Out in the Midday Sun Read online

  A scan of the leading companies in the Straits Settlements makes clear Scotland’s contribution to Malaya. The best known, Guthrie’s – founded in 1821 by Alexander Guthrie – was managed for the duration of the century by a trio of dynamic Scotsmen: James Guthrie, Thomas Scott and John Anderson. It was the longest surviving company in Malaya, but there were plenty of other influential firms with Scottish associations – A. L. Johnston & Co., managed by the Scots-born William Henry Read (in partnership with Robert Bain and James Cunison Drysdale), Syme & Co., Fraser & Co., McAlister & Co. and Paterson, Simons & Co., to name a few. Typically, the Scots provided the first two governing Residents of Singapore: Colonel William Farquhar of the Madras Engineers and Dr John Crawford, once of the East India Company medical service. Malaya’s best-known hill stations, Fraser’s Hill and Cameron Highlands, bear Scottish names. In a nautical context, Captain John Blair of Alloa – ‘as honest good a Scotsman as ever left the land of cakes’ – became Manager of Singapore’s Tanjong Pagar docks in 1866, while in 1880 rare visitors to Selangor included Scottish engineers of small coasting steamers.18

  With the opening up of the Malay States to commercial exploitation, a steady flow of Scots planters, young ‘creepers’, surveyors and engineers came to build roads or plant rubber.19 None took to pioneering better than Jimmy Irvine, who was greatly admired in his adopted home town of Penang. He sailed from Clydeside in 1873, and within a short time was

  the friend of Malay sultans, owner of an engineering business, maker of bridges, roads in the jungle, planter of padi fields, builder of wharves on the rivers. He had fought in the Perak Wars, started a steamship service, founded a ship chandlers’ and contractors’ business, and yet had time to become a great authority on the natural history of the peninsula.20

  Irvine represented the post-Pangkor generation of pioneers, as did Grant Mackie, a Scot ‘of great character in whom the spirit of adventure was strong’. Born in 1852, he was a son of the manse who began his Malayan career as a road constructor but after many years in the country struck tin and became extremely rich. Grant was a contemporary of James McClymont, a Girvan lad who began as a clerk on the Port Dickson–Seremban railway and rose to be General Manager of the Sungei Ujong Railway, meanwhile acquiring a large fortune from investments in rubber and other ventures.21

  In the 1890s coffee planting became the fashion, but after 1900 a new wave of pioneers came to develop rubber. Possibly as many as one-third of these planters were Scottish, though whether, as Somerset Maugham implied, they spoke in a broad, unintelligible accent is a moot point. Scottish directors sometimes selected educated lads from modest but respectable backgrounds – though many had been to English or Scottish public schools: Bruce Lockhart, for instance, went to Fettes, his best friend, Freddie Cunningham, to Glenalmond before coming out East in 1907.22 There were a number like James McClymont, who spoke with a broad Girvan tongue, or the manager of a Kedah estate who had a chip on his shoulder about arrogant English public-school ‘creepers’; although those same English subordinates admired their boss as an ‘utterly fearless Scottish highlander … the soul of honesty and conscientiousness’ and a dab hand with a 22-bore rifle to boot.23 Estates such as Lauderdale in Perak, Caledonia in Province Wellesley, Highlands and Lowlands and Lothian in Selangor advertised their Scottish ownership; names like Watson, Duncan, Findlay and Macfadyen recall the many early Scottish proprietors. In the more obscure role of estates’ doctor, Dr Malcolm Watson made his name as a noted malariologist while carrying out valuable research on the habits of mosquitoes on the rubber plantations around Klang, Selangor. In the opinion of an English planter, ‘without Watson’s brilliant discoveries and leadership the plantation industry in Malaya would never have survived’.24 Scotsmen could be found in the remotest places. In 1913 the minuscule community of Kuala Klawang in Jelebu (‘an enchanting little mountain nest’) included two mine owners called Macgregor and Hamilton (the latter Bruce Lockhart’s cousin) and two mine managers, Laidlaw of the Titi tin mine and Ross of the Kenaboi gold and silver mine.25 And the list of notable Scots Malayans could run on and on. It was a time when dozens braved 8,000 miles at sea – an ‘awesomely hazardous’ voyage – knowing little of what to expect at journey’s end, for ‘A man might never return from tropical exile.’26

  James H. Drysdale was another of these determined pioneers. Despite a family connection with Malaya, he succeeded through his own initiative.

  I arrived in Singapore in March 1872 as fourth engineer of the SS Tanah Merah after rather a long voyage, having sailed from the Tail of the Bank [Clyde] on New Year’s morning at 3 o’clock, and run into a gale in the Irish Channel, which compelled us to run back to Belfast for repairs. As three engineers were the full complement for a steamer of her size running on the coast, I was dumped on Tanjong Pagar wharf with all my belongings, namely an old-fashioned carpet bag of clothes and ten bright guineas in my pocket, to make a career for myself in the East. Fortunately I was gifted with a nature which made me tackle any work that was given me with right good will.27

  Variations on his unceremonious landing and uncertain future were enacted time and time again. A missionary teacher never forgot the empty feeling of being ‘a lonely stranger at Tanjong Pagar’ after disembarking from a P. & O. liner.28 It was the sight of the coaling station which overwhelmed Maurice Hillier when he reached Singapore on Christmas morning, 1887:

  Torrential rain was falling from a leaden sky as we entered the harbour … I looked from my porthole on to a dirty, shabby wharf, covered with sodden stacks of coal, backed by a row of dingy sheds. There was not a soul to meet me, and the outlook was miserable in the extreme. I waited awhile, but as no one turned up, eventually managed to secure for myself a ramshackle gharry, and behind a wretched little pony with an air of dejection altogether in keeping with my own spirits, made my way along the Tanjong Pagar Road to the town. Any Old Timer in Singapore will know that I got no glimpse of the promised paradise along that dreary stretch, and my heart was in my boots.

  Fortunately, once inside his hotel Hillier met a holiday atmosphere which dispelled his depression, and later he discovered a certain beauty in his surroundings. ‘The green sward of the esplanade with the trees and the cathedral spire in the background made an unforgettable picture.’29

  Those who had company on the outward voyage were less aware of loneliness. Travelling out with Christopher Harrison on board P. & O.’s SS Syria to Penang in 1907 were four other young Englishmen: one a lawyer who built up a practice in Ipoh, and three would-be planters like himself. Harrison was all too conscious of his immaturity: ‘I was only 18 and very pink and white!’30 At much the same time another eighteen-year-old creeper went out on the SS India to Penang. Leopold Ainsworth was another public-school boy, but he arrived alone, knowing no one and with ‘nothing to help me on my way except for ten pounds in my pocket, and a five years’ contract for service on a rubber and coconut plantation in the native Malay state of Kedah’.31 Within a space of hours, Ainsworth experienced grandeur and bathos in quick succession. The beauty of Penang touched him deeply, but he was soon brought down to earth when he ate his first meal at the estate manager’s home. The first course consisted of tinned soup with a crust of dead ants. This was followed by tinned soft roes on toast, tasteless but badly fried in coconut oil. Next came a kind of tinned beef, ‘exquisitely tough and stringy and flavoured with a sharp metallic tang’. In place of bread he was given ‘large dry biscuits of the dog variety, very hard and tasting of cardboard and straw’. The smell and taste of the semi-molten tinned butter was indescribable. The final course, banana fritters, looked better but was ruined by the flavour of coconut oil, and the whole meal ended with coffee, ‘its horrible flavour due to the cook’s invariable habit of using one of the manager’s socks as a strainer’.32

  After this inauspicious beginning, while he worked for £15 per month, Ainsworth, like Drysdale, began to find Malaya a congenial place. He branched out on his own, starting as a p
lanter with thirty acres of his own land under rubber, then becoming successively an independent factory owner, rubber trader and surveyor, before returning latterly to rubber planting as the Manager of a 5,000-acre estate in Kedah owned by a large American firm.33 Drysdale, meanwhile, had married the daughter of an English doctor, a humanitarian pioneer in Borneo. In time they had four children, and, apart from home leave, they put their roots down in Singapore. He forged a career in a newly established firm of engineers, founders, and bridge – and shipbuilders. Messrs Riley & Hargreaves expanded and diversified until it had five branches in the Far East and employed up to l,000 men. James Drysdale became the Manager of the company’s central store in Singapore.34

  Similarities may be drawn, but there was no single profile of the pioneer. Ainsworth and Harrison, public-schoolboy planters, were no more typical than Drysdale, the Scots engineer, or Franklin Kendall, the P. & O. assistant from an ancient Cornish naval family. According to hearsay,

  In the early days … when Malaya was being opened up, the men who went out from Britain to work there were all kinds, rich, poor, honest, dishonest. These early pioneers either passed quickly from sight or they eventually retired home with, very often, a considerable Fortune – acquired by ‘Fair means or Foul’. Having got home they then became ‘big noises’ in the City.35

  A sizeable number came because they had family contacts or school friends in service in India or Ceylon, if not in Malaya itself. Colonial life and service ran through generations. In addition to the well-known names – Maxwell, Birch, Clementi, Braddell – there were many other examples of Malayan dynasties.

  The Blundell–Newton connection began with the Hon. Edmund Blundell, Governor of the Straits Settlements from 1855 to 1859, who had started his career in 1821 with the East India Company in Penang. His daughter married Kenneth Bruce Stuart Robertson, Singapore’s Deputy Commissioner of Police, and their daughter married a direct descendant of Isaac Newton, the legendary scientist and mathematician. Howard Newton (whose name was given to Newton Crescent and Circus, and a station on the Singapore–Kranji railway line in 1903) served in Singapore’s Municipal Engineers Department for almost twenty years, until 1895.36 In turn, two of Howard Newton’s daughters married into prominent Singapore families, the Maysons and the Griffith-Joneses.

  John Theophilus, who worked in Malaya for forty years, recalled his and his first wife’s Malayan antecedents:

  Around the 1860s Colonel Talbot was in charge of the garrison in Singapore, and he had to my knowledge, three sons and a daughter; and a young cadet called Frank Swettenham came – who eventually of course was Sir Frank … Well, old Colonel Talbot and his wife were very good to Swettenham, and he helped these three Talbot chaps when they grew up. All of them came out here. It was the end of the eighties, I suppose. One of them was head Policeman and President of the Lake Club in Kuala Lumpur – you will see on the board here, from 1903 to 1908, I think; that’s the eldest one, Henry Talbot. Jack Talbot was an accountant; and he ended up as Accountant-General; and the third one … was a District Officer. Now, my first wife’s parents got married in Taiping. Her mother was a Miss Scott, who came out with her cousin, Miss Talbot, both unmarried ladies; and this Captain Edye of the Malay States Guides, he heard that Miss Scott had money and he said, I’m going to marry her!’, and he jolly well did! Miss Talbot then met a fellow called Evan Cameron who was running the Straits Trading Company in Seremban, and Evan married Miss Talbot … There was a certain Edward Merriweather [sic]. He came out in the early nineties or late eighties, but he ended up in 1915 as Chief Secretary, Singapore, and he was knighted then: Sir Edward Merriweather. He was a distant cousin of my family – my mother’s side of the family … His wife was a Miss Braddell – you may have heard the name. The Braddells were a Singapore family, generations of them.37

  Another distinguished figure was E.W. F. Gilman, who retired in 1931 as Resident Councillor of Penang after thirty-two years’ service. He had connections on both sides of the family with early pioneers. His great-grandfather, John Gilman, had been an East India merchant. His grandfather, Dr Oxley, whose name is commemorated in Oxley Road and Oxley Rise, rose to be Senior Surgeon and Sheriff of the Settlements. Another notable pioneer family were the Russells. In the 1880s seven of them disembarked at the port on the Klang river and made their way by gharry to Kuala Lumpur. ‘My grandfather came out as a Government printer, and he was for a number of years editor of the Selangor Journal,’ recalled a third-generation Russell, who came to Malaya in 1953.

  And then he was the first editor of the Malay Mail; and he had five sons … and these boys were apparently the first English family to be brought up in Kuala Lumpur … The sons were brought up rather in the Chinese fashion, being educated in different things. The eldest boy, George, was an engineer; Phil was an architect, Don was a mining engineer, and my father [Archie] … made finance his particular field. They started a partnership and they constructed roads from one place to another, and they built the railway station in Kuala Lumpur; and Phil, the architect, certainly designed some of the buildings here, too, like the old Hong Kong Bank building, which was where J. A. Russell and Company had their first office.38

  The Crawford family played the part in the tin and rubber industries that the Russells were to play in tea. ‘They were all true pioneers, and became experts in their particular fields by the gradual accumulation of hard-earned knowledge.’39 When James Richard Crawford, an engineer, arrived in Perak in 1885 Sir Hugh Low was Resident. The family connection with Perak was to last ninety years. After a spell in construction work he made Ipoh his base, invested in a plot of jungle off the Gopeng Road, and built a family house in 1905. ‘He could have owned half of Ipoh!’ exclaimed his son.40 By 1910 he had his own foundry business. Malaya was on the brink of an economic boom. He sold his business and went into rubber instead, but also bought the Ulu Piah tin mine in partnership with his brother Robert and two Frenchmen. The venture paid off handsomely and paid for his children’s education.

  Undoubtedly many Europeans were attracted by the hope of quick profits, others by the lure of space and of the unknown. And the prospect of an outdoor life drew some from industrialized England. Robert Munro, ‘a cheerful, sporting soul’, threw up a career as an insurance broker in the City to take up the quiet life of a planter at Jugra in Selangor.41 Freddie Cunningham was encouraged to leave Scotland because he was ‘the so-called brainless son of the family’.42 A few, like the Polish-born mariner Joseph Conrad, arrived by chance – in Conrad’s case, after the barque on which he was sailing caught fire in the Indian Ocean. Oliver Marks, a Ceylon tea planter, happened to visit Malaya in 1890 with his cricket team. He gave such a brilliant performance on the sports field that he was offered a job in the Civil Service, decided to accept, and rose in twenty years to be Resident in Selangor. Misfits from English society often found their niche in Malaya. ‘A good many of the men here are regular rolling stones who have at last landed in well-paid billets here.’43 And, in a cruel jibe, a senior manager told his junior, ‘Some people come out to Malaya as planters because they would be unemployable elsewhere.’44 Former naval and army officers were taken into government service. Curiously, the old landed Catholic families of England, whom history had consigned to the role of social and political outcasts since the Reformation, also found a new raison d’etre as colonial servants. From their ranks came several respected administrators, including a Governor of the colony, Sir Frederick Weld, and two of his relatives, F. J. Weld and Sir Hugh Clifford. Indeed at one time so prominent was the Catholic caucus that there were mutterings of anti-Protestant discrimination in Singapore!45

  There are two common perceptions of the pioneers. One is that they were just ordinary men and women caught up in an extraordinary world; the other is that they needed to be rugged individualists to survive. Exceptional lives are more likely to be documented. Madame Chasseriau was perhaps unusually resilient and brave; but Louisa Isemonger, wife of the Police Magistrate in
Province Wellesley in the 1870s, was a ‘gentle, thoughtful, well-informed and studious’ woman who ‘interested herself in the Malays and has not only acquired an excellent knowledge of Malayan, but is translating a Malayan book’.46 Two with saintly courage were the dignified, long-suffering Mrs Douglas of Klang, who, in addition to her wifely duties in that difficult outpost, tended to her handicapped daughter ‘with a loving, vigilant, and ceaseless devotion of a most pathetic kind’; and Sophia Cooke, the dedicated missionary who became a household name in Christian circles. For over forty years until her death in 1895 she ministered to such unlikely opposites as poor, homeless and unwanted Chinese and members of the armed forces and the European police force in Singapore.47 Alan Morkill, who became District Officer in Negri Sembilan, recalled that ‘Splendid work was done by the Lady Dispenser, Miss Kibble. Malays would not allow their women to be attended by male doctors and the Government brought out a few of these devoted women to serve their needs.’ Miss Kibble doubled as a midwife, and ‘no hired car driver would take a fare from “Missy Kibble” in Kuala Pilah’.48

  Fame of a different kind came to two explorers. William Cameron was a government surveyor who crossed mountainous primeval jungle with his elephants and in 1885 mapped the Perak–Pahang border around what became known as the Cameron Highlands. Louis James Fraser, commemorated by Fraser’s Hill, was a partner in the Singapore firm of Maclaine & Fraser before he went upcountry, trying his hand as a speculator, ore trader and mule-train operator in the mountains between Selangor and Pahang. Tough men of all sorts figured among the rolling stones: mercenaries like a certain Captain Tristram Speedy, who stood six feet five, sported Abyssinian garb, played the bagpipes, and brought his own sepoys from India to quell the riotous miners of Larut. Captain William Brown talked of a ‘hardcore generation of adventurer captains’ and of ‘the circle of “Muck-a-mucks” and the Sahibs’ whom he encountered in the 1890s in Penang. The Europeans there