1 - The Background: The Appointment of General Sir Gerald Templer as High Commissioner and Director of Operations, Malaya (1952–54)

Summary

General Templer was appointed as High Commissioner and Director of Operations in February 1952, following the murder in October 1951 by Communist insurgents of the previous High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, on his way up to Fraser's Hill from Kuala Lumpur. His appointment marks a turning point in the long, long, war against the Communist Party of Malaya's uprising (the Malayan Emergency) against the Malayan Government during which the entire country was turned upside down again so soon after the end of World War II and the Japanese Occupation. When Templer left Malaya on 31 May 1954 after his two-year proconsulship, as will be related, it was still very much a time of living dangerously, and in spite of the tremendous efforts he put in to defeat the Communist uprising, it still had another six years to run before the Communists were defeated and the Emergency brought to an end. Not long after Templer left Malaya, his successor as High Commissioner, Sir Donald MacGillivray, informed Lennox-Boyd, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, that the CPM's forces under arms “amounted to not less than 5,000 and they were still able to obtain as many recruits from the civilian population as they wish …. The Emergency remains much more than an issue and it would be a grave mistake to think that its end is now in sight.”

The Malayan Emergency was the name given by the British colonial authorities to the uprising of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) which lasted from 1948 to 1960. The objective of the CPM was to overthrow the Government by force and establish a Communist People's Democratic Republic of Malaya. In all but name it was a war remarkable for the fiercely fought counterinsurgency operations in the Malayan jungle between the Government security forces and the CPM's guerrilla army, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). The CPM had no inhibitions, however, about the name used for the conflict and always referred to it in its own literature as a war, namely, “The Anti-British National Liberation War”.