Dear friends and colleagues
After the ambush.
It had been just over four months since I last wrote and perhaps you were thinking I had disappeared, or run out of puff, or lost interest in writing. To be honest I was exhausted. Having to complete a book for Thames and Hudson, The Story of Contemporary Art, one for Lund Humphries, Ding Yi in their Contemporary Painters series and a book length exhibition catalogue for Far Away but Strangely Familiar, Twenty-Three artists from the Philippines in Slovakia all around the same time was an experience I never want to have to do again. But apart from last minute editing these are all now completed tasks. There have been things I wanted to report: being in the PRC for the anniversary of Tianamen Square, the Asian pavilions at Venice, curating the exhibition in Slovakia, and I shall get around to reporting of them, albeit long after the event. But something else is on my mind today, a photograph I found many years ago in a book which has haunted me ever since and which I have only recently re-discovered, a photograph of an Englishman in South-east Asia, like myself. 
He is young, in military uniform, an officer’s cap on, binocular around his neck. He stands, a slim figure with arms akimbo, hands on his waist. He is striking a pose, I suspect of determination, but, to me at least, his face is in fact that of a worried man. Are his eyes haunted too?
What else can we deduce from this image? He wears short sleeves so he is based in a hot country, a fact confirmed by the hut behind him with its reed walls and roof. The badge on his sleeve, the crossed kukris or knives, suggest he is commanding a unit of Gurkha soldiers. So he is, we could say, part of the colonial apparatus, a white man leading coloured soldiers against other coloured people to ensure their subservience.
Except things are never so neat and pat.
If the photograph recalls anything to me, it is of going to the British War Cemetery outside Yangon (Rangoon) and walking amongst these endless rows of gravestones. It is beautifully kept and maintained, the cleanest and neatest place I saw when I went to Myanmar. But above all I was struck as I walked amongst the graves looking for the grave of my wife’s grandfather’s by how young all these men, British and Indian, were – 18, 19, 20, 21… That was what was shocking. So young!
And I do know who this haunted young man was and where he was and when: on the back of the photograph is hand written “Oliver Crawford. Taken the day after the ambush – outside my room at Wandielum, K.L. My clothes hanging in background, to dry.”
The book I found it in, presumably used as a book mark, is one from a series of books, the Oxford History of Modern Europe, A.J.P Taylor’s The Struggle for mastery in Europe, 1848-1918. It is a large and serious book. A tiny sticker on the inside cover says “BLACKWELLS, Oxford, England,” so it has been ordered rather than bought from there. Amazon didn’t exist back then!
On the fly leaf of the book is written “Oliver Crawford, British Military Hospital Singapore, Boxing Day. 1954.” Also, between pages 222 and 223, presumably likewise used as a book mark I find a sheet of bank paper, torn on one side, as if taken out of a notebook is written “Oliver Crawford, Far East Forces Training Centre, Khota Tinpqi, Malaya, 26 November, 1954.” There are no annotations in the book itself.
He must have been one of many young men sent out as second lieutenants to lead patrols in the jungle of Malaya against the insurgents of the predominantly Chinese MRLA, (Malayan Races Liberation Army) who had sought since 1948 to de-stabilise the colonial government and set up a communist state. By 1954 the MRLA was waning but still active. Only in 1960 by which time Malaya had achieved independence and the last few remnants of the MRLA had drifted away to Thailand was the “emergency” deemed over.
Jungle warfare was terrifying. You would patrol for days and when you either were ambushed or ambushed someone the incident would be very, very brief – probably less than fifteen seconds of hectic gunfire, before the retreating party disappeared back into the jungle.
Why do I have this book? It’s a tragic story.
In the village where I was brought up was an elderly woman called Kathleen Crawford who became close friends with my mother. Mrs Crawford (you never referred to adults by their Christian names in my youth) was from Ulster and a fervent protestant: she refused to take the normal communion wafer, it was too papist for her, so the vicar, my father, had to give her a fragment of ordinary bread instead. Before the second world war she had been sent out on the fishing fleet to India.[1] She had married an officer in the British army there – by memory something like the second Punjab Rifles – who after the birth of their first child, Oliver, had died of a fever. She returned to England, obsessed with the raj and an India that was soon to disappear.
Oliver was apparently brought up strictly to be like his father, a pillar of the empire, but by the time I was old enough to known what was going on in the village he had long since disappeared and was only referred to as a “problem”, who rarely visited his mother. Once apparently, on one of these rare visits he was so skint that he had to borrow money from my father to buy his mother flowers – and never paid the money back.
What was this “problem”? Political? Had he turned against the empire his mother believed in? Or was he gay? All we knew was that he had written books. Then one day my mother told me Mrs Crawford was phoned up by Oliver’s publishers. “Who should we send his royalties to?” The publisher asked. “To Oliver, of course,” she replied. With reluctance, the publisher said, “I am sorry, do you not know he is dead?” He had died, we were told, in poverty, of starvation even, in Jerusalem.
When Mrs Crawford died, she left all her possessions, save her house, to my mother. (The money she also left her made my mother’s last years much easier.) At my mother’s request I arranged for a second-hand bookseller to take all the books away. I wish now I had looked for copies of the books Oliver had written, amongst them that entitled The Door marked Malaya published by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958. Now I will have to find a copy of that book and see if it explains what this haunted young man is thinking.
However, looking at the photograph and with what little I know, I feel I can say that this young white man was as much a victim of the colonial enterprise as anyone else.
Best wishes and speak soon
Tony
- Fishing for husbands: young women who had not caught a husband when introduced to society were sent to India to catch one there. Lots of young British men there and very few (white) women. ↑