On 12 June 1952, Mrs B.H. Oon, a prominent member of the Penang MCA Branch, unofficial member of the Federal Legislative Council, and a partner of the well-known Penang law firm, Lim, Lim and Oon, wrote to Colonel H.S. Lee to enclose a copy of a letter she had received from Dr Victor Purcell in the United Kingdom to say he and a colleague would welcome an invitation from the MCA to visit Malaya “in order to correct certain misleading reports and ill-informed criticisms that had appeared in the press in Britain” and to ascertain the facts about the present position of the Malayan Chinese. Mrs Oon said that she read out Dr Purcell's letter at a meeting of the Penang MCA Branch on 17 May and had sent a copy of it to the MCA President, Tan Cheng Lock, and she hoped it would be possible for the MCA to extend an official invitation to him and his colleague, Francis G. Carnell, a lecturer in Colonial Government at Oxford University, to come to Malaya.

Dr Purcell was an old friend of the Malayan Chinese who had specialized in Chinese Affairs during his long service with the Malayan Civil Service (MCS) (1922–46). He spoke Cantonese and Mandarin and had held a number of senior appointments in the Chinese Affairs Department, and was internationally recognized as a scholar and sinologue. On retiring from Malaya, he was employed by the United Nations as Secretary of the Working Group of 12 Nations on Asia and the Far East, and had last visited Malaya in 1947 and 1950.

On receiving Mrs Oon's letter, Tan Cheng Lock discussed the matter with his colleagues and it was agreed to send an invitation to Dr Purcell and Francis Carnell to visit Malaya as honorary MCA advisers, and shortly afterwards they arrived in Malaya on a short visit from 20 August to 20 September 1952. However, much occurred during their short visit, and it was little realized at the time how contentious it would be.

When Templer's proconsulship in Malaya was coming to an end, the Colonial Office and War Office made arrangements for his succession, and it was proposed that he should remain in Malaya until the end of May 1954 when the Deputy High Commissioner, Sir Donald MacGillivray, would take over from him. As MacGillivray was a career colonial civil servant and not a soldier, Lieutenant General Sir Geoffrey Bourne would take over as Director of Operations.

It was then planned that Templer would take leave until he assumed in October 1954 his new appointment in Germany as Commander of the Northern Army Group, Allied Forces, Western Europe, a post combined with that of Commander-in-Chief of the 80,000-strong British Army of the Rhine, one of the most important appointments in the British Army.

When the time came for his departure from Malaya on 1 June 1954, Templer was given a grand send-off at Kuala Lumpur International Airport befitting his high position, cheered by thousands of spectators and farewelled officially by a wide array of Malayan dignitaries, including MacGillivray, members of the Federal Executive and Legislative Councils, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Colonel H.S. Lee, Dato' Onn bin Ja'afar, as well as the Malay Sultans or their representatives, service and police chiefs, and high-ranking civil servants. General Templer, resplendent in his white tropical General's full-dress uniform and wearing all his decorations and the coloured sash of the GCMG, inspected the four guards of honour from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Police that had been drawn up on the tarmac of the airfield. The RAF Band played the Royal Salute followed by Auld Lang Syne. It was a most poignant and moving occasion and according to the Malay Mail, Lady Templer was in tears and Templer was visibly affected too, when they boarded the VIP aircraft that was to take them to Singapore on the first stage of their journey home.

Everybody assumed, as had been announced, that Templer was on his way to take up what was one of the top appointments in the British Army, and only Templer himself and a very few sworn confidantes knew that his appointment had in fact been cancelled.

At the time of General Templer's arrival at Kuala Lumpur on 7 February 1952, the constitution in force was the Federation of Malaya Agreement 1948, which had replaced the Malayan Union. It came into being on 1 February 1948. It was called an “Agreement” but to all intents and purposes it was in fact a formal federal Constitution. The Federation of Malaya (in Malay Persekutuan Tanah Melayu) introduced in 1948, was the name given to the nine Malay States (Perak, Selangor, Negri Sembilan, Pahang, Johor, Kedah, Perlis, Kelantan, and Trengganu, and the two Settlements of Penang and Malacca). In this book, for simplicity, the Federation of Malaya is often referred to as “Malaya”. Singapore was a separate colony. The Federation of Malaya became independent on 31 August 1957. In 1963 it was reconstituted as Malaysia with the inclusion of Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak, although Singapore withdrew from Malaysia on 9 August 1965 and became a separate state.

The Preamble of the Federation of Malaya Agreement is important as it repeated the intention of the British Government to “move towards eventual self-government”:

The promise towards self-government within the British Commonwealth was, in fact, repeated by Clement Atlee, the British Prime Minister, in the House of Commons on 13 April 1949 and 28 March 1950.

At the time of Templer's arrival in Kuala Lumpur, how did the British colonial Government function and what were its instruments of government?

Firstly, there was a Federal Executive Council, consisting of Templer as the High Commissioner as President [in Templer's time, the Deputy High Commissioner, Donald MacGillivray, was deputed by Templer to be de facto in charge of the Executive Council] aided by three ex-officio members (Chief Secretary, Attorney General, and Financial Secretary), with not less than twelve nor more than twenty-four members nominated by the High Commissioner. The function of the Federal Executive Council was to debate public policy matters and aid and advise the High Commissioner.

One of the most dramatic incidents of General Templer's proconsulship occurred in 1952, which had the makings of a serious misunderstanding between the Malayan people and the British colonial Government. It brought into question various aspects of the legal system under the Emergency Regulations which were in force during General Templer's proconsulship that were of serious concern to the general public. It involved the trial, which was given wide publicity, of Lee Tien Tai (usually known as Lee Meng), an attractive twenty-six-year-old Chinese (Cantonese) woman senior cadre of the Communist Party of Malaya, running the important Communist courier link between Chin Peng's CPM Central Committee in south Thailand and Singapore, who was arrested and sentenced to death in 1952 for being in possession of a hand grenade contrary to Regulation 4(1)(b) of the Emergency Regulations 1948.

The case received considerable publicity at the time in the Malayan, Singapore and the international press, as it brought to light several disturbing features about the Malayan legal system, which attracted considerable public criticism during General Templer's proconsulship that will be discussed in due course in this chapter. It eventually involved not only the Malayan Government but also the British and Hungarian Governments. Several other prominent persons became involved too, such as the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; Malcolm MacDonald; P.G. Lim; Tan Cheng Lock; Tunku Abdul Rahman; and the Sultan of Perak, Sir Yussuf 'Izzudin Shah.

The Lee Meng's case is still remembered by the Malayan Chinese community. As recently as 21 February 2014, Dato Seri Ong Ka Chuan, Secretary General of the Malayan Chinese Association, referred to it in an interview he gave to The Star Online in which he recollected the important part played by the MCA's first President, Tan Cheng Lock, in drawing up a petition to seek clemency from the Sultan of Perak for Lee Meng who had been sentenced to death. Dato Seri Ong said the way in which her case was handled by the British colonial authorities came in for considerable criticism at the time and that the Chinese community was angry at what they perceived as “blatant persecution” on the part of the British colonial officials to ensure that she was convicted.

This book came about as a result of a conversation I had with Ambassador K. Kesavapany, then Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Singapore, in May 2010, when he asked me whether I thought there would be a place for a new book on General Sir Gerald Templer, High Commissioner and Director of Operations, Malaya, 1952–54. I replied that I thought there would be, provided it focused on General Templer's time in Malaya and the implementation of the political and socio-economic sides of the Directive he had been given by the British Government rather than the military side, which has already been adequately covered, though there might be some overlapping at times of the two sides.

On the political side of his Directive, the British Government instructed him to “assist the peoples of Malaya in due course to become a fully selfgoverning nation within the British Commonwealth” and “to promote such political progress of the country as will, without prejudicing the campaign against the terrorists, further our democratic aim in Malaya.” On the military side, he was instructed to restore law and order and defeat the Communist Party of Malaya's uprising, which has become known as the Malayan Emergency.

Templer never wrote his memoirs and the only full-scale biography of him is John Cloake's Templer, Tiger of Malaya: The Life of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer which was published several decades ago. John Cloake, an old family friend, was commissioned to write it by Lady Peggie Templer, General Templer's widow. It is well written but much new material has become available since then. There is, too, a short thirty-nine-page monograph, Templer in Malaya, by C. Northcote Parkinson, then Professor of History at the University of Malaya in Singapore, which is brief and insightful, but it was published rather hastily in Singapore to coincide with Templer's departure from Malaya in 1954.

The part played by Templer in his short but important two-year Malayan proconsulship at a vital time in Malaya's history undoubtedly helped to shape the beginning of the road to self-government leading to independence, although both came about after he left Malaya in 1954.

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”.

In furtherance of his political plans to defeat the Communist uprising, General Templer realized that it was important to obtain the support of the Indian population in Malaya, as well as the other communities, and he took an active interest in improving the social conditions of the Tamil rubber tappers and labourers throughout Malaya which had often been neglected. One way he did this was by enlisting the cooperation of P.P. Narayanan, a Federal Legislative Council member, a powerful trade union leader, and the first President of the Malayan Trades Union Congress and General Secretary of the National Union of Plantation Workers.Narayanan had formerly headed the Negri Sembilan Indian Labour Union with H.K. Choudhury. Both had been officers in the INA (Indian National Army) formed by Subhas Chandra Bose in Singapore during the Japanese Occupation with the support of the Japanese to fight alongside the Japanese Army in its advance on India. After the Japanese surrender and the return of the British colonial power to Malaya in September 1945, several INA personnel took the lead of forming Indian sections of the trade union movement and as many of them were anti-British, they were attractive candidates for recruitment by the Communist Party of Malaya but Narayanan was anti-Communist.

The National Union was an amalgamation of five unions and as it formed one of the most powerful trade union groups in Malaya representing in 1953 close to 79,000 members, the majority of whom were Indians, its support for the Government's cause would be of great value.

An approximate breakdown of employees' unions by ethnic groups at the time was Indian 78,984; Malay 15,869; Chinese 12,912; and Others 1,792, from which it can be seen that Indian rubber plantation workers provided an important platform for shaping the direction of the Malayan trade union movement. Templer was shrewd in making this move as according to secret CPM instructions issued just before the outbreak of the first Malayan Emergency, “the progressive mass organisations of the various Trade Unions in Malaya … youth organisations, women's associations” should all come under the direct leadership of the Party “and efforts should be made through Communist-controlled trade unions to create labour unrest … Labour unions could be strengthened as they could be Communists' strongest weapons.”

This book presents a fresh look at General Templer, whose brief presence in Malaya (1952–54) played a significant and pivotal role in the making of self-rule in the colony, which subsequently led to the first General Elections in 1955 and then the all-important independence in 1957. It highlights the political and socio-economic aspects of his governance which were underpinned by a military model, principle and discipline.

Templer's “political philosophy” was deceptively simple and was captured well in the following statement of his that he made regarding his strategy to defeat the Communists forward movement in Malaya during the Emergency period (1948–60): “The answer (to the uprising) lies not in pouring more troops into the jungle, but in the hearts and minds of the Malayan people” (Brian Lapping, End of Empire, 1985, p. 224). The words “hearts and minds” have since become a mantra in Malaysian realpolitik with only a handful knowing of their origin, but Dr Comber explains the origin of this phrase, which was actually first used in 1818 by John Adams (second U.S. President).

It is generally known that even though he was well qualified to deal with the military aspects of fighting the Chinese-dominated Malayan Communist Party during the Emergency, Templer, however, did not have the same kind of expertise to deal with the “complex and complicated” ethnic relations in Malaya. His opinion on and attitude towards the leadership of UMNO and MCA was not entirely favourable and at best only civil. In spite of that Templer successfully fought to grant Malayan citizenship to 2.6 million non-Malayan residents, a majority of whom were Chinese. He also sought political and social equality of all Malayans long before the idea became fashionable among NGOs and civil society groups in Malaysia in the 1980s.

Dr Comber, through his sharp scholarly lens and the rich analytical skills he acquired while in the intelligence service, takes us on a journey many Malaysians have never taken before, that is, looking closely at the short but highly impactful life of a high-ranking British officer in shaping Malayan, and eventually Malaysian, ethnic politics and governance.

On 19 March 1952, some six weeks after his arrival in Malaya, General Templer, as President of the Federal Legislative Council, addressed the opening session of the Council to outline the manner in which he intended to implement the political Directive he had been given by the British Government. It dealt with an impressively wide range of social, economic, and political matters which brought out clearly his views on the immense number of complex problems with which he had to grapple.

Templer sent a draft of his speech to Lyttelton in London, which he said was “entirely in accord with Her Majesty's Government's policy”, and in his telegram of 12 March to Lyttelton, which he copied to Malcolm MacDonald, British Commissioner General for South East Asia in Singapore, he said that it had been “gone through yesterday by the Executive Council”.

In his telegram to Lyttelton, Templer said that during the past few weeks he had held a number of discussions with Dato' Onn, Dato E.E.C. Thuraisingham, a Ceylonese Tamil, who was the Member for Education, and other local politicians about responsible local government at grass roots level, which Templer referred to as the “parish pump level”. On 7 March, the Singapore Standard in a critical article written by S. Rajaratnam [then a newspaper journalist who later joined the People's Action Party (PAP) and became Singapore's first Minister for Culture and subsequently Singapore's longest serving Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister], said it was Templer's intention to limit Malaya's advance to self-government, to use Templer's own phrase, to “parish pump” level. This mention of the term “parish pump” which was to incur Templer's wrath, attracted a lot of attention, and Templer informed Lyttelton that he intended to issue a statement about it in his forthcoming address to be delivered on 19 March to the Legislative Council along the following lines:

General (later Field Marshal) Sir Gerald Templer, KG, GCB, CB, GCMG, KBE, DSO (1898–1979) had a traditional military education at Wellington College and the Royal Military College (RMC), Sandhurst (1915). He was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Irish Fusiliers on 16 August 1916 and after the war, he served with them in Persia and Mesopotamia until he returned to England in 1922. He attended the British Army's Staff College from January 1928 to December 1929. He then served as a company commander in Egypt and Palestine during the Arab rebellions 1935–36, and was awarded a DSO and Bar and a Mention in Despatches.

At the outbreak of World War II, he was a Major, acting Lieutenant Colonel, at the War Office, London, and in September 1939, he served as an intelligence officer at the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force in France under Major General Sir F.N. Mason-Macfarlane. After he returned to England, he became Brigadier General Staff under General B.L. Montgomery, then commanding XII Corps, and was thereafter one of Montgomery's most fervent admirers.

In 1942, at the age of forty-four he became the youngest Lieutenant General in the British Army and he served briefly in North Africa and Italy. He reverted to the rank of Major General to command the 56th Infantry Division and then the 6th Armoured Division in Italy, where he was wounded in 1944 when a land mine blew up the army lorry in front of his staff car while travelling in convoy. The looted contents of the lorry fell on top of him and damaged his spine, and he was evacuated to England. He then worked in the War Office until he became Director of Civil Affairs in the British Zone of Germany under Montgomery, who was by then a Field Marshal commanding the British 21st Army Group. He regarded this period as valuable experience for Malaya although his time in Germany was marred by his having been involved in the summary dismissal at the end of World War II of Dr Konrad Adenauer, then Mayor of Cologne, for incompetence and inefficiency.