{"id":12979,"date":"2020-07-21T12:14:26","date_gmt":"2020-07-21T11:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/?p=12979"},"modified":"2020-07-21T12:14:26","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T11:14:26","slug":"john-cecil-cloake-and-sir-gerald-templer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/john-cecil-cloake-and-sir-gerald-templer\/","title":{"rendered":"John Cecil Cloake and Sir Gerald Templer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week’s blog post showing some of John Cecil Cloake’s photographs of Iraq provoked a number of responses from readers. It is always interesting to read people’s reactions to the blog and to learn more about the subject matter about which I have written. In this week’s blog post, RAS President, Tony Stockwell, in response to last week’s post, takes us from John Cecil Cloake, and his role as biographer of Sir Gerald Templer, to wider issues of the history of Malaysia. My thanks go to Tony for taking the time to write this piece:<\/p>\n

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John Cecil Cloake<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“John Cloake\u2019s principal enthusiasm in retirement was the history of Richmond and its neighbourhood about which he published extensively.\u00a0 In addition, at the invitation of Lady Templer he wrote the biography of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer ,”Templer:\u00a0<\/em>Tiger of Malaya”<\/em> (London, Harrap, 1983).\u00a0 Cloake seemed a surprising choice.\u00a0 His career had been in the diplomatic service and he had met Templer only once (lunch at the National Army Museum, Templer\u2019s passion in retirement). \u00a0\u00a0Nevertheless, the project went ahead and Lady Templer gave Cloake full access to the papers of her late husband.\u00a0 Cloake\u2019s biography has not lost its vitality. It remains a very \u2018good read\u2019.<\/p>\n

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Templer\u2019s reputation as \u2018Tiger of Malaya\u2019, rests on a relatively brief term (1952-54) as High Commissioner and Director of Operations during the Communist Emergency (1948-60). \u00a0Cloake devoted one third of the 500-page biography to these two years. \u00a0Templer was appointed at a particularly bleak period following the assassination of the previous High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney.\u00a0 He was by no means the government\u2019s first choice.\u00a0 Churchill and his secretary of state at first preferred Sir Hubert Rance (the last governor of Burma) but, when they eventually settled on Templer, they ensured, by appointing him both high commissioner and director of military operations, that he would wield and enjoy greater power than any of his predecessors.<\/p>\n

Templer \u00a0cracked on with counter-insurgency operations.\u00a0 Whether by \u2018winning hearts and minds\u2019 or by \u2018screwing down the people\u2019, the results were spectacular. In approximate figures the recorded number of incidents involving communist and security forces dropped from 6,000 in 1951 (the year before Templer\u2019s appointment) to 1,000 in 1954 (the year when he left Malaya).\u00a0 Over the same period, annual casualties declined: security forces from about 1,200 to 240 and civilian deaths from around 1,000 to 185.\u00a0 The strength of the Malayan National Liberation Army diminished from an estimated high of over 7,000 to 3,400. \u00a0As security improved, so emergency regulations were relaxed and plans for police reform, land settlement, and elections advanced with a view to eventual independence.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Templer\u2019s methods were frequently high-handed and counter-productive (notably collective punishment). They exacerbated communal antagonism and provoked fury in liberal circles in Britain. The eminent sinologist, Victor Purcell, led the charge. On retiring from the Malayan Civil Service in the late 1940s, Purcell had been appointed lecturer in Far Eastern History in Cambridge.\u00a0 He also acted as constitutional adviser to the non-communist Malayan Chinese Association. As Malaya moved towards self-government, Purcell laid into Templer.\u00a0 Templer\u2019s regime, Purcell wrote in Malaya; Communist or Free<\/em> (1954), was \u2018a terrifying combination of crassness and voodoo\u2019.\u00a0 Their exchanges were vitriolic and splenetic with Purcell making a bit of a fool of himself in public and Templer spitting teeth in private. Purcell\u2019s crusade eventually fizzled out in a damp-squib of a discussion attended by some 50 more or less ignorant men at the Athenaeum in May 1954.\u00a0 By this time Templer had stood down from Malaya and the eyes of the world were focused on Dien Bien Phu.<\/p>\n

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Sir Gerald Templer<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While writing the three Malayan chapters of \u00a0Templer\u2019s biography, Cloake wisely drew upon Anthony Short\u2019s The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948-1960. <\/em>\u00a0Short had served in Malaya as a national serviceman and, on being appointed to the History Department of the University of Malaya, he had been commissioned jointly by the University and Government<\/p>\n

of Malaya \u2018to write, for publication and without censorship, the history of the communist insurrection\u2019.\u00a0 To this end he was provided with every assistance by the Malayan government including full access to their confidential and secret papers. Short submitted his \u00a0completed manuscript in 1968.\u00a0 After three years of silence, the Malaysian government reneged on the contract as did Oxford University Press notwithstanding the fact that the Press had read and already accepted the manuscript for publication. The book was eventually published in Britain by Frederick Muller in 1975.<\/p>\n

One can suggest all manner of reasons for this volte face on the part of the Malaysian government but the upshot was, as John Bastin put it in his foreword to the book, the public had been \u2018denied for more than five years the opportunity of reading what is unquestionably the most authoritative and balanced book on the Communist Insurrection in Malaya\u2019. Far from being the last word on the subject, however, Short\u2019s book encouraged further research projects from a range of angles as bit by bit the United Kingdom\u2019s fifty-year rule was relaxed and hitherto embargoed material at The National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) was opened to scrutiny.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0Tony Stockwell<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week’s blog post showing some of John Cecil Cloake’s photographs of Iraq provoked a number of responses from readers. It is always interesting to read people’s reactions to the blog and to learn more about the subject matter about which I have written. In this week’s blog post, RAS President, Tony Stockwell, in response…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[508],"tags":[1427,604,2919,1429,1430],"class_list":["post-12979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collection-highlights","tag-anthony-short","tag-john-cecil-cloake","tag-malaysia","tag-malaysian-history","tag-sir-gerald-templer"],"acf":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royalasiaticsociety.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}