Previously, the missionary moved quietly through the uneasy stillness of the town, where fear and strange kindness often met without warning. Only the day before, he had been stopped by a former pupil now wearing the uniform of a rebel, who spoke to him with warmth before disappearing into the shifting tide of conflict. Back at the mission house, the hours dragged on with little sound beyond distant rumours and crackling radio reports, until at last the tense silence broke with the arrival of cautious soldiers and the thunder of planes overhead. Though the rebellion was fading, nothing felt quite settled, and the missionary found himself caught between relief and a lingering sense that the land itself had not yet exhaled.
Malays now began to inform on their neighbours. This was a purely internal matter, affecting only themselves; the Chinese were not involved in any way. Old scores were settled. The police hauled in anyone on the slightest suggestion or suspicion. Innocent people were arrested. There was a whole atmosphere of uncertainty. The police themselves were no longer trusted by the government, since many had been compromised in their allegiance. The British sent in the Special Branch from Singapore, experts in dealing with the Tongs and well used to extracting all the necessary information.
By the end of 1963, all the rank and file had been released. Azahari had made a swift escape to the Philippines. His top lieutenants languished for some 8 years in prison until one day they made their escape from Brunei and headed for Sarawak. At that time its Chief Minister was conducting a childish campaign against Brunei, for not coming into the fold of Malaysia; he held on to the refugees and treated them well. But he was not in the big league of playing international politics and was happy to see them off to Kuala Lumpur. In a magnanimous gesture, Malaysia returned them to Brunei. A few years on, they asked pardon of the Sultan and were reconciled to him in a religious ceremony.
When the rebellion started, there was actually a Brunei Army in existence; it had just been raised and training in Malaya but it was not thought expedient to call them home. The Sultan had only a doubtfully loyal police and Field Force to rely on. In time, the Brunei Army expanded into a second battalion. With typical lack of common sense, the Sultan allowed it to be based and therefore recruited at Tutong, the home of the Kedayans, who had fought so manfully against his father during the rebellion. Realising this, he offered to support a British battalion at his own expense. Under this condition, Britain made an exception to its “East of Suez” policy. and a Gurkha battalion has been there till the present time. Then he raised a battalion of retired Gurkhas to be stationed in the capital. All this military force is rationalised thus. The Field Force are watching the police; the first army battalion are watching the Field Force; the second battalion are keeping an eye on the first; the reserve Gurkha battalion are watching them and the British battalion are watching everyone. The old Sultan himself was never to be seen afterwards without a huge bulge in his sarong; even at children’s rallies, he was never without his .45.
In the 1980s as the officiating chaplain to the British forces, I took the ecumenical service for them and did anything required. It turned out that the Gurkha colonel was divorced and wanted to marry a Catholic lady. She had been previously married outside the church and now divorced; since the Catholic Church does not recognise such a marriage, she was free. His case was different; he and his first partner were Anglicans. I had to conduct the necessary investigations and correspond with the high and mighty at Westminster Archdiocesan Marriage Tribunal.
A very charming and friendly lady came to see me. She told me her name was “Esmond”; this is quite an uncommon name, and in fact I knew only one such. Surprise! surprise! it was her uncle Donal Esmond, MHM; by that time he was dead. His brother Eugene had studied for a time with Mill Hill. He became a pilot with Imperial Airways. On his travels, he would land at Uganda, in East Africa to visit his former classmates. He joined the Fleet Air Arm and led the famous death and glory attack by the Fairey Swordfish on the German battleship Scharnhorst which was escaping up the North Sea in the early part of World War II. He was shot down. For this he was awarded the VC. His photo hung in the library of our former Mill Hill seminary in Freshfield, near Southport. It is surely a small world. I officiated at their marriage and later at their child’s baptism.
Thus it was that I was quite friendly with the colonel. He invited me to take part in a programme commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Brunei Rebellion. The plan was for the Gurkhas to re-enact the Army capture of the oil-field and landing strip, as a kind of war games. I was asked to fill them in on my experiences from the view-point of a civilian. As a matter of courtesy, he informed the appropriate authorities of his plans. He was shocked when he was refused permission, on the grounds that all this talk of a rebellion in 1962 was just exaggeration and hearsay. George Orwell in his novel of the future “1984” tells us what happens to history in a totalitarian state; it is tailored and edited, excised, expunged to fit the current thinking of the rulers.
After full independence was assumed from the United Kingdom, ironically in 1983-84, the Brunei Government began to show its muscle and started to be just plain nasty all round. It decided to curtail the autonomy of the private schools, namely the mission and Chinese. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the capital went in a body to make their disapproval felt to the Minister of Education. Such a ministry might be at the bottom of the list in a democratic government but not in a totalitarian state, which recognises only too well the power it carries. Abdul Aziz is the most influential person outside the royal family; he has been in almost every department, has built up a network of cronies and spies who are intensely loyal to him; he is the type of person who poses a constant threat to the Sultan. That he is an Islamic fundamentalist means that he wields a threat to just about anyone, even those who are in theory placed above him.
His reason for moving in on the Chinese schools was that the Chinese had never been loyal to the state, that they always looked to Peking and that their schools simply prepared the pupils to continue this tradition. This was the usual claptrap which the Malays had always fed to the British; they were the loyal ones; the Chinese could never be trusted. The delegation listened to all this abuse in silence. Then, “Just who,” they asked, “were involved in the Brunei Rebellion? Was there one Chinese? No, it was your own people, the Malays, who tried to overthrow their lawful government.” He was struck dumb; he naively assumed that since the Rebellion had been erased from the school textbooks, it had also disappeared from the minds of those who had lived through that sad time. That of course did not mean any alteration of his plans for our schools nor has it ever changed his thinking about the disloyalty of the Chinese.
After the Rebellion was over, mindful as always of my public image, I got a quick message of to the bishop that we had survived and, thinking of posterity and my place in the Mill Hill archives, I despatched one to Mill Hill, where someone would probably say, “Why is this man spending all this money on a telegram when a letter would do just as well.” Of course, my first message was to my dear mother back home. Goodness knows what she must have thought when the BBC broadcast about the “jungle army” invading Brunei- just as she was remembering that it was coming up for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
No sooner had we recovered from that ordeal than we were faced with the worst floods in years. I tried to get round as many parishioners as I could. There is nothing more depressing than a flood, more weakening of one’s resolve to be up and doing. It was just one thing after another; all the utilities affected; the shops running out of food; everything in chaos. The situation was much worse in the interior where our priests worked themselves to the bone trying to provide food and medicine for their poor people.
