Out in the Midday Sun by Margaret Shennan

Author:Margaret Shennan [Shennan, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789814625319
Publisher: Monsoon Books
Published: 2015-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

10

The Mem, the Missee and the Tuan Kechil

‘What was the poor Planter to do – stuck out in the East with no women of any kind?’ fumed Guy Hutchinson, and his frustration was echoed by hundreds of heterosexual bachelors in the interwar years.1 ‘There was very, very little female company in Kuala Lumpur. As far as I remember in that year 1931 there were only two unmarried British girls and they had already got fairly firm boyfriends,’ confirmed a young police officer. ‘You couldn’t get a look in.’2 The only hope came from ‘the “fishing fleet” of unattached ladies [who] came regularly up from Australia to Singapore, Malaya and Ceylon. They would have friends or relations here and they would stay with them. Most of them found husbands alright!’3

The Great War had marked a watershed in social conventions, including attitudes to sex. Asian mistresses with Eurasian children were no longer acceptable to the European community; the social pressure on employers to employ married men was growing, although the rule that men should not marry before thirty persisted, at least in theory. (Those with private incomes could always circumvent the ban, the planter John Theophilus recalled.) ‘After the big slump – from 1934 onwards – the number of European men was smaller and the number of wives greater, and the older generation’s daughters were beginning to come out.’4 Then, as the decade progressed, a visitor noticed a huge increase in the number of European women, which coincided with, and was facilitated by, modern developments like motor cars and railways, and electricity and refrigerators and radios, and also by the expansion of shipping lines such as P. & O. and Blue Funnel.5 ‘Everyone seemed to be getting married – the omens looked good,’ rejoiced Hutchinson as ‘the all-male society that had centred on the local clubhouse was slowly infiltrated by the gentler manners of the English and Scottish shires’.6

By 1931 women accounted for 28 per cent of Malaya’s European population – some 5,000, together with about 2,500 children, almost half of them resident in Singapore. By the end of 1940 the figures had increased to about 8,500 women and around 4,300 children.7 Whereas many of the older generations of immigrants remained unmarried, the new generation had partners who tended to be from similar commercial, technical or professional backgrounds to their own. They came from the middle-class suburbs around London or Manchester, Liverpool or Glasgow, or the industrial towns of northern England and Scotland. Wives had known their husbands from school days, as neighbours or family acquaintances, members of the same church, tennis club or social set. Thomas and Ethel Barnes both came from the Clapham district of London. E. Milroy Dickson of the Singapore Harbour Board had known his wife, Barbara, since childhood, as both families had lived in Brigham, near Cockermouth. While on home leave, Fred Snell, a quantity surveyor with Singapore Municipality, met his wife, Peggie, in Radlett, Hertfordshire, where she was a journalist. Kathleen King was a secretary at

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