‘I always had a great deal of time for Chin Peng. He was by far the most intelligent of all the Communists, calm, polite, very friendly – in fact almost like a British officer.’
(Senior District Officer and Chin’s escort to the 1955 peace talks, John Davis)

There are several basic facts about Malaya which you need to grasp in order to understand the so-called ‘Malayan Emergency’ (1948 to 1960).

British Malaya

Malaya was never a unified nation. ‘British Malaya’ (1896 to 1946) consisted of the Federated and Unfederated Malay States. The Federated states were four protected states in the Malay Peninsula – Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan and Pahang – established by the British government in 1896, which were British protectorates run by their own local rulers. The Unfederated Malay States was the collective name given to five British protected states, namely Johor, Kedah, Kelantan, Perlis, and Terengganu. Unlike the federates states, the unfederated states lacked common institutions and didn’t form a single state in international law. They were standalone British protectorates. In addition, there were the Straits Settlements, established in 1896 and consisting of the settlements of Penang, Singapore, Malacca, and Dinding, to which were later added the Christmas Island and the Cocos Islands.

After the war, in 1946, the British colony of the Straits Settlements was dissolved. Penang and Malacca which had formed a part of the Straits Settlements were then grouped together with the Unfederated and Federated Malay States to form the new Malayan Union.

Map of Malaya 1952 to 1954 © Monash Asia Institute, from the Cambridge University Press book ‘Templer and the Road to Malayan Independence‘

Racial heterogeneity

Of the population of about 6 million, 40% were Malay, almost as many were Chinese, and the remainder Indians, Europeans or other.

The three non-European communities – Malay, Chinese and Indian – had different traditions, religions, languages, cultures and tended to cluster round different professions and occupations. For example, the sultans of each of the states was Malay, as was his court and advisers, whereas a high proportion of the country’s successful businessmen were Chinese.

There were some 12,000 British, consisting of the Malayan Civil Service, policemen, rubber planters, tin miners, doctors and businessmen.

Following the Second World War, in 1946 the British authorities announced a new administrative structure named the Malayan Union, which aimed to distribute power and influence among the three main ethnic groups, Malays, Chinese and Indians. This prompted an outcry and mass opposition, particularly from Malays who saw their influence diminish in what they considered their own country, as well as objections to other implications of the plan.

Protests led to the formation of the United Malays National Organisation which organised a campaign of civil disobedience, boycotting council meetings and so on. Bowing to pressure the British authorities scrapped the Malayan Union and in 1948 replaced it with the Federation of Malaya, consisting of states ruled by sultans as British protectorates i.e. with British advisers, with Penang and Malaca defined as colonies, and Singapore given separate and unique status.

Chinese communists

The 1948 reorganisation took power away from the Chinese community which made up about a third of the population and which responded with negative newspaper articles and political action. Distinct from the Chinese community as a whole (which included many rich and influential businessmen) was the relatively small Malay Communist Party, almost entirely staffed by Chinese. Many of these communists had fought alongside British irregular forces in guerrilla campaigns against the Japanese after the Japanese captured Malaya in 1942, in fact many of them had been armed and trained and served in Force 136.

The post-war authorities were able to monitor the activities of the Malay Communist Party for the simple reason that its leader, Lai Teck, was a British double agent. However, in 1947, his cover was blown and Lai absconded (taking the party’s disposable cash with him).

His replacement, Chin Peng, aged 26, son of a bicycle repairshop owner, was more ruthless and cunning. Barber’s book explains all this background and then describes the crucial Communist Party meeting held in a remote jungle location in Pahang, the largest state, in May 1948 (that pivotal year in the Cold War).

During the war many of the party’s members had fought a jungle insurgency as part of what was called the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, led by British army officers. Now, simply by changing one word, it became the Malayan People’s Anti-British Army. Many of the members, their arms, training and tactics remained exactly the same, but now they were dedicated to kicking out what they saw as just another colonial occupier and oppressor. In an irony which escaped no-one, many of the new communist terrorists (CTs) were fighting officers and men they had previously fought alongside against the Japanese.

Chin Peng divided his army up into two parts: the armed force of 5,000 fighters, organised up into nominal regiments, but in fact broken down into attack units of as little as half a dozen men, to be distributed around the country, based in the jungle near the network of arms caches they’d helped establish during the war. The second part was the Min Yuen, meaning ‘Masses Movement’, consisting of hundreds of thousands of normal everyday citizens who would operate on every level of Malay life, as waiters in British clubs, clerks in government offices, as schoolteachers, newspaper reporters and so on (p.37) who would supply the active army with food, money and information.

The primary aim was to sow terror, pure fear, among the British colonial community and its native assistants and workers (collaborators, in the communist view). As the campaign spread, Chin intended for the European community to become demoralised and increasingly enfeebled while the tentacles of the Min Yuen spread at all levels of Chinese society until it was so powerful and numerous that a communist revolution became inevitable.

Barber details Chin’s three-phase plan:

Phase one

Guerillas attack isolated planters, tin mines, police and government officials, creating a climate of fear, forcing these scattered Europeans to abandon the country and seek the cities for safety.

Phase two

Areas abandoned by the British would be named ‘Liberated Areas’ and become the settings for guerrilla bases. The army’s numbers would be increased by recruits from the Min Yuen.

Phase three

Moving out from their bases in the Liberated Areas, the expanded army would attack towns and infrastructure, roads and railway, electricity and water supplies, while the Min Yuen sabotaged urban services. The expanded guerrilla army, supported by China or Russia, would confront the weakened and demoralised imperial forces in a final revolutionary struggle.

What is notable about all this is that the communists were overwhelmingly Chinese, relied on the active support of part of the Chinese community, and expected the revolution to come with help from China, and yet… the Chinese made up a distinct minority of the Malay population. As you might expect, the largest element of Malaya’s population was Malay. And lots of the plantations and other businesses the communists targeted were staffed by Indians, especially Tamils.

The use of terror

Barber views the Malay Communist Party campaign through the teachings of Lenin and Mao. Lenin had written that, through the application of terror, a well-organised minority could take over a country (p.36). Mao had written extensively about the organisation and strategy necessary for a peasant army taking on a larger, better-funded, full-time army. Be mobile and flexible. If you meet resistance, withdraw.

To spread fear you practice murder with maximum cruelty. Barber doesn’t hold back on his descriptions. The emergency is commonly dated from the murder of three British planters, two at one plantation, the other at a nearby one, on the same day, 16 June 1948. He goes on to describe, in detail, the CTs’ tactics and types of attacks: they crept up on native Malay or Tamil tappers (the workers who tapped the rubber trees), captured them and slit their throats like farm animals. They seized workers and chopped off their arms with the large Malay knife. They regularly attacked isolated plantation owners’ houses or bungalows, using British Sten guns or grenades. They made road ambushes by falling trees across roads then subjecting stalled vehicles to barrages of fire. That is how they murdered High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney (p.156).

The casualties were never enormous – not on the scale of an actual war – but still significant, with around 500 European settlers or officials being killed each year, and several times more communists. In total, during the entire emergency, 1948 to 1960, 1,346 Malayan troops and police were killed, 519 British military personnel, about 6,710 communists, with civilian casualties of around 5,000.

The British response

The British responded with a number of co-ordinated strategies: most Malay settlements had so-called ‘squatter’ camps surrounding them, occupied by immigrants from China, some of whom helped the communists, but many of whom were victims of the communists if they didn’t help or were suspected of collaborating. Therefore the British created a network of ‘New Villages’ and relocated the 600,000 squatters to them. Surrounded by barbed wire, they certainly protected the inmates from attack, but also could be seen as concentration camps.

The British authorities enforced a photo identity scheme, and tried to starve the communist guerrillas by implementing a food denial campaign by enforcing food rationing on civilians, killing livestock and using chemical herbicides to destroy rural farmland. Policing was expanded and re-organised to provide protection for workers going to work on rubber plantations or tin mines.

It is ironic to learn that the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 led to boom market for rubber and boom period for Malayan economy (p.182). Nonetheless, when the Conservatives won their election victory in October 1951 victory, they discovered that Britain was on verge of bankruptcy. The country had lower food stocks than ten years earlier, in 1941. By 1951 huge numbers of men involved – 40,000 regular troops including 25,000 from Britain, 10,000 Gurkhas, 5 battalions of the Malay Regiment, plus 60,000 full-time police and 200,000 Home Guards. The war was costing £500,000 a day. (p.162) No wonder Correlli Barnett railed against the stupidity of spending all our Marshall Aid running the ridiculous empire.

The incoming Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, sent Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttleton on a fact-finding mission which reported back that the situation was dire and highlighted disagreements between army and police and divisions even within the police. Churchill appointed General Sir Gerald Templer to take over. Templer was a splendid example of the imperialist education system, having attended Wellington, Sandhurst, been an Olympic hurdling champion, and served in post-war Germany where he’d realised the Germans needed encouragement, carrots, promises of better times, to prevent communism.

It was Templer who realised the British had to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population, not with military force, but simply by showing that democratic capitalism would give the native populations and their families a better future. So he combined expanding the police force, and especially its Special Branch wing, with social works, the building of hospitals, schools, an increase in teacher training, setting up of women’s groups and so on.

Barber’s approach

Noel Barber (1909 to 1988) was a journalist who worked as foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail in the 50s, 60s and 70s. He also managed to write some 22 non-fiction books about the many countries he reported from (Hungary, Tibet, India). Late in life, a car crash ended his career as a journalist and he switched to writing novels, producing half a dozen, none of which I’ve heard of.

The War of the Running Dogs: How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerrillas 1948-60 was Barber’s 15th non-fiction book. I picked it up in a second-hand shop because I want to understand more about Britain’s decolonisation beyond the glut of books and documentaries about the two usual suspects, India and Israel.

I think it’s safe to say that Barber’s approach is old school. Writing at the end of the 1960s, he himself came from a solidly upper-middle-class family, good public school, well-connected family (his brother, Anthony, was a Conservative politician, who rose to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in Ted Heath’s government 1970 to 1974).

Thus we get the story predominantly from the British side and from a perspective which is now disappearing, told with a hearty patriotism which often reads like it’s from one of the Famous Five children’s book. The senior British figures are often described as ‘magnificent’, policies and outcomes are ‘splendid’. Men are men, especially the gruff, no-nonsense Lieutenant General Gerald Templer who was sent by Churchill to replace the assassinated High Commissioner Sir Henry Gurney. Templer barks out orders, insists things are done the same day, issues red orders which must be carried out by underlings or else, insists on shaking hands with all the Malay staff at government house (in fact, King’s House) in Kuala Lumpur. Shakes colleagues by the hand and tells them, ‘You’re a man‘.

Other ‘men’ include Sir Harold Briggs, First Director of Operations, Sir Robert ‘Bob’ Thompson of the Malayan Civil Service, Colonel Arthur Young, Police Commissioner, Bill Carbonell Commissioner of Police, and Peter Lucy, the amazingly brave rubber planter. It is a winning aspect of the book that it opens with a one-page ‘cast of principal characters’ [which isn’t all-white, it includes Malayan politicians and all the key Communist leaders]. Somehow this crystallises the impression given by much of the text that the war was a spiffing affair with manly chaps like General Templer grasping Colonel Young with a firm handshake, looking straight into his eyes, and saying, ‘You’ve done a man’s job, sir.’

Stories and comedy

Barber tells a number of funny or wry anecdotes. For example, the occasion when Templer addressed the population of one of the New Villages which had passively let CTs walk in, take all their weapons, and then walk out, the British general tried to convey his anger, but the Malay translator produces a comically rude mistranslation.

Or the amazing tale of 14-year-old Terence Edmitt who drove the family armoured car (!) through a CT roadblock and ambush, carefully ramming the car blocking the road into the ditch, while the car echoed to fusillades of bullets from CT sten guns and his mum and dad fired back through slits in the side (p.227).

Or the astonishing story of Peter Lucy and his tough, no-nonsense wife Tommy, who refused to abandon their remote plantation bungalow, so they fortified it, ringed it with barbed wire, and regularly fought off CT attacks with Sten guns and hand grenades even when Tommy was nine months pregnant!

Barber finds the astonishing or the amusing, the gossipy and heroic, in everything. This is one of the aspects which makes it more of a popular magazine article than a work of serious history.

There are other reasons why I doubt a book like this could be published nowadays:

1. Race and ethnicity

As Britain ceases to be a white country (estimates vary, but by about 2070 it’s thought whites will be in a minority in the UK) and its academic and publishing industries become ever-more hypersensitive to issues of race and ethnicity, the book’s unstinting support of ‘our boys’ and of colonial administration generally, has, I think, nowadays, become untenable. Barber would be picked up on countless places where he makes no-longer-acceptable generalisations about the Malays, the Chinese or the Indian population of Malaya.

In fact, Barber goes out of his way to praise the three different racial groups in Malaya, and also brings out Templer’s and the British authorities’ deliberate policies of racial integration. He tells the story of Templer being outraged to learn that some ex-pat club refuses membership to Malays and Chinese, gets the entire board sacks, and forces them to take non-European members. So Barber and his heroes are very pro race equality and racial integration. Templer and many other Brits realised it was vital not only to winning the war but to ensuring a smooth transition to independence. That wouldn’t save them from being damned by modern academics and critics.

And Barber goes out of his way to detail the intelligence work of the CT defector Lam Swee and, especially, of C.C. Too, a Chinese brought in to head British psychological operations, who became responsible for the propaganda war, including dropping millions of leaflets in the jungle telling the terrorists they would be treated well if they gave themselves up, describing the joys of civilian life (which amount to ‘women and cigarettes), as well as planes which were commissioned to fly low over huge expanses of jungle broadcasting the same message from big loudspeakers (p.139).

So I wasn’t aware of any racial bias or bigotry at all, rather the reverse. Bet that wouldn’t save him, though. And although he goes out of his way to give a positive impression of the remote communities of ‘aboriginal’ peoples, the peoples who inhabited Malaya before either the Malays or Chinese arrived, I suspect he would be hammered for calling them ‘abos’ and not the currently acceptable term, which appears to be ‘Orang Asli aboriginals’.

2. Women

Since the complete triumph of feminism in academia and the media, the slightest disparaging remark about women in any capacity is enough to end careers.

Again, Barber is surprisingly liberated for his day (he must have written this book in the late 60s and 1970 for it to be published in 1971) and goes out of his way to praise women at every level. For example:

a) He describes the tremendous good works done by Templer’s wife, who threw herself into organising hospitals, schools, women’s groups and generally improving the status of women in Malay society.

b) He gives specific examples of amazing courage and bravery among women in the war, for example, Lucie Card who one minute is living a middle-class life in Surrey, volunteers for the St John’s Ambulance, and a month later is driving an ambulance through bandit-infested jungle in Malaya (p.237 ff.)

Barber devotes a long passage to the surprising fact that Chin Peng selected as head of the communist army’s courier network, a determined young woman, Lee Meng. Not only do we hear about her legendary efficiency and ruthlessness, but there is a long passage devoted to the hard work the Malay Special Branch put in to a) identifying her b) arresting and interrogating her.

It is just as surprising to learn that a key player in tracking her down was British operative Eileen Lee. The complexities of the operation to identify Lee Meng sound as if they’re from a James Bond story (as does the very unlikely-sounding story of CT double agent ‘the Raven’ attending a dinner party of local Brits disguised as a servant in order to leave a secret message on the District Officer’s pillow! p.286)

Elsewhere Barber remarks more than once that female comrades in the Liberation Army were generally thought to be tougher and more ruthless than most of the men.

So Barber goes well out of his way to sing the praises of women in general, and to single out some remarkable examples of female braveness, toughness and ingenuity in particular – but I don’t think that would be enough to save him. He routinely refers to these heroic women as ‘girls’, sometimes as ‘young and pretty girls’ (p.203), ‘she was young, extremely beautiful and very pregnant’ (p.284). Tsk tsk. His entire attitude would, nowadays, be dismissed as the patronising stereotypes of a patriarchal, pro-imperialist, white supremacist male. I’m surprised his book is still in print.

It’s very obvious that anyone interested should read a more up-to-date account of the war, but all the aspects I’ve just mentioned mean that Barber’s account is interesting not only for its subject matter, but for the strong flavour of the 1970s prism through which he views them.

3. Unquestioning patriotism

For Barber, the high commissioners, heads of police or special branch, are ‘magnificent’, so a ‘splendid’ job, are real ‘men’. He mentions at some length the two trials of Lee Meng and how, when the authorities couldn’t get a guilty verdict from the first trial, they simply held another one with a more European panel of ‘advisers’ (instead of a jury). This caused controversy at the time. Similarly, he mentions the ‘Batang Kali massacre’ when 24 unarmed Chinese prisoners appear to have been murdered by British troops. He mentions these things, presents the evidence and says they left question marks over ‘British justice’. He makes brief mention of regulation 17D which gave the government the power of detention without trial and that some 30,000 civilians were interned under it, but not much more. He mentions these things but I bet a modern historian would use them to flay the racist imperialist British.

Key developments

By October 1951

It had become clear to Chen Ping that his initial three-phase plan wasn’t working. He duly called another big meeting of senior Malay Communist members and issued a new Directive. This refocused the communist campaign – stop killing innocent bystanders and Chinese, focus more on police, soldiers, direct officers of imperialism – but at same time boosted political efforts to infiltrate trade unions and create communist sympathisers through legal means.

January 1952

The appointment of Templer as High Commissioner, who comes in with sweeping new policies. One is to place enormous bounties on the heads of the CT senior command, double if caught alive, half if caught dead. He wanted them alive so he could convert them and use them as propaganda. Also to interrogate them and get intelligence about camps and strategies.

September 1952

One of the stupidities of the entire thing was that the British fully intended to quit Malaya, and had made this known to all the sultans and the general population. Throughout the period Britain made attempts to get more local figures into politics, to make more places open to locally elected officials. Then on 14 September 1952 a new citizenship law gave 60% of the Chinese population and 180,000 Indians full and immediate citizenship, with procedures established for all other inhabitants to apply for citizenship (including any Europeans who had one parent who’d been born in the country).

Spring 1953

Chin Peng makes a momentous decision to relocate his forces across the border into Thailand. Barber describes eye-witness accounts of the jungle meeting where this was announced to the communist cadres and the mood of disillusion and demoralisation which it led to.

Winding down

By mid-1953, five years into the war, a number of key communist leaders had been captured, killed or had defected. The British had sealed the squatter Chinese population off in the New Villages, enforced citizen id cards on everyone else, granted citizenship to large numbers of the population with processes for everyone else to gain full, legal citizenship, and had laid out a timetable towards full and free democratic elections to be held in 1955. Independence, in other words, was only a few years away. In the meantime Templer had overseen the inauguration of a sort of welfare state into which legal citizens paid, and which would contribute towards medical care or pensions. Tours were organised of government offices which included each citizen being taken to a bank and show how much money they had accrued, and led up to a speech by Templer himself. More and more CTs began to defect, giving themselves up and were astonished when they were not shot out of hand, but carefully treated, questioned, then freed and given clothes, money and jobs, and encouraged to spread the word to their comrades still in the jungle.

It became harder and harder for the communists to persuade peasants or urban dwellers that theirs was the correct route to freedom when the British route was so obviously better, for everyone.

This is what Templer meant when he had announced his ‘hearts and minds’ strategy. Barber really emphasises that right at the start of the emergency the government took the right decision which was to keep the emergency in the hands of the civil authorities – to make it a law and order issue. To make the police and Special Branch the key arms of law enforcement, with the army solely as backup and for specific defined operations (p.245 and throughout).

It was vital that the majority of the population see that law and order and government continue in its same form. The classic mistake to make in such situations, is to appoint a military overseer who invariably puts military units in charge, maybe imposes martial law, sets up special army-run detention centres and so on, with the inevitable result that sooner or later some atrocity is committed or photos leak out of inmates being mistreated in military gaols, and the general effect is to alienate the majority of the non-combatant population and encourage them to give passive or active support to the insurgents. As the Americans did in Vietnam and then again, astonishingly, in Iraq.

The Brits may have bent the law in some trials, been responsible for one well-publicised massacre (Batang Kal: 24 terrorists shot; My Lai: over 500 unarmed men, women and children killed), and the New Villages policy doesn’t sound as benign to me as Barber makes it sound. But overall, eventually, the non-military nature of the British response worked.

Communist desertions

The British placed huge bounties on the heads of the CT leaders. They offered huge sums for information. And they paid CTs who handed themselves in. Millions of leaflets offering safe passage were dropped over the jungle (93 million in 1953 alone, p.246, 525 million in total, p.321).

So many took up this offer that in the summer of 1953 Templer set up the Special Operational Volunteer Force, 180 ex-communist terrorists grouped into twelve platoons of 15 men each (p.233).

Barber describes in detail the defection of a number of the highest CT leaders, including the elusive Osman China ‘one of the most brilliant propagandists in South-East Asia’ and Hor Leung, a high ranking communist official (pages 250 to 265).

Elections

In July there was the first full general election in Malayan history. Barber had already introduced us to Tunku Abdul Rahman who had emerged as a canny political operator in the regional elections of 1952. Now he built a coalition between the ethnic parties to take overall power. 85% of the electorate voted and the Tunku’s Alliance won 51 of the 52 seats. He immediately began criticising the British veto on all laws passed by the assembly and pushing for the British to leave and relinquish full political power as soon as possible. The Tunku immediately issued a complete amnesty to all remaining CT fighters and had it distributed by leaflet, loudspeaker, the press and so on. Chin Peng replied calling for an immediate ceasefire.

The Tunku and his party were keen to hold talks but the British stalled. They were still responsible for the country’s security and felt admitting Chin Peng to a conference table would subvert the democratic process they had put in place, would give the communists influence not merited by their dwindling band of malnourished jungle fighters, and would hand a propaganda coup to the communist cause across wider South-East Asia (not least in Vietnam). But the Alliance party and many others saw this as simply excuses for the British to hang onto ultimate power. As long as the emergency remained, the British remained, and so the imperial power had a vested interest in dragging it out.

We now enter the complex world of multi-party politics, in which there are factions within the ruling Alliance party, these disagree with the old sultans, many of whom trust their British advisers more than these upstart democratic politicians, and the British administration itself which was divided about policy, and a British political community which was, of course, also divided between Conservative ruling party and the opposition internationalist Labour Party. The story gets more complex and, frankly, more boring, more bureaucratic.

The solution to this particular conundrum was simple: the British announced that they would leave whether the emergency was over or not. The existence of the emergency would not prevent full independence. And so Chin Peng was offered and amnesty and the opportunity to emerge from the (Thai) jungle and hold talks with First Minister Tunku.

In the event Malaya finally became fully independent (achieving Merdeka or independence) in August 1957, ending 83 years of British rule. Although under a British-Malayan Defence Pact, the Malay Army was run by Director of Operations Sir James Cassels (p.305), British soldiers continued to provide ‘defence’ for the Malayan state, and continued to be ambushed and killed by the 1,000 or so remaining CTs left in the jungle.

Despite independence the Communist insurgency continued until 1960. The final 30 or so pages don’t cover any of the political, social or economic ramifications of independence, but instead continue to give us exciting stories of derring-do, describing the cat and mouse campaigns to kill or capture the last remaining CT leaders, who are regularly portrayed as fiendish, cunning, clever, zealous and indoctrinated opponents of tall, tough, multi-lingual British Special Branch or SAS officers with mops of unruly hair and piercing blue eyes.

These last couple of extended adventures made me suddenly realise who Noel Barber reminds me of – Frederick Forsyth. A lot of the passages of action – the ambushes and attacks, the forays into the jungle, the top secret intelligence work – and the stereotyped characters – bluff British army officers, slight twinkly-eyed Chinese fanatics, beautiful girls, fast cars, Sten guns and armoured cars – read like an airport thriller, an airport thriller, a lot of which just happens to be true.

On 31 July 1960 the ’emergency’ was declared over and there was a huge victory parade through Kuala Lumpa which Barber describes in joyous detail, and then wraps his account up with a purple prose description of free, independent Malaya, unchanged and yet completely changed, enduring forever…

Thoughts

1. I must read a more modern account of the emergency, one which will probably contain a far more damning version of British behaviour.

2. Ideally, this modern version would go on to cover the longer period after independence up to the 1990s, say, so that the long-term effect of not only the emergency but of colonial rule can be assessed in the longer perspective.

3. Barber’s book is a very accessible, rip-roaring boys adventure version of events. The thing is, this may not be so misleading because quite obviously a lot of the British participants took part in that spirit, had that gung-ho, patriotic ‘come on chaps’ attitude. Certainly in his interviews with Peter Lucy and his wife, with Lucie Card and the dashing Scottish officer she met and married in Malaya, David Storrier (p.239), they all talk like that, they describe acts of everyday heroism and bravery with a dashing disregard for the danger.

4. And this is connected to the many scenes and descriptions of events where Barber deploys the techniques of a popular novelist, setting scenes whether in ex-pat clubs or jungle guerrilla camps, giving vivid descriptions of emaciated CTs, terrified Tamil workers, jolly fun-loving sultans and dashing Brits which come from movies, novels or comics of the 1950s:

Gallery of characters

Colonel Robert ‘Bob’ Thompson, son of an English clergyman, fluent Chinese scholar, fought with the famous Wingate Chindits, had a ‘brilliant’ war record, looked like a film star, was ‘a dashing, handsome, highly intelligent bachelor with a ready chuckle’ (p.24)

Sir Edward Gent, the High Commissioner… at Oxford gained a double first and was a rugger Blue… (p.44)

Malcolm MacDonald, Commissioner-General for South-East Asia… was something of a ‘character’ and over the years had developed a public image of a shirt-sleeved, approachable democrat… (p.47)

Police-Superintendent ‘Two-Gun’ Bill Stafford, a stocky, broad-shouldered barrel-chested aggressive man with grey-green eyes, who had been a ‘crime-buster’ before the Emergency and was already something of a legend in Malaya. (p.66)

[David Storrier] had sharp features, straight fair hair and the bluest eyes she [Lucie Card] had ever seen.

[Sir Henry Gurney’s] panache had become a legend in Palestine during the last frightful months… known to close friends as Jimmy, he had gained a blue for golf at Oxford and was a keen tennis player. (p.73)

Colonel Nicol Gray was a strong man in every sense of the word. (p.81)

John Davis, Senior District officer was ‘a broad-shouldered man of forty-nine with twinkling blue eyes and a shock of unmanageable hair’ (p.276)

The commanding officer chosen for the task was a spectacular character – literally: Major Harry Thompson, seconded from the Royal Highland Fusiliers, stood six feet four inches, had a thatch of fierce red hair and a boxer’s nose (p.311)

Evan Davies was a master of the technique of using double agents… He had impeccable manners… he was ‘feared yet respected in every CT camp in Malaya’… he drove a cream, two-seater sports car ‘with his usual dash and verve’…He had ‘a remarkable ability to think like a Chinese…’ ‘He had been a policeman on the beat in London before being promoted to Special Branch, followed by a spell as a Commando during World War Two..’ (pages 281 to 24)

Related history reviews

• Imperialism reviews
• New world disorder reviews

Related literary reviews i.e. about Malaya

• Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (1895)
• An Outcast of The Islands (1896)
• Tales of Unrest (1898)
• Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume two
• Collected short stories of Somerset Maugham volume four
• Passage of Arms by Eric Ambler (1959)