Singapore in Global History
Edited by
Derek Heng and Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied
P u b l i c at i o n s S e r i e s
Edited Volumes 14
Cover design: JB&A raster grafisch ontwerp, Westland
Layout: The DocWorkers, Almere
ISBN
e-ISBN
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978 90 8964 324 7
978 90 4851 437 3
692
© ICAS / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2011
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10 The British Military
Withdrawal from Singapore and
the Anatomy of a Catalyst
Loh Kah Seng
“It was not even a sell-out: it was a handout, with virtually nothing
demanded or even bargained for in return”, an angry Arthur de la Mare,
the former British High Commissioner in Singapore, wrote to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in November 1971.
De la Mare was reflecting on the handover of the British military bases to
the Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) government between 1968
and the end of December, when the remaining British forces would
depart from Britain’s chief base in Southeast Asia.1 De la Mare castigated
his colleagues for conceding the bases to Singapore without retaining a
say in their deployment for economic purposes. With more than a tinge
of regret, he lamented, “Had we so wished we had the opportunity not
only to retain all that we needed but also to transform Singapore from a
doubtful military bastion (it was never a very good one) into the forward
base of British business and commerce in East Asia”.2 It was a scathing
comment on the end of Singapore’s role in the British Empire.
Between crisis and catalyst
Yet, De la Mare’s remarks also reveal much about Singapore’s emerging
new place in world history as a development-driven, industrial state at
the end of the 1960s. They lend support to a new approach that extends
beyond the imperial and national history frameworks within which
narratives of the British withdrawal have usually been located. Imperial
historians such as John Darwin, looking through a Britain lens, typically
focus on its struggles to maintain a world presence in the 1960s and the
convoluted process by which this ‘East of Suez’ policy was finally abandoned (Darwin 1988, 1991). When the call to pull out was finally made in
January 1968, some historians have attributed it to the force of economics, particularly the sterling crises of 1966-67 and the devaluation of the
pound in November 1967 (Darby 1973; Butler 2002; Hyam 2006). Other
historians have pointed rather to the political actors: specifically, the
cabinet reshuffle that undermined the old guard which had supported
the ‘East of Suez’ policy (Darwin 1988; Pickering 1998).
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In this literature, Singapore appears, if at all, as a passive, hapless
appendage. By contrast, nationalist historians take a Singapore vantagepoint and view the run-down as one of a number of key events which enabled the making of a ‘nation’. Like their imperial counterparts, they also
frame the withdrawal as a crisis, but as Singapore’s crisis; this is encapsulated in the numerical terms in which the pull-out is usually framed:
the economic importance of the bases, the number of workers affected
and the blow to gross domestic product. C.M. Turnbull’s standard history
text adopts the view that the pull-out momentarily ‘clouded’ the nation’s
prospects for survival and turned out to be a blessing in disguise (Turnbull 1989, 293-4). A more recent book maintains that the run-down “galvanised the fighting spirit of Singapore leaders, who went on to rally their
people all the more” (Lee 2008, 265). Given the purported severity of the
withdrawal in nationalist history, its actual impact on Singapore was so
strikingly minimal that it ran the risk of becoming a non-event.
The withdrawal, which involved much British and Singapore negotiation and collaboration, sits clearly at the nexus between the imperial and
national histories. De la Mare’s complaint provides a glimpse into how
freshly sovereign Singapore not only survived the crisis, but transformed
it into a platform for a massive industrialisation programme based on
foreign capital investment. The pull-out is an excellent case study on the
linkages between imperial, national and local histories. Some scholars
have located Britain’s decision to withdraw at the intersection between
metropolitan politics and geopolitical developments in Southeast Asia
(Hack 2001a; Hyam 2006). This paper follows a similar approach by
examining the dynamics of Anglo-Singaporean collaboration for the
mechanics of the pull-out, and adds a new one: social history. By using
both official records and oral history interviews, this paper examines
how a transnational event started by Britain’s power-brokers became a
path-breaking catalyst for development thousands of kilometres away in
a micro-state, with significant consequences for the life and work of its
people.
The key to Singapore’s active connection to the imperial history of the
British withdrawal lies less in political than in social and development
history. The late colonial regime of post-war Singapore had launched
a long process of transforming the island into what James Scott terms
a “high modernist” state, geared towards development and governed
rationally on scientific principles (Scott 1998). By the time the accelerated timetable for the pull-out was announced, Singapore was well on its
way to becoming such a society; in housing in particular, the relocation of
semi-autonomous informal dwellers to public housing was already effectively integrating them into the formal structures of the state (Loh 2009a,
2009b). The British run-down facilitated this long-term process in several ways: in the handover and economic conversion of the bases, the
british military withdrawal from singapore and anatomy of a catalyst
197
growth of the industrial economy, retraining of redundant base workers,
a massive expansion of technical and vocational education, and instilling
social discipline in labour. While the official terms describing the event,
namely, ‘withdrawal’, ‘pull-out’ and ‘run-down’, implied a contraction, it
really prompted the opposite: development, conversion and mobilisation.
In this crucial sense, the British withdrawal was less a crisis – for either
Britain or Singapore – than a catalyst, and it underscores the theme of
change and transformation so central to the making of modern Singapore.
The frame of crisis entails that, once it is resolved, history comes logically
to an ‘end’, and this under-emphasises the terms of historical inquiry.
The frame of catalyst, however, reveals not only the mechanics of crisis
resolution, but also extends the enquiry forward in time. Although most
of the concerns about the pull-out did not materialise, the withdrawal
was nevertheless certainly not a non-event in history; rather it provided
the impetus for magnifying and accelerating policies of change that had
been initiated earlier. This approach can also be seen in Khairudin Aljunied’s recent thought-provoking study of the 1950 Maria Hertogh riots.
By bypassing the usual subject of the causes of the riots and exploring
instead their ‘aftermath’, the historian can link up the imperial, regional,
national, and local levels of history, thus providing greater insight into an
event (Aljunied 2009b, 130).
Decolonisation and development: the bribe and the sweetener
When British Prime Minister Harold Wilson announced the accelerated
timetable for Britain’s pull-out from east of Suez in January 1968, it meant
that British forces would vacate the island completely by March 1971. This
was a considerably shorter schedule compared to that of the 1967 British
Defence White Paper, where half the forces in Southeast Asia would pull
out by 1970/71 and the remainder in the mid-1970s. In Singapore, the 56
British military sites occupied a tenth of the total land area and contributed
a fifth of gross domestic product. One-sixth of the island’s labour force
depended on the bases for work, either directly for the 4,450 enlisted and
23,000 civilian Singaporeans, or indirectly, including numerous service
workers such as barbers, bus and taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and some
8,000 female domestic workers (or amahs) (Singapore Parliamentary
Debates, henceforth SPD, 7 September 1967, 173-4). The run-down would
also place a heavy economic burden on Singapore, which would need to
build up its own defence and compensate for the loss of local spending by
the British services. Singapore also faced a larger perennial challenge since
the end of World War Two to industrialise and provide work for the growing numbers of young job-seekers and the unemployed (Ministry of Labour
1977a). Speaking to Parliament when the accelerated withdrawal timeline
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was publicised, Minister for Finance Goh Keng Swee warned that about
half of the labour force employed at the bases would be retrenched between
1967 and the actual run-down in December 1971 (SPD, 3 December 1968,
38, 59).
These were the ‘facts’ of a national crisis that never came to pass.
The question of defence was resolved through the creation of a citizen
army and Singapore’s participation in the Five Power Defence Arrangement, which was signed in 1971 (Chin 1983). The economic impact was
on the whole offset by the government’s counter-recessionary development plans, which facilitated the expansion of manufacturing, trade,
transport, banking and finance, and tourism (Yeo 1970; Hon 1973). The
departing British themselves contributed significantly to this growth by
handing over the military bases to Singapore for defence and development, towards which they also provided a sum of £ 50 million as Special Aid over five years to help the island manage the crisis. Singapore’s
unemployment rate tumbled from 8.1% in 1967 to 4.5% in 1973, while
the economy experienced robust double-digit growth rates in this
period.
Central to Singapore’s ability not only to avoid the predicted calamity
but also to transform itself into a model of growth was the close collaboration between the British and PAP governments. While part of this
relationship had always been visible in formal politics and diplomacy,
much of it was less immediately obvious, but nonetheless just as crucial
(in the form of development projects). Since the end of war, these had
been integral to British decolonisation in Singapore and were indeed so
in wider imperial practice; from the mid-1950s onwards, an important
mission of the British Colonial Office was to ensure the orderly process
of decolonisation by providing economic aid to the colonies through
the Commonwealth (Boyce 1999, 179-83). This “renewed sense of
imperial purpose” led Britain to spend £ 344 million between 1946-70
in an attempt to establish a “partnership” with its colonies throughout
the world (Stockwell 2008, 274). In post-war Singapore and Malaya,
the British sought to safeguard their economic and strategic interests
in the region by restructuring local societies and economies in their
own image (Tarling 1993). Decolonisation, then, did not simply mean
grooming local politicians who appreciated British interests or suppressing ‘communists’, but also engineering a viable economy and a
citizenry instilled with the requisite social discipline.
This collaborative relationship became clear when the PAP came to
power in 1959 and Singapore became a self-governing state. Despite
some initial anti-colonial gestures, the new government quickly put
into practice level-headed programmes of development, integration and
mobilisation. The continued presence of the British military bases was
accepted, even welcomed. At Singapore’s independence in 1965, the
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199
left-wing Barisan Sosialis, the main opposition party, demanded the
immediate removal of the bases, arguing that they not only encroached
on Singapore’s sovereignty but were launching pads for Anglo-American
aggression in the region (Plebeian Express 29 September 1965, 2). The
government pointed to the bases’ contribution to the city-state’s defence
and economy. In December, the Minister of State for Defence Wee Toon
Boon referred to the continued presence of the British naval base at
Trincomalee in Ceylon for nine more years after the island was granted
independence in 1948 (SPD 17 December 1965, 309).
The key local players in this Anglo-Singaporean collaboration
were Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, his deputy Goh Keng Swee and a
supporting cast of senior civil servants. Much has been written, including
by Lee himself, about his rush to London following the announcement
of the accelerated withdrawal and his success in obtaining an extension
of the final run-down from March to December 1971 (Lee 2000). But
the roles played by the Singapore leaders went deeper. From the start,
Lee and Goh had different responses to the accelerated pull-out. On
reading an advance text of the withdrawal schedule in January 1968,
“Mr Lee appeared stunned and took some time to adjust himself”, while
“Dr Goh Keng Swee read the letter without any emotion and did not
seem surprised by it”.3 A later British document exaggerated the reactions of Lee and Goh as, respectively: “If you have to go, at least do not
scuttle off and thereby rock the boat” and “If you have to go, go quickly
because we want the real estate”.4
Despite these initial reactions and some disagreements over the details
of the development plans, Lee and Goh both agreed on the significance
of the pull-out and the substance of Singapore’s response. Lee was less
worried about the actual economic effects than the psychological impact:
the “crisis of confidence… with repercussions on investment and the
expansion of jobs”.5 “This was something which we saw as a contingency
which must occur”, Lee said in an interview in January 1968, “[I]t’s a
question of timing”.6 The accelerated run-down would, in his view,
deprive Singapore of the requisite ‘breathing space’ needed to build up
its defence and industry.7 Goh shared Lee’s concern about confidence,
while his real worry, like Lee’s, was about security. Pondering the possibility of the run-down in early 1966, he even wondered if “the resulting
slump might be no sad thing if it would bring down costs in Singapore”.8
What the PAP leadership did in response to the accelerated timeline was
not simply to address the economic effects, but to maintain investor confidence in Singapore.
Britain, the perpetuator of the ‘crisis’, was willing to help Singapore do
this. In appraising the purpose of the Special Aid later, British High Commissioner de la Mare bluntly stated in January 1970 that “the £ 50 million
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was a bribe to keep the Singaporeans sweet” and achieve the three main
aims of the British pull-out:
a to ensure the orderly withdrawal of British forces in accordance with
our plans
b in the interests of political stability in the area to ensure the prospect of a viable economy in Singapore and to avoid endangering the
economy of Malaysia, and
c to safeguard our own trading and investment interests.9
The British accordingly took a “general and flexible approach” to the transfer
of the bases.10 As early as November 1967, the British Ministry of Defence
had accepted that “if it [the transfer of British lands] should come to a local
argument, we have virtually no bargaining position at all”.11 Half a year later,
when a Singapore delegation visited London to negotiate the terms of the
Special Aid, the discussion focused on using the aid for development in
the public and private sectors (particularly manufacturing and tourism),
and ensuring that the approval of projects, disbursement of funds and
repayment of loans would be simplified.12 There were no serious disagreements over policy. As J.Y.M. Pillay, Permanent-Secretary at the Ministry of
Finance, who took part in the aid talks, stated in December 1967, Singapore
had to “take organisational measures to put this aid to effective use”.13 He
felt that the amount of aid was “not ungenerous”.14
Another example of Anglo-Singaporean collaboration can be seen in
the ‘Malta precedent’, which highlights Singapore’s location in a wider
Commonwealth history in the late 1960s. After visiting Malta in 1967,
which had experienced a similar run-down, Lee Kuan Yew was extremely
critical of its alleged “aid dependency” mentality, particularly of Maltese
dock workers playing water polo in the naval dockyard (Lee 2000, 70-1).
Like Singapore, Malta obtained its independence from Britain in 1964,
but allowed the British to retain their military facilities on the island until
1979. Malta was also economically dependent on the British, with 13% of
its gainfully employed population working in the bases (Craig 1991). In
fact, the Singapore government learned positive lessons from the Malta
experience. In their exploratory negotiations with the British on the
terms of the Special Aid in October 1967, the Singapore side repeatedly
referred to the Malta precedents, e.g. transferring all British assets to the
Singapore government without charge.15 The provision of a three-month
long retraining programme for retrenched base workers, discussed
below, was also a Malta precedent.16 So little of this has been acknowledged in public history, because Lee had not desired the Special Aid programme to be given undue coverage in Singapore, for fear that the people
would “get into a Malta frame of mind”.17 The way the ‘Malta precedent’
has been discursively rendered in Singapore history is testament to the
british military withdrawal from singapore and anatomy of a catalyst
201
high modernist social engineering which occurred during and after the
British withdrawal, as determined by the PAP government and particularly by Lee himself.
‘No haphazard takeover’: conversion, redundancy and retraining
One strand of the accelerated withdrawal from Singapore led to another.
The pursuit of economic development was to some extent mandated by
the anticipated effects of the British withdrawal. In 1968, the PAP government quickly committed $ 150 million to a counter-recessionary plan
and, over the period of the pull-out, a total of over $ 1 billion. Public
works and construction were key planks in this programme, to which
an additional $ 400 million was allocated to the 1968 budget to offset
the deflationary effects of the run-down. The authorities also relaxed
plot ratios in the Central Area and provided financial incentives, such
as reduced property taxes, for private developers to increase the speed
of construction of commercial buildings, offices and hotels, and other
urban renewal projects (Singapore 1975). Not all the development efforts
were, however, reactive: major construction projects originally planned
for the late 1970s, such as road, drainage and sewerage development,
land reclamation, public housing, and urban renewal, were also brought
forward to absorb redundant labour (Tan 1972). De la Mare found Singapore’s initial anxieties over the pull-out to be remarkably ‘short-lived’,
quickly replaced by an acute economic sense.18 Other British officials
concurred in 1970 that “[a]lthough our declared aim was to mitigate the
economic consequences of our withdrawal, in the event Singapore has
adjusted to this more rapidly than we anticipated”.19
The Singapore government also established the Bases Economic Conversion Department (BECD). Under the direct purview of the prime minister, the department attempted to rigorously deal with the multi-faceted
legal, economic and technical issues related to the withdrawal through a
single public body. Its leadership, which was inter-ministerial, comprised
Hon Sui Sen, the Department’s Commissioner and Chairman of the Economic Development Board (EDB). Hon’s deputies were K.R. Chandra,
the Permanent Secretary of Law, in charge of issues of transfer, conversion and land use, and J.Y.M. Pillay, his counterpart from the Ministry
of Finance, who dealt with issues such as Special Aid and finance. The
BECD’s work involved managing the handover of the British military
lands and assets; administering, developing, converting, and disposing of the lands and assets to civilian use; conducting negotiations over
the delivery of British aid to help tide Singapore over the effects of the
run-down; and using part of the aid for the retraining of redundant base
workers.20
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The conversion of the bases was a success and in both real and
symbolic terms a major boost to Singapore’s development. As early
as October 1967, when the British Director of Lands and Claims in
the Far East Command asked the Chief Surveyor of the EDB, “[W]
hat Singapore was going to do with so much land – about 22 square
miles”, the latter confidently referred to a map of the island and
“named a planned use for practically all establishments and installations”. “This implies no haphazard takeover”, the Director concluded,
“they know where they are going!”21 The converted bases aided the
creation or expansion of several major industries in the early 1970s:
the conversion of the naval dockyard at Sembawang into a commercial shipyard; of Changi airbase into a recreational resort and later an
international airport; of part of the military facility at Seletar airbase
into Singapore Electronic and Engineering Limited for repairing and
overhauling electrical and electronic equipment; and of Blakang Mati
into a tourist resort, renamed Sentosa. The BECD also planned the
establishment of an offshore oil-drilling site off Sembawang, support
operations at Loyang and industrial estates at Ayer Rajah and Telok
Blangah; and the relocation of the University of Singapore from Bukit
Timah to Kent Ridge. In the largest of the conversion projects at the
naval dockyard, the British shipbuilding firm Swan Hunter provided
vital technical and managerial expertise, as the Singapore officials “did
not seem to have much grasp of the complexities of the commercialisation project”.22
This is not to say there were no minor political or administrative hurdles in the process but, by and large, the transfer and conversion took
place smoothly within the framework of Anglo-Singaporean collaboration. Both the British and PAP governments generally agreed on the
terms of the transfer of the bases. In the same year that the withdrawal
was announced, Britain proposed, and Singapore accepted, the working premise to transfer without charge to Singapore military facilities
required for the republic’s economy or defence, together with surplus
items of non-operational moveable equipment.23 With up to a tenth of
Singapore’s land area becoming available for economic use, the British
pull-out was a major catalyst for development in a land-hungry and rapidly developing state. The government’s aim was not simply to prevent
or absorb unemployment but to pursue a “positive, job-creation” strategy, based on state-driven industrialisation, so that “conversion planning can foster, and be integrated with, wider economic changes both
nationally and globally” (Southwood 1991, 195, 200). At the same time,
the conversion enhanced Singapore’s industrialisation programme,
because it coincided with the flow of international, particularly American, capital in the late 1960s to countries with cheap factory sites and
low labour costs (Rodan 1989).
british military withdrawal from singapore and anatomy of a catalyst
203
Less successful were the BECD’s retraining programmes to help
redundant base workers find new employment in industrial vocations,
although retraining might have played a symbolic role in demonstrating
Singapore’s will and ability to industrialise and maintaining investor confidence. In a speech in 1968, Lee Kuan Yew explained why the redundant
base worker had to be retrained:
It’s no use giving the man ive weeks’ pay or one month’s pay for
every year of service – he will spend that and having nothing, he
will be on my dole. What I want is to keep up the man’s morale
and self-respect.24
Here again, as in his stress on investor confidence, Lee emphasised the
psychological; morale, he believed, was “three-quarters of the essence of
the solution to the problems consequent on the reduction of the bases”.25
This belief that the way to revitalise redundant workers was to provide
them new skills rather than financial relief, was deeply rationalist.
The three-month long retraining programmes, modelled on those
in Malta, were planned by the Organising Committee for the Training
and Retraining of Redundant Base Personnel, established in April 1968
under Ernest Wong, Director of Training in the BECD. The committee,
like the BECD itself, was cross-ministerial in its work, coordinating the
efforts of the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC), individual trade
unions, EDB, and the ministries of education and labour. Discounting
workers who were skilled or close to retirement, and those who could
be re-employed from the naval dockyard to Sembawang Shipyard, the
final figure of retrainees was 9-10,000, most of whom were white-collar
administrative workers or unskilled labourers.26 Some 3,309 out of the
10,000 retrenched workers at the Naval Base were re-employed by Sembawang Shipyard in 1968 (SPD 3 December 1968, 38).
Economist Lee Soo Ann viewed the retraining as “an exercise in sheer
hope which might very well end in frustration” (Lee 1971, 61). Here, the
high modernist developmental project could not overcome individual
resistance. The retraining was clearly inadequate in many cases for converting a white-collar worker into a skilled tradesman, as was highlighted by
the government’s plea for employers not to discriminate against retrained
workers. Lee Kuan Yew stated in his memoirs that the retrenched were
readily absorbed into factory work provided by the emerging industries in
Singapore (Lee 2000, 73). But if this was true in a general sense, there
were nonetheless very divergent experiences. Hwang Peng Yuan, the Head
of Promotion in the EDB, reflected later that when “you get a 40-year-old
shopkeeper who was already earning $ 1,500”, “[i]t doesn’t make sense
for him to train as a machinist and start at $ 500”.27 In 1971, Hon Sui
Sen admitted in Parliament that the redeployment of some retrenched
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base workers was difficult, while many older workers had not responded
favourably to retraining, prompting the government to terminate the programme (SPD 17 March 1971, 759). There are no statistics on retraining,
but a telling case was that of Lim Meng Jock, who joined the Naval Base
as an accounts clerk in 1964, was retrenched in December 1968, and then
completed two technical drawing courses. However, Lim did not become
a tracer, but joined Sembawang Shipyard as a billing technician, another
administrative position, before leaving to set up a catering business a few
years later. The British withdrawal, he said, had “not much of an impact”.28
The emphasis on technical and vocational education also shaped the
nature of work for generations of young Singaporeans in the 1970s and
beyond. Following the announcement of the British pull-out, a new Technical Education Department was formed in the Ministry of Education
(Singapore 1973). When Minister for Labour S. Rajaratnam spoke to
the first graduating batch of 427 retrained base workers in July 1968,
he made no distinction between the retraining of redundant base workers and the new policy of promoting technical and vocational education
due to the changing technological basis of the global economy, which
was making white-collar and unskilled workers increasingly redundant.
He spoke of the base workers as the “earliest victims” of this worldwide
shift in the demand for labour, but noted their “good fortune” in receiving special assistance from the government to find alternative work. He
warned white-collar workers that one day soon they might be replaced by
machines and computers.29
Because it clearly aided Singapore’s development, the British keenly
endorsed the use of the Special Aid to finance and supply British expertise for the expansion of technical and vocational education. The former British army depot at Telok Blangah was converted into the fourth
vocational institute in Singapore, which was capable of retraining 2,000
workers a year initially, but eventually doubled that number (Ministry
of Education 1969). The PAP government, with British assistance, was
steadily transforming the economic, employment and social structures
in Singapore. In 1972, commenting on the development of technical and
vocational education, the new British High Commissioner S. Falle surmised that “a major cause of the new release of disciplined energy which
has produced this success was probably the galvanising effect on the Singapore government and people of the announcement of the withdrawal
of British ‘aid’ in the form of the spending power of our armed services”.30 With the reforms, the experiences and outcomes of work for
young school-leavers with different skill-sets were to vary widely (Salaff
1988). From the 1970s, secondary, polytechnic and tertiary students with
technical or vocational education were finding more highly paid jobs and
more quickly than those trained more generally in the Arts. Males and
English-educated University of Singapore students also did significantly
british military withdrawal from singapore and anatomy of a catalyst
205
better than their female and Chinese-stream Nanyang University and
Ngee Ann Technical College counterparts (University of Singapore 1976,
1980; Pang 1972, 1973, 1974; Eng 1974).
The labour laws and ‘new release of disciplined energy’
The PAP government’s ability to push through far-reaching social and
economic policies came from the mandate it received in the 1968 general
elections. Following the announcement of Britain’s run-down, the leadership decided to hold early elections some seven months in advance for
a strong mandate from the citizenry at this difficult juncture. The party
won all the seats in Parliament and polled 86.7% of the vote, although
this was helped by the decision of the opposition parties (except the
Workers’ Party) to boycott the polls. Foreign observers saw the early elections as an attempt by the PAP to obtain a popular mandate and push
through a comprehensive economic package without having to spend
time debating or consulting the people (Far Eastern Economic Review,
henceforth FEER, 59 (9), 29 February 1968, 360).
The companion policy to the educational reforms involved remoulding the character of labour, arguably the most comprehensive of the
PAP’s policies designed to maintain investor confidence. With complete control of Parliament, the PAP swiftly passed the Employment
Act and an amendment to the Industrial Relations Act. Together with
the Trade Unions (Amendment) Act, passed in 1966, this trio of labour
laws redefined the relationship between labour, employers and the
state in post-pull-out Singapore. By making it mandatory for unions to
hold a secret ballot before a strike decision could be taken, the Trade
Union (Amendment) Act greatly undermined labour militancy, while
a further amendment outlawed strikes in the essential services and
sympathy strikes. The anticipated effects of the British withdrawal reinforced the government’s rationale for passing the Employment Act. In
July 1968, when S. Rajaratnam explained the legislation as designed to
help facilitate Singapore’s future development, he framed the pioneer
batch of retrained base workers as the vanguard of an adaptable national
workforce spearheading the island’s venture into manufacturing in the
1970s.31 The Act aimed to maximise the productivity of labour by increasing the number of working hours and cutting down on fringe benefits.
Employees may not work overtime for more than 48 hours each month;
may only obtain a maximum of one month’s bonus per annum; may
not obtain retrenchment or retirement benefits if they had not continuously served an employer for three or five years, respectively; and may
only be paid double time, not triple time as previously, for work on a
public holiday. The government also referred to the British withdrawal
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in justifying the need for the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act.
This legislation transferred significant powers to management, including the right to hire and fire, while trade unions were also prohibited
from obtaining terms superior to those stipulated in the Employment
Act in the “pioneer industries”, to which the government was seeking to
attract foreign investment.
The act of passing these pro-capital laws signified the progressive
intentions of Singapore to international investors. They were intended
to enhance Singapore’s appeal as a site for foreign industrialists by shifting the basic labour framework from employee protection to employer
protection (Tan 1970, 25). Many workers and even labour leaders and
PAP MPs were critical of certain provisions in the laws, although, significantly, they accepted them as necessary for the industrialisation programme.32 The overwhelming electoral mandate won by the government
was expedient, because it meant that labour MPs and activists could not
simply reject the laws out of hand (FEER 61 (30), 25 July 1968, 186). In
Lee Kuan Yew’s view, it was the acute sense of anxiety over “an economic
collapse” arising from the news of the British withdrawal which led the
workers of Singapore to accept the tough labour laws (Lee 2000, 108-9).
Peter Vincent, President of NTUC, the dominant umbrella of unions in
Singapore, warned retrained base workers in 1968 that “the world does
not owe us a living”. He urged them to support the new labour laws and
“contribute to the further development of Singapore” through manufacturing and tourism.33 An NTUC seminar in 1969 formalised this change
of the trade union movement’s role from being an independent player
involved in “collective bargaining and traditional militancy” to playing
an integrated ‘symbiotic’ role between government, management and
labour in Singapore (Ministry of Labour 1977b, 2).
The PAP government’s belief in utilising the labour laws and retraining schemes, not only to equip workers with new skills but to create
a new type of worker with a disciplined work ethic, was rationalist and
quintessentially high modernist. The labour laws were not merely
proscriptive but developmental in intent. The Employment Act aimed
to “tighten labour discipline by providing against malingering and
restrictive practices” (Ministry of Labour 1977a, 2). The conversion of
the naval dockyard into Sembawang Shipyard encapsulated this social
engineering. Ship repair work in a commercial dockyard, unlike in a
naval facility, now became a seven-day-a-week preoccupation, including
overtime.34 When the 3,309-strong civilian workforce of the naval dockyard was hired en masse by the shipyard, the management cracked down
strongly on work absenteeism, frequent sick leave and social gambling
at the dockyard, as mandated in the Employment Act (Chew 1998). As
a former BECD official reflected on the discursive language of the new
industrial economy, base workers “could no longer adopt a carefree or
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lackadaisical attitude to their work as they would have to meet completion time of vessels” (Leong unpublished). The Barisan Sosialis alleged
that “[o]n the excuse of fighting unemployment consequent on the sham
‘British withdrawal’, workers are heavily oppressed and exploited” (Plebeian 101, 9 January 1971, 2).
Many former base employees keenly felt this dramatic shift in the
culture of work at Sembawang Shipyard, although few understood the
significance of the labour laws at the time. The amount and pace of work
changed markedly along with the surge in the volume of ships calling
at the shipyard. While working in the naval dockyard, Lim Shee Chee’s
father, a fitter, would cycle to work in the morning, spend much of a
typically slow day drinking coffee, cycle home for lunch, before returning to his workplace; he would be home by 4.30 pm. “That’s the life of a
servant of the British Empire”, Lim remarked.35 John Ng, a policeman at
the Naval Base who retained his job at the shipyard when the British left,
commented that there was not a single oil spill in the dockyard and workers could “shake a leg” during lull periods.36 But at Sembawang Shipyard,
Ho Shee Lim, a tradesman, felt that “every day was a mad rush”, as workers now had more challenging targets to meet.37 Balachandran Nair, a
mechanic at the naval dockyard who continued working in Sembawang
Shipyard, observed that “work in the shipyard was a tough life”, “miles
different” from that in the dockyard. As security guards increasingly
cracked down on social gambling during working hours at the shipyard,
the corporate focus on profits and individual betterment filtered down to
many workers. “You sweated to get [a] bonus in Sembawang Shipyard”,
Nair told me, adding, “Only thing good in Sembawang Shipyard is you
get promoted if you worked hard”.38
Work in the shipyard also became more stressful because it was much
more regulated. Along with the increased volume of work came changes
in the supplement of rules for Sembawang Shipyard workers. Getting
sick leave now became more difficult, at least in the eyes of the workers.
In Nair’s account, the medical centre in the Naval Base was always full
on Monday, as the British did not interfere with the workers’ entitlement
to 14 days of sick leave per year. “If the British were still here”, Nair concluded, “Singapore would not be what it is today”.39 John Chai, a tradesman for steel fitting in Sembawang Shipyard, stated that as the amount of
work increased after the commercialisation of the dockyard, the hazards
of working onboard ship were greatly magnified. As one could get seriously hurt by the release of toxic gas, an explosion or fire, objects falling
from above, or slipping on a wet surface, he had to be “100% alert” at
work. As he felt that the doctors in the shipyard were reluctant to grant
medical leave unless one was seriously sick, Chai took care of the minor
bruises and cuts he suffered at work by continuing to work and seeing a
Chinese physician for treatment, or by self-medicating. Of the injuries,
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Chai observed, “It’s nothing, [you] just have to take care,” adding, “That’s
the way”.40 Chai’s remarks indicate the extent to which former base workers were socialised into the post-pull-out industrial economy of Singapore.
In its review of Singapore in 1969, in the middle of the run-down, the
British High Commission labelled the year as one of “non-stop action”.
This was the “year of the Beaver”, with burgeoning construction work in
Singapore – on “hotels, housing, office-blocks, factories, container ports,
schools power stations, flyovers, community centres” – making it truly
a “workers’ republic”. No small thanks because, the report concluded in
self-gratifying fashion, Singapore had responded robustly to the shortened timeline for Britain’s withdrawal from the island. The writer of the
report was Arthur de la Mare.41
From ‘Little Britain’ and ‘Kochu Kerala’ to modern Singapore
Mass redundancy due to the run-down was a central concern for the
Singapore government. In fact, most blue-collar workers of the naval
dockyard were absorbed into Sembawang Shipyard, while the experiences of white-collar employees, unskilled workers and service providers
varied, depending less on the pull-out per se than on local factors such as
one’s age, education, family composition, and social networks. The father
of Lam Chun Chew, a senior clerk at the Naval Base, was retrenched, but
this was the prelude to a ‘golden handshake’, as he received a five-figure
redundancy benefit, found work in private firms and retired comfortably
several years later. “I really believe you have picked a wrong candidate to
relate to you of my father’s retrenchment story”, Lam told me, “simply
because our situation was very different from others”.42 The grandmother
of George Annadorai, who worked as an amah for a British family in RAF
Seletar, also received a “handsome offering” when they departed. She was
elevated from domestic servant to landlady overnight, using the money
to build wooden houses in Jalan Kayu village just outside the base, which
she rented out to villagers.43
Another amah, Tan Geok Hak, was not so fortunate. Working for the
family of a British officer in Holland, the withdrawal cut her source of
income without providing for any redundancy benefit. She became a
home-based, piece-rated worker in Singapore’s informal economy, sewing clothes and making paper bags for pressure lamps. Many older Chinese amahs, she said, “retired” after the British withdrawal, an outcome
which was less a voluntary than an enforced one.44 For Song Koon Poh,
the son of a clerk working in the British Ordnance Depot, the run-down
was a life-changing personal experience. Following his father’s retrenchment, Song had to forgo his opportunity to pursue his pre-university
education and venture into the workplace to support the family, thus
british military withdrawal from singapore and anatomy of a catalyst
209
fulfilling the Chinese tradition of family-based self-help. He joined a
shipping company as an assistant boarding officer in 1971 at the age of
17, benefiting from the boom in Singapore’s marine industry. His sister,
like Tan, also contributed to the household by sewing clothes, for which
she was paid by piece. As Song reflected: “We struggled as a family during the years just before the British pulled out and immediately after”.45
Just as crucial as the economic consequences was the social impact of
the British run-down. Its role as a catalyst was also to extend the political
economy of life in Singapore into spaces previously under British military control. On the one hand, the British bases were ‘Little Britains’ in
the cultural and economic senses, self-contained enclaves governed by
the British which “stood quite apart from the development going on in
other parts of the Island” (Lim 1974, 23, 58). On the other, the military
facilities also developed a unique, semi-autonomous ‘base culture’ owing
both to the presence of British power and the Asian labour force residing
in them. The Naval Base, for instance, was known to the locals as ‘Kochul
Kerala’ or ‘Little Kerala’, after the rich cultural life of the large Malayali
population living in the base, expressed in their religious and cultural
organisations and activities (Liew 2006).
Socially and culturally, for many former base employees and residents,
the British pull-out constituted the end of an era. Life in a British base
was shaped by the unique combination of Western modernity and vernacular culture. In the locals’ perception, the base represented the best of
two different worlds: the kampong with its unauthorised housing, basic
amenities but close community bonds, and the Western-style estate with
its permanent housing, material comfort and modern amenities. In the
Asian quarters in the Naval Base bounded by Kowloon, Delhi and Madras
roads, the neighbours knew one another as far as 200 metres away, while
adults and children of different ethnic groups intermingled freely. As John
Ng, the naval policeman in the base who learnt Tamil from his neighbours
and friends in the base, recalled, “You could see an Ah Seng, a Muthusamy and an Ahmad together”.46 For Cramon Chenteley, whose father
was a fitter in the Naval Base, the area was not only “a protected place”,
fenced up and closely guarded, but also a “kampong-like” environment
where school-going children and youths were “free to play”. Yet, he was
also happy that he did not have to endure water rationing while living in
the base (they had piped water), or use a pail toilet (they had water closets)
or an oil lamp (they had electricity).47
When the bases began to be run down, however, the residents began
to experience the powerful integrating pull of the high modernist
state and economy of Singapore. Here was ‘conversion’ of not only
the uses of physical assets but also social and economic roles. Where
once the rent in the base had been heavily subsidised and the utilities
free, the residents now had to pay for the use of water and electricity.
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As Vanessa, John Ng’s wife, a Punjabi, remarked, “Nothing is free after
the British withdrawal”.48 Balachandran Nair, who moved out of the
area when he got married and later moved into a Housing and Development Board (HDB) flat in Ang Mo Kio estate, lamented, “You can’t
get that life [in the Naval Base] back”.49 For those still living in the
base, as more of their neighbours left, as George Annadorai recalled
of RAF Seletar, there was an obvious ‘slow death’ to the social and
cultural life of the community.50 The tipping point for many residents
was when they moved out of the bases in the early 1970s as the British
forces finally left. In the new HDB public housing to which many of
them moved into, they encountered the lack of social and community
interaction which many other Singaporeans had experienced a decade
earlier: locked doors and a life centred around the demands of work,
away from one’s residence. Like many former Naval Base residents,
John Chai, the tradesman, moved into the Jurong Town Corporation
flats built for workers in Sembawang. He hardly knew his neighbours,
but eventually understood why: he typically left for work around 5 plus
in the morning and returned home only at 10-11 pm after working
overtime.51 As full-fledged worker-citizens of the post-pull-out state,
the lives of Chai and other former base workers were being drawn into
the emerging high modernist structures of Singapore, as the island
became increasingly connected to an international web of industrial
capital in the 1970s.
Conclusion
In 1974, Lee Kuan Yew thanked Her Majesty’s Government for the
‘breathing space’ British forces had provided for Singapore’s development.52 He had much to be thankful for: the accelerated British withdrawal was not only the final chapter of decolonisation in Singapore,
but also the first step in the independent city-state’s growth. The catalyst, which began as a crisis for both Britain and Singapore, was forged
at the intersection of imperial and national policies and enabled by the
combined agency of the two parties. The British aim was to achieve
successful decolonisation by continuing to encourage Singapore’s
development during the withdrawal. This meant providing aid and
technical expertise to Singapore and handing over the bases promptly
for its defence and developmental uses.
British policy coincided with the high modernist projects pursued by
the PAP government, a programme that was also based on the post-war
colonial blueprint. This programme sought to protect investor confidence in Singapore in both concrete and symbolic ways, as envisaged
by Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Keng Swee. Despite de la Mare’s accusation
british military withdrawal from singapore and anatomy of a catalyst
211
of a British ‘handout’, he admired the development of Singapore in the
late 1960s and recognised the role played by the run-down; if anything,
he was overly pessimistic about the role of his British colleagues in negotiating the terms of the handover. In fact, as officials in both countries
realised, the economic and strategic interests which Britain wanted to
safeguard in a smooth pull-out would at the same time be served by facilitating the expansion of the Singapore economy. De la Mare’s view of the
Special Aid as a “bribe” and “sweetener” was not so much wrong as not
fully putting in context the close collaboration between Britain and Singapore in dealing with the effects of the run-down. The ‘Malta precedent’,
which Singapore drew on for its negotiations with the British and for
addressing the effects of the withdrawal, was another slice of the connection between Singapore and another part of the Commonwealth.
The programmes of national development and social engineering, enabled by Anglo-Singaporean collaboration during the withdrawal, spurred
the transformation of the island state into an international industrial hub
in the 1970s and elevated it to a new place in world history. Rationalist
projects to commercialise the military facilities, accelerate construction
works, expand technical and vocational education, retrain redundant
base workers, and forge a disciplined labour force both provided the raw
material for Singapore’s growth and mobilised the people into their new
role as members of a new ‘workers republic’. These were either ongoing
projects now being systematically expanded in the context of a ‘national
crisis’ or planned ones which were quickly brought forward. Not all the
projects were entirely successful: the retraining was often inadequate and
naturally invoked the resistance of middle-aged clerical workers, while
the reform of technical and vocational education was to further divide
the experiences of workers according to skill as well as language and sex.
Fast pace of work, systematic routines and stress now characterised the
working lives of many former base employees re-employed in the newly
commercialised plants of production. Whatever their effects, the projects
collectively defined the political economy of work in Singapore into the
1970s and beyond.
Finally, the effects of a decision made in Britain were deeply felt at the
local level, as the lives of base workers and residents were ‘converted’.
This encapsulated strikingly James Scott’s point that high modernism
sought not only to transform nature but also human nature (Scott 1998).
During the PAP era from 1959 onwards, the British ordnance depots were
the remaining semi-anachronistic spaces in the city-state which, while in
their own ways modern, existed largely outside the well-regulated structures of the newly emerging state that was predominant on the remainder of the island. The base residents, used to the unique blend of the
material comfort and vernacular base culture of the ‘Little Britains’ and
‘Kochul Kerala’, found their own identity dramatically redefined by the
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scope of transformation during the run-down. Formerly ‘servants of the
British Empire’, they were now being socialised as worker-citizens of the
post-pull-out state. When they moved out of the bases, often to public
housing estates close to their workplaces, the sense of community and
neighbourhood which had for a decade shielded them from the political economy of industrialisation gave way to a closely integrated relationship with the state and international capital. It was, naturally, the
pull-out which enabled the final phase of the modernisation process
the British regime had first started a generation earlier at the end of the
Pacific war to be completed at the bases themselves. Wan Chan Peew, a
clerk working at the Naval Base, was re-employed in the same vocation
at Sembawang Shipyard. Recalling the conversion of the bases, the move
of many base residents into HDB flats and the increase in his working
hours from 36 to 44 per week, he observed, “It was such a buzz – rather
than the pull-out!”53
Notes
1 This time-frame refers to the schedule planned in 1968; in fact, smaller British forces
remained in Singapore until March 1976.
2 FCO 24/1019 Telegram from Arthur de la Mare to Alec Douglas-Home, 3 November 1971.
3 FCO 24/62, Note of a Conversation at the Commonwealth Secretary’s Luncheon for
Mr Lee Kuan Yew on 16 January 1968.
4 FCO 24/1861, Memo on ANZUK Real Estate by P. G. de Courey-Ireland, South West
Pacific Department, 10 October 1974.
5 FCO 24/62, Letter from Lee Kuan Yew to Harold Wilson, 18 December 1967.
6 FCO 24/62, Transcript of Interview, ‘Prime Minister Lee Explains his Difficulties’, 15
January 1968.
7 FCO 24/62, Transcript of a Press Conference Given by the Prime Minister Mr Lee
Kuan Yew at the City Hall, 9 January 1968.
8 FCO 24/62, Telegram from British High Commission to Commonwealth Office, 5
January 1966.
9 FCO 24/888, Telegram from Arthur de la Mare to Roy Mason, President of the Board
of Trade, 29 January 1970.
10 FCO 24/1861, Disposal of Service Assets in Singapore, 29 August 1974.
11 FCO 24/75, Note by the Ministry of Defence on Defence Lands and Fixed Assets in
Malaysia and Singapore, 9 November 1967.
12 FCO 24/114, Opening Statement by Mr Hon Sui Sen, Leader of the Singapore Delegation, Annex B, 8 March 1968.
13 Radio Corporation of Singapore, audio recording titled ‘Interview with Manual Pillay,
Economic Development Board’, 6 December 1967.
14 Author’s interview with J.Y.M. Pillay, 26 November 2009.
15 FCO 24/75, Extract from Meeting in Singapore, 12 October 1967.
16 Radio Corporation of Singapore, audio recording titled ‘Interview with Manual Pillay,
Economic Development Board’, 6 December 1967.
17 FCO 24/327, Telegram from British High Commission to Commonwealth Office, 2
March 1968.
british military withdrawal from singapore and anatomy of a catalyst
213
18 FCO 24/888, Telegram from Arthur de la Mare to Roy Mason, President of the Board
of Trade, 29 January 1970.
19 FCO 24/888, Letter from Roy Mason, President of the Board of Trade, to Judith Hart,
Minister of Overseas Development, 24 February 1970.
20 Ministry of Culture 110/68, Memo from Secretary to the Prime Minister to All Permanent Secretaries and Heads of Departments, 8 February 1968.
21 FCO 24/75, Extract from Presentation by Director of Lands and Claims, Far East Command, 13 October 1967.
22 FCO 24/114, Negotiations on Aid with Malaysia and Singapore, 8 March 1968.
23 FCO 24/114, Note by the British Delegation on the Transfer of Lands and Fixed
Assets, Annex C, 8 March 1968; and Note by the British Delegation on the Transfer of
Moveable Assets, Annex D, 8 March 1968.
24 FCO 24/62, Transcript of a Press Conference Given by the Prime Minister Mr Lee Kuan
Yew at the City Hall, 9 January 1968.
25 OD 39/8, Letter from Lee Kuan Yew to Reginald Prentice, Minister for Overseas
Development, 15 December 1967.
26 Radio Corporation of Singapore, audio recording titled ‘S. Rajaratnam at Graduation
Ceremony of 1st Group of Trainees for Redundant Base Civilian Workers’, 29 July 1968.
27 Oral History Centre (henceforth OHC), interview with Hwang Peng Yuan, 29
August 2002-4 April 2003.
28 Author’s interview with Lim Meng Jock, 17 November 2009.
29 Radio Corporation of Singapore, audio recording titled ‘S. Rajaratnam at Graduation
Ceremony of 1st Group of Trainees for Redundant Base Civilian Workers’, 29 July 1968.
30 FCO 24/158, Telegram from S. Falle to Michael Walker, Overseas Development Administration, 21 February 1972.
31 Radio Corporation of Singapore, audio recording titled ‘S. Rajaratnam at the Graduation
Ceremony of 1st Group of Trainees for Redundant Base Civilian Workers’, 29 July 1968.
32 OHC, interview with Seah Mui Kok, 6 July 1988, 17 June 1994.
33 Radio Corporation of Singapore, audio recording entitled ‘S. Rajaratnam at the Graduation Ceremony of 1st Group of Trainees for Redundant Base Civilian Workers’, 29
July 1968.
34 Radio Corporation of Singapore, audio recording titled ‘Conversion of Naval Base –
Swan Hunter Group’, 18 June 1968.
35 Author’s interview with Lim Shee Chee, 4 December 2009.
36 Author’s interview with John Ng, 16 December 2009.
37 Author’s interview with Ho Shee Lim, 15 December 2009.
38 Author’s interview with Balachandran Nair, 17 December 2009.
39 Author’s interview with Balachandran Nair, 17 December 2009.
40 Author’s interview with John Chai, 28 December 2009.
41 FCO 24/875, Singapore: Annual Review for 1969, 5 February 1970.
42 Author’s email correspondence with Lam Chun Chew, 13-17 November 2009.
43 Author’s interview with George Annadorai, 10 December 2009.
44 Author’s interview with Tan Geok Hak, 17 December 2009.
45 Author’s email correspondence with Song Koon Poh, 4-6 October 2009.
46 Author’s interview with John Ng, 16 December 2009.
47 Author’s interview with Cramon Chenteley, 10 December 2009.
48 Author’s interview with Vanessa Ng, 16 December 2009.
49 Author’s interview with Balachandran Nair, 17 December 2009.
50 Author’s interview with George Annadorai, 10 December 2009.
51 Author’s interview with John Chai, 28 December 2009.
52 FCO 24/1861, Conversation with Mr Lee Kuan Yew, 29 November 1974.
53 Author’s email correspondence with Wan Chan Peew, 10 January 2010.