The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (30 page)

Kwek was not browbeaten by the threat of strike action and wanted to send his buses out the next day. But 150 strikers of Fong’s group had already formed a human barrier in front of the main gate of the depot and refused to move despite repeated police warnings. Water hoses were then used and they were dispersed. Fifteen strikers claimed they had been brutally assaulted, but none had anything more than superficial bruises. Kwek got 40 of his 70 buses onto the road.

In the next two weeks, I received my first lesson in CUF negotiating tactics. Every concession made immediately led to a new demand. Every refusal to give in to a demand led to an increase in heat and tension. Meanwhile, the Chinese students together with supporters from Lim Chin Siong’s Factory and Shop Workers’ Union continued to visit the strikers in order to increase their sense of solidarity and omnipotence, and their conviction that victory was inevitable. Lim and Fong wanted nothing less than to win control of all the bus workers and be able to paralyse the city’s transport system at will.

On 29 April, Marshall intervened, going personally to the Hock Lee depot to bridge the differences and get a settlement. Under pressure from the chief minister, Kwek offered to take back the dismissed workers pending the outcome of the court of inquiry ordered by Lim Yew Hock. I persuaded Fong to accept this. F.A. Chua, the judge who had heard the
Fajar
sedition case, was the chairman of the court of inquiry. Being a
pragmatic man, he looked for a workable solution. He gave two-thirds of the buses to Fong’s union and one-third to the house union, to be run on separate routes, and recommended that all dismissed workers be reinstated. The buses went out the next day.

But the strike resumed within hours when ticket inspectors from Fong’s union refused to register their names with the company before leaving the depot, while other members claimed they were being discriminated against by being allotted vehicles in poor condition. Workers in Kwek’s loyal Hock Lee Employees’ Union continued to take their buses out on the roads, but strikers slashed the seats and rang the bells incessantly to disturb the drivers. Meanwhile, the pickets were out once more and the police had to use water hoses to disperse them. That was only the beginning. The following day, Fong called a two-day stoppage by all seven bus companies in Singapore, which would bring public transport to a halt. Twenty unions in the group that he and Lim Chin Siong controlled then threatened a general strike unless direct negotiations between the Hock Lee Bus Company and the SBWU were opened within 24 hours. Early on 12 May, crews of the remaining Hock Lee buses and of the Singapore Traction Company were intimidated into stopping work, and since the STC ran the major routes within the city, the city itself was almost paralysed, with only private cars and pirate taxis on the streets. Work also stopped at many other places, as Governor Sir John Nicoll reported to Alan Lennox-Boyd, secretary of state for the colonies, either “in sympathy, fear or plain bewilderment”.

On the same morning, the pickets returned to the Hock Lee bus depot. Fong had urged them to be brave enough to stand firm this time, and they linked arms in a human chain as the police moved in with their hoses. The water jets still swept them away, and the buses passed through the gates, to be pelted with stones. But in the afternoon, 20 lorryloads of reinforcements from the Chinese middle schools converged on the depot and a pitched battle took place, with about 2,000 students
and 300 strikers pitted against the police. The main weapons were stones and bottles on one side and tear gas on the other, but every now and then cornered policemen had to use their firearms. When darkness fell, the rioting grew more intense.

At about 9 pm, I drove to the junction of Tanglin Road and Jervois Road, which was on a hillock and gave a good view of the Hock Lee bus depot below me. I had my car radio on, and at 9:30, Marshall came on the air. It was sad. He was confused. He was for the people, for the downtrodden workers, yet they were rioting. He extolled them for their past sacrifices, which had made Singapore prosperous, and appealed to them to give him time to put things right. He said, “We have furthermore sought and are still seeking to obtain the services of Professor Arthur Lewis of the University of Manchester, a West Indian Negro of world standing as an economist, and all his life a staunch socialist, in order to assist us in reorienting the economy of this territory for the benefit of the people.” I could hardly believe my ears.

I despaired for Marshall and for Singapore. Either he should have left the governor and the chief secretary to tackle this problem, or if he was going to be in charge then he had to govern and tell the striking workers that unless they stopped this violence, he would use force to restore law and order. On 21 May, the governor reported to Alan Lennox-Boyd, “The chief minister, under strong pressure from myself and others, addressed the public over Radio Malaya in a long and unconvincing speech, once more blaming ‘colonialism’ and ‘economic exploitation’ for the situation, likely neither to restrain the lawless nor to reassure the law-abiding.”

I knew that Lim Chin Siong and Fong were working for a clash with authority, but I did not expect an outburst of mob fury. People assumed there was always some latent animosity in the Chinese-speaking population for their white bosses, but I never realised it was so intense. Raised to fever pitch by the middle school students and the communist
cadres in the unions, it exploded. It is probable that even Lim and Fong were not prepared for what was now to take place. But I was to learn again and again that their purpose was never to argue, reason and settle. It was always to engineer a collision, to generate more popular hatred of the colonial enemy. They wanted to establish the Leninist preconditions for a revolution: first, a government that no longer commanded the confidence of the people, and second, a government that had lost faith in its ability to solve its problems as growing lawlessness, misery and violence overwhelmed it.

The rioting spread the next day. By 4 pm, mobs of about 1,000 were attacking the police and had to be broken up with tear gas. After dark, they continued to strike at police posts, road blocks, individual policemen and radio patrol cars. It was hit-and-run throughout the night until 3 am, when the main crowds dispersed. But groups of 10 and 20 were still throwing stones and bricks at policemen who were clearing the roads of obstruction and towing away damaged vehicles. Two policemen were killed and 14 injured, along with some 17 civilians. Whenever violence erupted, the crowd would go for any whites on the scene, since feelings against them were running strong. An American correspondent for UPI was beaten to death, and three Europeans had narrow escapes.

At about 10.35 pm that first evening, a mob had attacked a police patrol car with a British police lieutenant in charge, hurling bottles and stones as they closed in for the kill. The lieutenant radioed for help, but before he and his men were rescued he fired four shots from his revolver. He was not aiming at the crowd, he said, but one shot appeared to have hit a Chinese student of about 17. Instead of taking him straight to hospital, however, the other students put him on a lorry and paraded him around the town for three hours, so that by the time he was brought there he was dead from a wound in the lung. Had he been taken to hospital directly, he might have been saved. But what was one life if another martyr could stoke up the fire of revolution?

After the riots on 13 May 1955, the government decided to get tough and closed three Chinese schools. But the students continued to camp in them and were supported by the trade unions controlled by Lim Chin Siong and Fong; there were more marches through the town by the strikers, and stone-throwing and attacks on cars. The tense situation finally eased after the funeral of the Chinese student on 15 May passed without incident. That night, after four hours of mediation, a happy Marshall broadcast that an agreement had been reached that “might well lead to a settlement of all outstanding strikes of an industrial nature” in Singapore. He appointed as arbiter Charles Gamba, who was known to be sympathetic to the union. Gamba gave his final ruling on 28 May. The SBWU members who had been dismissed on 23 April were to be reinstated. The Hock Lee Employees’ Union was to be dissolved, and 160 members retrenched.

Kwek would not give up easily. He still allocated work to members of the officially defunct Hock Lee Employees’ Union who had been loyal to him, and the union’s leaders threatened to reject Gamba’s ruling until the government prevailed upon the company to go along with it. Kwek was bitter and defiant. He was a Hockchia, a Hokkien sub-branch known to be rough and tough. The Hock Lee Bus Company was a family business, and he was confident he could fight and win because many union members were his clansmen and key officiais like the inspectors and timekeepers were his blood relatives. But an inexperienced government, not knowing what the game was about, helped the communists to break the most tightly knit of all the bus companies in Singapore.

It was a total victory for Fong and the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union and their methods, not least because they now had the full measure of Marshall. They knew they had a swing door to push. The way in which the SBWU had fought and won gave all trade unions – workers and leaders, communists and non-communists – confidence that they had much to gain if they, too, showed fight.

12. Marshall Accentuates the Crisis

Fong Swee Suan and four other union leaders were arrested by the government under the Emergency Regulations on 11 June 1955. Six thousand bus workers came out in protest against their detention. The next day, thanks to what the authorities described as “mob coercion” of the drivers, taxis also disappeared from the streets. But the government mounted free emergency lorry services to important parts of the city, and more than 100,000 labourers and 280,000 others went to work as usual without incident. Despite the paralysis of public transport, the strike failed to bring the city to a standstill. This time the people were out of sympathy with it – it was too political and not related to any of their economic grievances. After four days, Lim Chin Siong and Devan Nair suddenly called it off, and 13,300 workers, men and women in 90 commercial and industrial enterprises, returned to work. The government claimed victory. Fong was not released until 25 July.

I had decided to get away from this madhouse and go on my annual vacation. With Choo and Loong, age 3, I drove up to the Cameron Highlands on 1 June and stayed there for three weeks. We left 5-month-old Ling at home as she was too young.

I played golf at Tanah Rata every day, morning and afternoon. As I walked on the pleasant and cool nine-hole Cameron Highlands course, 5,000 feet above sea level, I soaked in the significance of the events of the previous few months. I felt in my bones that to continue on the course Lim Chin Siong and Fong had embarked upon would end in political disaster. The PAP and the Middle Road unions (named for the location of their headquarters, not their policies) would be banned. But
if Marshall were to flinch from taking unpopular action, the whole economy and society of Singapore would be in such a chaotic mess that the British government would have to suspend the constitution.

On 21 June, I drove back to Singapore with the family. The press hinted that I had run away from these troubles, but I knew my presence would have made no difference. When the
Straits Times
asked why I did not return from my leave, I said my executive committee had not asked me to, and I had full confidence in them.

This had been my baptism of fire working with the CUF. I talked the problem over with Chin Chye, Raja and Kenny. (Keng Swee was in London doing his PhD.) We decided that I should read the riot act to Lim and Fong. I told them that if they carried on in this way, they would have to go it alone. That sobered them up, and on 26 September the governor, Sir Robert Black, would write in a report to Alan Lennox-Boyd:

“The collapse of this general strike did much to discredit the extremist elements in the PAP. Lee Kuan Yew was away from Singapore at the time and I am informed that he departed deliberately in order to have no part in the violence. … Since then there has been a change in tactics by the PAP. While continuing to foment strikes, in pursuit of their campaign for winning control of labour, they have been at pains to keep within the law.”

That did not last long. After a few months, the pro-communists drifted back to their old ways, but they did not provoke bloody clashes with the police or stage a general strike to paralyse the economy. I believed they still thought clashes with the police and the government were the way to arouse more hatred and heighten the revolutionary fervour of the people. There were times when Lim and Fong appeared to listen to my advice to keep to the methods of constitutional struggle with long negotiations and passive resistance to avoid bloodshed. But they came from a different tradition and background from mine and they had different models in mind.

I was in a most difficult position. While I could not and would not defend them, I could not condemn them without breaking up our united front. As I had explained to a correspondent of the
Sydney Daily Mirror
in an interview reported in the
Straits Times
, “Any man in Singapore who wants to carry the Chinese-speaking people with him cannot afford to be anti-communist. The Chinese are very proud of China. If I had to choose between colonialism and communism, I would vote for communism and so would the great majority.” I was hoping that I could get enough Chinese to vote with us against the communists and for independence and democracy. But I was not at all sanguine that this could be easily achieved if a successful communist China continued to be their source of inspiration.