The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (23 page)

The press exposure and publicity enhanced my professional reputation. I was no longer just a brash young lawyer back from Cambridge with academic honours. I had led striking workers, spoken up for them and was trusted by them. I had delivered without much broken crockery. I gained enormously in the estimation of thousands of workers in Singapore and Malaya without frightening the English-educated intelligentsia. My friends and I were now convinced that in the unions we would find the mass base and, by extension, the political muscle we had been seeking when discussing our plans for action during all those beery nights spent pub-crawling in London after meetings at Malaya Hall. We had found the way to mobilise mass support.

Non-communist groups were encouraged, even emboldened, by this demonstration of constitutional, peaceful, non-violent mass action to redress legitimate grievances. A spate of trade unions and clan associations approached me to be their legal adviser, and I was happy to
collect them as potential political supporters. Most paid nominal fees to Laycock & Ong to put my name down on their letterheads as their Legal Adviser. I attended many of their annual dinners or general meetings. I learnt to get along with different Chinese language groups, some Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking like the Chinese Printing Workers’ Union, many only dialect-speaking like the Singapore Hakka Association.

It was often embarrassing because my Chinese was totally inadequate. I felt greatly ashamed of my inability to communicate with them in what should have been my native tongue. Once again, I started to make an effort to learn Mandarin. I got myself a teacher and a small tape-recorder. I shared the teacher with Hon Sui Sen, who had now become commissioner for lands, taking lessons at his government quarters at Cantonment Road. But progress was painfully slow. I had little time and, worse, few opportunities to practise the language.

However, I did not need Mandarin for my next major involvement in industrial action. In December 1952, 10,000 mainly Indian members of the Naval Base Labour Union gave strike notice out of the blue, and on 29 December, the workers at the base in Sembawang downed tools, to the discomfiture of the naval officers in charge and of the Singapore government. Royal Navy ships that had reached Singapore from the war in Korea – a carrier, two frigates and a submarine – were held up and could not be repaired. The governor intervened, but after two fruitless meetings, representatives of both sides agreed to send the dispute to an independent arbitrator, John Cameron, a Queen’s Counsel from the Scottish Bar. The union asked me to present their case.

I spent a few weeks swotting up salary scales and making comparisons between Singapore government and Admiralty wages for the same or similar jobs. Hearing was in camera at the Registrar’s Office in the Supreme Court and lasted for a week in February 1953. Cameron, a seasoned Scottish advocate, maintained an air of impartiality. The Admiralty had an experienced establishment man who knew his salary
scales backwards. When Cameron made his award on 11 March, it was clear that he knew the limit of the Admiralty’s budget and was not going to breach it. I had pressed for parity with Singapore government pay rates, but Cameron rejected it.

The union officials were disappointed, and the president was under pressure to reject the award. I saw the officials and persuaded them that it would be unwise to resume the strike after they had accepted arbitration as a means of settlement, that this was part and parcel of constitutional struggle. My views prevailed and the episode did me no harm. Although I lost some standing for obtaining only minor concessions, I had established myself as a legal adviser who played by the rules and was prepared to advise his client union to accept an unfavourable award.

Other strikes were brewing in Singapore and in Malaya. The clerks of the Singapore Union of Postal and Telecommunications Workers had given notice that they would strike for higher pay on 23 March 1953. It was to be the first-ever strike by government clerks. The union asked me to be its legal adviser. The government offered arbitration and after discussions with me the union agreed. The government put up the names of six members of the Malayan arbitration panel. One of them happened to be Yong Pung How, my contemporary at Cambridge Law School.

For three days the proceedings received considerable publicity in the press and on radio. I had two objectives: to get a good award; and more important, to expose the high-handed and incompetent manner in which British colonial officers dealt with local public servants. I did this without appearing aggressive. Yong Pung How awarded the 1,000 clerks 28 months’ back pay and other increases amounting to about $1 million. This outcome restored my standing with the workers.

Meanwhile, senior government local officers had been getting restive. Kenny was seething with resentment at an unjust award of special family allowances for expatriate officers only. The Singapore Senior Officers
Association had made repeated representations without results. When Keng Swee returned from England at the end of 1951, he worked out a simple strategy that would give them the political muscle to bring the government to heel. Instead of fighting for family allowances, comparable to expatriate allowances, for fewer than 200 local senior officers, Keng Swee proposed that they demand proportionate allowances for all government servants, especially the poorly paid and numerous Division 4 daily-rated workers. Since 1945, wages in government service had lagged behind inflation. After the postmen’s strike had shown what mass action could do constitutionally, the daily-rated workers were eager for industrial action.

In July 1952, Keng Swee helped Kenny to form a Council of Joint Action to represent all government unions and associations with a total membership of 14,000. They demanded family allowances equivalent to non-pensionable expatriate pay. At a mass rally in November, the workers turned up in force to express their resentment at the racial discrimination against local public servants. Their handbill asked, “Is this just? Europeans have SMALL families and BIG allowances. We have BIG families and NO allowances.”

The elected members of the Legislative Council sensed that there was political credit to be gained from backing the demand for family allowances for the locals, especially the lower paid, and began to speak in support of it in the Legislative Council. Governor Sir John Nicoll, who presided over the Legislative Council meeting, was not amused. He advised them to confine themselves to exercising control “on the higher plane of general policy”, and warned the civil servants, “you cannot put pressure on councillors”.

The Council of Joint Action denied that they had approached the legislative councillors for assistance, but asked whether as members of the public, government servants did not have the right to discuss matters of principle with their elected representatives. The Singapore Federation
of Government Employees’ Unions wrote to the colonial secretary to express the “deep distrust which all locally domiciled officers have of expatriate officers in the government”.

Faced with growing resistance and a surprisingly rebellious attitude from his government servants and even from previously meek legislative councillors, the governor sought to defuse the mounting dissatisfaction by appointing a special committee under a well-known economist, F.C. Benham, to “investigate whether the present emoluments of locally domiciled officers are adequate”. After three days of consultation, the committee agreed with the unions that they should receive family allowances. The governor was appalled. This would lead to an enormous drain on the budget. When he rejected the report, six unions threatened strike action. To stave off the strike, the governor promised an independent commission under Sir Edward Ritson. In March 1953, Ritson recommended that expatriate family allowances be abolished.

The Council of Joint Action had shaken the colonial system. After 10 months of further negotiations, the government approved a salary scale that gave bigger increases to the higher-paid than to the lowest-paid government workers or those in between. Thus the colonial government denied Keng Swee and Kenny the political credit with the blue-collar workers that they had sought.

8. Widening the Oxley Road Circle

In September 1952 a tall, Indian-looking Malay in his late 40s, with a long, thin, un-Malay nose, arrived at my desk. Speaking English well but in a hesitant manner and with a slight stammer, he introduced himself as Yusof Ishak, owner, editor-in-chief and managing director of the
Utusan Melayu
. His chief sub-editor, Samad Ismail, had been held with other subversives on St John’s Island since his arrest in January 1951, but his case would soon come up for review. Would I represent him?

All the hopeless and near-hopeless cases against the government had been coming to me as a counsel of last resort. I had prosecuted on quite a number of fiats (which entitle a private citizen to sue the state), getting convictions against minor officials for bullying underdogs who were prepared to pay me to seek retribution for them – a trishaw rider suing a detective for assault, a dock storeman suing the Harbour Board for unjust demotion. In one illuminating instance, I prosecuted for criminal breach of trust Lieutenant-Commander George Ansel Hardcastle, RNVR, the chief fire officer of the Naval Base Dockyard Fire Brigade, for misuse of the workers’ benevolent fund. The case went before an English judge in the criminal district court, who acquitted him. The dissatisfied firemen then took my advice and sued Hardcastle for restitution and damages in the high court in order to publicise the case. However, his fellow officers passed the hat around and produced the $12,000 required for restitution and to pay legal costs just before it was to be heard, thus denying the union the satisfaction of exposing and disgracing him in open court. Such was the atmosphere of antipathy and distrust in which we lived.

But Samad’s case was not a matter of law. It was a political action by a colonial administration threatened by a communist armed insurrection, and under growing pressure from nationalist demands for independence. The best approach was to persuade the government that this particular detainee was probably a nationalist who would eventually become an adversary if not an enemy of the communists, even though he might be going along with them for the time being. I decided to take the case without referring to John Laycock. This was work for which the
Utusan Melayu
would pay the bill.

I was unlikely to get results by simply pushing against the government, so I decided to call on the Special Branch officer responsible to find out the real position of my client, and what they had against him. As luck would have it, that took me to Superintendent Richard Byrne Corridon. Corridon, who was in charge of the Indian and English-educated section of Special Branch, was an expert who had been doing similar work in British India, and could tell the difference between Indian communists and Indian nationalists.

We had met before. He had studied my file, and one Sunday morning early in 1952 had visited me at 38 Oxley Road, just for a chat. He said he had read of my activities in London and was interested to meet me to find out more about the communists there, like Lim Hong Bee, and their influence on Singapore and Malayan students. I told him what I thought of Lim Hong Bee, and of the unlikelihood of the communists making much headway with the English-educated in London, but added that after the arrest of Eber and his group in Singapore in January 1951 I could be wrong. At the same time, I disabused him of the suspicions Special Branch had entertained about the Budapest Festival of Youth. I said Dennis had gone to the festival simply for a good holiday, and that he was about as political as a tadpole. Years later, I discovered that this phrase had found its way into their files.

I now saw him at his Special Branch office in Robinson Road. He was completely open. He said Samad was a bright Malay, very active, a first-class operator. I asked him if he was a communist. He said, “The most brilliant communist I know.” This did not sound promising until he added, “But people grow up and their minds change with experience. Work on him. He is worth saving.”