Elephants, Tigers and Tappers

Michael Thorp

Description

A young and naive Englishman sets out on his first tour of duty as a Rubber Planter in an isolated rubber estate in near Kuantan, Pahang. Set in the waning period of the last few years of British Malaya, from1956-1960, Michael Thorp paints a vivid picture of his life on a rubber estate in the harsh tropical climate of Malaya. As a young 20-year-old with no prior knowledge or experience in rubber planting, he recalls, with fondness, and humour, the challenges and difficulties of learning the ways, cultures and languages of the various ethnic groups that worked on the rubber estate, of learning to adjust and live a life of isolation, with no transport and little or no company, and unique, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that could only come about from living on a rubber estate. Lively anecdotes that recount these experiences complete each chapter, from weaning a stranded baby elephant on condensed milk, to harrowing encounters and narrow escapes from dangerous snakes and ravenous tigers.

Sujets

• Malasia
• Malaysia
• Travel writing
• Malaisie

Informations

• Publié par: Marshall Cavendish International
• Date de parution: 13 octobre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789814677202
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright 2009 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited
Cover design: Lock Hong Liang
Cover images: Goran Anicic, Benedeki (sxc.hu) and Vicky S
Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions
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National Library Board Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data
Thorp, Michael, 1936-
Elephants, tigers and tappers : recollections of a British rubber planter in Malaya / Michael Thorp. Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Travel, 2008.
p. cm.
ISBN-13 : 978-981-261-746-0
ISBN-10 : 981-261-746-9 eISBN: 978 981 4677 20 2
1. Thorp, Michael, 1936- 2. Rubber plantation workers - Malaysia - Malaya - Biography. 3. Plantation life - Malaysia - Malaya - History. 4. English - Malaysia - Malaya - Biography. I. Title.
HD8039.R92
633.8952092 -- dc22 OCN258850915
Printed in Singapore by Times Graphics Pte Ltd
Contents
Do You Play Cricket?
The Voyage Out, On The Willem Ruys
Arrival On Kuala Reman Estate
Life On A Rubber Estate
Working With Robbie And The Elephant Fence
Working With George Wood
Loneliness Can Lead In Many Directions
Maurice In The Jungle And On Merdeka Day
Hot Days, Sweaty Nights, And Cool Muster
Motorcycle And Liberation
Telok Cempedak
Cricket On The Padang Besar And At The Kuantan Recreation Club
A Lift From The Sultan, With No Outriders
West Meets East
Transfer To Nada
Hit On The Head By The Shopkeeper s Wife
Back To Panching
Ah Moi
Sungai Lembing Cut Off By Floods
Monkey Attack
Going Home
CHAPTER 1
Do You Play Cricket?
I was part of the madness of the Empire. It was a madness that paved the way for a British, London-based rubber company to employ a bumptious, twenty-year-old boy with no real life experience and send him on a journey to Malaya, to become a Rubber Planter. It was part of the colonial madness that reached back to a gun-runner, Francis Light, who visited the Malay coast in 1770. He discovered that Dutch influence did not stretch as far north as Kedah and that Siamese influence did not stretch as far south, so he urged the East India Company to found a settlement in the area. That, however, was not part of the Company s policy, the directors already having a far larger empire than they knew what to do with. Light might have implored forever in vain, had not the War of American Independence (1775-83) come to alter the whole situation.
I was first employed as an Assistant Planter in a dismal London office in 1956, at the age of twenty. I was three years older than Sir Hugh Clifford, another huge figure who helped cement British interests in Malaya. In 1883, he was only seventeen when he was first employed in the Colonial Service. He went on to be Governor of the Straits Settlements. When I started planting, I probably had only a third of Sir Hugh s intelligence and nothing like his dedication. The reason I mention Hugh Clifford is because he and I, in some small measure, share a complicated and absorbing involvement with the State of Pahang-but more of that later.
Frankly, when I signed up to go to Malaya I had no idea of what I was going to. My father had to witness my signature and sign the contract because I had not, at the time of employment, achieved my majority, as reaching the age of twenty-one was so grandly termed. My father also had to sign on my behalf when I went to sea as an indentured apprentice. On both occasions, aware of the implications for him as a parent with the possibility of recrimination at some later date, he cautioned me before he signed: Is this really what you want to do?
Yes it is Dad. I answered impatiently, slightly irritated that he should choose to show fatherly concern at this somewhat late stage.
I knew nothing about planting. My knowledge of botany was only rudimentary school botany and biology. The company I was to work for gave no training, no briefing, not even a simple training course to introduce me to the complicated ethnic structure of Malaya. All I knew before I set out for my new country was just what I could pick up in the reference section of the Reigate Public Library.
However, I did write a letter to my brother who was serving in the British Royal Air Force in Kuala Lumpur at the time. As far as I could understand he was servicing combat helicopters and himself undergoing jungle survival courses. He wrote back, and, in no uncertain terms, told me that because of the state of emergency in the country Planters were being shot all over the place, and on no account was I to consider such employment. Young men are stupid and full of ideas of their own immunity from pain, discomfort and unpleasantness. At the age of twenty it seems that adventure beckoned with an irresistible force.
In October 1956 I was called in for an interview in the London offices of The Pahang Consolidated Company Limited, a tin mining company in Malaya and the parent company of The Kuala Reman Rubber Estates Ltd. Mr Gordon Fairmaid, a bespectacled New Zealander with a surprisingly boyish crew cut, was Chairman of the Company. He had previously been General Manager of the tin mine at Sungai Lembing, some 40 kilometres due west of Kuantan. As a mining engineer who had worked his way up to become General Manager in Malaya and then Chairman of The Board of Directors in London, he had years of service with the company, and I was in total awe of a man who had obviously spent his whole life in the East. At that interview I remember Fairmaid as a surprisingly mild and gentle person who obviously had years of experience from Malaya, but was considerate enough to answer the most na ve questions. Subsequently, and with hindsight I suspect his affability was directed at the need to recruit a feisty young man, indeed, any young man, rather than reveal the more steely side of his nature.
I see from your CV that you were an apprentice in the Merchant Navy, and you ve had experience with Kroo labour on vessels sailing up and down the West Coast of Africa. He looked over the top of his glasses. What is an apprentice?
It s like a cadet, Sir. A junior officer, but with indentures to stay with the same company for your sea time.
I see from your letter you have had an accident to your shoulder. Is that all cleared up?
Yes, Sir, I replied, dishonestly rubbing the wound still suppurating from unabsorbed internal stitches.
You don t want to go back to sea then? Again he peered at me over the top of his spectacles to examine my face and catch any fleeting trace of emotion or feeling that my answer would bring. I had prepared a reply for exactly this moment, and decided that now was the time to trot it out.
While I have been recovering from the surgery to my shoulder I have been working in my company s shipping offices in Plantation House, in Fenchurch Street. The building is full of rubber companies and the Commodity Exchange is on the ground floor. I have found it all very interesting, I have asked questions during my lunch hour and I ve spoken to quite a number of people about the plantation industry. When I saw your advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, things just seemed to fall into place.
I did not want to explain that from my almost three years at sea, I had discovered that a career as a mariner was not what I wanted for the rest of my life.
I loved the sea, the immensity of the ocean and the endless skies. And I really missed the exhilaration of being on a ship in heavy weather. Those deliciously fearful and exciting moments of living on the edge, intense feelings of fear and delight when hanging on to the wing of the bridge watching the foredeck punch into head seas and the feel the shudder and whoosh as the bow slammed water in a hissing spray out past the sides of the ship to be whipped away by the wind. That fear, that exhilaration, sharpened my youthful appreciation of being alive; and that, that humming in my body, I loved. But the make and break of leaving home and living in such confined quarters, of having to share months at sea with people with whom I had nothing in common, put me off the seaman s life.
Perhaps the real trouble was, that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Unlike some of my friends who, at the age of sixteen or so, declared that they wanted to be chemists, or journalists or study medicine, I really had no idea of which way to go or what direction to take. All I really knew was that I felt an overwhelming sense of living in a world that somehow offered more than my own home town of Reigate could offer; more