The Long Road to Changi

Prologue

In London’s southwest, nearby to Wimbledon’s tennis lawns and the hallowed rugby turf of Twickenham, is another, less heralded, treasure – the British National Archives in Kew. I went there in 2012 to look at the events surrounding a seventieth anniversary – the Fall of Singapore. In some of the darkest hours of World War II, a British-led army of empire, including 15,000 Australians, surrendered on the Island to the Japanese on 15 February 1942. Within twenty-four hours, the Australians, along with more than 100,000 other prisoners-of-war, were ordered by their new Japanese masters to march to a sprawling barracks complex at Changi, on Singapore’s northeast corner, a 25-kilometre foot slog under a sweltering tropical sun. As they tramped, the soldiers passed bloated bodies lying rotting in the heat, while Japanese troops carried off for their pleasure young Chinese women in trucks. Wherever they looked, the defeated soldiers saw only flags of the Rising Sun.

The irony was powerful – the British had built Changi as a symbol of empire, a top-quality, no-expense-spared barracks for the garrison that held their ‘impregnable’ fortress, Singapore. In defeat, it was the opposite, a byword for the horrors of slave labour and brutal, arbitrary punishment. It was both the greatest defeat ever inflicted on Australian troops and the most calamitous loss ever suffered by the British empire, one so severe the strains of ‘Rule Britannia’ never rang out in quite the same way again.

As a result of these events, Changi – and the camps on the Burma Railway to which many POWs were later sent – live on in the Australian psyche, perhaps not to the same degree as Gallipoli, but not far behind. Synonymous with the triumph of mateship over cruelty and appalling hardship, Changi evokes the noblest, albeit most tragic, image of Australians at war. There has been so much written about the barbaric conditions that men endured at Changi and the camps, but, distressing as these are, their horrors don’t explain the historical question of how and why our troops ended up in those places to begin with.

This book attempts to answer that question, and in doing so, examines Australia’s role in the British empire, and its relationship with the ‘Mother Country’. The British archives at Kew provide some compelling but disturbing evidence about the health of the bond between mother and child. As defeat loomed at Singapore, British officers were particularly scathing of Australia’s military contribution to the cause, and highly critical about the behaviour of Australian troops.

British Army officer Captain T.V.H. Beamish described the Australians as ‘ill-disciplined and bolshie’, and said that ‘many had no intention’ of fighting.¹ Captain F.S. Bell of the Royal Navy thought it would be hard to imagine a ‘more demoralised undisciplined rabble’ than the Australian units on Singapore, with hundreds of men fleeing the battle to crowd the docks in search of a boat home.² Other stories have it that Australians used rifle butts to club their way on board the last ships leaving Singapore, or forced their way up gangplanks at the point of a gun.

Such accounts quickly came to form a conventional wisdom in the British high command. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave his account of the fall of Singapore to the House of Commons in secret session in April 1942, he spoke of ‘credible witnesses [who] disparage the Australians’. Churchill accompanied that comment with the observation that Singapore fell without any serious fighting, a subtle but perhaps sharper dig at the Australians, because they were in the very front line when the Japanese first invaded the island.³

These criticisms went beyond the details of a heavy wartime defeat. The vehemence with which many British observers heaped odium on Australia and Australians is a significant theme in the historical record. Rear Admiral Jack Spooner, commander of Britain’s warships in Malaya, died while trying to flee Singapore himself, and wrote a painful last letter to his wife. This has two themes: his heartfelt devotion to her, and his belief that Australians were to blame for the fall of Singapore. ‘All my happiness in life has come from you,’ he wrote, adding, ‘The AIF [Australian Imperial Force] let us down again last night. There is the debacle’.⁴

As British officers commanded the defence of Singapore throughout the fighting, pinning Britain’s greatest military defeat onto Australia’s national chest seems a stretch. Some British diatribes against the Australians are extraordinary in their vitriol. In his official report, Captain Bell explained the events in Singapore as a reflection on the Australian national character, and in particular, the extent of public drunkenness. This was such that it ‘is quite evident that one will never make a soldier [of the average Australian] while these conditions are allowed to remain’.⁵

Senior British naval officers distributed Bell’s report throughout the British defence establishment, but the highest levels of the British leadership were prone to similar views even before the fighting. Air Vice Marshal Robert Brooke-Popham, commander of British forces in the Far East when the war started, held a distinctly odd view about the deficiencies of Australia and Australians. These he attributed to the absence of the English class system and its many virtues, and in particular the scarcity of domestic servants to allow enough time for proper, if leisurely, personal development:

[Australians] are still occupied with the physical effort of living; there are but few servants so that daily work in and about the house absorbs time and energy. Consequently they have but little inclination or opportunity for reading and thought; so newspaper headlines and articles exert undue influence.

Worse still in Brooke-Popham’s mind was the lack of quality among Australian political leaders, most of whom, he thought, possessed only a ‘second class brain’, and ‘possibly because they recognise this fact and so acquire a certain inferiority complex, they lack moral courage and are inclined to give way to public outcry as expressed by the newspapers’.⁶

At the end of each day reading this kind of material at the British National Archives, I walked back to my nearby bed and breakfast, through the prosperous streets of middle-class Kew. Like many Australians of English descent, I feel a sense of familiarity when I visit Britain. In those quiet moments, passing by the neat terrace houses and Kew’s archetypal English pub, with boxes of geraniums at its windows, I felt a curious and troubled combination of emotions – a sense of belonging in what was nominally a foreign country, alongside a sharp discomfort with the hyperbole directed at my compatriots on the dry pages of the archives.

The depth of British hostility toward the Australians at Singapore poses many questions. To begin with, how was any army going to fight well when its supreme commander thought a significant number of the troops available to him were colonial hillbillies? If teamwork is important on a sporting field, it’s even more vital on a battlefield. How could Brooke-Popham, holding the contempt he did for Australia and Australians, weld an effective military force together to defend Singapore?

So as we go along the road to Changi, we need to keep an eye on what was – or wasn’t – holding the defenders of Singapore together. One way to look at this issue of common cause and unity is to test whether the behaviour of Aussie troops was any worse than that of other defending troops. To explore that theme, I went to the Imperial War Museum, where former British servicemen and women have lodged their personal accounts and diaries, in much the same way as our own veterans place their papers in the hands of posterity at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

The District line of the London Underground snakes east from Kew, across the muddy banks of the Thames, past famous subterranean stations like Victoria, St James’s Park and Westminster. As modern commuters scurry to and fro, it’s hard to imagine families sleeping on these cold platforms for nights on end, sheltering from German bombing raids during the Blitz seventy years before. Perhaps, with the British Isles under attack, the fate of Singapore held more significance in Australia than it did in the ‘Mother Country’.

A change at Embankment, south to Elephant and Castle, brings me up at Lambeth, home of the Imperial War Museum. The records here tell a different story from some of those of British leaders about the Australians. Taking a seat in the research centre at the museum, I ask to see a memoir written by Eric Markham, a young English army clerk in Singapore. This makes for interesting reading. Markham tells how in the final days before the surrender, the officers for whom he worked were so drunk they were incapable of issuing coherent orders.⁷

On this evidence, Australians were not the only ones drowning their sorrows in the last hours of the siege of Singapore. When I asked the Markham family if I could quote directly from Eric’s memoir, they denied my request, anxious not to see the reputation of British officers sullied.

What of the other complaints about the behaviour of Australian troops? Another frequent accusation is that the more desperate Australians forced their way onto ships leaving Singapore at the point of a gun. Again, were the only deserters wearing slouch hats?

Perhaps not. A. R. Wilson, a Royal Air Force (RAF) radio operator, has left at the Imperial War Museum an account of his departure from Singapore aboard a river steamer, Wu Chang. As the ship loaded stores for the voyage, sixty men from a British army unit pulled up alongside, led by a particularly determined warrant officer. Brandishing weapons, they clambered aboard, and a stand-off then ensued with Wu Chang’s skipper. This was only defused when the captain agreed to allow his new passengers to remain aboard, on the condition that they surrendered their weapons.⁸ To avoid any repetition, Wu Chang’s captain secured the arms under lock and key.

Having digested this kind of material at the Imperial War Museum, I find things start taking on a different colour. Back at Kew, I follow up other official files that might have more evidence of British desertion and misbehaviour, and there’s plenty to find. On 10 February 1942, just two days into the battle for Singapore, two officers and a sergeant major of one British unit – 18 Reconnaissance Regiment – went among their men and told them to ‘get out’, since things were so bad it was a case of ‘every man for himself’. Their men did as they were bid, and took off – all the way to Perth, which they reached having got aboard one of the last boats leaving Singapore.⁹

The failure of British troops to stand their ground was not isolated. The war diary of the 4th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, one of the units heavily engaged in the fighting on Singapore Island, shows that within hours of the battle starting, the battalion’s strength – nominally about 800 men – quickly fell to 350, thanks in part to the large number dropping out with ‘shock’. When the surrender came, the battalion was down to just 250 men, yet two days later, when the Suffolks marched into captivity, the battalion’s roll call was mysteriously back up to 450 men.¹⁰

The problem extended right across Britain’s colonial administration in Singapore. Despite direct orders to remain at their posts, to prevent a breakdown in order while the Japanese took possession of the city, British officers who made up the bulk of the Singapore police force and the customs service deserted in numbers. These desertions were so scandalous that, after the war, British administrators were at a loss to repair relationships between those who did their duty as ordered and those who made off to the security of evacuation ships.¹¹

This isn’t meant to be a swipe at the ‘Poms’, but the beginnings of a serious investigation into why Australians got such a bad name at Singapore, when their alleged disgraces crossed national boundaries. The finger-pointing at Australians began as soon as the guns fell silent, but was significantly reinvigorated in 1995 when British author Peter Elphick published Singapore: the Pregnable Fortress, which suggests the desertion of Australian troops was an important factor in the fall of Singapore. In recent years, the press have regularly referred to Australian bad behaviour whenever the events of 1942 arise in public debate. In 2012, on the seventieth anniversary, the media carried stories of Australian misdemeanours based on Elphick’s work, accompanied by a call for ‘greater candour’ in discussing Australian desertion from a former director of the Australian War Memorial, Dr Peter Stanley.¹²

On my reading of the archives, the need for candour goes wider than Australian shores. Writers following Elphick tread a similar path in search of Australian misdeeds. In 2005, Colin Smith published Singapore Burning: Heroism and Surrender in World War II. Smith pays tribute to Australian valour in the earlier fighting on the Malay peninsula, but he writes of a ‘growing mutiny’ among the Australian troops by the time the combatants got to Singapore Island.¹³ Mutiny is a stronger term than desertion, meaning a conspiracy among the ranks of a military force to overthrow authority. To go with it, Smith makes some other strong claims.

For every Australian to enter Singapore in the back of an ambulance there were scores more wandering the streets, looking for somewhere safe to sleep where they would not be discovered and immediately be sent back to the front line. Next on their wish list were food, alcohol and then (occasionally) sex, though not necessarily in that order.¹⁴

This passage is easy enough to analyse. Smith provides no evidence to support the more salacious element of this allegation, and it is demonstrably wrong as a matter of simple mathematics. There were 1306 Australians wounded in the fight for Malaya and Singapore. Assuming half of these casualties were incurred on the island, on Smith’s formula of ‘scores’ of malingerers for every wounded man, there should have been 26,000 Australians carousing their way through the streets of the city in the last days of the fighting. This is significantly more than the actual number of men who ever served with the Australian army on the island.

When I asked Smith for permission to reproduce this passage, he graciously granted it, but asked me not to use it in isolation. But my argument is not about Smith or Elphick, it’s about why Australian troops have been singled out – and how the story of Australia’s alleged cowardice and inexperience has become conventional wisdom even in the wider English-speaking world. Recent American biographers of Winston Churchill propose that Arthur Percival, British commander of the troops fighting on Singapore Island, surrendered to the Japanese partly because Australian General Gordon Bennett deserted and abandoned his troops while fighting was still underway.¹⁵

Gordon Bennett was not above blame for the disaster of Singapore, but this account is wrong. What is going on here, when assumptions about Australian culpability at Singapore have reached the level of fiction? Is there something more deep-seated than the mere facts of military disaster at play, something that goes to the underlying relationship between Britain and Australia? Why has the antipathy toward Australia and Australians on the part of some British officers at the time retained so much currency, even if it is perhaps unconscious and not malicious?

To answer these questions, we need a broader view of the events at Singapore, of the fighting, the movements of armies, ships and aeroplanes, the suffering and sacrifice of soldiers. Singapore was an icon of the British empire, a military base meant to bind Britain and its dominions – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa – more closely together. But the promises of protection and security made by the ‘Mother Country’ fell flat. Moralising about what desperate, hungry and exhausted troops did to get a passage home from a shell-torn waterfront will only take us so far towards understanding what happened. To get a clearer insight into Australia’s worst military defeat, we need to start by asking questions of the generals and politicians who put the troops there.

But to walk the long road to Changi again involves a journey that stretches back even further than the 25 aching kilometres covered by the defeated troops in February 1942. Through history, one war tends to beget another, and so in many ways, the route to Changi begins at the end of World War I.

ONE

‘We cannot defend ourselves’

Two things, over the course of twenty years, resulted in the march to Changi: British weakness and Japanese indignation. Australian leaders had a bit to do with both, beginning in 1918, when the victorious powers – Britain (and the various parts of her empire, including Australia), the United States, France, Japan and Italy – deliberated over how to construct a new world order after the defeat of the kaiser’s Germany.

For the first time in our history, Australia was at the centre of world politics, largely thanks to the prime minister of the day, Billy Hughes. Nicknamed the ‘Little Digger’ for his affinity with the armed forces, Hughes had fought a hard war. Critics grudgingly observed Hughes was too small to hit, too deaf to argue with, and too tough to chew – and they weren’t far wrong. Short of stature and hard of hearing, Hughes didn’t muck about when it came to doing his bit to win the war. When the guns opened up in 1914, he was a Labor man, serving as attorney general, and he used the office to weed out German influence in Australia. German investors controlled big parts of Australia’s hard rock mining industry, especially the rich Broken Hill lead and silver deposits, so in November 1914, Hughes marched troops into the Melbourne and Sydney offices of the companies concerned and took control of the industry at the end of a rifle barrel.

Hughes succeeded Andrew Fisher as prime minister when the latter’s health failed in 1915, but Hughes did not remain Labor leader for long. Committed to the war effort, he rent the party asunder over efforts to introduce conscription for overseas military service. Crossing the floor of the parliament to find friends among conservative ranks, Hughes won a general election in 1917 at the head of a new Nationalist Party.

At two referenda, Hughes failed to convince the Australian electorate of the need for conscription, but, undeterred, he stretched every nerve and sinew to help Britain win the war. And he did so for a reason absolutely central to this story.

Hughes pushed for the biggest possible war effort to help Britain so that in the years to come, Australia’s contribution would give her the right to influence the policies of the empire when it came to what he thought was the long-term threat to Australia’s existence – the ‘yellow hordes’ of Asia.¹

Hughes had in mind the only independent industrial power in Asia at the time – Japan. Since the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese migrants flocked to the goldfields of the Victorian central plains, Australians had been fixated on the prospect of Asia’s impoverished millions descending on the land of the Southern Cross. This idea was fundamental to Hughes, but he wasn’t worried about Chinese coolies sloshing pans for gold.

In World War I, Japan was an ally of the British empire, thanks to a 1902 treaty, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Tokyo honoured her treaty commitments and entered the war against Germany, and as a result, the Australian and Japanese navies cooperated on occasion as the kaiser’s few warships in Asia were hunted and destroyed in 1915. Japanese sailors even helped put down a mutiny among Indian troops serving in the British army in 1915 in – of all places – Singapore.

Despite these cooperative signs, Hughes was unconvinced when peace came in 1918. To protect Australia’s position, he insisted on a voice at the negotiating table that would determine the new world order – as he said loud and often, the memory of Australia’s 60,000 war dead demanded as much. When Japan argued for racial equality to constitute one of the principles that would guide a new international body – the League of Nations (forerunner of today’s United Nations) – Hughes saw a fundamental threat. ‘White Australia’ was the cornerstone of Australia’s national identity at the time, and any newfangled principle of equality undermined it.

Hughes lobbied hard against the Japanese, and got various reviews from his fellow heads of state. French President Clemenceau enquired of him, ‘Mr ’Ughes, I have ’eard you is ze cannibal?’, to which Hughes replied, dead pan, in the manner of Mark Twain, ‘That’s greatly exaggerated.’² For American President Wilson, his most regular sparring partner, Hughes was a ‘pestiferous varmint’, but despite the prairie dog analogy, Hughes got his way, and the international community rejected racial equality as a basis on which to organise global affairs, but only in the face of Japanese fury.³

One problem solved, another soon presented. Hughes successfully pushed Japan to the margins of the international community, but Tokyo still had more prosaic claims to diplomatic respect – her navy, and it was getting bigger. In the last years of the war, Britain’s Royal Navy had been fully occupied with fighting the kaiser. Japan – less stretched by the war – took the opportunity to expand her fleet. By 1918, she had giant new battleships under construction that promised to render much of the British battle fleet obsolete.

To keep the Japanese in check, Hughes preferred to renew the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance. Exhausted by the war and financially indebted, the British certainly had no great desire – or capacity – to enter into an arms race with Japan, or the United States, which was also building big new ships to meet the challenge from Tokyo.

In truth, few people around the world had much enthusiasm for this jostling for international power. Across the globe, popular opinion was scandalised by the horror and waste of the trenches. For all the victors of World War I a naval arms race was the last thing on the political to-do list.

The resolution of this problem was the diplomatic puzzle of the day, even if the bare requisites for a settlement were straightforward. Why not replace the Anglo-Japanese Alliance with a naval disarmament treaty that bound all the remaining great naval powers? If such a thing could be crafted, international rivalries might be contained for a generation or more, and the vast national resources needed to complete new and gigantic warships could instead be devoted to the task of economic recovery.

The idea caught on, and so the Americans invited delegations from the victorious powers to Washington, for the purpose of reaching international agreement on controlling the spread and power of naval armaments. Diplomats from around the world set out for the United States in the northern autumn of 1921.

The Washington Naval Conference opened on 12 November and the British were in for a shock in more ways than one. This was the age of Prohibition, and an alcoholic drink could not be legally obtained in the American capital. The British delegation thought they had that problem covered by importing crates of whisky and champagne in their diplomatic cargo, a booty they then stored in their hotel strongroom. This even had an armed guard, but when the British went to break open their first bottle, they found early signs of American mobsters at work. Burglars had breached the safe by knocking down an external wall, and carted off every bottle.⁴

With a stiff but sober upper lip, the British delegation attended the conference opening only to be confronted with a more official surprise. President Harding, with typical American high-mindedness, assured the world that the United States approached the task of naval disarmament ‘wholly free from guile, sure in our own minds that we harbor no unworthy designs,’ and he graciously added, ‘we accredit the world with the same good intent’.⁵

After Harding dished up this rhetorical entrée, the Americans wheeled out a main course that stunned the conference with its boldness – a ten-year moratorium on the construction of any further new battleships. The British delegation went to Washington without a definitive plan of their own, and according to onlookers, the American proposal turned the admirals of the Royal Navy various colours of the rainbow. Harding’s proposition threatened to relegate the British, without new battleships to match those of America and Japan, to second-power status.

If the Washington talks were to succeed, it was this kind of technical anomaly between the powers that would have to be resolved. The delegates spent hours haggling over terms, but finally in February 1922 a treaty emerged, the like of which the world had never seen before. Indeed, it might be said that more warships were lost at Washington than in any naval battle in history. The powers agreed to limit new building, but allowed Britain to build two new battleships to catch up with their former American and Japanese allies, and otherwise all nations committed themselves to scrapping scores of old but still useful ships. In the process, Australia paid a price. The dominions like Australia, Canada and New Zealand were included in the British quota, and accordingly the pride of the Royal Australian Navy – the battlecruiser HMAS Australia, just eleven years old – was scuttled off Sydney Heads.

Taking into consideration the scrapping of old ships, and the ban on building new ones – with the two exceptions for Britain – the Washington Naval Treaty limited the total of each power’s battleship fleet in the ratio of 5.15 (Britain and the US): 3.15 (Japan): 1.75 (France and Italy). Around the world, millions were delighted, greeting the new treaty as the hope of the age. From time immemorial, peace treaties had come and gone between tribes, kingdoms and nations, and still war blighted the lot of humankind. Here for the first time was a treaty that would not merely govern the behaviour of nations, but also limit the number and type of weapons they could hold. Perhaps for this brief moment, World War I really did promise to be the ‘war to end all wars’.

The Japanese were less happy. On top of the snub over racial equality orchestrated by Hughes, Tokyo was now permanently relegated to own a fleet smaller than Britain and the United States. Japanese patriots felt the twin slights fiercely, and dreamed of restoring the glory of the Rising Sun.

Even with a new and historic framework of international naval limitations in place, Britain still had an empire to run, and cardinal to this task was the capacity to project military power around the world. After Washington, the Royal Navy had fewer ships with which to do this. Maintaining its reputation as a global force, especially in Asia, where the Japanese, even with a limited fleet, remained a possible threat, became the defence policy problem for London in the 1920s.

The answer was a naval base at Singapore. If the Royal Navy was too small to actually station a fleet in Asia, the next best thing was to build a supply and repair base in the region. With this infrastructure in place, the British could sail out a fleet if a crisis arose, comfortable in the knowledge that their ships would have the facilities needed to sustain them.

The attraction of Singapore was geographic – it was a central location for British interests in the region. For India, then a vital part of the empire, the island was a gateway to China and Japan. From Singapore, British ships could also guard the sea route across the Indian Ocean from the Suez Canal to Australia and New Zealand. This seemed to honour the role to protect Australia that Hughes sought from the Mother Country, but whether ships from Singapore could safeguard Australia’s vital interests on the eastern seaboard was not so clear.

There were other doubts. If Britain was too weak to maintain a fleet at such a base, what was to stop an enemy – likely Japan – wrecking the place before the Royal Navy steamed out from the North Sea? That part of the problem was easier to solve: heavy coastal gun batteries would hold the fort – literally – until the ships could arrive. So British naval strategists completed their plans with a budget to fortify Singapore Island, with big guns at Changi and other key ports.

With this logic began the empire’s biggest defence scheme of the inter-war years, one with such momentum that it survived cancellation and prolonged criticism. The initial plans were discussed between British leaders and the prime ministers of the dominions in 1921. Implementation began not long after the ink dried on the Washington Treaty. On 1 May 1923, the British government passed a motion in the House of Commons, committing itself to spend £9.5 million (or AU$486 million in today’s money) to construct the Singapore base.

Hughes was delighted, telling the Australian public the Singapore strategy was vital because:

We must have a scheme of Empire defence in order to defend Australia. We cannot defend ourselves. We haven’t enough men, or money. There is no one upon whom we can rely to help us except Great Britain …⁶

‘We cannot defend ourselves’ – the thought rattled around the insecure minds of some Australians like a demented marble. For Hughes and others like him, Australian defence plans had to support the British because there was no alternative. This was a strange conclusion for a young nation to arrive at – a sense of national impotence that sat oddly against the martial reputation established by its troops at Anzac Cove in 1915.

Ironically, considering his wartime exertions received the British investment he wanted, Hughes was no longer prime minister when Britain physically staked itself to Asia at Singapore. Still suspect in the eyes of his new conservative allies for his Labor past, Hughes stood aside as prime minister in February 1923, replaced by his treasurer, Stanley Melbourne Bruce. Melbourne-born but Cambridge-educated, Bruce served in the British army in World War I, and was a leading empire loyalist. Bruce proved an insipid replacement for the firecracker Hughes. At the end of Bruce’s career, having held the highest political office in Australia, he declared the three things of which he was most proud: his spell as captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St Andrews, Scotland; his fellowship of the (British) Royal Society; and his sporting ‘blue’ from Cambridge University, following his membership of the winning rowing eight in the 1904 ‘boat race’ against Oxford.⁷

With that pedigree, it’s not surprising that the new leader confirmed Australian support for British plans. Bruce followed Hughes on Singapore, declaring, ‘the Australian view is that the proper representation of the British navy, in the Pacific, depends absolutely on the existence of a modern naval base in this ocean’.⁸

Singapore, being several thousand kilometres from the Pacific Ocean, was a curious choice for Australian politicians to support. Australian military leaders certainly thought so. Head of the Australian navy Rear Admiral Percy Grant argued the obvious – Singapore was too far from Australia to protect the country. But with a great scheme of empire underway, no one of influence took any notice, in Australia or London.⁹

The emerging wealth of Singapore, and Malaya to its north, which Britain occupied through alliances with local sultans, also helps explain London’s decision to invest in a naval base on the island. Founded as a trading port in 1819 by British colonial administrator Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles to challenge Dutch commercial dominance in the region, Singapore’s initial source of wealth now seems perverse – it was opium. As we fight the drug wars of the twenty-first century, it’s worth remembering that a fair part of the British empire in Asia was built on the proceeds of running opium from India, via Singapore, to legions of addicts in China.

Even as the British began planning their naval base in 1923, their tax revenues in Singapore were still heavily reliant on the opium trade. But the place had prospered in other ways, on the back of developments in Malaya involving vital raw materials for an advanced industrial economy. First came the discovery of the world’s richest deposits of tin, a key ingredient for many metal products, especially tinplate for food canning. Then Malaya proved an ideal place to grow rubber. As the motor vehicle industry expanded in the first years of the twentieth century, so the demand for rubber car tyres blossomed, and British investors saw their chance to cash in via plantations of rubber trees on the Malay peninsula. British