow confusion behind Japanese lines; it reaped chaos for the people of Malaya. In the interregnum, the Japanese money kept some of its value as people hurriedly sold off hidden hoards of Straits dollars to pay off debts in the Japanese ‘banana money’.
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But when Japanese themselves offloaded their freshly minted notes, it soon became worthless: ‘Everywhere’, one Chinese trader observed, ‘you find the Japanese notes everywhere – along the roadside, five-foot ways, people just throw them away.’
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A petition to the government described the resulting hysteria: ‘Many civilians have registered their names with the lunatic asylum, commit suicide and daylight robbery due to the non-recognition.’
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The Malayan Communist Party was reported to have lost most of its funds. Mountbatten was furious: the policy was, he said, ‘un-British and disastrous to our reputation for fair play’.
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The British put Straits dollars into circulation by issuing cash relief and advances on salaries, and a surprising amount of pre-war money came out of holes in the ground. The transience of wealth was inseparable in the popular imagination with the proliferation of open gambling in the streets. But a more abiding legacy was a lingering suspicion of paper money, particularly among peasants who were reluctant to part with their rice crops for cash at the low official prices; they bartered or put it on the black market. Weimar-proportion price inflation resulted: rice was now at thirty to forty times its pre-war price, and banana and sweet potato skins were sold as staples in the markets.

The black economy eclipsed the old colonial economy almost
entirely. It was a parallel world that reached from maritime trade to industrial production on the forest frontier. Quiet tropical islands such as Karimun, just southwest of Singapore, suddenly became chaotic ‘free ports’ for the smugglers’ trade from Thailand, Sumatra and Java. Pirates staged audacious raids on Penang island. Taking advantage of the liberal policy towards societies, the Ang Bin Hoay brotherhood united the notorious gangs of Penang and, by the end of the year, mass initiation ceremonies – involving hundreds at a time – were held in the Relau hills. Lorries cruised through the streets of George Town, picking up men with cries of ‘This way for the Show!’ and ‘Any more for the hills?’
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During the BMA period, 600 murders were reported and 470 instances of gang robbery, as against thirteen in 1939. Before the war the British had governed this volatile world at a distance. Labour had been controlled principally by employers and contractors. But the European managers had disappeared and many Chinese industrialists fled abroad. Those who remained had found it difficult to refuse to join Japanese-sponsored community organizations, and now carried the stain of collaboration. They lost considerable prestige; some retired from public life altogether, or had to struggle to regain their standing in the community. The power of the
towkays
was weakest in the countryside, where, for a time, the rule of the bosses was broken.

The production of strategic commodities such as rubber, tin and timber was taken over by the informal economy. Rubber was collected on a ‘self-tap, self-sell’ basis. An everyday sight around mining pools was large numbers of women panning for ore, a process known as
dulang
washing. There were violent confrontations when the police tried to stop it. Gangs of ‘democratic workmen’ elected their own bosses and demanded logging rights. Chinese peasants moved onto disused plantation land or forest reserve. The first British visitors to reach these areas were grudgingly impressed. ‘Although these people may be given to gang robbery’, a forester wrote in his diary, ‘they are nevertheless remarkably good gardeners.’
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Townsfolk were almost entirely dependent on their terraces of vegetables and tobacco. Many labour and forest departments and district and land offices had ceased to function. But to the British these people were illegal ‘squatters’, and as order slowly returned they came into conflict with the colonial
regime and European rubber planters. Foresters were ‘constantly being threatened with calamity’, and in October two were killed trying to prevent some Chinese from felling timber.
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For the first time the squatters – slash-and-burn farmers, freewheeling tappers and loggers, ‘wild rat’ miners and charcoal burners, illicit distillers and wild-game hunters – had political muscle and military backing. Kuomintang guerrillas still controlled most of the routes across the Thai border, and in the squatter hamlets and small towns it was the fighters of the MPAJA who were the law. Those
towkays
brave enough to restart their business paid them ‘taxes’. Large tracts of the peninsula – including much of the central range – were no-go areas for Europeans: a state within a state. There were around half a million ‘squatters’ in Malaya, one in five of the population.

The British were desperate to put the legitimate economy back to work. They flew in leading Chinese financiers from exile in India as ‘sponsored civilians’ to reopen the banks. The European businessmen who were still awaiting repatriation resented their head start. The old network of Teochew merchants revived the junk trade with Siam. Although loans were scarce, for a businessmen with cash there were tremendous new opportunities. By the age of twenty-five, the Chinese trader Ang Keong Lan had acquired $50 million by trading pigs for copra and castor oil with the Japanese. He was slow to sell on his ‘banana’ currency, and had to exchange it at $10,000 to the Straits dollar. Still he managed to bounce back: he obtained a motorboat and, with the connivance of customs men, was able to trade flour and cigarettes from Singapore to Penang, where they fetched a much higher price. It was slow business, but in this way Ang laid the foundation of a business empire – the Joo Seng Group – that would extend from trade to banking and insurance.
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The Japanese military government was staffed by businessmen and run for profit, and had brought the worlds of money and administration closer together. After the liberation, commercial success remained conditional on squaring police officers and customs officials.

The BMA evolved into a form of what was later to be called ‘crony capitalism’. In its transit camp in India, officers were overheard to regret the delay of Operation Zipper because ‘there would not be any loot left’.
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Wherever British and Commonwealth troops were
deployed, graft followed them. The Sydney police warned British commanders in Japan that Australian criminals were enlisting solely to get at the black market opportunities.
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Ralph Hone himself later admitted that his officers were among the systematic offenders. Many British businessmen from the pre-war days were now in uniform, and in this, as one Penang newssheet remarked acidly, ‘they have found an ideal combination’. New arrivals cheerfully accepted treating and pleasing from local businessmen, and some connived in local scams. Military stores and ‘rehabilitation’ goods disappeared en route to Malaya, or were landed in the wrong place; in the docks, goods vanished, invoices never appeared, or when they did, charges were paid three times over. This was known locally as ‘the multi-million scandal’ and, when an audit report finally appeared two years later, the scale of the losses from short deliveries, looting and pilfering was over $15 million. The BMA officers’ mess at Fu Court in Singapore was, reported one old Malaya hand, H. T. Pagden, ‘full of such loot’.
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The British practice was to give a commodity to a company to distribute, and there were kickbacks right down the line to the distributors’ agents and salesmen.
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Competition between suppliers forced up the price of sweeteners. Even when BMA supplied its own transport to move vegetables to break the black market, food control officers charged for access to the lorries, and the drivers charged ‘tea money’ to the suppliers. Yet traders were still willing to pay as there were profits of 1,000 per cent to be had.
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The NAAFI was notoriously venal; one case alone – which was prosecuted – involved the robbery of £20,000 worth of cigarettes; service goods were sold openly in the market at Petaling Street in Kuala Lumpur, and Indian soldiers levied a toll on the transport of pigs and other foodstuffs to Singapore.
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It was reported in Ipoh that merchants could not even get their calls connected at the telephone exchange without being asked for a ‘loan’ by the operators.
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The notoriety of the ‘banana colonels’ and ‘banana majors’ of the BMA struck a savage blow at the reputation for clean, impartial government that the British were so anxious to maintain. It gave further encouragement to people to avoid government altogether. As the Chinese proverb observed: ‘Don’t enter a government office with no money even if you are right.’
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At a fundamental level, British rule had lost its legitimacy. The first
men ashore put a great deal of store in the spontaneous celebrations and the loyal processions that had greeted them. O. W. Gilmour rejoiced to be welcomed at his old house in Singapore by his gardener, his driver and his cook. That the leaden paternalism of the British was preferable to the arbitrary violence and psychological trauma of Japanese rule was a point few Malayans, of the middle classes at least, would dispute. For this reason, most of them deferred to the old hierarchy. But Asian civil servants resented that the fact that they had stayed at the posts, when the Europeans had not, was interpreted by their British masters as unquestioning ‘empire loyalty’. Malayans who had kept basic services going were roughly pushed aside. One leading Chinese doctor, Benjamin Chew, who had kept a tuberculosis ward going at Tan Tock Seng hospital in Singapore, was told by a British medical officer, ‘Chew, your cases can go into the streets.’ Dr Chew left the government service in disgust.
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The ‘colour bar’ was restored at its pre-war level. One of ‘sponsored civilians’ brought in from India by the BMA was the Selangor mining tycoon H. S. Lee. He was one of the first of the China-born
towkays
to be educated at Cambridge University, and had the honorary rank of colonel in the Nationalist Chinese Army. But on his first arrival back in Malaya he experienced crude racial affronts. As a BMA officer he was entitled to buy NAAFI goods at a service price, but was refused them on the grounds that he was Chinese. ‘I can hardly believe’, he wrote to Victor Purcell, ‘that racial discrimination still exists.’
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The general responsible was challenged on this. He did not deny the discrimination, his argument being, Purcell was told by a sympathetic colleague, ‘that whisky is not a natural part of the standard of living of a Chinese. I agreed with him that they preferred brandy, but as that is not obtainable they are prepared to put up with whisky as a second-best.’
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These slights would never be forgotten by the individuals who suffered them.

The second colonial conquest was more aggressive than the first. ‘The army’, wrote H. T. Pagden, ‘behaved as if they were in conquered territory.’ Singapore became a staging post for hundreds of thousands of men in uniform shipping to points further east, and this soon deflated any sense of elation that war was now over. At the beginning of December, at huge expense, Mountbatten moved the HQ of South East Asia Command to Singapore. He took the city’s landmark skyscraper,
the Cathay Building, as his offices. It had many associations with the war, as a Japanese headquarters and where, in its auditorium, Subhas Chandra Bose declared a government of Free India. The supremo’s personal staff was regal in scale: the previous year it reached 7,000 people. The military requisitioned 2,227 houses and 51 institutions and clubs, and they took the best: navy officers messed in the Adelphi Hotel and the RAPWI organization at the Goodwood Park. Even the luxury department stores in Raffles Place – Little’s and Robinson’s – were taken over by the NAAFI; the elite Singapore Cricket Club became the Army YMCA. By contrast, Raffles Hotel was a dismal haunt for European refugees and ex-internees. The military soon became unpopular with the locals for forcing up prices still further. But the good life for which the Singapore garrison had been famous in 1941 began to revive: roadside cafés sprang up, with ‘singers and young girls acting as waitresses; and beer drinking. There were no holds barred.’
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The senior civil affairs officer on the island called the extravagant public entertainments ‘nothing short of criminal’, and Mountbatten was compelled to issue draconian standing orders for a curfew on other ranks, the closure of service bars and clubs by midnight, a ban on meals or drinks in civilian-run establishments and detailed checks on bad traffic discipline.
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This was mostly on the part of Indian drivers who had learned to drive in the desert of North Africa or the dirt-tracks of Burma, but it seemed to symbolize the arrogance of the new regime. In the words of one Chinese newspaper, people saw military vehicles ‘as snakes and scorpions, and streets and thoroughfares as hells’.
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Attlee took a personal interest in the morale of army personnel. The BBC Home Service was urged to broadcast encouragement to people to keep a constant flow of letters posted to serving men who now had time on their hands, time to brood. One of the first units into liberated Malaya was an advance party of ENSA, the armed forces’ entertainments association. By the fourth day of reoccupation they were giving an impromptu performance to the POWs in Changi: Gracie Fields appeared there on 1 October. They reclaimed the Victoria Theatre on Singapore’s Esplanade – killing around 5,000 swallows who had roosted there throughout the Japanese occupation – for John Gielgud to perform his
Hamlet
.
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But what was on offer fell
far short of what was desired by weary, frustrated men. Malaya’s allocation of 15–16,000 barrels of beer a month was well below the target of 25,200 for the NAAFI canteens.
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Soldiers turned to other diversions. One unit in Ipoh discovered an antiquated provision in the King’s Regulations for fodder for horses, and they used this to resurrect the Perak Turf Club. The first race meeting was on Boxing Day 1945. It drew a bigger crowd than the victory parades, and made a considerable profit for the British ‘owners’ of the horses.
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But such events made a mockery of the BMA’s calls for people to be patient in the face of scarcity. ‘We ask for bread’, the
Malaya Tribune
remarked, ‘and we are given… horse-racing!’
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