Out in the Midday Sun Read online

  Seeking confirmation that the British were indispensable, Isabella Bird asked her Kling boatman what brought so many migrants voluntarily to Malaya ‘from the Red to the Yellow Sea’. He answered without hesitation. ‘“Empress good – coolie get money; keep it.” This being interpreted is, that all these people enjoy absolute security of life and property under our flag.’ On the other hand, she had the acumen to realize that ‘This is by no means to write that the Malays love us, for I doubt whether the entente cordiale between any of the dark-skinned Oriental races and ourselves is more than skin deep.’67 Emily Innes agreed. ‘Malays – the patriotic ones – do not love us; why should they?’ Why, indeed. A deep chasm lay between the civilizations of Europe and Asia, with all the possibility of racial intolerance. Tunku Chi of Selangor ‘hated the English … with all her heart’ for having ‘civilised’ her husband, the Viceroy.68

  The ‘inscrutable Chinee’ was not just a popular theatrical stereotype: to many British colonials he was a genuine enigma. After a river excursion into Perak’s tin-mining country, where he observed the Chinese at work, a young government officer wrote home, ‘They are a most extraordinary people. I cannot understand them at all yet and they always smile with a smile that is childlike and bland and with few exceptions one can never believe one word they say.’69 Isabella Bird discovered part of the explanation. In a frank exchange with a Chinese acquaintance whom she considered both able and highly educated, she was told that the Chinese (with the possible exception of the Babas) regarded the British as ‘the incarnation of brute force allied to brute vices!’ As for the Malay people, she wrote, ‘we do not understand them, or they us, and where they happen to be Mohammedans, there is a gulf of contempt and dislike on their part which is rarely bridged by amenities on ours’.70 Only the Tamil Indians and Ceylonese showed blind admiration for Europeans.

  The responsibility for racial harmony lay unquestionably with the British administration, although, as products of the age of nationalism, officers dearly thought in terms of racial stereotypes, as one of them revealed:

  the Malays are far more reasonable [than the Irish] but just as cunning and tell more lies. I am beginning to like the Chinese in a sort of way they are as obstinate as pigs and are always in court with paltry cases; as to paltry cases the Klings are the worst and they are all regular lawyers and never speak the truth by accident.71

  However, ‘If I may venture an opinion,’ stated Isabella Bird firmly:

  all Colonial authorities in their dealings with native races, all Residents and their subordinates, and all transactions between ourselves and the weak peoples of the Far East, would be better for having ‘the fierce light which beats upon a throne’ turned upon them. The good have nothing to fear, the bad would be revealed in their badness, and hasty counsels and ambitious designs would be held in check.72

  Whatever the prejudices and shortcomings of the British, a visit to Saigon in 1861 convinced Franklin Kendall, a shipping assistant with P. & O., that as colonial administrators they were far superior to the French:

  ‘The French … do not understand what they are doing at all … They seem to delight in harassing and annoying the natives as much as they can. They knock down their houses, burn their rice, make them work like so many convicts … and stop all their trade. Their only idea is ‘La Gloire’ … Then again, they don’t look after their own men at all; they make them work in the sun without awnings, lie down on the damp ground without tents, pay them very badly and feed them worse … The way too in which business is mismanaged and the public money squandered is so patent to any sound-thinking man … I do not mean to say that we English are by any means immaculate, but we have a semblance at any rate of management and order in the way we do things, which Johnny Crapaud has not.73

  Two decades later Isabella Bird heard that Saigon ‘has the wild ambition to propose to itself to be a second Singapore!’ – a preposterous idea, since on the Mekong dockside ‘nothing looked very busy’ and ‘the cafés were full of Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Germans, smoking and dozing with their feet upon tables’. During her walkabout there, Isabella came across a young French artillery officer who was ‘eloquent upon the miseries of Saigon’. Swiftly she decided, ‘I do not envy the French their colony.’74 The English, however, were admired by their European rivals. In a conversation with the French Ambassador, the German Chancellor Karl von Billow is said to have remarked, ‘My dear Ambassador … You know very well that if we both were condemned to spend the rest of our lives in a colony, you wouldn’t live in a German one and I certainly shouldn’t live in a French one. We’d both choose an English one.’75 Faced with different Asian cultures and with an existing system of native rulers in the Malay States, the British responded to the challenge of colonial government by introducing into Malaya their own notions of justice, policing and ways of life, and the whole mental paraphernalia of a ‘self-confident culture, convinced of its superiority and its “civilised” status’.76

  But the last word, like the first, should perhaps belong to that astute eyewitness Isabella Bird. In her judgement, the other powers were ‘almost nowhere in this strange Far East’. She had no doubt about Britain’s place in the world at the height of the Victorian era. With apologies for sounding ‘hifalutin’, she wrote with conspicuous pride and all the moral certainty of a nineteenth-century Imperialist:

  Russia, France, Germany and America, the whole lot of the ‘Great Powers’ are represented chiefly by a few second-rate warships, or shabby consulates in back streets, while England is ‘a name to be conjured with’, and is represented by prosperous colonies, powerful protective forces, law, liberty, and security. These ideas are forced on me as I travel westward.77

  2

  Pioneers and Progress

  From the 1880s Malaya was gripped by an enterprise fever that affected many parts of the globe in the late nineteenth century. A free immigration policy drew in Asian immigrants to fill the labour void. Tin was still the magnet of opportunity for thousands of Chinese, and the race to develop the Perak tinfields of the Kinta valley foreshadowed the Klondike gold rush. Shiploads of Tamils from southern India and hundreds of Javanese came as indented estate labourers. In other fields, too, opportunities expanded. Jaffna Tamils from Ceylon filled clerical posts or laboured on the railways; Sikhs, Punjabis, Bengalis and Pathans found positions as watchmen and police, or in transport and business. Europeans learned of new openings in established agencies or fledgling companies which seemed to offer attractive prospects for engineers, managers, administrators, salesmen, shippers and professional experts. They were still a small fraction of the population, a modest 6,500 in 1901, of whom three-quarters were residents of Singapore and Penang. Who were these pioneers from Europe, what brought them across the globe in search of work, and what did they achieve?

  The Malays did not distinguish between Europeans, regarding them all as simply ‘orang puteh’ – ‘white men’. In fact the majority – about 85 per cent – came from the British Isles. They were predominantly young, unmarried men, sons of the middle classes: officers and officials, soldiers and sailors, professional or skilled men, men with no formal qualifications, men with university degrees, public-school men, set to become so-called boxwallahs, officewallahs, junglewallahs and competition-wallahs.1 Of the others, a small number came from continental Europe, from farming, mining or seagoing backgrounds. A few were Americans of European ancestry. Some were of settler stock from the Dominions – Australians and New Zealanders. A proportion came from other parts of the Empire. A stream of Ceylon planters, for instance, arrived at the beginning of the century. To take an example, Bill Fairlie was a Scotsman who began as a coffee planter in East Africa. He moved to Ceylon, where he planted tea for twelve years, and finally came to Malaya, ending by managing a tea estate in the Cameron Highlands.2

  This diverse body of expatriates disembarked at Penang or Singapore to join a European merchant class in the Straits Settlements that was considered a well-integrate
d, gregarious, international community, with ‘none of that abominable clique system of Bombay or Calcutta’ which a young shipping assistant, Franklin Kendall, had encountered before transferring to Singapore.3 Young men experienced the camaraderie of living in communal lodgings or messes. Non-British Europeans turned for company to their consulates.4 At the same time the British, having imported the old Regency tradition of social and sports clubs, relaxed and mingled in a range of institutions, such as the Singapore Club or the Tanglin Club, founded in the 1860s, or the newer golf and swimming clubs established in the 1890s.

  Some social changes appeared after the Straits Settlements became a Crown Colony, in 1867. Official circles grew in size and self-importance; governors were conscious of their position as representatives of the Queen. By 1880 colonial officialdom was somewhat stuffy, according to Isabella Bird – imbued with a ‘high sense of honour’ and a ‘righteous esprit de corps which characterises our civil servants in the Far East’, though, travelling in a semi-official capacity, she appreciated the advantages to be gained from this enhanced status.5 In particular, she was struck by the conviviality she encountered everywhere among the Malays: ‘Their hospitality was very graceful. Many of the wealthier Mohammedans, though they don’t drink wine, keep it for their Christian guests, and they offered us champagne’, while her Chinese host in Larut ‘in anticipation of our visit … had conveyed champagne, sherry, and bitter beer!’ Government officers received a social allowance, so they were obliged to entertain fellow Europeans even in jungle outstations; but it was a duty that was taken seriously. One of the few compliments Emily Innes ever paid the Resident of Selangor was that he was hospitable; and Isabella Bird was also grateful to his gracious wife, who, despite a lack of facilities, managed to produce an excellent English afternoon tea: ‘Before we left [Klang] Mrs Douglas gave me tea, scones, and fresh butter, the first fresh butter that I have tasted for ten months.’6 Friendly behaviour became a tradition in Malaya. As a resident of Penang, Gerald Mugliston, recalled ‘the good fellow, and sportsmanship and the hospitality among the European community, and the wish, from highest to the most lowly, to try to do everything possible to help a youngster on his way’.7 Sometimes cultural differences between Europeans were the subject of gossip or jest among them, but they rarely caused friction before the First World War. Rivalry and sectarian differences mattered little. So when the tiny Christian congregation in Klang gathered for Sunday service one evening in 1879, the hymn, ‘“I heard the voice of Jesus say”, was sung with equal enjoyment by Catholics and Protestants in the wilds of the Golden Chersonese’.8

  Forty years earlier scarcely a European had been seen in Province Wellesley, and even in the 1850s ‘there was only one white man to be found in the interior between Singapore and Bangkok’.9 The fact that the first European pioneer in the region was a Frenchman made no difference to the British. Leopold Chasseriau enjoyed a unique reputation for boldness and initiative. Born in Bordeaux in 1825, he began as a sugar planter in Mauritius before moving to pastures new in Malaya around 1848. First he opened up a plantation in Province Wellesley, the Jawee Estate, but over a drink with an Englishman he then bought several thousand acres of jungle around Ayer Rendang in northern Malaya. A descendant tells his story:

  Having picked up a partner on the way, Great-Grandfather set off at once with a gang of men and elephants to clear his newly acquired property … Pirates, alerted by the bush telegraph, were awaiting them by a bend in the [Batu Kawan] river, and the poor partner, taken by surprise, was struck through the heart with a kris, and that was the end of his adventures. But Great-Grandfather was ready with his pistol, and within a few minutes the corpses of the pirates were drifting down the river, escorted by a fleet of hungry crocodiles. Undeterred, he carried on with his pioneering alone, and from then on, continually called upon by Rajahs of the surrounding states to restore order, he became, willy nilly, the policeman of Northern Malaya, marching his battalion of armed men and elephants wherever a new war broke out.10

  After several years, Leopold Chasseriau returned to France to find a wife and brought back his imperturbable seventeen-year-old bride, fresh from her convent, to his estate, renamed Malakoff after the key fortress captured by the French in the Crimean War. There he grew sugar cane and tapioca. Although she was probably the only Western woman in the whole of Malaya’s interior, Madame Chasseriau took to pioneering like a trooper. It seemed as natural to sleep at night with a pistol under her pillow as to stable war-weary elephants in the garden and to use her bungalow as an emergency hospital for locals wounded in fights. Meanwhile, the indefatigable Leopold, tall and strong as an ox, combined the role of the Malay rulers and the future British Residents in the Malay States. He ‘suppressed the bandits and administered justice, and if a few corpses were hanging from the surrounding trees by the end of the morning session, there were no complaints. His methods and his justice were feudal and effective.’11 After a further long spell in France the Chasseriaus returned again to Malaya in the 1870s, sold Malakoff, and settled down instead on a thousand acres of newly cleared jungle on the island of Singapore. Then, like a true entrepreneur, Leopold struck a bargain with the Governor, Sir Andrew Clarke. In return for a concession of another 2,000 acres he offered to clear the town streets of its human refuse. Every day at dawn a train of forty bullock carts and 500 men left the Chasseriau estate on Bukit Timah Road to bring back the ‘odiferous but invaluable fertilizer’. His crops of coconuts, sugar cane, tapioca and coffee flourished, and to play safe he ‘kept tigers on the estate to gobble up the jungle pigs who root up the tapioca tubers’.12

  In the frenetic climate of pioneering, fortunes were quickly made and lost. Until mining techniques changed dramatically in the twentieth century, the Chinese used cheap, labour-intensive methods to dominate tin production. Attempts in the 1880s by European prospectors and companies to break into mining in Perak and Selangor fell down on cost-effectiveness, and by 1892 their efforts had all but failed. The sole option was the Society of Kinta Tin Mines, which was the first to operate in Kinta and also built the first hydroelectric power-station in Perak around the turn of the century. Meanwhile, other industries were developing. A formidable Dutchman, Theodore Cornelis Bogaardt, who joined the British agents Mansfield & Co. in 1872, was succeeding in his shipping ventures with the Straits Steamship Company and the Blue Funnel Line. Danish sea captains made a niche for themselves in coastal steamer traffic. A German, Herman Muhlinghaus, was co-founder with a Scotsman, James Sword, of the powerful Straits Trading Company, which owned smelting works in Province Wellesley and on the island of Pulau Brani in Singapore harbour.

  The German pioneers were unquestionably a thrusting group. The German house Behn Meyer, founded in 1840, became one of the most famous in the East. With offices in Singapore and Penang, from the 1880s it held the agency for the prominent German shipping line Norddeutscher Lloyd. The high profile of the Germans impressed the Mancunian Edwin Brown, who travelled out in 1901 on Norddeutscher’s SS Hamburg to join Brinkmann & Co., and became one of only two Englishmen in the Singapore branch. In no time he became acquainted with members of the other leading companies: Huttenbach Bros, Kumpers & Co., Puttfarcken & Co., Schiffmann Heer, Rautenberg, Schmidt & Co. and of course, Behn Meyer. Germany’s commercial presence had been steadily growing over half a century (especially in the years since Isabella Bird had made her disparaging remarks about other European powers), but the portents were already there in 1860 when the shipper Franklin Kendall began to feel outnumbered. ‘Talk about Australia being full of Scotchmen, what would anybody say of Singapore? Jellicoe [his colleague in the P. & O. office] and I are almost the only two Englishmen in the place, the rest being with very few exceptions about 75% Scotch and 25%Germans.’13

  His tongue-in-cheek remark said a lot about the composition of Singapore’s commercial sector, which had a marked and enduring Scottish presence. The Scots’ invasion of the East had begun in the 1720s and was confirmed later in the cent
ury when Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, recruited large numbers of his fellow countrymen to the East India Company. The Scots in the East were proud of their nationhood. Penang had been ‘quite appropriated by the Scotch’, a visitor observed.14 But Scottish celebrations were held throughout the Straits Settlements. In Singapore, ‘New Year’s Eve was always a very hilarious and noisy evening. There were so many Scots … that Hogmanay and First Footing was carried on with all the Scottish traditions and drink’, while Burns Night and St Andrew’s Day were occasions for ‘highly exaggerated exhibitions of Scottishness peculiar to the Scot in exile … They are the necessities of life to the exile, these festivities, with their fantastic meals of haggis, Atholl brose, salt herring, all of them manufactured apparently for export to places such as Penang.’15

  To keep their end up, Penang’s English community celebrated St George’s Day with equal enthusiasm, inviting all their Scottish friends to a grand ball at the Town Hall. For all their clannishness, the Scots were much admired. The Jaffna Tamils, an ‘industrious, thrifty, conservative, intelligent, morally earnest’ people, actually cherished being called the ‘Scotsmen of the East’;16 and an Englishman, looking back over his Malayan career, marvelled at the providential impact of the Scots. I’m astonished and struck by the fact of the large number of Scotsmen with whom I’ve been great friends,’ he added.17