Choo was on the veranda with our son Loong, then aged 2, when two men turned up at 38 Oxley Road one Sunday morning in 1954. This was a fortnight after I had told some of the Chinese-educated students that I wanted to meet some leaders in the Chinese trade unions. I came to the sitting room to greet them. They said they were from the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union. They were soft-spoken and could understand a little English, but had brought Robert Soon Loh Boon along as interpreter. Their names were Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan. I had made contact with the activists in the Chinese-educated working class world and was excited at the prospect of exploring it for recruits to our cause of a democratic, non-communist, socialist Malaya. Lim and Fong looked the right type: well-mannered, earnest and sincere in demeanour, simple in their clothes, Fong to the point of shabbiness. Keenness and dedication were written in every line of their faces and in every gesture.
They were in marked contrast to the shallow characters whom my colleagues and I had earlier met at David Marshall’s flat, when he and Lim Yew Hock of the Labour Party were discussing the formation of a new political grouping that would later emerge as the Labour Front. That had been part of our probing; we wanted to assess what they were capable of. But we found it difficult to take Marshall seriously. A mercurial, flamboyant Sephardic Jew, he was then the leading criminal lawyer in Singapore, but when he made what he considered a sound proposal, we often could not help laughing at him. He was apolitical and naive. We knew he was a prima donna who loved to be centre-stage and would be uncontrollable. On one occasion, he was so furious when we laughed at him at the wrong moment that he flounced out of the room in a tantrum, and then out of his own flat altogether. We found ourselves left with his friends and a lot of food and drink. We ate, drank, exchanged pleasantries, thanked the maid, and left. After the third meeting, we decided that it would be ruinous to be in any way associated with these people. What we were looking for were serious-minded men for a long-term enterprise, men who would take with equanimity the ups and downs of politics in pursuit of our objectives.
Lim Chin Siong and Fong Swee Suan were the exact opposite of Marshall and company, and I liked what I saw. They were the Chinese-educated equivalent of the Fajar boys who were prosecuted for sedition, but more determined, more selfless, more hardworking, the kind of lieutenants we had been searching for. I was hopeful that we could win such people over.
I explained to them my plans for forming a party to represent the workers and the dispossessed, especially the Chinese-educated, not in order to win the coming election, but to gain a significant number of seats so as to show up the rottenness of the system and the present political parties, and to build up for the next round. They were non-committal, but after my experience with the Chinese school students, I was not surprised. I knew that before making any major decision they would have to report back and submit their assessments, whereupon somewhere above or beyond them earnest discussions would be held and they would eventually be given the MCP line. Two weeks later, they returned with another interpreter. Yes, they were prepared to join me, not to seek power but to expose the colonial regime, the inadequacy of the proposed Rendel constitution, and to demolish the parties that would take office.
We planned to launch our People’s Action Party at a public meeting on 21 November 1954, and I wanted them both to be convenors. They whispered among themselves and said they would first discuss it. The next time they came, they said that Fong, who was the paid secretary of the Singapore Bus Workers’ Union, would be a convenor, but Lim Chin Siong would stay out for the time being. I did not know their reasons. I suspected it was because Fong was the more expendable of the two, and at the same time had been less exposed as a security risk, so that Special Branch would have few traces of him on their records when his name appeared in the press.
But I was satisfied. With Fong in, I felt the new party would have a reasonably broad working-class base. We had the English-educated, the Malay blue- and white-collar workers, and we now had the Chinese clan associations, trade guilds and blue-collar workers as well. We did not want the middle school students to be in any way associated with us. Any political party in Singapore’s segmented society had to balance its appeal to one section of the community against the fears or resistance it would arouse in another, and for this reason they would not be an asset. They would frighten off the English- and Malay-educated, who were about 40 per cent of the population.
In October, we announced the inauguration of the party, and in November, pledged ourselves to fight for “a multilingual legislature with simultaneous translation as no elected legislative councillor has the slightest idea what the Chinese-speaking population thinks and feels and this is hardly a healthy state of affairs”. This forced the other political parties to do likewise.
To balance the party’s radical reputation and the left-wing background of some of the convenors, I persuaded Tunku Abdul Rahman, by then the leader of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and a member of the Executive Council in Malaya, and Sir Cheng Lock Tan, president of the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA), to speak at the inauguration. I had met Tan at several dinners, and the Tunku had consulted me in my office when he wanted to sue a newspaper in Singapore for libel. Later, I had invited him together with the Singapore UMNO leaders to dinner in my home. Thus I had two highly respected Malayan leaders attend the inaugural meeting of the PAP because of their personal links with me, and probably also because they thought I could be a useful ally in future. But while the Tunku did not want me to enter politics in the Federation, Tan did. This fundamental difference between the two reflected basic contradictions in their electoral interests. The Tunku wanted the Chinese in small pockets, disunited if possible, disorganised and easy for the Malays to handle. Tan wanted young men who could bring the Chinese community together, and the MCA was very keen on getting Singapore into the Federation to increase their voting strength.