The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (22 page)

I, too, was sickened by the result. My duty as an advocate of the Supreme Court required me to do my best for my clients without breaking the law or advancing a falsehood. I had cast much doubt on the prosecution’s case and thwarted justice. I had no doubt that my four clients did kill Ryan, that they were highly keyed-up that night and would have murdered any white or partly white person who came their way, anyone associated with the Christian religion and thus, to them, against Islam. I had no faith in a system that allowed the superstition, ignorance, biases, prejudices and fears of seven jurymen to determine guilt or innocence. They were by definition the ordinary man in the street with no special qualifications other than an ability to understand English and follow the proceedings. I had seen juries in British courts. I did not think they deserved the reverence that lawyers and jurists ritually accorded to their collective wisdom.

One difference between cases in England and Singapore was the need for interpreters. Many witnesses were not able to or did not wish to speak in English, if only to have more time to frame their replies to questions. The Malay interpreter, a stout Indian Muslim, was superb. He would mimic the pitch of voice, the body language and the mood of the witness. He produced his most memorable line when one of them quoted the words
Allahu Akbar
. He translated: “He said the men were shouting
Allahu Akbar
. My Lord, the phrase means ‘God is Great’. It is also the Muslim battle cry.”

But interpreters have other uses, and when our first child was born on Sunday, 10 February 1952, I consulted one of those at the Supreme Court who had helped many lawyers find appropriate Chinese names for their children. The date of birth was the most auspicious in the Chinese calendar, the 15th day of the first moon of the Year of the Dragon. We therefore decided to name our son Hsien Loong – Illustrious Dragon. He was a long baby, scrawny but weighing more than eight pounds, and he gave us great joy.

When I saw Choo in Kandang Kerbau (maternity) Hospital over the next few days, I was able to tell her of my second piece of good fortune – my first union work. It would bring me into the political spotlight and into a head-on clash with the government.

7. My First Clashes with the Government

One afternoon in 1952, a group of three Malays and one Indian in postmen’s uniform came to the offices of Laycock & Ong to see me. No longer in Laycock’s room, I met them in the outer office – not air-conditioned, hot, humid and noisy with the sound of traffic and hawkers. The Postal and Telecommunications Uniformed Staff Union, they told me, had put forward claims for salary revisions but had so far not been successful, and they had been given permission to engage a lawyer to appear for them. I asked John Laycock whether I should accept the case, given that there would not be much money in it. He told me to carry on for the sake of the goodwill, so I did it without asking for legal fees. This decision to represent the postmen was to be a turning point in the history of the trade unions and constitutional mass action. Little did I know that I would be guiding union leaders in a strike that in two weeks changed the political climate. It put the colonial government on the defensive and encouraged workers’ militancy. But it also created the conditions for the communists to reorganise their mass support.

P. Govindasamy, a mail officer (one grade higher than postman), was not well-educated but briefed me in adequate English. He was totally relevant and reliable. He was later to be elected MP in a neighbouring constituency and helped me look after mine. The negotiations with the Establishment Branch of the government secretariat, which lasted from February to May, produced only the same salary revisions that applied to postmen in Malaya although I had argued that the work was more onerous and the cost of living higher in Singapore.

We were coming to a crunch. One Sunday morning, the union held a pre-strike meeting at their quarters in Maxwell Road, where large
families lived in one-room flats with communal kitchens and toilets. Nearly the entire union of 450 postmen turned up. My presence was to give them moral courage, and to reassure them that what they were doing was not illegal, especially since no strikes had been held in Singapore since the Emergency was declared in 1948. In bazaar Malay, I got my views across to all, mostly Malays, the rest Chinese and Indians. They decided to give strike notice.

Before the strike began on 13 May, Keng Swee, who had returned from England, arranged a dinner at the Chinese Swimming Club in Amber Road for me to meet an associate editor of the
Singapore Standard
, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam. Raja was a Malayan of Jaffna Tamil origin. He had been in London for 12 years until 1947, associating with a group of Indian and African nationalists and British left-wing personalities, and writing anti-colonial tracts and newspaper articles. He was a good listener. Out in the open by the swimming pool, against the music and the hubbub of the swimmers, I briefed him on the background to the strike. He had been waiting for a good issue on which to challenge the colonial government, and was eager to do battle for the postmen.

While the postmen were picketing peacefully on the first morning of the strike, the government sent a large contingent of Gurkhas armed with revolvers and kukris into the General Post Office in Fullerton Building on Collyer Quay, the most prominent part of the business district. The deputy commissioner of police announced that police with sten guns would stand guard at all post offices until the strike ended.

Next day, the newspapers carried photographs of the Gurkhas and police and, in sharp contrast, a moderate statement by the president of the union saying that the postmen would refrain from picketing until their intentions were clearly understood. Public sympathy swung towards the postmen. The following day, the government withdrew the Gurkhas and the pickets resumed peacefully.

At the government secretariat at Empress Place, leading the negotiating delegation of the Postal and Telecommunications Uniformed Staff Union in May 1952. At far right is mail officer P. Govindasamy, who later became an MP.

The
Singapore Standard
was a locally owned newspaper with a much smaller circulation than the pro-British
Straits Times
, but its voice counted in this contest. Many locals read it, forcing some colonial officials to read it as well. In his editorial, Raja took a sardonic swipe at the racial bias of the colonial government, questioning the right of British expatriates to receive better pay than the locals; they had been given $1,000 in expat pay, but the postmen were refused an extra $10 a month.

Meanwhile, the mail piled up, to everyone’s inconvenience. The public had to collect their letters and parcels on their own. In spite of this, the public was for the postmen because of their moderate actions and the statements I drafted for them. Raja’s headlines and editorials in the
Singapore Standard
helped enormously. The Malay newspaper
Utusan Melayu
backed the strikers, for most of the postmen were Malay. So did the Chinese dailies, the
Nanyang Siang Pau
and
Sin Chew Jit Poh
, where many communist sympathisers among their reporters and editors always opposed the government.

The
Straits Times
, on the other hand, was British-owned and run. It had a capable editorial writer, Allington Kennard, who tried to be neutral but found it difficult not to be pro-government.

Raja was enjoying the fight. This was crusading at its best – fighting for the downtrodden masses against a heartless bunch of white colonial exploiters. His polemical style was emphatic. Many years hobnobbing with Indian and West Indian anti-imperialists had given him a heavy touch. My three years of sparring with friendly and sympathetic British students of the Labour Club in Cambridge had given me a different diction, and a preference for the understatement. So we played a duet, Raja strong and vigorous, I courteous, if pointed, always more in sorrow than in anger. I phoned him to make suggestions, relaying reactions from our supporters; he checked his editorial pitch with me. He would bring his galley proofs to my home for discussions, or we would talk on the phone, often well past midnight, just before his paper went to bed. The
Singapore Standard
forced the pace and the establishment paper, the
Straits Times
, had to publish my letters to keep up an appearance of impartiality.

By the end of the first week, popular opinion turned strongly against the administration. British colonial officers had not been accustomed either to presenting their case in order to win public backing, or to dealing with local men who politely showed up their contradictions, weaknesses and cavalier attitudes. Exposure of the high-handedness of the government officers who dealt with the postmen moved other unions to come out in open support of them. Even the secretary-general of the pro-establishment Singapore Trade Union Congress, who was a close associate of Lim Yew Hock and an executive committee member of the Singapore Labour Party, joined the bandwagon. He announced the launching of a fund “to help the postmen to carry on their strike to a successful end”. The
Singapore Standard
invited contributions from the public and collected donations from individual donors.

The government was rattled. The colonial secretary offered “to resume negotiations as soon as the employees return to work”. I replied that if the workers called off their strike and the negotiations then failed again, they would face the prospect of a second strike. “This pattern, if repeated several times, will reduce the strike, the union’s last weapon in collective bargaining, to a farce.”

At a Legislative Council meeting on Wednesday, 20 May, the governor himself warned the postmen that the government would not be forced by strike action into submitting to all their demands. The following day Raja riposted in the
Singapore Standard
:

“For the first time in the history of the trade union movement in this country, the foremost official in the colony has publicly questioned the validity of the strike weapon. Put more bluntly, Mr Nicoll (the governor) says that the government considers pressure through strikes, whether justified or not, whether illegal or not, as something which the government cannot tolerate.”

This hurt. British officials were demoralised by this turn of events. They were taking a pummelling in public. The colonial secretary responded by promising the 500 striking postmen and telegraph messengers that he himself would conduct negotiations with their union representatives if they reported back for work. I persuaded the union leaders to take a fresh position and announced that the strike would be suspended for three days.

That saved the face of the colonial secretary and his officials. Negotiations resumed on 26 May and ended with a satisfactory agreement.

It was the first strike since the Emergency Regulations were introduced in June 1948, and it was conducted completely within the law, with no threats or violence or even disorderly picketing. The fight had been for public support and the union won. After this demonstration of the incompetence of the British colonial officers, the people saw that the government was vulnerable when subjected to scrutiny.