The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew (35 page)

Marshall, already in London, had read the statement I made on leaving Singapore and thought I was undermining him. He attacked me bitterly in an address to 200 Malayan students, warning them that I was inviting communists into the PAP and preparing the way for a communist capture of power in 1959. But I was not the only person with whom he was to find himself at odds. At the opening plenary session of the conference, the colonial secretary, Lennox-Boyd, laid down the line in a quiet, firm speech in which he made clear Britain’s position. Referring
to Marshall’s visit to London the previous December, he said the chief minister had departed from an understanding agreed then that Singapore would have only internal self-government. “Instead he now seeks full sovereign independence. Her Majesty’s Government has not been consulted nor agreed to open discussions from this new starting point.”

Marshall did not take the hint. He was too involved in his own emotional processes. Before he left Singapore, he said publicly that he would resign if he failed to get independence. A few days after I arrived in London, I received a memorandum from him dated 21 April, which was circulated to members of the delegation and to the British government. Marshall demanded immediate
merdeka
, i.e., independence. Merdeka, he argued, would rally the people against communism.

But Lennox-Boyd was not impressed and said on 25 April that while Her Majesty’s Government was prepared to make substantial concessions to Singapore’s aspirations, it intended to retain the “ultimate word” in internal security in the form of a defence council chaired by a British high commissioner.

Far from reading the weather signals and battening down his hatches, Marshall decided to sail ahead. He circulated a new memorandum on 1 May together with the draft of a Singapore Independence Act. Since his earlier proposals had not proved acceptable, he had perversely decided to ask for full independence, this time providing for a Defence and Security Council that “shall be advisory only” and constitute no more than a “transitional phase”. During this transitional phase Britain could intervene and suspend the constitution, but otherwise Singapore would have “full sovereignty” in “normal times”. Marshall’s new proposal would allow the British to intervene only in “abnormal times”, in other words only after a period of disorder or after the communists had seized power unconstitutionally and threatened Britain’s bases.

Marshall’s response to Lennox-Boyd was similar to his response when the governor, Robert Black, rebuffed him over the issue of four
junior ministers. He raised the stakes. He did not realise that he was playing against the principal himself, and the principal was not going to yield. At the next session, 4 May, Lennox-Boyd commented dryly on Marshall’s point about “normal times”, that “present times could hardly be regarded as at all normal”, and the argument went back and forth, with Marshall getting more and more tense as Lennox-Boyd maintained a phlegmatic calm.

One incident will always stand out in my memory. In the middle of an impassioned flow from Marshall, a private secretary tiptoed up to Lennox-Boyd’s chair to put a cable in front of him. Lennox-Boyd read it and began to write on it. Marshall was miffed. He stopped in mid-sentence, and in a high-pitched voice that showed he was really angry, said, “Secretary of State, we know that you have many important possessions around the world, but we have come 8,000 miles to London to present our case and we demand that you give us your attention.”

Without lifting his eyes from the cable, Lennox-Boyd continued writing and said, “Chief Minister, let me assure you that of all our valuable possessions across the world, Singapore is one of our most valuable. It is a precious jewel in the British Crown. I am all ears. You were saying, Chief Minister” – and he repeated verbatim Marshall’s last three sentences. It was a virtuoso performance, very British, quite devastating. Marshall was livid and speechless, an unusual state for him.

But it was all getting very tiresome and obviously leading us nowhere despite many interminable meetings and quiet discussions. Marshall was chasing a mirage, “something more than internal self-government but less than complete independence”, as he told me when I asked him just what he wanted. Discussions dragged on through the eighth, ninth and tenth plenary sessions, until at the eleventh, on 12 May, we moved to the question of the chairman of the Defence and Security Council. Marshall first suggested that he should be someone appointed by the United Nations, a proposal that guaranteed a British rejection. Then,
three days later and acting on the advice of his executive committee in Singapore, he suggested that he should be a Malayan appointed by the Federation government. Lennox-Boyd was taken aback. With three British, three Singaporean and one Malayan on the council, the casting vote would rest with the Malayan and the British would be in a minority. That afternoon he dismissed the idea, saying, “The responsibility of defence is a UK one, and as long as this is so the UK must have the final say in the chairmanship of the Defence and Security Council.”

The talks had reached a dead end. Lennox-Boyd decided there was no point in taking the conference any further, and made it clear that this concluded the talks. Marshall was flabbergasted. His face darkened with emotion. Except for Marshall and Lim Chin Siong, all members of the delegation including myself had been prepared to accept what the British had offered – a self-governing constitution with the Singapore government in control of internal security, but with Britain retaining the power to override it through a Defence and Security Council on which the British would have the majority vote. I advised Marshall not to refuse this, but to “go back to the Assembly and debate the matter and then take it one step further”. But he rejected it outright – he was not one for cool, quiet calculations when in a tight corner into which he had backed himself.

That evening we were interviewed together on Independent Television. We both denounced Lennox-Boyd, but Marshall used the more picturesque language, protesting that the secretary of state had offered “Christmas pudding with arsenic sauce”. He now had to keep his promise to resign.

At about 5:45 that afternoon, the secretary of the delegation phoned to say that Marshall was summoning an urgent meeting to discuss the reopening of the talks. I woke Lim Chin Siong up and told him. He was incredulous.

“Lee, go away, do not play fool with me,” he said in his Hokkien English.

“Lim, I am not playing the fool,” I replied. “There is a meeting at six.”

By his unpredictable and inconsistent twists and turns, Marshall had alienated not just myself and the Liberal Socialists, but his key Labour Front members. His wanting to restart the talks to save himself was too much for them. “You cannot eat your own vomit,” as one Liberal Socialist delegate put it in vivid Hokkien. Half an hour into the meeting, Marshall knew that if he tried to resume negotiations, he would have to do so on his own. He had overplayed his hand and was isolated.

That night, he went to a performance of
Madam Butterfly
with Lennox-Boyd and Lady Patricia Boyd, and then on to a Spanish restaurant to dine to the tune of guitars and the stamping feet of flamenco dancers. Meanwhile, I decided to stop him from staging a recovery. At a press conference that same evening at Malaya Hall, I made it clear that the PAP would have nothing to do with a reopening of the conference. I said it was a “final, desperate attempt to hang on to office, a sign of incredible political ineptitude”, and rounded it off with “Never in the history of colonial evolution has so much humbug been enacted in so short a time by so erratic a leadership.”

I knew that by calling the press conference that very same night, late though it was, I would get into the London papers the following day, with a good chance of making the Singapore papers as well despite the time difference. What I said would get into print and pin down the position of all the other members of the delegation. And that was what happened.

I left London with Lim Chin Siong on 21 May. The conference had proved to be a fiasco. But it was not without value, for it purged Singapore of Marshall’s erratic exuberance. Marshall had to resign, and I reckoned that Lim Yew Hock would probably be the next chief minister of a Labour Front government. We would be entering a new phase. I was not sure what Lim Chin Siong thought. He may have been calculating the consequences of Marshall’s rashness, which he had encouraged. We were
bound to have a government less favourable for the CUF, for Lim Yew Hock would be a different proposition. In the last stages of the conference, I had seen Marshall totally under the influence of Lim Chin Siong. When he had alienated all the non-communists by his sudden shifts in position and his tantrums, it was to Lim that he reached out for support, and he had foolishly taken Lim’s advice to reject Lennox-Boyd’s final offer.

14. Exit Marshall, Enter Lim Yew Hock

When Marshall finally returned to Singapore on 25 May 1956, he was still sore and angry with me. He ordered me out of the room when I turned up at the airport to greet him, intending to stay on for his press conference. Looking right past me, he said the conference was for friends only. I left.

At his last debate as chief minister on 6–7 June, still wanting to go out in glory, he asked the Assembly to approve the stand of its delegation at the conference in London. The Liberal Socialists rebuked him for his inconsistencies, and for his stupidity in refusing three-quarters of a loaf and coming back with nothing. I decided not to criticise Marshall, but to present a united front against the “wicked” British.

There was an end-of-term atmosphere at the meeting, and I saw little to be gained by rubbing Marshall’s face in the dirt. At the end of the two-day debate, Marshall resigned. The following day, on 8 June, Lim Yew Hock was sworn in as chief minister.

I was convinced Lim Yew Hock would have to govern differently. He did not have Marshall’s personality or his flair for publicity. He could not live from one crisis to another. He was a stenographer who had risen in the world because he was sensible, reasonable, dependable and valuable to his employers. I felt almost certain he would accept the analysis of his officials, notably Special Branch experts, and act on their advice on how to deal with CUF subversion. The CUF had made wide inroads in so many directions, and his problem was how to curb them without incurring unpopularity. If he attacked Chinese education and language, he would lose the votes of the Chinese-speaking people. If he detained their militant leaders and they were suddenly unable to win further benefits through strikes and demonstrations, he would lose the
votes of the workers, including the Malays and Indians, who would demand their release.

Nevertheless, with Lim Yew Hock as chief minister, the situation had become more hazardous for the CUF. I was therefore surprised that, far from retreating or lying low, Lim Chin Siong and company decided to play a more prominent role. In the election for the new PAP executive committee, they contrived to win five out of the 12 seats for their group, Lim Chin Siong scoring the largest number of votes himself, 1,537 against my 1,488. He had left the moderates with a nominal majority, but had made it clear that when it came to mass support, the pro-communists held all the trumps. Their strength was overwhelming and they could easily take over the party whenever they wanted to.

I decided it was time to take my annual fortnight’s holiday. I drove up to the Cameron Highlands with Choo and Loong, stopping on the way at the Station Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. We chose it because Loong was fascinated by trains, and we took him down to the platform to see them arrive and depart. But there was a more important reason for staying in Kuala Lumpur. In response to a letter I had sent him earlier, Ong Pang Boon came to the hotel to see me.

My Chinese was still woefully inadequate. Pang Boon spoke Mandarin, Hokkien and Cantonese, and was educated in Chinese and English. He had just graduated from the University of Malaya, and was working in Kuala Lumpur for the Malaya Borneo Building Society. His salary was about $700 per month. He had helped me in Tanjong Pagar during the 1955 election campaign, and I wanted him to be the organising secretary of the PAP, but I could only offer him $450 from my assemblyman’s allowance of $500 a month. He replied that he would come to Singapore “if the party orders it”. I told him I could not order him to do something that was going to cost him $250 in loss of salary and involve his leaving his home town, especially as his employers had also offered to send him to England for training. He asked for time to consider the offer. About
two weeks later, he accepted and agreed to start in mid-August. I was relieved and grateful. I would have been hard put to find someone else as dependable. He had political sensitivity, an understanding of the Chinese middle school students, and convictions that were not communist. Most important of all, I felt I could trust him.

His was no easy task. It was difficult to run a multiracial, multilingual party in Singapore. The PAP activists were Chinese-speaking and their natural leaders were Chinese-educated. So the branches catered for them – songs, dances and classes for cooking, sewing, literacy and radio and motor repair were all in Mandarin. This put off the English-educated Chinese and the Malays and Indians, for even where they were in the majority it was the Chinese-educated who ran everything. The PAP central headquarters held general meetings that the English-speaking members would attend, but there were no social or cultural activities specifically organised for them, for that would have required bigger premises too expensive for a poor party to rent.