The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (16 page)

He listened to my woes. I must have looked truthful because he relented and said I should have brought my problems to him. He could have arranged for some accommodation in a hostel that would have provided for my needs. Looking back now on those years, I am glad I did not stay on in London. I am sure I would have had a miserable time. But I have always felt remorse at having let him down after the special favour he extended to me. When he became vice-chancellor of London University in the late 1970s and I was prime minister of Singapore, I thought of writing to him but decided it might be better to let it pass. Perhaps I should have, just to tell him I had not forgotten his kindness.

London had its compensations – and its lessons for a future lawyer. One person who made an impact on me in my first term at the LSE was Harold Laski, a professor of political science. Like many other students who were not doing political science, I attended some of his lectures. He was a magnetic speaker, small, unimpressive physically, but with a scintillating mind. His Marxist socialist theories had a profound influence on many colonial students, quite a few of whom were to achieve power and run their underdeveloped economies aground by ineptly implementing policies based on what they thought Laski taught. It was my good fortune that I had several of these failed economies to warn me of this danger before I was in a position to do any harm in government.

The two or three of Laski’s lectures that I attended were my first introduction to the general theory of socialism, and I was immediately attracted to it. It struck me as manifestly fair that everybody in this world should be given an equal chance in life, that in a just and well-ordered society there should not be a great disparity of wealth between persons because of their position or status, or that of their parents. I made no distinction between different races and peoples. We were part of the British Empire, and I believed the British lived well at the expense of all their subjects. The ideas that Laski represented at that time were therefore attractive to students from the colonies. We all wanted our independence so that we could keep our wealth for ourselves.

I thought then that wealth depended mainly on the possession of territory and natural resources, whether fertile land with abundant rainfall for agriculture or forestry, or valuable minerals, or oil and gas. It was only after I had been in office for some years that I recognised that performance varied substantially between the different races in Singapore, and among different categories within the same race. After trying out a number of ways to reduce inequalities and failing, I was gradually forced to conclude that the decisive factors were the people, their natural abilities, education and training. Knowledge and the possession of technology were vital for the creation of wealth.

There was much Marxist analysis in Laski’s socialism. I agreed with the Marxists that man did exploit his fellow men through his possession of greater capital or power, and that because a man’s output was more than he needed to consume to stay alive, there was a surplus for the employer or landlord to cream off. My aversion to the communists sprang from their Leninist methods, not their Marxist ideals. I had seen how ruthless the MPAJA had been in Singapore after the Japanese surrendered, taking summary revenge on all those whom they suspected of having worked for the enemy or otherwise betrayed their cause without any attempt to establish their guilt. They had been repulsive
down to their very uniforms, their floppy cloth caps, their body language and their arrogant, aggressive attitudes. Among the student communists at the LSE, I found the same zealous hard sell, that over-eagerness to convert people to their cause. And they used whatever means were at their disposal, like those attractive young ladies ready to befriend lonely colonial students, deceiving the unwary by calling themselves the “Socialist Club”.

I had also read in the British newspapers how the Russians had used their armies of occupation to install communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. I was revolted by the way Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, was killed, found dead after having conveniently “fallen” from a window so that the communists could take over; by the harassment of Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary, who had to take refuge in the American embassy in Budapest after standing up to them for his Catholic beliefs. Jack Hamson, a Cambridge Law School lecturer and himself a Catholic, was so outraged and sickened by what had happened that he spent a whole hour’s lecture on the morning the news broke not on the law of contract, but on the evils of Soviet communism. It made a deep impression on me and increased my antipathy.

But the idea of an equal, just and fair society appealed to all colonial students, and the British Fabians recommended a step-by-step approach to this ideal state that would make it unnecessary to behead the rich and expropriate their riches. By stages, and without disrupting the economy or creating a social upheaval, the rich would be deprived of their wealth through taxation in their lifetime, and through heavy estate duties when they died. Their children would then have to start out in the world on the same basis as those of poorer parents. I could see no flaw in that. I was too young to know how ingenious British lawyers were in constructing trust deeds that made it difficult for the government to get too much out of estate duty.

I was so attracted by the Fabian approach that for years after my return from Britain I subscribed to their magazines and pamphlets. But by the early 1970s, I was despairing of their unworldliness. One particular issue stuck in my gullet. It was about education. Two headmasters had written a serious article to argue that British comprehensive schools were failing, not because they were wrong, but because the best teachers were still teaching the best students. The best teachers should be teaching the weakest students, who needed them in order to become equal. The good students would do well anyway. This Procrustean approach was too much for me. I stopped subscribing.

Cambridge was a great relief after London. In the immediate post-war years it was a blissfully quiet provincial market town. There was little traffic – many bicycles, but only a few private cars and some buses and trucks. Most of the dons, the fellows of colleges, tutors, lecturers and professors, and even the censor of Fitzwilliam rode bicycles. I bought myself a second-hand bicycle for £8 and cycled everywhere, even in the rain. This was a very basic bike handed down from student to student over the past 20 or more years.

I soon got used to my new routine. And I had less trouble with meals. The food in hall was wholesome, with enough carbohydrates and proteins, although very British and very pallid. The deep-sea cod and halibut were tough and not tasty like the inshore fish I was used to in Singapore. There were no garnishes; as aboard the
Britannic
, everything had to be seasoned with salt and pepper. In spite of the cycling in clean but damp fenland air and the adequate meals, when I got back to Singapore, an X-ray of my lungs showed I had had a touch of tuberculosis when I was in England. Fortunately, it had healed and showed up only as a white patch in the X-ray. Still, I was grateful I had got a place in Cambridge. I am sure it would have been worse had I stayed on in London.

For exercise, I decided to join the Boat Club. I had first to practise, not by going out on the boat, but by “tubbing” on the river bank: sitting in a stationary tub, and being instructed how to hold the oar, how to stretch myself and pull it back, where to put my feet. After two practices per week for three weeks, I made it to a boat. On the afternoon of my second scheduled outing, a snowstorm broke and I assumed the practice was cancelled. I was severely reproached. Seven others and the cox had turned up but could not take the rowing eight out because I was missing. I decided that the English were mad and left the Boat Club. Thereafter, cycling around Cambridge to get from my digs to lectures and from lectures to Fitzwilliam House for meals provided my exercise.

The first year Qualifying One class of law students was small, some 30 compared with 200 in London. Most students who came up to the university were ex-servicemen who were given special dispensation to take a degree in two years instead of three, and therefore went straight into the second year. Unlike them, I had to do a Qualifying One first, and take three years. The British undergraduates studying with me were young people of 18 or 19 straight from school. I was 23. There were a few men from Malaya including Yong Pung How, about 20 years old and from Kuala Lumpur. (He was to be the chief justice of Singapore in 1990.) As I had missed the first term, Pung How readily lent me his notes. They were in a neat hand, comprehensive and a good synopsis of the ground I had missed. They were most useful because the Cambridge syllabus had different subjects from my first-year London course. During the Easter vacation, I swotted up what I had missed and caught up with my work. By May, when the Qualifying One examinations were held, I was fairly well-prepared. Three weeks later, in June, when the examination results were posted up at the Senate House, my name was among the few in Class I. I cabled home the good news.

I was glad I had not disappointed the censor, who had taken me in one term late on the strength of my academic record. Billy Thatcher, as he was affectionately known by all his students, met me outside Fitzwilliam as I was parking my bicycle to go in for lunch in hall. He paused to congratulate me. I could feel that he was pleased. He had told me when I saw him in December 1946, “Lee, when you come up to Cambridge, you are joining something special, like joining the Life Guards and not just joining the army. You have to stand that extra inch taller.” When I replied that I would try to get a First Class, he looked gravely at me and said, “Lee, don’t be disappointed if you don’t. In Oxford and in Cambridge, you need that divine spark, that something extra before you get a First.” I was relieved that my Cambridge examiners had decided I had that something extra.

Love to Choo, from Britain’s coldest winter, January 1947.

In high spirits, I bought myself a second-hand motorcycle, an old army surplus Matchless, not much to look at but with a lovely engine. It cost about £60. Suddenly I was mobile. I went wandering all over the Cambridge countryside and saw places that were not accessible by bus or railway. I would stop and buy cherries or strawberries where the farmers had put up placards inviting people to come and pick them or buy them.