Laycock had become increasingly unhappy about my political activities but never complained to me directly.
In 1954, after three years of service, he had given me a partnership contract under which I was guaranteed a minimum that was more than what Choo and I earned together. He did not want to continue to employ Choo, who was happy to stay at home to look after Loong – and later Ling, when she was born in January 1955. He knew I was doing my job in accordance with our agreement, and he tolerated me. However, the defeat of the Progressive Party and his own dismissal by the voters of Katong were crushing blows. He might perhaps have thought that the Progressives would form the government and I would be in opposition. But not this. I had become totally unacceptable. He never spoke to me again. Finally, he wrote me a letter asking for our partnership to be terminated as soon as possible, suggesting the end of August 1955. I promptly agreed. Thus ended one phase of my career.
In the five years since my return from England, I had built up something of a law practice and also a base for political support in the trade unions. But I now had two tasks ahead of me: to start my own law firm and to create a party organisation for the PAP. There was no great urgency. I had four months before I would leave Laycock & Ong, and four years in which to get the PAP into shape before the next general election. Together with Choo and my brother Dennis, we set up the firm Lee & Lee in Malacca Street, next to Laycock & Ong.
What I had not anticipated was the impact of the election campaign on the militants and trade unionists.
The frenetic activity of the pro-communists, the fierce rhetoric of their speakers on Lim Chin Siong’s and Devan Nair’s platforms, had generated great heat. Many of the MCP cadres had been lying low, or had been under cover since the Emergency was proclaimed. In the weeks before and during the election, they came out into the open, using their anonymity as campaign helpers to foment feelings against authority among the workers, the rural dwellers in the countryside (mostly Chinese vegetable, pig and poultry farmers) and the Chinese middle school students. They stoked up hatred against the imperialists, the colonial government, the colonial police, the British capitalists and the local compradors who helped the British capitalists exploit the people. They had created a hothouse atmosphere – all those caught up in their circle believed that a successful revolution was just around the corner. And the militancy proved contagious.
Before the Fajar case, I had been looking for potential activists among University of Malaya students who would be willing to work with the unions. I had too much to do, and needed lieutenants who would stay on the job full-time. They were not easy to find. Good graduates wanted good careers. Not many were willing to take less than the going rates of pay for men with their qualifications, and work with the unions. There was no glamour in the job. The few who came forward did it for a cause, the idealism of youth. One of these was Sandrasegeram (or Sidney) Woodhull, whom I appointed to the Naval Base Labour Union as their paid (or underpaid) secretary. Another was Jamit Singh, a Sikh who had discarded his turban and trimmed his beard.
He had failed his final examinations, but was active enough for the job, although somewhat hotheaded. On my recommendation, he became the paid secretary of the Singapore Harbour Board Staff Association. Before I made these appointments, I checked with Corridon to know whether they were secret members of the Anti- British League or were likely to be Marxists or communists. He had nothing on them, but could not vouch for their inner loyalties. He encouraged me to try them out because if I did not get them to work for non- communist causes, their activism would lead them to the communists. It made sense. Neither was pro- communist to start with. Woodhull had only dabbled in Marxism at the university, and Jamit had no interest in intellectual theory.
But the next thing that happened was that the Singapore Harbour Board Staff Association, hitherto a non- militant group of largely English-educated Indian and Chinese clerks, went on strike. Ostensibly, Jamit had called them out because the Harbour Board had not settled claims on overtime rates, working hours, pensions and bonuses. But the truth was that he just wanted a fight, and pressed on even after the Harbour Board offered wage increases. It was all my doing. I had been naive in putting the few English-educated activists that
I had into contact with the Chinese-speaking cadres of the MCP. Now even the apolitical Jamit Singh had gone along with Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan because they were the most active of all the unionists.
He had got worked up seeing the Chinese-speaking unions becoming militant, and decided his clerks should not lag behind. Furthermore, now Lim had Devan Nair and James Puthucheary (they had been detained on St John’s Island together) in his Singapore Factory and Shop Workers’ Union, whose membership had jumped from a few hundred the previous year to more than 10,000. They helped him operate within the law and navigate the Chinese-educated through the English-speaking bureaucracy.
The pro-communist cadres were keyed up with the exhilaration of winning their political battles with a legitimate political vehicle, the PAP, with English-educated leaders who understood constitutionalism. It provided them with cover. Lim Chin Siong’s position as a legislative assemblyman also gave him status and respectability with government and police officials. Then there was the hubris arising from the complete and total defeat of the Democratic Party and the rout of the English-educated professionals in the Progressive Party. To face this challenge there was now a Labour Front government consisting of weak opportunists, with a well-meaning but politically innocent chief minister in David Marshall, who did not understand the Chinese- speaking people, but was extremely anxious to live up to his self-perceived role as a liberal and a socialist bent on freeing Singapore from colonialism.
In the Legislative Assembly, I renewed my acquaintance with William Goode, the chief secretary. I first met him in 1953 over a minor grievance of the postmen. This was when the government had given convicts the task of painting red stripes down the sides of the postmen’s khaki drill trousers, which they complained made them look like circus attendants. The government insisted the stripes were necessary because postmen were wearing these trousers when off duty, which they were not supposed to do. Goode was a big man with rugged features and a broken nose from boxing in his younger days. He had a long upper lip and spoke in a quiet, modulated voice. He had been educated at a public school and Oxford. But one could feel the steel behind the soft voice, his grey eyes and the firm set of his jaw. He was in the Singapore Volunteer Corps and a prisoner of war from 1942 to 1945, and was sent to work on the death railway in Thailand. He laughed easily and had a bluff manner. We got on well, and settled the problem by having the painted stripes changed to narrow red cloth piping. This made the postmen look smart, not clownish. It cost the government a little more.
Goode now explained that the Emergency Regulations were necessary because murder, arson, acid- throwing and other crimes of violence were part of the communists’ bid for power. They had to maintain their acts of terrorism not just against the military, but also against civilians in order to cow them into a conspiracy of silence. The result was that no one who valued his life would appear in court as a witness to any communist-related crime. He recalled the assassination on 17 April of a young Chinese boy who was called out of a music club where he was playing a harmonica and shot dead. As it happened, I was at our Dapu Hakka Association just next door that Sunday afternoon, attending a tea party given in my honour to celebrate my election victory, and had heard the gunshot ring out. It was broad daylight, but nobody came forward to identify the assassin or assist the police, who were always helpless when it came to getting communists arrested and brought to trial.
I knew from my five years of practice at the Bar that Goode was stating hard facts. However, I could not support the extension of the Emergency Regulations because we had attacked them as part of our election platform. We had done so as a matter of principle, believing that if we had independence we could do away with them. By April, I was beginning to have some doubts about this, but it was to be another year and a half before my doubts turned into a conviction that Raja, Keng Swee, Chin Chye, Kenny and I were all wrong.
But I had a role to play in the Assembly, namely to discount the gravity of the security situation and move our agenda forward. In response to Bill Goode’s speech, therefore, I said ironically, “That was a thrilling account of what good police and detective work can unravel,” adding that there was “not one iota of evidence” that the schoolboy was killed under very mysterious circumstances or was a victim of a campaign of terror, other than the fact that since he had been shot, his fellow students had thought it wise to stay out of the affair.
Neither repealing nor prolonging the Emergency Regulations would solve the problem, I said, adding, “If we are ever to solve it, let us have the courage to say: ‘We believe in democracy and we are going to fight for it. We give you this democracy to fight for.’ If we then fail we would have to admit, as the French admitted in Indochina, that nothing can succeed.” I believed then that had the French given the Vietnamese their full
independence they might not have gone communist.
After the first two days of that Assembly meeting, it was obvious to the reporters in the press gallery and to the members present that the two main players were going to be Marshall and myself. He had the personality, a gift for colourful language, and a histrionic bent that could capture the attention of the House. I had a knack for pricking and deflating his high-flown metaphors and rather enjoyed doing it. Although the PAP had only three members in the Assembly plus Ahmad Ibrahim, the Speaker, Sir George Oehlers, placed me where the leader of the opposition would normally be seated, facing the chief minister.
A lawyer in his late 40s, Oehlers was very meticulous and punctilious, determined to be manifestly fair and impartial. He knew that he would preside over more interesting debates if I were seated opposite Marshall because I would stand up to him. What the Speaker did not yet know was that Marshall was easily provoked by sharp needling into making sallies he would later regret. He was soon to face a vital test of his authority, for the momentum of Lim Chin Siong and Fong’s activities during the election campaign was carrying them inevitably towards a clash with the police.
Fong had succeeded in getting the Paya Lebar Bus Company workers to join his union in February against the wishes of their employer, and was now trying to win over the Hock Lee Bus Company. But Kwek Sing Leong, the tough managing director of Hock Lee, was not going to give up control of his workers and his business to a group of young communists; what was more, Lim Yew Hock as labour minister supported him, and so did his Singapore Trade Union Congress. Fong was nevertheless determined to teach Kwek and the remaining bus companies a lesson.
The day after the opening of the Assembly in April 1955, he got the supporters of his Singapore Bus Workers’ Union (SBWU) to celebrate its first anniversary by picketing the Hock Lee depot in Alexandra Road. He declared an official strike, and urged the employees of all bus companies to come out in sympathy if Kwek did not agree to Hock Lee becoming a closed shop with the SBWU as its only union, and immediately settle their outstanding disputes. Kwek’s response was to dismiss all 229 workers belonging to the SBWU, whereupon the workers went on a hunger strike and picketed the depot again the same night.
Then the ubiquitous Chinese middle school students got into the act. The boys and girls turned up to entertain the strikers with songs and dances, and since one of Lim Chin Siong’s many disputes was with the Mis-Sino Aerated Water Company, which was not far from the Hock Lee premises, the students were able to shuttle between the two to give encouragement and support. I advised Fong not to call a strike until a 14-day notice had been given and had expired. Fong complied but in a speech in the Legislative Assembly on 27 April, Lim Chin Siong objected to the notice, which was required under the Emergency Regulations.
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