Vol. 29 No. 15 · 2 August 2007
pages 6-10 | 5475 words
Trying to Make Decolonisation Look Good
Bernard Porter
- BuyBritain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-68 by Ronald Hyam
Cambridge, 464 pp, £17.99, February 2007, ISBN 978 0 521 68555 9
- BuyThe Last Thousand Days of the British Empire by Peter Clarke
Allen Lane, 559 pp, August 2007, ISBN 978 0 7139 9830 6
- BuyForgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper
Allen Lane, 673 pp, £30.00, January 2007, ISBN 978 0 7139 9782 8
Gosh, how civilised it was. ‘At last, without convulsion, without tremor and without agony, the great ship goes down.’ The ‘great ship’ was the British Empire; the words are those of the imperial historian Jack Gallagher. Noel Annan believed that the ‘peaceful divestment of the empire’ was ‘the most successful political achievement of Our Age’. The main actors on the British side all came out of it pretty chuffed, too. They must have been encouraged in this feeling by the crowds that cheered Lord Mountbatten on India’s Independence night, 14-15 August 1947, and unharnessed the horses from his vice-regal coach to drag it around New Delhi themselves, to the amazement of one journalist: it was as if ‘this nation had become more pro-British than it had ever been since the British came.’ That was immensely gratifying; especially as making their ex-subjects more pro-British was one of the primary aims of the decolonisation strategy, from the moment the empire’s days were seen to be numbered, which was quite early on.
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[*] The first volume is Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (Penguin, 554 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 978 0 14 029331 9).
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Letters
Vol. 29 No. 17 · 6 September 2007
From Colin Bickler
It is a pity that Bernard Porter helps perpetuate the myth that the 1948 killings of Malayan Chinese rubber tappers by British soldiers were covered up, and that the affair can be compared to My Lai (LRB, 2 August). As the Reuters correspondent in Kuala Lumpur in the 1960s I was delegated to do the on-the-spot research for an Observer story about what happened at Batang Kali. I discovered there had been no deliberate cover-up, although the British media had overlooked the story, probably because they were more concerned about the ‘Communist threat’.
The killings were reported at the time, although only briefly, and as far as I could find, only in a local Chinese-language newspaper. However, that report provided me with the information I needed twenty years later to find survivors and eyewitnesses. They told me that a British patrol, of Scots Greys I believe, looking for Communist ‘bandits’ had rounded up a group of Chinese rubber tappers. Some of them – scared or guilty, we’ll never know – panicked and ran. The soldiers shot and killed or wounded several. Afterwards, several soldiers were court-martialled and disciplined.
The Communist guerrillas the soldiers were chasing were led by Chin Peng, whom Porter mentions in passing. During the war, Chin Peng had fought the Japanese alongside British special forces smuggled into Malaya, and because of this was taken to London to march in the Victory Parade and given the OBE. A couple of years later the award was taken away when, as secretary-general of the banned Malayan Communist Party, he started an insurrection that was to last fifteen years. For a long time after that, Chin Peng, whose real name was Ong Boon Hua, hid out in southern Thailand. In July, now in his eighties, he petitioned a Malaysian court, claiming his right to citizenship.
Colin Bickler
City University, London EC1
From Jerome Satterthwaite
Bernard Porter corrects the familiar story that the guns in Singapore could only point out to sea, and couldn’t be turned round to face the Japanese land invasion. My father was responsible for the installation of the shore batteries, which he handed over to the navy before returning to Vickers Armstrong in Barrow-in-Furness. He told me that when he arrived back in Barrow telegrams awaited him asking how the mountings could be modified so that the guns could be trained inland. These cables were soon followed by others, asking how the guns could be most quickly and permanently disabled. My father’s photographs of the installations are on permanent loan to the Liddle Collection of the Brotherton Library in the University of Leeds.
Jerome Satterthwaite
Millbrook, Cornwall
