The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (18 page)

We took our final law examinations in May 1949, and when the results came out in June, I was satisfied. I had made a First and won the only star for Distinction on the final Law Tripos II honours list. Choo also made a First, and we cabled the good news to our parents. It was a good cachet for the next stage of my life. Before an undergraduate can take his degree, university rules require him to “keep” at least nine terms, in other words to stay in residence in college or in approved digs for about eight weeks in a term. Choo had been in Cambridge for only six terms; I for only eight. Special dispensations must have been granted because we were both allowed to take our degrees that midsummer day, 21 June. Otherwise I would have had to remain in Cambridge for another term, and Choo for another three before we could graduate.

Cambridge makes a point of maintaining hoary traditions that become more quaint with the years, but they add to its mystique as an ancient seat of learning. On Congregation Day, students formed a queue in accordance with the seniority of their colleges and, led by their tutors, entered the Senate House near the law schools. As censor, Billy Thatcher personally led me and the others forward – Fitzwilliam, being non-collegiate, was last in the queue. Afterwards we took many photographs with the dons and other students on the lawn outside the Senate House. Several of the law lecturers, who as supervisors from Trinity Hall had taught Choo and me, were there to share our joy, including Trevor Thomas. Pung How captured the moment with his camera.

We then adjourned to Trevor Thomas’ rooms in Trinity Hall to celebrate the occasion with champagne. Another lecturer, Dr T. Ellis Lewis, affectionately called TEL, who had taught both of us, joined us. He was Welsh, with a delightful quizzical face, bald, wispy white hair at the sides and rimless glasses. He said to Choo and me, “If it’s a boy, send him to us in Trinity Hall.” When Loong, our first child, was born in 1952, I did write to the senior tutor to book a place for him. But 19 years later, when he went up to Cambridge, Loong decided to go instead to Trinity College, which Isaac Newton had established as the premier school of mathematics. Good tutors in Trinity helped him become a wrangler (a student with first class honours in mathematics) in two years instead of the usual three.

The photograph of our graduation that I treasure most is one of Billy Thatcher standing between Choo and me. I had not let him down. Nor had my “lady friend”. Thatcher left a deep impression on me. He was a wise, perceptive man who had a lot of time for the students in his charge. One day, when I was having tea with him in his room, he pointed to the road workers who had been digging up Trumpington Street, and said that in the previous three hours they had had two tea breaks. They had been different before and during the war. Now they were not willing to
work as hard, and the country would not progress. I thought him a reactionary old man, but he taught economics, and years later I concluded that he knew what made for growth. On another occasion, he told me, “You are Chinese. You Chinese have a long civilisation of several thousand years to back you up. That is a great advantage.” Just before we went down from Cambridge in June 1949, he invited Choo and me for morning coffee for the last time. He patted Choo’s hand and, looking at me, said, “He is too impatient. Don’t let him be in such a hurry.” He had read my character well, but he also knew that I had a serious purpose in life and was determined to achieve it.

Having graduated, we took a 10-day holiday, this time touring England and Scotland in a coach. But we were not finished with our law studies yet. To practise in Singapore, even a degree from Cambridge University was not enough. We still had to qualify as a solicitor or a barrister in England. So we had joined the Middle Temple, which was one of the four Inns of Court that together taught and examined students for admission to the Bar. When we came back from our trip, therefore, we tried to live in London and for a while took a flat not far from my old digs on Fitzjohn’s Avenue. But for Choo housekeeping and study did not mix well, so we decided to skip lectures at the Inns of Court, and stay at Tintagel in Cornwall to read up and prepare for the Bar finals by ourselves.

We had already spent several vacations there, in an old manor house run by a Mrs Mellor with the help of her three sons. She fed us well, and was reasonable and helpful. We had the whole house to ourselves, except during the summer when there were a few other guests. We took long walks along country lanes and enjoyed the warm, moist southwesterly winds. Our only entertainment was to listen to the BBC Home Service on a Pye radio I bought in Cambridge. It gave us many hours of relaxation and pleasure. For exercise and recreation, I started to play golf, alone most of the time, on a nine-hole course at King Arthur’s Castle Hotel that was empty except during the holiday season. The course was hilly and windy, and exciting for a duffer like me. It kept me fit. Choo and I spent much time looking for my lost golf balls, often finding other, better ones. Choo would also pick wild mushrooms, which Mrs Mellor cooked for us. They were delicious.

Cambridge, 1948, with the Bridge of Sighs in the background.

Graduation day, 21 June 1949, with Choo and W.S. Thatcher, censor of Fitzwilliam, who made it all possible.

Less delicious were the meals we were obliged to take at the Middle Temple. To be called to the Bar, we had to “eat our dinners” in hall three times a term, as was required of all students. That meant a seven-hour train journey to Paddington station. But it was a chance to catch up with Malayan and Singapore friends at Malaya Hall in Bryanston Square. We indulged in talk of the kind students in London from all colonial territories engaged in, of our coming fight for freedom.

Some of my friends from Raffles College were politically active. Among them were Goh Keng Swee, my former economics tutor, who was taking a first degree BSc at the LSE, and Toh Chin Chye, who was doing a BSc in physiology at London University. They and a few others had formed a group called the Malayan Forum, whose object was to build up political consciousness and press for an independent Malaya that would include Singapore. Its members were drawn from all racial groups – Malay, Chinese, Indian, Eurasian – and it was non-ideological, neither left-wing nor right. It was anti-colonial, but committed to non-violence in order to disassociate itself from the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), which had already launched its armed insurrection against the British in Malaya in June 1948. Its members held meetings, sometimes with British politicians – junior ministers in the Labour government like Woodrow Wyatt, or Tory and Liberal MPs – as guest speakers. India and Pakistan had already gained their independence in August 1947, Burma and Ceylon in 1948. The imperial dam had been breached, the British Empire was in retreat, and most of us were confident that we, too, could get our independence. We sensed that the British people and their leaders had lost the will to keep their subject peoples down.

Some members of the Malayan Forum in a restaurant in Soho, London, summer 1950. Standing, left to right: my brother Dennis, Philip Hoalim Jr, Maurice Baker and Lee Kip Lin. Mohamed Sopiee is at my right. Seated, left to right: Chin Chye, Miki Goh, Choo, Kenny Byrne and his wife Elaine.

After plenty of talk, we would go pub-crawling from Malaya Hall to Marble Arch and along Edgware Road. The beer was awful, flat and heavy English “bitters”. Even after many years, I never got to like it. But there was nothing else we impecunious students could afford. Light lagers were expensive, the price of whisky was prohibitive. Soused with beer, we talked of the great things we would do on our return. Later, I was to discover that very few would stay the course. Many wives would object to their husbands jeopardising their careers by opposing British colonial authority, and quite a number of the men themselves, faced with cold reality and hard choices, lost their stomach for the fight. Meanwhile, there were others already in the field. At one extreme were the politically effete time-servers, the English-educated intelligentsia. At the other were the communists and their united front, well organised and apparently enjoying support in every key sector of society from schools to trade unions, the press and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.

I decided before leaving Britain to make contact with Lim Hong Bee, the unofficial MCP representative in London. Lim had been a Queen’s scholar in 1934, but had lost interest in his studies and was consumed by the communist cause. He never passed his Bar examinations nor did he get his Cambridge degree. He stayed on in London to produce a stencilled pro-MCP tract called the
Malayan Monitor
. It was dreadful, crude propaganda, but he was a strong-willed fellow. I telephoned him to ask to see him, and he arranged to meet me outside the office of the
Daily Worker
, the organ of the British Communist Party, near Fleet Street. I brought Choo along; she knew him as a friend of her elder brother.

He was a strange man. Instead of going straight to where we could talk, he took us by a roundabout route through narrow streets, making unnecessary twists and turns before finally stopping at a working man’s pub-cum-lunch-room, grubby and very proletarian. He lived in a self-created conspiratorial world. After social pleasantries, I asked him point-blank why it was that all communists devoured the social democrat
workers in their united fronts, quoting what they had done in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. He denied this strenuously. He said the social democrats in these countries had become so convinced that the cause of the communists was superior that they had joined them. He was completely out of touch and living in a dream world of his own in which he was a great revolutionary. When we parted, I was convinced that the MCP either did not consider London an important outpost or had no idea what Lim Hong Bee was actually doing there as their unofficial representative.

In February 1950, while I was still at Tintagel, David Widdicombe, one of my Cambridge friends, stood as the Labour candidate for the rural seat of Totnes in Devon, an hour and a half away by train. He needed a driver for his truck and a general assistant. Choo and I spent a fortnight helping him until election night. We were both put up with Labour supporters, I with a train driver, Choo with the young wife and children of a man who was away training to be a solicitor.