The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (20 page)

It was against such a backdrop that Choo and I sailed home on a Dutch liner, the
Willem Ruys
. It was the best ship plying between Southampton and Singapore – new, air-conditioned, with excellent Indonesian and Dutch food, and wonderful service provided by literally hundreds of
djongos
, or Javanese waiters, dressed in native costume. It was a farewell fling. We travelled first class in adjoining cabins, and had a wonderful time – except when I got seasick in the Bay of Biscay and again on the Arabian Sea, and was reduced to a diet of dry toast and dried beef. Otherwise, it was a memorable journey.

By now, I had become highly politicised and anti-colonial, and was repelled by the presence among the first class passengers of several Indonesian Eurasians who fawned upon the Dutch captain and his officers. On the other hand, we were impressed by the bearing of Mr and Mrs Mohammad Razif, a reserved middle-aged Indonesian couple who kept their distance from the captain. We struck up an acquaintance with them, and Razif proved to be a nationalist from Sumatra – he later became the Indonesian ambassador in Kuala Lumpur. He restored my faith in the pride of a colonial subject people, and I had a high regard for him. But it was to be some time before I realised that a country
needed more than a few dignified and able men at the top to get it moving. The people as a whole must have self-respect and the will to strive to make a nation of themselves. The task of the leaders must be to provide or create for them a strong framework within which they can learn, work hard, be productive and be rewarded accordingly. And this is not easy to achieve.

We reached Singapore on 1 August. It was good to be home. I knew I was entering a different phase of my life. I was quickly reminded of its hazards. Although we were travelling first class, the immigration officer, a Mr Fox who came on board wearing a natty bow tie, made sure that I knew my place. He kept Choo and me waiting to the very last. Then he looked through Choo’s passport and mine and said enigmatically, “I suppose we will hear more about you, Mr Lee.” I glared at him and ignored his remark. He intended to intimidate, and I was not going to be intimidated.

Later, I was to discover that among the black marks against me was my suspected attendance at the World Festival of Youth in Budapest in August 1949. During that summer vacation, the Soviet Union used the Hungarians as hosts for this communist-organised rally and the International Students Union in London invited groups in Britain to take part. Some Malayan and Singapore students accepted because it was a chance to have a cheap holiday, everything found for the cost of a return rail fare. Keng Swee, Maurice Baker, my brother Dennis and many others went. Once there, however, Lim Hong Bee and a Singapore crypto-communist named John Eber tricked them into forming a contingent to march with a banner that read “Malaya Fights For Freedom”. British Intelligence learnt of this, and since some of them might become troublemakers when they returned home, sent to Singapore Special Branch a list of those who had participated, including “K.Y. Lee”. Special Branch interviewed my parents, but as they knew nothing, they could not clarify the position. In consequence, the authorities did not know
that their suspect was my brother Dennis, D.K.Y. Lee, and not me – H.K.Y. Lee.

But there were other reports in their file on me to earn me the distinction of being the last passenger on the
Willem Ruys
to be cleared. When I recorded my oral history in 1981, a researcher showed me documents of a meeting on 28 June 1950 at Government House at which Nigel Morris, the director of Special Branch, had recommended that Choo and I be detained on our return from England. However, R.E. Foulger, the commissioner of police who had earlier invited us to spend a weekend with him in Devon, had disagreed. The minutes further recorded that the governor, the general officer commanding and the colonial secretary had supported Foulger, arguing that because we both came from respectable families, public reaction to our arrest would be bad. Instead, they said, more could be gained if we were befriended and won over. The commissioner general for Southeast Asia, Malcolm MacDonald, “was suggested as an appropriate host since he frequently invited students to dinner”. In fact Malcolm MacDonald did invite Choo and me a few months after our return.

While Mr Fox kept me waiting in the first class lounge of the
Willem Ruys
, I popped out on deck to wave to my family – Father, Mother, Fred, Monica and Suan – on the quay with some friends, including Hon Sui Sen. Choo’s family was also waiting for her, but when we disembarked, we parted company. She went back with her parents to Pasir Panjang, I to Oxley Road. We parted as friends, not giving away the secret of our marriage in Britain.

6. Work, Wedding and Politics

The press reported our return, giving prominence to my academic success in Cambridge, and also to Choo’s. The publicity helped me get my first job. While visiting the Supreme Court, I met a Straits-born lawyer, T.W. Ong, who asked me if I was interested in doing my pupillage in his firm, Laycock & Ong. I was, and he immediately arranged for me to see John Laycock, his senior partner, the following day.

Laycock was a Yorkshireman of about 60 who had qualified as a solicitor in England. He had been in practice in Singapore since the early 1930s, and had married a Chinese woman. They had no offspring of their own and had adopted several Chinese children. He had a powerful mind and a fierce temper, but his voice was small for a tubby man with such a big head; his face would flush when he was angry and he would become almost incoherent. He was full of energy, drank heavily, and perspired all the time, wiping himself with a large handkerchief. He offered to take me as his personal pupil. This meant I would sit in his office cooled by two large Philco air-conditioners, which made a powerful racket but were otherwise effective. He would pay me $500 a month until I was called to the Singapore Bar, which would take one year because I had chosen not to read in chambers in England.

I started work almost immediately. I had tropical clothes made – white drill trousers and light seersucker jackets – and bought cellular cotton shirts that could breathe. But it did not help. I sweated profusely, not having acclimatised to the heat and humidity, and every time I went out to the courts I would come back soaked. It was disastrous to be wet in Laycock’s draughty air-conditioned room, and I would go down with
coughs and colds. I soon learnt that the first thing to do when I got back to the office was to wash my face with cold water, cool down and change into dry clothes.

Having found a job, my next task was to see Choo’s father, Kwa Siew Tee. He was a tall, energetic, self-made man who had taught himself accountancy and banking through correspondence courses and had risen to his present position in the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation on his own merits, having neither relatives to give him a push nor money to buy promotion. I asked him for his daughter’s hand and when we could have the wedding. He was dumbfounded. He had expected the normal ritual of a visit by my parents to broach the subject, but this brash young man had turned up to settle the day himself, taking for granted that consent would be given. However, he did not grumble as much to me as he later did to Choo. We agreed to an engagement, to be followed by marriage at the end of September. Reading the announcement in the newspaper, Laycock offered to take Choo as a pupil and pay her $500 a month too. I told Choo about it, and she promptly accepted. It was most convenient. We could go to work together, and see each other every day.

On 30 September 1950, after being married secretly for nearly three years, we went through a second ceremony at the Registry of Marriages, which was then in the Supreme Court building. The registrar, Mr Grosse, was 15 minutes late. I was furious and told him off. An appointment had been made yet he kept all of us waiting. Later that afternoon, our parents held a reception for relatives and friends at the Raffles Hotel. Tom Silcock, professor of economics at the University of Singapore who had taught both of us at Raffles College, proposed the toast to the bride. He was not a witty, light-hearted speaker, but he did Choo proud. Choo then moved into 38 Oxley Road. My mother had bought some new furniture for us, and we started our official married life. But it was a difficult adjustment for Choo because she had now to fit into the Lee family, consisting not only of my grandmother, father, mother, sister, and three brothers, but several relatives from Indonesia who were still boarding with us, supplementing my mother’s income.

Our wedding at Raffles Hotel, 30 September 1950. The label “Stikfas” in the left corner was placed by Yong Nyuk Lin to remind us of our gum-making during the Japanese occupation.

I joined the Singapore Island Club to keep up the golf I had learnt to play at Tintagel, and was so keen on the exercise that one wet afternoon I drove Choo there despite the rain. On Thomson Road my Studebaker skidded, did a U-turn, and rolled over onto a soft grass slope. I was stunned. So was she. We were lucky. We had absolutely no injuries. Had we gone off the road a little further up, we would have struck a large water pipe instead of wet ground, and that might have been the end.

I was restless. Politics in Singapore made frustrating, even infuriating reading. Power was in the hands of the governor, his colonial secretary and his attorney-general. They all lived in the Government House domain that symbolised it. The governor lived in the biggest building, Government House, the colonial secretary in the second biggest bungalow, the attorney-general in the third, and the undersecretary and private secretary to the governor in two other bungalows. The telephone exchange serving these five buildings was manned 24 hours a day.

This was the real heart of government. There was a Legislative Council, but only six of its 25 members were locally elected. The rest were British appointees and officials, headed by the colonial secretary. In 1951, elected members were increased to nine, but they did not have the power to determine policy. Nor did they have any standing with the people – the turnout for municipal and Legco elections was pitifully small.

My boss, John Laycock, was the moving spirit in the main political party, the Progressive Party, but its nominal chief was another lawyer, C.C. Tan, who looked and sounded feeble. Its leaders were mostly returned students who had read law or medicine in Britain in the thirties and were
overawed and overwhelmed by English values. They were like my grandfather – everything English was the acme of perfection. They had no confidence in themselves and even less in their own kind.