16. Flushing Out the Communists

After the PAP won the Tanjong Pagar by-election, Chin Chye, Pang Boon and I decided to tighten constitutional control of the party so that the left wing could not capture it and use us. For instead of accepting the setback and working within the changed situation until conditions became more favourable to his side, Lim Chin Joo had decided to make a bid to take over the party himself. One of the branch secretaries told Pang Boon that the pro-communists were planning to capture eight of the 12 seats on the central executive committee.

This was adventurism, or what Marxist-Leninists would call “left-wing infantilism”. The pro-communists wanted to demonstrate their revolutionary resolve, not realising that they needed the respectability of the PAP more than we needed their mass support. In the minds of the people, the PAP was already established as a consistent, radical, pro-workers’ party. If we did not misplay our hand, we would always have their general goodwill and support because of the good work we had done so far. Rather than lose control of the PAP and have to start all over again, we were prepared to see the pro-communists abandon us and form another party using David Marshall as cover. Marshall’s retirement from politics was brief; he was shortly to launch a new party, the Workers’ Party. We knew that with him as leader, they would have enormous problems. He was erratic and temperamental. He did not have the political skills to keep the balance between constitutional and non-constitutional methods, and would soon get their new party proscribed.

Keng Swee, Kenny, Raja, Chin Chye, Pang Boon and I discussed this and decided to leak a story to the Straits Times that at the coming conference in August we intended to pass a series of resolutions that would effectively reorganise the PAP and make it stand clearly for “an independent, democratic, non-communist, socialist Malaya”. To implement this policy, we would put ourselves up as a block of eight candidates, leaving only four seats for open voting. This was our ultimatum – we were ready to fight the pro-communists and have them leave the party. The Straits Times played up the story. But the pro-communists had every intention of capturing the PAP because, they knew Marshall was not a viable alternative. He might be useful for sporadic action on the flanks of the party to keep it on their track, but he would not be stable enough for the long term. It was, moreover, absurdly easy for them to organise their raid on the central executive committee. We were still innocents at the game, no match for their low cunning.

It was the practice of union members who joined the PAP not to give their home addresses but those of their unions, and we were simple-minded enough to send their admission cards there. As a result, hundreds, if not thousands, of these cards ended up at Middle Road, then the headquarters of the Singapore General Employees’ Union (SGEU) and several other unions and associations, to be used as their leaders saw fit. At the party conference on Sunday, 4 August, therefore, their supporters outnumbered ours, and the vote was split 50–50, the non-communists taking six seats and the pro-communists six.

We were faced with a dilemma. To take over the party would put us in a quandary, for we would not have enough votes to implement our policy. Not to take over would mean losing control to the communists and having the party reorganised further to our disadvantage. I calculated that Lim Yew Hock was unlikely to leave these people in charge for long, certainly not until the next general election, but that would still allow the CUF time to rebuild its strength in the unions and the party. After some discussion, I issued a statement signed by all six of us, the non-communists:

“Because three of the eight retiring members were not re-elected (there was one non-communist newcomer), we do not consider that we have the moral right to assume the offices of chairman, secretary and treasurer and their deputies.”

The pro-communists were nonplussed. They had not thought their tactics through. They had expected us to continue to front for them on the central executive committee, especially if they left us in nominal charge, holding the key positions of chairman, secretary and treasurer. But we decided to leave them in charge so that any pro-communist act they committed would be entirely on their own account. I felt certain Lim Yew Hock would never allow them to become a threat to him, but would move against them even if they had Marshall as a cover. So we were happy to let them take over all the top positions. They were not. They pleaded with us to have Chin Chye continue as chairman and myself as secretary-general, and to reassure us, they offered to let us co-opt two members to the committee while they co-opted only one, giving us a tactical majority. When we refused, they became nervous, acutely aware of their vulnerability without us as front men. After some hesitation, they filled the key offices with Tan Chong Kin as chairman and T.T. Rajah, a lawyer and a left-wing poseur, as secretary-general. I gave them six months to a year before they got into trouble. I was wrong.

Lim Chin Joo had other far-reaching plans. Jamit Singh and his working committee had opened discussions with the Singapore Trade Union Congress (STUC) to negotiate a merger with the SGEU and its affiliates at Middle Road. This could only lead to the pro-communists absorbing Lim Yew Hock’s own mass base in the trade union movement. With his STUC in imminent danger, he decided to act. On the night of 22 August, Special Branch arrested and detained 35 people – Lim Chin Joo and 12 other trade unionists, four journalists and 18 members of the PAP, including all the pro-communists on the central executive committee except T.T. Rajah. They had been in office for only 10 days. Rajah became sick with fear and worry, and on 3 September, precipitately resigned. Whatever else the second team of CUF leaders had lacked, it was not ambition. They had wanted no less than a united front of the PAP, the Labour Front, and Marshall’s projected Workers’ Party, plus a merger that would have given them overall control of the trade unions. Instead, they received a lesson on the folly of left-wing adventurism.

By moving so swiftly after the pro-communists had taken over the party, Lim Yew Hock had put us in the dirt. We appeared to have betrayed the pro-communists by openly dissociating ourselves from their actions and leaving them fatally exposed. On 23 August, the government issued a white paper with a section on “communist penetration of the PAP”. To clear ourselves of the smear that we were involved in these arrests, I proposed a motion in the Assembly, on 12 September, deploring its inaccuracies. I pointed out that the chief minister had suppressed the most important factor that had made him move, namely that his own STUC, his mass base, was on the point of being captured by Lim Chin Joo. He had not acted as a political favour to the PAP but to save his own position at a time calculated to cause us the maximum political embarrassment.

If the communists had been given a lesson on folly, so had the PAP – the folly of adopting a democratic constitution that had left it open to capture through the penetration of its own party branches. We discussed several possible changes to ensure that it could never happen again. But even as Pang Boon and I made a start by cleaning out the branches, we were busy preparing for the City Council election due in December. After Lim Yew Hock’s two political purges in 1956 and 1957, this election would be the first test of public opinion. The electorate had increased tenfold since 1951 to about 500,000 after the Citizenship Ordinance was passed in October 1957 to enable all those who had resided in Singapore for eight out of the previous ten years to register as citizens even if they had not been born there.

My major concern was to avoid a clash with Lim Yew Hock and his Labour Front, for that would only increase the animosity of the Chinese-speaking towards him, further reduce his political standing and make him take action to weaken the PAP. By working quietly through the UMNO leader, Hamid Jumat, who was de facto number two in the government, I negotiated an electoral understanding whereby the PAP, UMNO and the Labour Front would not fight each other but would share out the 32 seats on the council – 14 for the PAP, two for UMNO and 16 for the Labour Front. We undertook not to attack each other but to attack the Liberal Socialists, blaming all the past shortcomings of the old City Council on their predecessors, the Progressives, who had been in charge of it since the early fifties, when elections were first held. Towards the end of the campaign, we converted these complaints of municipal mismanagement into a broad political offensive and presented it as a confrontation of workers (PAP) versus capitalists (Liberal Socialists).

Polling day was 22 December 1957. That night I was out on the field in front of the Victoria Memorial Hall where counting was taking place. A large crowd of young Chinese school students and workers were squatting on the grass, held back by a line of policemen. At about 11 pm, I saw a tall figure of a white man in shorts strolling through the crowd into the hall. It was Bill Goode, the governor. He was brave. True, the crowd was not yet in an excited mood. Nonetheless, he had been the chief secretary when the first wave of arrests was carried out in October 1956, and governor when the second clean-up of the pro-communists took place. But he showed no trace of fear. My respect for him increased.

The election results were devastating for Lim Yew Hock. Of the 16 seats they contested, the Labour Front won only four; the PAP won 13 out of 14; UMNO, the two they contested (both in Malay majority areas); the Liberal Socialists, seven out of 32; the Workers’ Party, four out of five; and two seats went to independents. The PAP had the best scores, with nearly 30 per cent of the total votes cast and the highest number of votes per candidate.

The most significant contest was in Jalan Besar, where the PAP’s nominee was Chan Chee Seng, a non-communist Chinese-educated Cantonese, a judo black belt, well-built, not intellectual but loyal and energetic and a good campaigner. The pro-communists had fielded against him a candidate standing under cover of Marshall’s new Workers’ Party (which they had duly penetrated, as I had expected), to prove that they could beat us if they chose. And although they lost by a clear margin, obtaining 1,600 votes against our 2,400, it was not a crushing defeat, and their latent strength was evident. They did not attack us openly on the public platform for being soft on Lim Yew Hock and the British colonialists, or for failing to fight for our detained PAP comrades, but insinuated this through word of mouth. They were able to muster a considerable vote through their door-to-door canvassing.

On the strength of the results, we decided to make a bid for the mayorship of the City Council by linking up with the two UMNO members. That gave us 15 out of 32 seats, and we were confident the rest would not be able to combine to defeat us. Lim Yew Hock might have expected us to identify ourselves with him by taking his four councillors into the coalition, but that would have been too heavy a political burden. We would have been associated with a corrupt clique, and the alliance might also have confirmed suspicions that there had been collusion between Lim Yew Hock and me when he arrested the pro-communist PAP executive committee members.

But the danger to the PAP had increased. Until this electoral test, Lim Yew Hock had harboured hopes that his tough action against the communists had won him the support of at least half the population – the Malays, the Indians, the English-educated Chinese and some of the anti-communist Chinese-speaking people.

That was not to be my only worry, however. Our candidate for mayor was Ong Eng Guan, whose emergence as a crowd-puller for the PAP had been an important development during the election campaign. Like Lim Chin Siong, Ong was a Hokkien and spoke the dialect as a native. True, he did not have Lim’s earnest, deeply sincere manner; he had a higher-pitched voice and his soft cherubic face was not one that showed strength. But in the course of making speeches during those five weeks, he became a good substitute for Lim Chin Siong.

To my astonishment, he began to show signs of megalomania. The resounding cheers that had greeted his Hokkien speeches at election rallies had gone to his head. Becoming mayor added to his delusions of power. On the way to the inaugural meeting of the new City Council on 23 December, he ran into a crowd of young PAP supporters who had set off firecrackers outside City Hall. A Chinese police officer remonstrated with the youths, whereupon Ong, who was there, intervened. In the ensuing mêlée, he and two other PAP city councillors were arrested, brought to the Central Police Station and released after their particulars had been taken. The meeting had to be postponed to the following day.

The next day, Ong went overboard as a populist. He allowed hundreds of the thousands of people gathered outside City Hall to crowd into the building and even the council chamber itself, including students and young children, many of them barefooted and bare-chested street urchins of seven or eight. Soon this mob was not only standing on the press tables and squatting on the floor, but pushing and jostling and breathing down the necks of the councillors themselves as they sat at their horseshoe table. They had come to clap, to cheer, to be part of the excitement although they did not understand anything of the proceedings. It took outgoing City President J.T. Rea, a professional British officer who was accompanied by the mace-bearer, 15 minutes to force his way into the chamber through a back door so that he could formally open the meeting and hand over office. The officials of the council were in a state of shock.

The new councillors could now exercise their newly granted privilege of speaking in Mandarin, Malay or Tamil, and when a Liberal Socialist member made the first speech in English, the crowd booed, although he was congratulating Ong on his election as mayor. Ong wallowed in the adulation he received. He declared that he would not wear mayoral regalia, nor stay in a mayoral mansion. He did not believe in these trappings of office. He would live and dress like an ordinary citizen. He did not approve of cocktail parties, and he did not smoke, drink or go to the races.

He allowed each of the 31 councillors to speak for two minutes, and then took a snap vote on the removal of the mayor’s mace. It was carried 26 to zero, with six Liberal Socialists abstaining, and Ong ordered that it “be hereby disposed of as part of the paraphernalia of the Singapore City Council. This is a relic of colonialism.” He next pushed his way through the spectators onto the balcony, where a microphone and loudspeakers had been installed at his request, and addressed the crowd outside in Mandarin for 10 minutes. He ended with three cries of “Merdeka!” The crowd cheered and yelled back in unison. “May God protect Singapore” was the Straits Times headline for its Christmas Day edition, quoting a Eurasian Liberal Socialist lady councillor.

“The usual dignity of the proceedings was ruined,” Goode wrote wryly to Lennox-Boyd in a report dated 27 December. The officials of the City Council, both white and Asian, were dismayed. The expatriates were fearful for their future. But, as he added, “There has been no criticism of the police action and as yet no agitation against the police by the PAP. Lee Kuan Yew is away enjoying his Christmas holiday!” Indeed, I was away. The evening the ballots were counted, my throat was so dry and burnt by all the cigarette-smoking during the election campaign that I could not find my voice to thank the crowd for their support. The following morning, I packed the family into my Studebaker and drove up to Fraser’s Hill for a 10-day break.

For the next 16 months, Ong held sway over the City Council as mayor, mounting one spectacle after another. His arrogant behaviour demoralised its officers and frightened the English-educated clerks and professionals. He played favourites, and gave orders through a crony from his home town of Batu Pahat whom he made his general factotum and who had to be obeyed without question. His good luck was that he did not have to last a full three-year term and thus was not called to account for the damage that he was wreaking on the system. There had to be a general election by May 1959, the end of the four-year term of Lim Yew Hock’s government, so Ong’s weaknesses would not have time to show up. Moreover, he was able to implement popular programmes, which were not costly, notably in deprived areas of Singapore. He installed street lamps and standpipes, brought drainage and power to the villages, and reduced rates for electricity from 20 cents to 12 cents a unit for the rural poor. He set up a City Information Bureau to publicise these achievements, opened a Public Complaints Bureau, and held “meet the people” sessions.

The English-educated were terrified, but Ong’s antics delighted the Chinese-speaking. All their lives they had felt excluded from power; now they had a Hokkien speaking their own language and giving vent to their frustrations. But Ong created problems that were to fester for years. For example, he allowed the hawkers to take over many main roads in the city, especially in Chinatown, where formerly they had been kept to the fringes and been allowed to encroach on them only after office hours. He was like a man possessed, intoxicated with power and mass adulation. He wanted to create a newspaper headline every day. He went on raising expectations with dramatic gestures, as if there were no tomorrow when the bills would have to be paid. I knew that he was doing immense harm to the country and the PAP, but thought it best to let him ride the surf for the time being and to sort things out after the general election. The popularity he lost for us among the English-educated he more than made up for in gains among the Chinese-speaking.