We started the meeting at 10 am on Sunday, 21 November at the Victoria Memorial Hall and continued until 1 pm, when we had to stop because it had been booked for a concert that afternoon. It was a warm, sticky morning. We filled the hall, but not to overflowing. Everybody was seated on wooden and cane armchairs. The Singapore Standard said there were 1,500 present, the Straits Times, 800. There was no electricity or magic in the air. Our supporters from the unions filled about two-thirds of the seats, and the rest were taken up by observers from other political parties and interested outsiders. We read set speeches; there was no great oratory. We dressed in open-necked shirts, Cheng Lock Tan in a lounge suit and the Tunku in formal Malay attire – a buttoned-up silk top, loose trousers and a short decorative sarong around his hips.

It was a good but uninspiring meeting. We had formally launched the party, got a decent press, made ourselves known, and were taken seriously. There were no flights of rhetoric, no balloons, no pigeons freed. But we were ready for nomination day when it was announced for 28 February and polling for 2 April 1955. After much intense discussion we had decided on five candidates: for Bukit Timah, Lim Chin Siong; for Farrer Park, Devan Nair (not my preference but a concession to the pro-communists); for Punggol-Tampines, Goh Chew Chua (a 60-year-old contractor friend of Kenny’s who had lived in Punggol and was well known in the area); and for Tanjong Pagar, myself. Fong Swee Suan could not stand as he had been born in Johor, but we fielded Ahmad Ibrahim as an independent for Sembawang, where the Naval Base workers would have the decisive vote. We believed he would get more support from Malay and Indian workers in the Naval Base if he was not identified as PAP and therefore too radical.

The PAP organisation was weak, almost nonexistent: no paid staff, branches or grassroots leaders. For canvassing and help at election rallies, we could call upon the unions and Chinese middle school students. But once the campaign started, our candidates went their separate ways, except when better-known speakers like myself made the rounds of all five constituencies to address mass rallies.

On nomination day, my two opponents in Tanjong Pagar constituency – one Chinese-educated, one English-educated – objected to my candidature because I had not resided in Singapore for seven out of the past ten years, as required by an Order in Council issued by the Queen’s Privy Council in London for elections under the new Rendel constitution. But it seemed that this ruling could itself be defective, for Singapore had been a separate colony for only eight years and eleven months – before April 1946, it was part of the Straits Settlements. A few Britishers also wrote letters to the Straits Times, threatening to take action to unseat me if I were elected, but the returning officer upheld my nomination and advised my opponents that objections on residential grounds could only be made through an election petition if I were returned.

After hearing from me, Keng Swee, then back in London, briefed the Labour MP Stanley Awbery about it, and Awbery put down a question in the House of Commons. In March, Henry Hopkinson, minister of state for colonial affairs, replied:

“Malayan students who were in Great Britain during the qualifying period for the forthcoming federal elections have on their return, if not otherwise disqualified, been allowed to register as electors if during the absence they have continued to regard the Federation as their home. They would no doubt also be treated as eligible to stand as candidates.”

Although he referred to Malayan students, those opposing me decided to drop the issue. They knew London would take retrospective action if necessary to put matters right, rather than have an unpleasant political row over rules that were manifestly absurd. As I had pointed out at the time, John Ede, born and bred in England, could qualify as an assemblyman because he had been resident in Singapore for seven years. If I, born and bred in Singapore, and lived here all my life except for four years in England, did not qualify, then the world must be square, not round.

But that was only my first hurdle. I suffered public embarrassment when the newspapers reported that Lam Tian, my Chinese-educated rival in the Democratic Party, had said I could not read or write the language, and was therefore not capable of representing the Chinese voter. I gamely countered, “Logically, since Lam Tian does not read and write Tamil and Malay, it means he does not propose to represent the Malay and Indian population of Tanjong Pagar.” I blithely claimed I could read, write and speak Mandarin, Hakka and Hokkien, and that I also spoke Malay. It was election bravado. I had been advised by some Chinese reporters that it would be best not to admit my lack of command of my own mother tongue. I remembered and bitterly regretted that I had not heeded my maternal grandmother’s wish that I should study Chinese in Choon Guan School. Now I had to exaggerate my linguistic skills. I could write some characters, but had forgotten most of them because I had not been using them since I gave up my job with Shimoda & Company in 1943. My spoken Hakka and Hokkien were pathetic, almost negligible. I vowed to make up for past neglect.

Lam Tian then challenged me to a debate at a street meeting in the Cantonese-speaking Kreta Ayer area of Tanjong Pagar. I dodged it, and counter-attacked by saying that to get things done in the Legislative Assembly and in the government, a candidate had to have good English, and that I would therefore be a more effective representative than he would. But I made a supreme effort to say a few words in Mandarin at my biggest rally in Banda Street, another Cantonese area. A friendly Sin Pao reporter called Jek Yeun Thong drafted two paragraphs for me, and then spent several hours coaching me to read a speech that took only three minutes to deliver. But the crowd was with me, and they cheered me for the effort.

My problems did not end there. The Chinese-speaking left-wing unions and the middle school students concentrated all their efforts on helping Lim Chin Siong at Bukit Timah and Devan Nair at Farrer Park. They did nothing for me or our other candidates. If ever I was in any doubt as to whom they took their orders from, it vanished after this experience. We were a united front of convenience. They wanted their own two men in, and I was only useful as cover for them. I never allowed myself to forget that. I had to speak at one rally for Lim and another for Nair, but my heart was not in it. It was in Sembawang with Ahmad Ibrahim, the unionist from the Naval Base fire brigade, and in Punggol-Tampines with old man Goh Chew Chua, who turned out to be an effective speaker in Hokkien and did well.

The campaign in no way resembled that of 1951 when I was Laycock’s election agent in Katong. That was a genteel affair with tea and dinner parties for a limited electorate of 48,000 registered voters out of a population of 1.8 million. In 1955, with automatic registration of the Singapore-born, there were 300,000 voters, about 60 per cent of them Chinese-speaking. Moreover, the communists and their sympathisers had decided to join the fray for the first time since the beginning of the Emergency. The atmosphere was very different: the principal languages were the main Chinese dialects, bazaar Malay, which could reach the largest cross-section of the people, and lastly English, which reached the smallest – the top layer of Singapore society who were close to the levers of power but insignificant in voting strength. The street rallies and the meetings in open spaces had speakers standing on lorries or pick-up trucks with microphones and makeshift loudspeakers, and electric bulbs to light them up. They drew huge crowds where Chinese and Malay-speaking voters predominated. The sedate parlour game politics of 1951 was a thing of the past.

One valuable experience I gained was from the canvassing I did. Tanjong Pagar was the docklands of Singapore where the dock workers, the trishaw riders, the shopkeepers catering to them, and the opium dens were. I visited places like the Singapore Harbour Board quarters for daily-rated Malays in Reclamation Road, wooden houses with no sewerage and no drainage. The stench was overpowering. I retched whenever I went into the area. But inside these homes their leaders maintained a network that kept the Malays a close-knit society. I was introduced to the local UMNO chief, and in no time at all he produced the key men among the few hundred families who lived there. They promised to deliver me their votes.

Another scene of filth and dilapidation was presented by the rows of mean, broken-down shophouses in Narcis Street and the roads leading to it on the site where Tanjong Pagar Plaza now stands. They had not been repaired for many years, and the drains were clogged with rubbish left by roadside hawkers, so that there was always a stink of decaying food. Enormous rats ran fearlessly in and out of these drains, ignoring the cats around. Again, I retched. When I got home, washing my hands was not good enough. Before I could sit down to dinner, I had to bath and have a complete change of clothes.

The biggest single theme that galvanised the Chinese-speaking was Chinese culture, and the need to preserve Chinese traditions through the Chinese schools. It was not a proletarian issue; it was plain, simple chauvinism. But the communists knew it was a crowd-winner that pulled at Chinese heartstrings, and they worked on it assiduously. In previous elections for the Legislative Council, the speeches were feeble, tepid, dull, delivered without feeling or conviction, usually in English, otherwise in Malay, and only sometimes translated into the different Chinese dialects. This time, Chinese orators took off. Speaking in their own dialects – Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew – they were superlative crowd-rousers. They could wax eloquent, quote proverbs, use metaphors and allegories or traditional legends to illustrate contemporary situations. They spoke with a passion that filled their listeners with emotion and exhilaration at the prospect of Chinese greatness held out to them. For the Chinese of Singapore, it was never to be the same again.

One man emerged from this election as a powerful public speaker. He was young, slim, of medium height, with a soft baby face but a ringing voice that flowed beautifully in his native Hokkien. The girls adored him, especially those in the trade unions. Apart from Chinese culture, his themes were the downtrodden workers, the wicked imperialists, the Emergency Regulations that suppressed the rights of the masses, free speech and free association. Once he had got going after a cold start at the first two meetings, there was tremendous applause every time he spoke. By the end of the campaign, Lim Chin Siong was seen as a charismatic figure and a person to be reckoned with in Singapore politics and, what was of more immediate concern, within the PAP.

Fong Swee Suan also addressed these mass rallies but he did not have Lim’s hypnotic effect. He was at a disadvantage. He had to speak in Hokkien to reach the widest audience, for the Hokkiens formed the largest single Chinese community in Singapore, and as a result their dialect was understood by the other groups – but Fong was a Hakka, like myself. Mandarin could reach only those under 35 who had been to Chinese schools; I was frantically learning it, but after these election meetings, I knew that even if I mastered it, it would not be enough. Yet I balked at the idea of learning Hokkien as well. The other language that could reach a big audience was bazaar Malay. This Melayu Pasar was a pidgin with little grammar, but it was understood by all races, and was the only means of trading with the Malays and Indians. However, because it was limited, it was difficult to move crowds in it. There could be no flights of rhetoric.

It was amazing how much personal loyalties counted for in that campaign. Those who came forward to help did so because they already thought well of me and wanted me to win. Under their union leaders, about 20 postal clerks sat for several consecutive days on my front veranda at Oxley Road (which was election headquarters for all four constituencies the PAP was contesting) to address my election manifestos for distribution to voters. Postmen also canvassed on my behalf in Tanjong Pagar and delivered my pamphlets house-to-house. Groups like the Itinerant Hawkers and Stallholders’ Association helped us. Some of their members who sold live chickens and ducks in the markets had been charged with packing too many fowls into the baskets strapped to their bicycles at Chinese New Year, and I had got them off lightly by appealing to the magistrate to have a heart – it was, after all, the biggest festival in the lunar calendar.

But the most enthusiastic organisations were the main Hakka Clan Association and its subsidiaries, like the association for my clansmen from our ancestral prefecture of Dapu in China. Total strangers came to Oxley Road to offer their services. They were Dapu Hakkas (one of whom called me “uncle” although he was older than I was), and they expected nothing in return except to share in my glory. Chong Mong Sang, the president of the Singapore Hakka Association, mobilised the clan’s resources and helped me with cars. He owned a successful chain of pawnshops in Malaya and Singapore (many pawnshops were run by Hakkas) and was my neighbour in Oxley Road. I was the association’s honorary legal adviser, and as a close-knit minority, the Hakkas loyally rooted for me. The Singapore Chinese Liquor Retail Association allowed me to use its premises in Bernam Street as my second election headquarters. Many anonymous people came there to give money, while others turned up with bales of white cloth for banners. They asked for no favours or rewards. I had none to give. In contrast, of the English-educated left wing, only two of the Fajar students assisted by writing addresses on election manifestos.

One big logistic problem that we had was to find transport to carry voters to the polling stations, where they would then feel obliged to cast their ballots for our candidate. This practice, introduced by the British, favoured the wealthy parties whose supporters had cars. I depended on miscellaneous personal contacts – my brothers and sister and my aunts, my Hakka neighbour, and friends like Hon Sui Sen and his brother. I put Dennis in charge of transport arrangements on polling day. It was not an enviable task. He had first to establish order and some sort of system out of the bedlam of vehicles that converged on Oxley Road from all over Singapore, then go on to my Bernam Street headquarters, and run around Tanjong Pagar picking up voters at the behest of my canvassers. He also persuaded some petrol stations to honour his signature and that of my clerical assistant at Laycock & Ong, for my friends had lent their cars with full tanks and we had to return them with full tanks, the petrol paid for out of election funds.

Nor was this all done just for me. Election agents for Lim Chin Siong and Devan Nair made demands on me for cars – an unpleasant man called Kam Siew Yee of the Teachers’ Union insisted that I produce 30 for Nair alone. On 21 April, some three weeks after the election, Choo wrote a letter to Keng Swee in England, which was intercepted by Special Branch and thus survived in their files. It vividly illustrates whom the unions and the Chinese students were really campaigning for through their biased behaviour over canvassing and cars:

“Harry’s helpers, canvassers, speakers, were honest to goodness straightforward workers – the postmen – clerks, shop assistants – a man who runs a food stall in Chinatown, Printers Union chairman, etc. Towards the last week about 20 brats came to help canvassing between 2 and 5 pm when all the men were still at work and not home, so their canvassing was not of much effect and you can compare that with the hundred and more Louis rustled up for Farrer Park right through the whole month. On polling day, there were a few more kids helping in Tanjong Pagar – pulling chaps out to vote. But if ever you have any doubts as to whether the kids are coming your way – this election will clear those doubts.

“… On morning of polling day Devan made the mistake of sending Kam here to 38 Oxley Road to collect cars destined for Farrer Park. Our transport committee had had a hell of a time finding cars (out of the 100 over lent to Harry) that could be sent to Bukit Timah and Farrer Park, because most people (like our Hakka neighbours opposite) lent cars to Lee Kuan Yew personally and not to PAP and had strong objections to cars going off elsewhere than to Tanjong Pagar. Cars were therefore carefully allotted – those who had no objection being sent away. When cars allocated to Farrer Park were late in turning up – Kam, the lout, had the effrontery to throw a scene and demand cars. Who the hell does he think he is.”

Polling day, 2 April 1955: I collected 6,029 votes against 908 and 780 respectively for my two opponents, both of whom lost their deposits. I had won by the largest number of ballots cast for any candidate, and by the widest margin. Lim Chin Siong, Ahmad Ibrahim and Goh Chew Chua were also returned. Devan Nair lost, and I was greatly relieved, for without Nair, Lim would not be able to operate effectively in an exclusively English-speaking Legislative Assembly. He was not fluent in the language, and Nair would have been his crutch. Now he had to depend on me.

The big shock of the election was the rout of the Progressive Party, which had been expected to emerge the largest in the Assembly. The Labour Front won 10 out of the 17 seats it contested, and, to his own astonishment, David Marshall became the chief minister. The PAP won three out of four, and the smaller parties and independents, eight of the remainder. But the Progressives won only four out of the 22 they contested, and the Democrats only two out of 20. Yet their two parties had the most resources in money and election workers. What had happened?

The Progressive Party had been formed as early as 1947, but consisted only of a small coterie of English-educated professionals and Englishmen like John Laycock. But Laycock lost out in his ward like many others because they were now heavily outnumbered by the Chinese-educated – the “Chinese Chinese”.

The Democratic Party was formed only in March 1955, after the Chinese Chamber of Commerce realised that automatic registration under the Rendel constitution would bring many Chinese-speaking voters onto the rolls. Broadly speaking, both parties represented the middle and upper middle classes, but while one was part of the British colonial establishment, the other was outside the magic circle. Its members were Chinese who made a good living as importers and exporters, retailers, merchants and shopkeepers, bankers, and rubber or tin magnates. They were the leaders of the Chinese-speaking traditional guilds; they were in charge of the Chinese schools, which they paid for and ran through their boards of management; and they funded and administered charitable Chinese clan hospitals and other welfare organisations. They saw this election as their chance to get at the levers of power that would increase their business prospects. They further believed that they could harness the energies of the Chinese middle school students to their party because the students were their children, and they had been sympathetic to their cause of defending Chinese education.

The cultural divide between the Progressives and Democrats was thus very deep and could not be bridged. In many constituencies, therefore, they split the right-wing ballot, with the English-speaking and Malay votes going to the Progressives and the Chinese-speaking to the Democrats. If they had worked together, they would have won half of the 160,000 votes polled (seven times the number in the 1951 election).

Once they knew they had lost, they sneaked out of the counting centre at the Victoria Memorial Hall and vanished into the night. They did not understand that when you lose, you have to be defiant, to keep up the morale of your supporters, to live and fight another day. The communists knew this and we, the non-communists in the PAP, quickly learnt it from them. But the two parties had been totally demoralised by our hard-hitting campaign, which introduced a note of stridency into the hustings. We had attacked the Progressives as stooges of the colonial power, and the Democrats as capitalists and exploiters of the people. Our main target, however, had been our white overlords, of whom I wrote in my manifesto, “The colonial rule of the British over Malaya is the basic cause of a great number of social and economic evils of this country.”

Marshall, a political greenhorn, criticised the PAP for going a little too far in demanding immediate self-government. “They seem to have been centred on antagonism and attack on the British. Their utterances seem to be unnecessarily anti-British.” That might have been the feeling of the English-speaking middle class; it was different with the mass of the Chinese-educated.

Phoenix Park, the British commissioner-general’s office, had its own intelligence assessment of the election. It quoted some passages of a speech I made at an election rally:

“As far as I can see, apart from those over 40, all the Chinese are immensely proud of the achievement of the Mao Tse-tung government. A government that in five years can change a corrupt and decadent administration into one that can withstand the armed might of the Americans in Korea deserves full praise. General Chiang and Kuomintang are finished – except to some stray supporters who talk of the reconquest of the Chinese mainland.

“But I believe there is growing in Malaya a generation of Chinese born and bred here, educated in the Chinese language and traditions, but nevertheless Malayans in their outlook. They consider Malaya to be their only home. They are proud of China as a Frenchman in Quebec would be proud of France. Of course, there are those who feel that the task of building up a Malayan nation is not worthwhile. These are the young students who go back to China to be re-absorbed into the Chinese stream of life. Those who remain behind are Malayans and will be more and more as the years go by.”

British intelligence thought my words worth reporting to fathom my real position.

Earlier, in January, Raja had drafted a PAP statement, which I then issued, proposing a general amnesty for the MCP. It was reasonable and logical, but in retrospect, naive and unworkable. “The past six and a half years have made clear that the Emergency in this country is essentially a political and not a military problem,” it said. The sooner it was ended, the sooner could the people avail themselves of the democratic rights that it had curtailed, and without which effective democratic parties could not properly function. The Malayan government should give firm guarantees that if the MCP abandoned its armed insurrection, there would be no reprisals, and if it accepted constitutional methods of political struggle, it should be permitted to operate as a legitimate party.

Raja and I were Western-educated radicals who had no idea of the dynamics of guerrilla insurgency and revolution by violence. Only later did we realise that the communists would never give up their capacity to use armed force whenever democratic methods failed to win them power. But while in part our misguided demands could be put down to innocence, in large measure they could be traced to adroit manipulation of the mass rallies by the pro-communists. They were superb stage managers, and their cheerleaders had orchestrated prolonged applause for all speakers who attacked the Emergency Regulations and made them appear to be a major issue, since they had to be abolished first if the MCP were to break out into the open and be free to organise the ground.

Initially I did not understand this, and was duly impressed because it all appeared to be so spontaneous. But as I attended rally after rally over the next two years, I gradually became aware that these cheerleaders were always scattered among the audience. Furthermore, they would be led by a master cheerleader, from whom they took their cue, and each in turn would have his own claque of 30–40 who would begin to applaud when he did, triggering off a response from the audience around him. It was well-rehearsed. I was to see them play a game of “spot the leader” at their picnics at which 20 to 30 students would sit in a circle, each touching his nose or pulling his ear or tugging his shirt sleeve, the object being to identify the one who changed signals and almost instantly prompted all the others to change with him. With a good team, it was not always easy. But it was the combination of this stage management and his own oratory that made the reputation of Lim Chin Siong during those weeks of electioneering.

Later, I learnt that if any speaker broke the party line, the claques would suddenly go cold on him, however striking his oratory, hissing, booing and making disconcerting noises to distract the crowd. The communists had developed these techniques in mass psychology to a fine art and used them to great effect among the Chinese-educated. So far as I could see, they did not work with the English-educated.

I said many things then that were imprudent, so it was perhaps fortunate that the PAP had not set out to form a government and therefore would not be implementing our proposals. But meanwhile, we had aroused expectations of great changes. We had got the people interested enough to come and listen to our speeches, and then tossed them stirring ideas, instilling in them a spirit of defiance. The campaigning during the five weeks of that election decisively changed the mood in Singapore. But while tea party politics might be a thing of the past, the aftermath of all that rhetoric would soon be bloody violence.