The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (33 page)

“I am a less emotional man, sir. I do not usually cry or tear my hair, or tear paper or tear my shirt off, but this does not mean that I feel
any the less strongly about it. My son is not going to an English school. He will not be a model Englishman. I hope, of course, that he will know enough English to converse with his father on matters other than the weather.”

That was how I felt. It probably went down well with the Chinese-speaking masses. Although Lim Chin Siong and the MCP were not happy with the report itself, they could not attack me openly for supporting it (the voting was 29 ayes and no noes) without provoking a breach in the PAP. On the other hand, the president and vice-president of the Singapore English Teachers’ Union (Chinese Schools) could. They dubbed it “a shameless piece of colonial prudery” (sic) and demanded the appointment of another committee whose members would have a closer understanding of Chinese education. I ignored this statement. The teachers of English in the Chinese schools – underqualified and underpaid – were as much under the influence of the communists as were the Chinese-language teachers.

The MCP was worried about the discipline the government would impose on the Chinese schools. They feared that it would stop the students from being “misused by political groups to overthrow a lawfully constituted government unconstitutionally”. Worse, the English language would open for them a completely different world through newspapers, magazines, literature and films. They would see the world with two eyes, with binocular vision, instead of with only one eye through a Chinese telescope. I had to take a position that would not allow the communists to denounce me as a deculturalised Chinaman. Had I taken a false step on this issue, I would have lost out. If they could show that I preferred English to Chinese as the more important medium of instruction in the schools, it would be impossible for me to retain the respect and support of the Chinese-speaking ground.

In mid-1955, I had sent Loong at the age of three and a half to Nanyang Kindergarten, which taught in Chinese. When I visited it later
with the all-party committee, the Chinese press carried a picture of him in the kindergarten, making it widely known that he was being educated in Chinese. My determination that my three children should be educated in the language and culture of their ancestors gave me credentials that the communists could never impugn. My two younger children, Wei Ling and Hsien Yang, followed Loong to Nanyang Kindergarten and on to Nanyang Primary School. Later, Loong and Yang went to the Catholic High School, while Ling continued in Nanyang Girls’ High School. They were completely Chinese-educated, but because they spoke English at home with their mother, they became equally fluent in English. And with tuition in Malay, from the age of six, they mastered a third language.

While people in Singapore were distracted by Marshall’s recurring crises, troubled by the unrest in the schools and industrial strife in the work place, events were taking place in Malaya that were to alter the future of the island.

13. A Flasco in London

Tunku Abdul Rahman, the leader of the Malay party, UMNO, in the Federation of Malaya, was the opposite of David Marshall. He was completely consistent and reliable. He did not pretend to be clever but was a shrewd judge of people. Most important of all, he understood power. His father had been Sultan of Kedah, and from the shadow of his father’s throne he had learnt how to wield it to get men to do what he wanted of them. As a royal prince himself, he had the unqualified support of the rulers of the nine Malay states of the Federation who had opposed the British government’s proposal for a Malayan Union in 1946. Best of all, he was genuinely pro-British and anti-communist. He had spent nine years of his youth in England as a student, three years reading law at Cambridge, where he was quite literally given a degree, and six more trying – but never very hard – to pass his Bar examinations. He enjoyed life and often told me about the wonderful times he had had in England. In him, the British found a leader who commanded solid backing from the Malays and good support from the Chinese and Indians.

In July 1955, the Federation held a general election in which an alliance of UMNO, the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC) swept the board. The Tunku and some of his colleagues then became members of the British High Commissioner’s Executive Council; as in Singapore, they now had limited self-government, but unlike our ministers they were quite happy to work with colonial appointees. One important difference was that they were fighting a communist guerrilla insurrection that could be put down only with the help of British, Australian and New Zealand forces, and the
British required that the Emergency should end before independence was granted.

In January 1956, the Tunku went to London for a constitutional conference, and on his way from Singapore to England aboard the Italian liner
Asia
told the press he did not agree with Marshall that Singapore should enjoy equal status in any alliance between them. If Singapore were granted equal status, “it would alarm the Malays on the mainland. The British separated the two territories primarily to protect the interests of the Malays in the Federation.” However, he agreed with the PAP that discussions should be opened between leaders of Singapore and the Federation on a future alliance. In his lead paragraph in the
Singapore Standard
, Raja interpreted “future alliance” to mean “future merger”. Raja could not have been more wrong.

The Tunku had something different in mind, not a union of the two territories but “an alliance”, an arrangement between two separate entities. He did not want Singapore as a state in Malaya because it would upset the racial balance in Malaya. Nor did he want Singapore as an independent state equal to Malaya. He wanted the British to stay in control of a Singapore with self-government, and an alliance with a non-sovereign Singapore government. Unfortunately, time was running out for such arrangements. The British knew it; the Tunku did not.

Alan Lennox-Boyd had visited Kuala Lumpur in August 1955 to assess the situation and the Tunku himself. He found in the Tunku someone he could trust, and granted him his date for independence, 31 August 1957. Furthermore, with immediate effect from the end of the constitutional conference in February 1956, the Tunku took over all the portfolios in the Executive Council from British officials and Malaya became
de facto
a self-governing state.

The Federation’s political advance altered the outlook for Singapore. Up to then there had been a chance that Malaya would not be granted
independence until Singapore was first a part of it. Now Singapore was out on a limb. The British plan was to have an independent Malaya with Malays in charge – Malays who would nevertheless need them for some time to help govern the country and fight the communists – while they kept Singapore as a colony indefinitely because of its strategic value to Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Singapore was likely to become at best a self-governing territory with all the trappings of independence but without real sovereignty, and the last word on defence, security and foreign policy would stay in British hands.

Marshall’s reaction to this was predictable: he was spurred into pressing for the maximum at the constitutional talks due to open in London on 23 April. If he had the chance, he would go for full sovereignty. He would exact complete independence from the British and so be on an equal footing with the Tunku. However, Singapore would sign an agreement guaranteeing the British their bases and giving Britain a decisive voice in foreign affairs. In short, he would have it both ways. With a little encouragement from his friends, including Ong Eng Guan, the treasurer of the PAP, he launched a “Merdeka Week” to collect signatures from the public and demonstrate the massive support there was for independence (
merdeka
in Malay) and for himself as its champion. Because his coalition government was known to be weak, he also decided to take to London a delegation representing all parties for a show of their unity on this issue.

He had been there in December 1955 and was then so encouraged by his meetings with British MPs and ministers that he told the British press there were no more “Colonial Blimps”, something he thought worth repeating in the Legislative Assembly on his return to Singapore. He also persuaded all parties to agree that he invite a delegation of Conservative and Labour MPs to visit Singapore during Merdeka Week, which was to climax in a rally on Sunday, 18 March 1956 at Kallang Airport. Some 170,000 signatures were meanwhile collected, and a photo opportunity
organised featuring enormous bound volumes to be presented by the all-party delegation to the House of Commons as proof of Singapore’s desire for independence.

Six British MPs came, the Labour group led by Herbert Morrison, who had been home secretary in the first Labour government in 1945–50 and number two to Prime Minister Clement Attlee. We met them informally at social functions, and I spent one evening with them at a nightclub in the Capitol Building. The main event was a semi-striptease dance show, inappropriate for a delegation that had come with the serious purpose of assessing our maturity, our burning desire for independence, and our capability to manage it. But to my surprise, Morrison enjoyed himself. He was in a holiday mood, and in his cheerful, chirpy, cockney way he made wisecracks about what he had seen. He did not believe that there was a great burning desire for independence among the mass of the people in Singapore, but shrewdly observed that there was a powerful and well-organised secret group that was manipulating the trade unions, the students, and many others. He might have wanted me to protest, but I did not disabuse him of his views.

When the day of the Merdeka rally arrived, I drove to Kallang with Choo, parked the car some distance away from the airport building, and walked to a platform that had been erected in an open field off the runway. It was a sultry afternoon – I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt – but some 25,000 people waited for about an hour until five o’clock, when Marshall arrived in his open convertible. He drove straight to the platform on which Chin Chye, Ong Eng Guan and I were already standing, and once up there with us, gave the Merdeka salute with a clenched fist. The crowd surged towards him, some of them mounting the stage, which, having been hastily and flimsily constructed of wooden beams and planks, promptly collapsed. The public address system then failed, so that for a few minutes no one could speak to them. When one microphone finally came alive again, I told a section of the crowd to
behave themselves, that some “devils” were up to no good among them, while a gesticulating Marshall talked into another microphone that was still dead.

Shortly after this, when the British MPs arrived, Morrison said to Marshall, “Sorry to hear you have got a collapsible stage.” They never went out to it, but were shown into the two-storey airport building and introduced to the crowd from the upper balcony. They had been reluctant to come, but Marshall had persuaded them that the people were friendly and they need not fear for their safety. Now he tapped the delegation leader, the Conservative Jeffrey Lloyd, on the back and said, “I think you should all nip out quietly.” Lloyd and his party quickly left.

I failed to get the crowd to quieten down, and Lim Chin Siong, speaking in Mandarin and Hokkien, was equally unsuccessful. This was not one of Lim’s organised rallies. This was the
hoi polloi
, and his cheerleaders were not in control. Ong Eng Guan suggested that if we got them to sing, they would not become violent. He took a microphone from Lim and belted out
We Love Malaya
, after which came the communist song
Unity is Strength
, sung to the tune of
John Brown’s Body
. Then it started to drizzle. I signalled Choo to get the car. She brought it as close to the platform as she safely could, and we drove off.

There was no way anybody could have controlled that crowd. They had become a mob. Soon people were throwing bricks through the glass windows of the airport building, then hundreds dashed forward to bang and shake its metal gates, and but for the arrival of police reinforcements would have captured it. When the police broke them up, they scattered in small groups, rampaging through the nearby streets and stoning a St John’s Brigade ambulance treating the injured. By about seven o’clock, order had been restored, but 50 people had been hurt, among them 20 policemen.