RUBBER, TIN AND GUNS

Evening Star, Issue 23679, 12 September 1940, Page 2

RUBBER, TIN AND GUNS

Sir Stamford Raffles could not have seen Ills England at bay to totalitarianism when ho founded Singapore 121 years ago, but he saw two elements vital to the British scheme—trade and strategy—so vital that in the past few years the British taxpayer has paid about £50,000,000 to secure them (writes R. C. H. M'Kie, in the ‘ Sydney Morning Herald It was Raffles who first saw the significance of a “ Gibraltar of the East,” and, although he was misjudged and misunderstood by men of his time, the Empire and our own country in particular owe to him a great- debt for making Singapore a British possession. To-day this island fortress is no longer a centre of tourist publicity and Hollywood sarong sentimentalism, of gin slings and pukka outposters, odorous canals and Chinese temples, but a city of guns behind a country scarred with tin mines and the green monotony of rubber estates.

I\liile -ruination of the beauty of the harbour has been one of the objections to a naval dock in Svdney, in Singapore all else has been subjugated to the military need. For the time being the curtain lias gone down on tho romanticism of Singapore and the island is cleared for action.

Singapore people do not quibble about the aesthetics of squat machinegun nests along the island’s beautiful coast roads, nor do they object to their shark and crocodile-resisting swimming _ paggars and foreshore gardens being demolished and replaced by steel stakes and lines of barbed wire in the sandy nollows. Singapore, with its naval and air bases side by side at Seletar, on the Strait of Johore, its Royal Artillery bases at Changi and island Blakau Mati, its township barracks, and hospitals, miles of military roads, antisubmarine booms, waters mathematically criss-crossed for accurate fire from Bren guns to 18in guns, its clusters of batteries electrically operated by remote control, and its vast minefields, knows that realism pays in a world of plunder.

The island of Singapore is about the shape and §ize of the’ Isle of Wight, and has rail and road communication with the Asia mainland by a causeway which cuts the Straits of Johore in half, a vital link in peace and war which must always be kept open. About 30 miles long by 17 miles across, tho island is mostly flat, dotted with rubber estates and coconut plantations, arid a few l.onely scraps of original jungle, and, for its size, has one of the best road systems in the world.

Singapore city is flat, ugly, with few good buildings, a steamy, shadeless trade port, with Chinatown’s maze of streets and tenements like a dirty stain behind it. In the centre of the city, on a hill where the palace of the Sultans of Singapore once stood, is Fort Canning, military headquarters, nerve--centres of this great fortress. Four miles inland is Tanglin. main European residential area, with its cool, colonial homes set in beautiful gardens—a smug, respectable area where social life radiates from the Tanglin Club. Four miles along the coast from the city, past the £1,000,000 airport, with its glass, steel, and concrete building, suburbia’s bungalows straggle along the palm-choked shore. ; ■

Singapore’s greatest drawbacks are a climate which wrings out every bunco of mental and physical energy and leads,,to 'the East's! Jbne and qrdy philosophy of t’d apa, or “ leave ;ft to to-morrow,” and a lack of variety in social life. Relaxation alternates with monotonous regularity from the sporting club, to pictures, to cabarets, in a city where the closing hour for everything is midnight. To-day soldiers and conscripted civilian are linked in a common existence and responsibility—defence. In peace-time the soldier has a disciplined life, and his movements are restricted by distance, low pay, and a petty, civilian exclusiveness. *' BIG SHOT.” Singapore is a colony ruled from London, and the mass have no voice in the government. It is primarily a fortress filled with service types, who are seldom noted for their intellectual or social progressiveness. It is also a great trading port. Much of the money made there is spent externally. Being a tuan (a master), the life the European leads breeds an unhealthy egotism, a petty exlusiveness. Civil classifications to_ the onlooker are both amusing and ridiculous. There are the tuan besar. ‘ No. 1 big shot,” in American parlance; the tuan ketchil, the little master; the tuan, the lowest in the European social scale; and “ the rest,” who have’ not even the distinction of being part of the scale. A pre-war. popular conception of Singapore was that it was owned by the British for the protection of the Malays and the benefit of the Chinese; and, taken broadly, this theory was fairly true. Of the total population of about 700,000 more than _ 500,000 are Chinese, who are deeply involved in the business activities of the island. There are about 60,000 Malays (an unproductive, backward, laughing, care-free race) and 70,00 b Indians, a big percentage Tamil coolies, to whom the country owes a debt for its development.

Singapore and Malaya, compared with French Indo-China with its Annamite and the Netherlands Indies with its Javanese problems, is fortunate in that it has internal political peace. With a great mixture of races, there is no united nationalist movement to worry the Government, and the economic progress of the country has been rapid. As the Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, said recently, “ This is no time for sickly sentimentalism.” _ Singapore to-day, city of rubber, tin, and guns means supplies and security. It is vital to us, and Australians may yet have to help defend it.