The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (24 page)

The police provided a special launch to take me to St John’s Island, a courtesy they extended to lawyers who represented the detainees. It was a pleasant 20-minute boat ride on a working-day afternoon, and was followed by a 20-minute walk from the jetty along pathways and up steps to the northern side of the island. There, amid beautiful old tembusu trees, stood some government holiday bungalows, and not far away, long rows of barrack-like buildings surrounded by chain-link fences for opium addicts undergoing rehabilitation. One of the bungalows was also ringed with chain-link topped with barbed wire. This housed the political detainees. In anticipation of my visit, the camp wardens had put a little wooden table with two wooden chairs under a nearby tembusu. I waited while an Indian warder went to the bungalow and came back with a slim, spritely, narrow-faced Malay of medium height, wearing sunglasses and looking quite sinister with his trimmed moustache and a broken front tooth. He smoked incessantly and seemed highly strung. He appeared sceptical about his prospects of release before an advisory committee consisting of a high court judge with two lay assessors.

I told him it depended on whether Special Branch believed he would continue to be a communist, in which case he would probably be detained again and again. But if after his release he operated as a nationalist, they were likely to leave him alone. He gave one of his deep guffaws. This was my first face-to-face meeting with a detained member of a communist organisation. I was ignorant of their psychology, the mental make-up and motivation that made them determined to prove to themselves and the world that they were men of conviction and
strength, able to endure great privations and hardships for a cause, worthy to be comrades of the other warriors dedicated to the Marxist millennium.

The review of his case was held in the judge’s chambers with no publicity. The chief ground for his detention was that he was a member of the MCP and a leader of the Malay Section of its auxiliary organisation, the Singapore People’s Anti-British League. The judge listened to my submission that he was basically an anti-colonialist and a Malay nationalist; that as a Malay he could not accept the chauvinistic appeals of a Chinese-led MCP; and that it was out of friendship and personal loyalty that, in September or October 1950, he had arranged the escape to Indonesia of a prominent communist, Abdullah Sudin, knowing that he was wanted by the police. I do not know if I made any impression on the judge and his two assessors. The judge said nothing, and the hearing was over in less than 20 minutes.

Samad returned to St John’s Island, but in April 1953 he and a few other detainees were released, among them C.V. Devan Nair. When I first saw Nair through the chain-link fence, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and clad only in shorts and Japanese-style rubber slippers, I found him an unlikeable person. He was short, squat, pugnacious and obviously angry with the world. But when Samad noticed that he had caught my eye, he told me that he was a good friend, an official of the Singapore Teachers’ Union. “Under detention,” he said, “you soon learn to differentiate between the weaklings and the strong men.” He referred to another Indian detainee, James Puthucheary, who talked a lot, was superficially clever but unreliable. Nair was a strong man, totally dependable. That might be so, I thought, but I did not like his looks. As it happened, shortly after that, the Singapore Teachers’ Union approached me at Laycock & Ong and asked me to represent him. I could not refuse, but did not relish the prospect of trying to win him over. When I next met Corridon, he gave me a rundown on Nair, confirming that he was an angry man,
dedicated and determined. He had been converted to communism by P.V. Sharma, the president of the union.

Our small group – Keng Swee, Chin Chye, Raja, Kenny and I – had meanwhile been meeting on Saturday afternoons in my basement dining room at Oxley Road to consider the feasibility of forming a political party. The room was in a hot, uncomfortable part of the house facing the setting sun, and even with three wide-open windows, two open doors, and a powerful ceiling fan whirring it could become extremely muggy. But if the atmosphere was soporific, we were not. We were determined that we would be completely different from the supine, feeble, self-serving, opportunistic parties and individuals in the existing Legislative Council and City Council. We therefore decided to invite Samad to join us to discuss the prospects for waging a constitutional struggle for independence without finding ourselves sucked into the communist movement. We also wanted him in because he could give us access to the Malay-speaking world, and get our views across to the Malay masses through the
Utusan Melayu
.

After two meetings, he asked if he could bring his friend Devan Nair along because he could make a useful contribution. I did not like the idea, but my friends and I agreed that if we only had people we liked in the inner core, we would never expand into a party. So Nair came too, and every week, or at least every other week, we would meet to talk over the situation and what political action we could take.

The British were not unaware of the political pressures that were building up. In 1953, the governor appointed Sir George Rendel, a former ambassador to Belgium, to head a commission to review Singapore’s constitution and recommend the next stage. In his report, published on 22 February 1954, Rendel proposed the automatic registration, as eligible voters, of all British subjects born in Singapore. This would increase the electorate fourfold. The new government was to consist of a council of
nine ministers, six of them elected members, who were to be appointed on the recommendation of the leader of the majority party. But the key portfolios were to be in the hands of three ex-officio members: the chief secretary, the financial secretary and the attorney-general. Except in the limited areas of foreign relations and defence (including internal security), the governor would be bound to accept the decisions of the council, which would be accountable solely to the new Legislative Assembly. There were to be 25 elected members, six nominated, and three ex-officio. The governor accepted the report for implementation at the next election in April 1955.

It became urgent for my friends and me to decide whether to take part in the election under this new constitution or again to stay on the sidelines. Samad and Nair were for staying out. They wanted independence or nothing at all. Drawing on the lesson learnt from the mistakes of the Malayan Democratic Union, Raja was strongly in favour of participation. So were Kenny and Keng Swee. I was convinced that non-participation would exclude us from the constitutional arena, and we would then end up like the MDU or have to go underground. So we started planning to form a party before the end of 1954 to give us some 6 months before the polls.

Things always seem to come out of the blue. On 28 May 1954, a group of students at the University of Malaya were arrested and charged with sedition. They wanted me to defend them. I looked at the charges; there was a 50–50 chance of a conviction. They had published in
Fajar
, a small undergraduate magazine that came out irregularly although it was supposed to be a monthly, an article which might have broken the law. I agreed to act for them, and after some reflection, advised them that theirs was a case best treated as a political contest, not a legal one. I proposed that we bring out from London a British Queen’s Counsel,
D.N. Pritt, famous for championing left-wing causes. Pritt was in his 60s, and known as a fellow traveller with a waspish tongue who was completely without fear of any judge either in the colonies or Britain itself. He had already been cut off from the British establishment and was treated as a crank, one of those eccentric Englishmen from the bourgeois class who chose to be more proletarian than the poorest worker while still living the good life. In June 1950, Choo and I had visited him in his flat in London to ask him to sign papers sponsoring our call to the Bar, where he was a Master of the Bench of the Middle Temple. I believed he would take the case, provided we could pay his passage and accommodation and give him a small fee. I wrote to him, and he replied promptly. Yes, he would come.

Knowing that Special Branch would be monitoring my correspondence with Pritt, I used Chin Chye’s name and address, and Pritt’s letters to me were therefore sent to him at his University of Malaya quarters in Dalvey Road. When I was writing this chapter in 1995, I discovered that, as a result, Special Branch thought Chin Chye and Raja had been responsible for bringing Pritt out to Singapore. They were wrong. I also used the address of Choo’s sister, so some of his letters went to Kwa Geok Choo at Cairnhill Circle, instead of to 38 Oxley Road or Laycock & Ong. Special Branch apparently never realised this, for their records did not show any interception of mail posted there.

One big problem I had expected was Pritt’s admission to practise at the Singapore Bar, which would normally have required him to have completed six months’ pupillage in the office of an advocate and solicitor of at least seven years’ standing. There is provision for a judge to waive this in unusual circumstances, but I expected the Bar Committee to object to any special dispensation. The Socialist Club of the University had set up a Students’ Defence Fund Committee and collected $10,000 to defray the cost of Pritt’s air passage, hotel expenses and a small gift. I decided that whether he was admitted or blocked, it was worth flying
him out to Singapore, since refusing him the right to appear would be a political defeat for the government. So I took the chance, and he arrived on 11 August. The students and I met him at the airport, and I drove him to the Adelphi Hotel. Big, heavy-set and bald, he was a bundle of energy. After a long flight with overnight stops in Cairo and Colombo, he was able that same evening to sit down at the desk in his warm and uncomfortable room, with an inadequate air-conditioner chugging away, to write up his notes of the case. I gave him the background to it and published materials that could be used in the defence, including marked extracts of relevant books and speeches.

He was obviously well-qualified to represent anyone accused of sedition anywhere in the British Empire and in Britain itself. But the law had to be complied with, so I arranged for him to sit in the office of Osborne Jones, an advocate and solicitor of not less than seven years’ standing, as required. After Pritt had graced his office for six days, Osborne Jones was able to swear in an affidavit, “I have instructed the applicant, so far as I am able to, on the differences of the law as it is in England and the law as it is in Singapore.” Osborne Jones was being strictly truthful. Pritt then had to appear before three examiners who had to satisfy themselves that he had “an adequate knowledge of the practice and etiquette of the profession and of the English language and is a suitable person for admission”. The three were the most eminent members of the Singapore Bar, the solicitor-general and two senior British lawyers. One of them asked him, “Mr Pritt, how would you draw up a conveyance of land?” Pritt replied, “Queen’s Counsel, sir, do not draw up conveyances of land.” Even the
Straits Times
reported this gem.

Pritt crafted his affidavit so as to leave the judge in no doubt as to his qualifications. He had been admitted to the Bar in 1909, which made him more senior than any lawyer in Singapore, including the judges. He had been a King’s (Queen’s) Counsel since 1927, and a Master of the Bench of the Middle Temple since 1936, He had appeared before courts
around the world, from India to the Cour de Cassation in Algiers. And he “had been offered permission to appear before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1950”.

In support of the application, I drafted an affidavit on behalf of the eight accused to affirm that since the case involved difficult and complex questions of law, they had earlier wanted to get another counsel for the defence with more experience in criminal cases and had asked me to approach David Marshall. But on 24 July, one of the students had received a letter from Marshall couched in vehement and colourful language. It read, “It is with growing anger that I have been reading your recent issues of
Fajar
, because through them I have learnt that you are merely masquerading as Socialists whilst spouting a venomous communist propaganda. … Please remove me from your list of sympathisers.”