Englishmen rather than mad dogs are at the center of this book, a social history of colonial Malaya from 1880 to 1960.
A major feature of the life of the educated English in the last 150 years could be said to have been the opposition between the professionals -- judges, colonial administrators, civil servants -- and the mockers, typically metropolitan artists and socialites. The former upheld society and the empire, while the latter sat back and laughed at them. But this opposition, which reflected the feud between the sports-playing "hearties" and the languid "esthetes" in British public schools, wasn't an unremitting hostility. At root, the two groups came from the same families and mixed socially. Thus Noel Coward's song about mad dogs and Englishmen going out in the midday sun, from which this book takes its title, while undoubtedly satirizing Empire-building Britons, was also laughed at, danced to, and probably even sung at festive dinners, by the imperial administrators themselves.
Coward -- a languid esthete if ever there was one -- also coined the lethal aphorism, "Malaya is a first-rate country for second-rate people." It's an expression Margaret Shennan quotes more than once, though with disapproval. But it reflected a sentiment widespread in the UK in the first half of the 20th century. Malaya, it was thought, was a good enough place for engineers, rubber-planters and Scotsmen, but it couldn't hold a candle to India, that jewel in the crown of British imperialism.
Somerset Maugham only reinforced the prejudice when he traveled in the land in the 1920s, listening to his hosts' tales on the verandah over many a stengah, and then writing up their gossip as short stories portraying them as bored, drunken and lecherous, far from home under an impossible tropical sun.
Shennan's book is, by contrast, a balanced affair. She has interviewed many surviving administrators, planters and members of their families, in addition to studying the printed sources. British rule appears here to have been authoritarian, softened -- or disguised -- by humor. Horrific incidents included a mutiny in Singapore in 1915 which ended with the execution of 37, two in front of a large crowd of spectators. One of the soldiers in the firing squad was described afterwards as having been "very shaky." Yet another man wrote home about the uprising in general "We had a great deal of fun out of it, and the whole thing has been very interesting and amusing." (He was probably trying to stop his family from worrying).
There were, however, celebrated cases that genuinely put the wind up the Raj, opening its impeccability to question. One such was the trial and conviction for murder of Ethel Proudlock in 1911. She had shot another Briton who she claimed had tried to rape her one Sunday evening when her husband was dining out. But it may have been that they were lovers, and she'd discovered that he also had a Chinese mistress (as her husband had had before his marriage). Either way, she was eventually pardoned by the Sultan of Selangor -- itself an event not without its problems for the protocol-sensitive British -- and immediately sailed back home. Ten years later Maugham heard about the case and turned it into a story entitled The Letter..
Many Britons, though, considered Malaya -- especially Singapore and Penang -- as a form of paradise, dubbing the Malays "Nature's gentlemen." Yet life can't always have been easy. This was an era when respectable expatriates wore their European clothes regardless of the heat -- gloves, for example, were compulsory for dancing -- and there was no air-conditioning. And the jungle, then as now, was characterized by impenetrable vegetation, leeches, steep slopes, interminable rain, and the dank odor of decay.
RSS