The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (19 page)

I learnt how to campaign, and made several speeches in small school and church halls. The audience would be a few dozen strong, with a maximum of a hundred and fifty. I chose one basic theme that I elaborated upon and varied from meeting to meeting. This was that Britain got more dollars every year from Malaya than the US-sponsored Marshall Plan, because Malaya produced half the world’s rubber and one-third of its tin. If Britain lost Malaya, there would be heavy cuts in imports of food and raw materials, an increase in unemployment and a steep rise in the cost of living.

In a choice between Labour and Conservative, people from the colonies had no difficulty in deciding which was better. Labour had a colonial policy. Its record since 1945 was impressive. Reforms long overdue had been carried out. But to the Tories, the colonies were simply areas for very profitable investments. A Tory government determined to
suppress the new nationalist spirit of colonial peoples in order to preserve the empire would provoke disorder. Then the MCP would become strong enough to drive the British out of Malaya.

The Devon audiences were intrigued to see a Chinese speaking for a British Labour Party candidate. It was a hopeless cause, but it was the way the party made young candidates cut their teeth. On 23 February 1950, the result of the election was declared at the Town Hall. David Widdicombe had been soundly trounced. But he made a brave speech, and his victorious Conservative opponent a generous one, encouraging him to fight another battle in some other constituency. It was useful experience in politics at constituency level.

A month or two later, I received a letter from the Singapore commissioner of police, R.E. Foulger, who was home on leave. He knew my parents, had heard that I was in Cornwall, and invited Choo and me to his house at Thurlstone in Devon. We spent three days there. He wanted to size me up, and I was interested in making contact and seeing what a post-war British colonial police chief was like. We played golf. My golf was still bad, but it was a useful weekend. I knew by then that I had drawn the attention of Singapore’s Special Branch and would be on their watch list. I had made some anti-British, anti-colonial speeches at Malaya Hall. They would know I was no dilettante. I thought it best if they also knew that I acted above board, constitutionally, and that I had no communist ties or sympathies. For we would soon be returning to Singapore.

In May 1950, we went down to London to take our Bar finals. We ran into a football crowd that weekend, and they banged the doors of the hotel where we stayed day and night, distracting us from our studies. But it would not have made much difference: we were to pay the price for being out of London and failing to listen to the lecturers who were also the examiners in the major subjects. They had set their questions on new cases they had taught. No one got a First Class. I got a Second Class and was listed in third place. Choo got a Third. But all was well.
On 21 June 1950, wigged and robed as the pageantry demanded, we were both called to the Bar at the Middle Temple dining hall. Life was about to enter a new phase.

I was happy at the prospect of going home, but looked back on my four years in England with satisfaction and some pleasure. I had seen a Britain scarred by war, yet whose people were not defeatist about the losses they had suffered, nor arrogant about the victory they had scored. Every bomb site in the City of London was neatly tended, with bricks and rubble piled to one side, and often flowers and shrubs planted to soften the ruins. It was part of their understated pride and discipline.

Their courtesy and politeness to each other and to foreigners were remarkable. Most impressive was the consideration motorists showed: you waved on the person with the right of way; he waved back to thank you. It was a very civilised society. And I felt a certain nostalgia for the Cambridge where I had studied with that unusual generation of returned warriors in their 20s, some even in their 30s, married and with children. They were serious men who had seen death and destruction. Some had been through hell. One student in Fitzwilliam, who had been badly burnt when his plane crashed, was painful to look at despite repeated plastic surgery. But he overcame his disabilities. He knew his disfigured face frightened and upset people meeting him for the first few times, so he set out to act normally, to be reassuring and without self-pity. Unbowed, he made the best of his life.

It was not the Cambridge of youngsters who wanted to have a good time and to impress each other with their arty-crafty ways. Yes, there were a few of those, fresh from peacetime national service or exempted from it, but they were a minority and they did not set the pace. It was the ex-service students, some carrying the ugly marks of war, who made post-war Cambridge a place for learning and coping with the war’s
aftermath. I was privileged to have been up with that generation of Britons.

Of course, there were rough bits, friction mainly with people who had to serve me – English men and women who probably resented having to wait on a scruffy and impecunious Asiatic student. But if some landladies were especially mean and difficult, there were gems like Mrs Mellor at Tintagel and Mrs Jackson, the caretaker of the China Institute in London whom I remember most from my years in Britain. The China Institute in Gordon Square was created by the British government and financed from the indemnity the Chinese had had to pay for the damage to British lives and property in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. It was open to all ethnic Chinese students, and I found it most convenient, a wonderful haven of peace and quiet near the heart of London.

Mrs Jackson was friendly to all the students. But from the very first she was particularly kind to me. During my vacations, as I changed addresses from London to Cambridge to London to Tintagel, 16 Gordon Square became my postbox. It was also a repository for our spare bags and books. Choo and I frequented it because we had no home in London, and at the China Institute we could wash off the grime of a capital sooty from coal fires with hot water, soap and clean basins that cost us nothing. All we needed were our own towels. And since the premises were rent-free, Mrs Jackson was also able to provide good and substantial high teas for just one shilling.

Petty matters? No one who was not a foreign student in England in those years of privation and shortages immediately after the war can imagine how difficult and inconvenient life was for us in a London bedsitter. The landlady supplied only breakfast, after which Choo and I would have to get out of our room to allow her to clean it. We would go to the public library to study, and eat our lunches and dinners in a restaurant. A clean and quiet place to rest and wash was an immense luxury, especially when it was free.

When I was in London in 1956 for the constitutional conference on the future of Singapore, I went back to Gordon Square to visit Mrs Jackson. She was as pleased to see me as I was to see her. But my association with the China Institute had meanwhile produced an unexpected political backlash. Years later, I discovered old reports in files of the Singapore Special Branch claiming that Choo and I had frequented it in order to fraternise with pro-communists from China, where Mao Zedong was then heading for victory in the civil war and on 1 October 1949 proclaimed the People’s Republic. One report even said that Choo was a more radical left-winger than I was. My confidence in Special Branch reports was badly shaken.

During my student years, I was eager to make contact with political leaders in the Labour Party, especially those who could assist people like me who wanted an early end to colonial rule and an independent Malaya that would include Singapore. The Labour Party was much more sympathetic to independence for the colonies than the Conservatives, who still spoke of “King and Empire” in rich, round tones when they addressed meetings I attended. I also wanted to develop contacts with British students who were likely to play a role in future in the main political parties, a network that would be useful when I tangled with the colonial authorities in Singapore and Malaya. I therefore studied their political system with keen interest.

Their system of parliamentary democracy seemed to work so well. A tremendous revolution – economic, social and political – was taking place peacefully before my eyes. The voters had thrown out Winston Churchill and his Conservatives in May 1945, although Churchill had won the war for Britain. They had put Clement Attlee and the Labour Party in power on the strength of their promise to bring about the most profound changes in British history. The Attlee government was implementing programmes designed to create a welfare state that would look after Britons of all classes from cradle to grave. Yet there was no violent
protest from its opponents, no blood in the streets. Only strong words from Conservatives in parliament and in the constituencies urging moderation and common sense on the question of what was affordable. I was most impressed.

Soon after the National Health Service Act was passed in 1948, I went to collect my spectacles from an optician in Regent Street in Cambridge. I had expected to pay between five and six pounds for them. At the counter the optician proudly told me that I did not have to pay for them, and instead gave me a form to sign. I was delighted and thought to myself that this was what a civilised society should be. A few months later, the same thing happened at the dentist. Again, I only signed a form. The college doctor did not even bother to have me sign a form because I was already registered in his book as a patient. Again, I was enormously impressed. But the newspapers reported that many Frenchmen and other Continentals were coming over to Britain for free dental treatment. I thought this was carrying things too far, but then the French were so much poorer. I admired the British immensely for the transformation they were bringing about.

What struck me most was the fairness of the system. The government was creating a society that would get everybody – rich or poor, high or low or middle class – on to one broad band of decent living standards. And this although there were still shortages. The rationing of food and clothes, introduced during the war, would continue until the Conservatives abolished it in the mid-1950s. It still applied to items like tea, sugar, sweets, chocolate, butter, meat, bacon and eggs. Utility clothes at reasonable prices were available, but needed coupons.

I was too young, too idealistic to realise that the cost to the government would be heavy; worse, that under such an egalitarian system each individual would be more interested in what he could get out of the common pool than in striving to do better for himself, which had been the driving force for progress throughout human evolution. That
realisation had to wait until the 1960s, when I was in charge of the government of a tiny Singapore much poorer than Britain, and was confronted with the need to generate revenue and create wealth before I could even think, let alone talk, of redistributing it.

Meanwhile, I knew from letters and from little snippets in the English press that trouble was brewing at home. Labour unrest and social tensions were being fomented by the MCP. There were strikes and political agitation, and by June 1948, communists had started shooting and killing British rubber planters upcountry. The guerrillas were back in the jungle, and the colonial government had declared an Emergency. In the open constitutional arena, on the other hand, there was no political force beyond the weak and spineless English-educated leaders who were only too eager to accommodate and please the British rulers. I felt strongly that when my generation returned, we must fill that arena. I joined the Cambridge University Labour Club and regularly attended their meetings, especially when Labour ministers came down on Friday evenings to talk about the programmes they were pushing through in parliament.

It was a time of great excitement and change. This was democratic socialism in action. And it was all so civilised. On one occasion, British doctors threatened to go on strike, but they were deterred from doing so by their sense of honour and tradition, and the duties and habits of constitutional order. Aneurin Bevan, the health minister, got his National Health Service bill passed after doing nothing more drastic than call the Tories “lower than vermin”. The Labour Party was also building more council houses to rent out at very heavily subsidised low rents. They expanded the scope of welfare to make sure the “safety net” caught all families who did not have enough to meet their minimum needs. (These minimum needs looked like luxury compared to what I remembered of conditions in Singapore even before the Japanese impoverished us.) It was a remarkable lesson in how to go about creating social justice.

My generation of Singapore and Malayan students in Britain after World War II were completely sold on the fairness and reasonableness of the Labour government’s programme. We were enthusiastic about the mature British system, under which constitutional tradition and tolerance allowed fundamental shifts of power and wealth to take place peacefully. We compared what we saw in Britain with Singapore and Malaya, with our largely uneducated peoples and a feeble press that ignored all the basic issues but reported the comings and goings of important people, mostly white bosses and the locals who hovered around them. The situation looked backward and unpromising.