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.
Patrick O’Donovan, Southeast Asia correspondent of the London Sunday newspaper The Observer, when I was a student in England described the older generation of returned Asian students as emotionally and psychologically incapable of fighting for freedom. Their starting point was that they could not take over immediately and run an independent country, and would require many more years of experience before they could do so. I saw them as unable to stand up for themselves, let alone stand up against the British. The same applied to the Indians from India who had become “Singapore leaders” by reason of their British passports and the political vacuum the MCP revolt had created. The only local of consequence was Lim Yew Hock, the general secretary of the Singapore Clerical and Administrative Workers’ Union.
These politicians made supine speeches that never challenged British supremacy. They were inordinately proud whenever they said anything critical of colonial officials. My friend Kenny Byrne described them as
“bred in servility”. Kenny had come home on the Willem Ruys with me; he worked in the government secretariat and we would voice our frustrations when I visited him in his government quarters after dinner. He was a tall, slow-talking, slow-walking Eurasian who had a long memory for insults and loathed some of his British fellow officers in the civil service.
I was determined to do something about this lamentable situation, and anxious that my other friends should return from England, especially Keng Swee and Chin Chye. I wanted their assessment, to compare notes and decide on a course of action. I also wanted to make contact with John Eber and Lim Kean Chye, who had been leading left-wing figures in the Malayan Democratic Union (MDU) before it was dissolved when the Emergency was declared in June 1948. One day in November 1950, without prior notice, John Eber called on me at Oxley Road. I asked him what we could do about Singapore’s futile constitutional politics. Why not form a party and do something substantial – stop this beating about the bush and challenge the power of colonial government? He was noncommittal. He said, “Well, there is an Emergency on. We have to be very careful.” He had probably heard from Lim Hong Bee of our meeting in London and was sizing me up as a potential recruit.
In January 1951, the newspapers reported the detention of an English-educated group of communists. It included John Eber, who had been vice-president of the MDU, C.V. Devan Nair, secretary of the Singapore Teachers’ Union, and Abdul Samad bin Ismail, chief sub-editor of the Malay newspaper, Utusan Melayu.
This was the first time detention powers under the Emergency Regulations were used against an English-
educated group. I had hoped to get John Eber and his friends interested in forming a constitutional political party, but instead he had come to assess me as a possible recruit for his cause. If he and his group had not been arrested for another six or 12 months, Special Branch might well have included me in the clean-up. This turn of events gave me time for reflection, and I soon realised the gravity of this development.
The MCP was waging a guerrilla war against the British in the jungles of Malaya, shooting white planters and locals who supported the colonialists. They were winning many recruits from among the Chinese- educated majority in Singapore, who had been impressed by reports of Communist China’s progress, and by the victories the People’s Liberation Army had scored against the Americans in Korea. These successes gave a powerful boost to China’s stature, and therefore to the conversion of the Chinese-educated to the communist cause.
But it was now clear that the MCP had also won recruits among the English-educated intelligentsia. In spite of the favoured treatment they received, and their monopoly of jobs in the government and the professions, some of the most idealistic had succumbed to the appeal communism had for peoples fighting colonialism. If we did nothing, if we failed to mobilise them into an effective political movement, the MCP would be the ultimate gainer.
I continued my work at the law and followed Laycock to court in his Chancery cases. He stayed sober when he had to appear, but on other occasions it would be something of an ordeal. He would take me out to lunches and dinners, and drink copiously – black and tan (beer and stout) to wash down oysters at the Kallang airport hotel or T-bone steaks at the Stamford Café or the Adelphi Grill. Sometimes he became too inebriated to work effectively in the afternoon, and at night he would drink himself silly on whisky. I ate more than was good for me and drank more than I wanted. Laycock must have thought me a useful recruit for his Progressive Party, for in February 1951, he asked me to be his agent for the Legislative Council election. I agreed. It would give me an idea of conditions and practices in Singapore.
Nomination day was 8 March, but there was no excitement. Small wonder. At the previous Legislative Council polls in 1948, only 23,000 out of a potential electorate of 200,000 had voted, and nearly half of those had been Indians although their community consisted of no more than six per cent of the population. Not unnaturally, therefore, there was a disproportionate number of Indians among those standing for election in 1951 – 15 (including one Ceylonese) candidates out of 22 contesting nine seats. One of them, the first woman to be elected to the Legco, absconded to India the following year with her lawyer husband and a large sum of money belonging to his clients. That did no good to the standing of India-born Indians in Singapore, who were regarded as birds of passage.
With a meagre vote, Laycock secured one of the six seats won by the Progressive Party. Two went to the Labour Party, and one to an independent. The campaign was a parody of what I had seen in England.
Laycock contested his home constituency of Katong on the east coast, where there were large numbers of English-speaking Straits Chinese loyal to King and Empire. As his election agent, I paid helpers to put up posters with his photograph, his name and the caption “Vote for John Laycock, Progressive Party”. But he also instructed me to arrange evening parties, with professional female dancers to partner the men in the Malay joget, and provided food and drink although it was against the law. I had to make sure, moreover, that the headman of the kampong involved was adequately compensated, for he was expected in return to tell his people to vote for Laycock. In the midst of the merrymaking, John Laycock would mount a small platform with a microphone to make a speech in English, promising that he would bring electricity and water to his audience. Few in the audience understood him. We held two meetings in Kampong Amber, a squalid squatter area that is now a high-rise condominium.
As in the 1948 election, only a small proportion of those eligible to vote turned up – 24,693 out of 250,000. The world that the legislative councillors represented was a small segment, isolated from the broad mass of the people. The majority of those on the island had been uninvolved and uninterested in the election for the simple reason that they did not have the vote, and anyway, everything was conducted in English. But the bulk of the population were Chinese-speaking. Their avenues for advancement after going through Chinese schools were negligible, and their political aspirations could only be realised through the MCP. They
included the hawkers, trishaw men, taxi drivers and runners for the illegal four-digit and chap-ji-kee lotteries.
They were the ordinary people who appeared in the outer office of Laycock & Ong, looking for help to get them out of entanglements with the police, the municipal authorities or the government. They spoke no English, and clerks interpreted for them to lawyers who did not speak their dialects.
I felt that this world of colonial make-believe was surreal. Officials catered only to their own interests and those of the English-educated, who could bring some pressure to bear on them through the English-language newspapers. But they were not the economic dynamo of Singapore society. I had a great sense of unease. I discussed these thoughts only with Kenny. I had to get on with my career in law, and had yet to see how the law would help me in politics.
On 7 August 1951, I completed my one year of pupillage. To be called to the Bar, Choo and I dressed in sombre clothes and donned our barrister’s robes complete with white tabs and, in my case, a stiff wing collar.
It was an important occasion then, for the entire Bar had 140 members, and only some 10 new lawyers were admitted each year. René Eber, a respected old Eurasian lawyer, moved our petition for admission with a gracious little speech. It was his crypto-communist son, John, who had been arrested seven months before.
Singapore is a small world.
Because my birth certificate called me Harry Lee Kuan Yew, I could not get either the Middle Temple or Cambridge University to drop “Harry” from my registered name. So on both my Cambridge University degree and my certificate as Barrister-at-Law, I am Harry Kuan Yew Lee. In 1950, I decided to try to have myself called to the Singapore Bar using only my Chinese name, with my surname placed before my personal name: Lee Kuan Yew. This time, I succeeded; Lee Kuan Yew became my public persona, what I stood for and saw myself as – a left-wing nationalist – and that is how I appeared in newspaper reports of my cases in court. But through all these years, my wife and my personal friends still call me Harry. In the 1950s, during my early days in politics, I was mildly annoyed to be sometimes reported as Harry Lee. Politically, it was a minus.
However, by the middle 1960s, after I had been through the mill and survived, I got over any sense of discomfort. It was not a reflection on me and my values. I did not name myself. I have not given any of my children a Western first name, nor have they in turn given their children Western names.
Three days after being called to the Bar, I was asked by my old friend, the registrar of the Supreme Court, Tan Thoon Lip, to defend four Malays in a case that would have a profound impact on my views about the jury system in Singapore. In December 1950, a Dutch girl who had been converted to Islam by her Malay foster mother was placed in a convent on the order of the High Court while the judge determined the right of her natural mother to reclaim her. The Dutch mother had handed the child to the Malay woman to look after when the Japanese overran the country. The press carried photographs of the girl in the convent, before a statue of the Virgin Mary. This so enraged the Muslims, who considered her a Muslim, that it sparked off several days of rioting during which Muslim mobs in the streets killed white men and women indiscriminately.
The four men whom I now had to defend were among 13 charged with having committed murder by causing the death of Charles Joseph Ryan, a non-commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force. The other nine accused were defended by a more senior lawyer, F.B. Oehlers.
The trial lasted nearly two weeks and was conducted before a judge and a jury of seven. I applied myself to the case more assiduously than Oehlers, a man of 50 years whose reputation at the Bar had already been made. Mine was to be decided. I did most of the cross-examination, setting out to cast doubts on the accuracy of the identification of the persons who took part in the riotous attack that resulted in Ryan’s death.
It had become dark by the time they got hold of Ryan, dragged him out of the bus in which he was travelling from Changi to the city, beaten him senseless and left him in a deep monsoon drain in the Malay area of Geylang Serai. I got the judge, together with the jury and witnesses, to go to the site at night to see the poor street lighting, which left much of it in shadow. I questioned how strangers who saw a mêlée of some 40–50 Malay and Indian Muslims could in that half-light have recognised the men in the dock as those who had struck the victim. How far away were they from his assailants at the scene of the crime? For how long did they see my clients? What clothes were they wearing? What special marks or features did the accused have on their faces?