Fan of a hero

Source: "Lifestyle"-The Star- 1 May 2005

HAROLD Speldewinde’s tales of World War II are often tributes to the late M. Saravanamuttu, former editor of the Straits Echo, who took charge of restoring order in the aftermath of the Japanese bombings of Penang in December 1941.

A former student of Penang Free School, Speldewinde had completed his Senior Cambridge examinations when war broke out.

He was then boarding at the home of the Quays, a Eurasian family that lived on Barracks Road while his Dutch Burgher parents from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) were in Taiping, Perak.

“After the bombings, I joined E Company of the Straits Settlement Volunteers Force (SSVF),” the 81-year-old president of the Penang Veterans Association reminisces while visiting the Penang War Museum in Batu Maung.

In the initial pandemonium after the wave of bombings, rotting bodies littered the streets of George Town and looting was rampant as the British retreated from Penang.

The Straits Echo’s was one of the few offices that remained open under the leadership of Saravanamuttu, affectionately known as Uncle Sara; the editor had been a classmate of Speldewinde’s father back in Ceylon.

Harold Speldewinde in the War Museum Penang looking over a torture chamber used by Japanese to break prisoners they interrogated during their Occupation of Penang.

Sara set up the Penang Service Committee comprising elected members from Penang’s different communities to run the town on Dec 16; he also made the hefty Speldewinde, then 17, his personal bodyguard.

The E Company Eurasian volunteers who gave up their arms after the British retreat were called into service as Volunteer Police to keep peace and prevent looting under the leadership of a Eurasian, Lieutenant Willweber, who was later asked by the Japanese to become manager of Penang Hill Railway.

“Armed but not in uniform, I took part in preventing looting,” remembers Speldewinde. “Confiscated loot, comprising mainly food and clothing, was kept at E Company’s headquarters at the Francis Light School on Perak Road and was later distributed to the needy,” says Speldewinde who accompanied Sara on welfare visits.

Even after the British had evacuated by Dec 16, the bombings continued and the committee that met twice daily at No. 10, Scott Road, decided that the Union Jack at Fort Cornwallis had to be taken down and replaced with a white flag of surrender.

“As there were no volunteers, Sara and R.S Gopal, his sub-editor, carried out this mission,” says Speldewinde.

Local Japanese who had been imprisoned by the British before the war were released; with the help of one of them, Sara broadcast an appeal on Dec 19 from the Penang Wireless Station, urging the Japanese air force to stop bombing the island because the British had left Penang.

“Tribute must also be paid to a young Penangite by the name of Ivan Allan who bravely went to Sungai Petani on Dec 18 with a Japanese named Izumi to convey the news that the British had evacuated Penang,” says Speldewinde.

When two companies of Japanese troops arrived in sampans at the Church Street Pier at 4pm on Dec 19, Sara, as the committee chairman, appealed to the Commander not to molest the local population.

“The next day, the Japanese Civil Administrator, Hiroyasu, arrived and formed four different committees comprising Malays, Chinese, Indians and Eurasians. These committees were known as the Peace Preservation Committee.”

While the Japanese troops put up temporarily at the Convent Datuk Keramat, several British officers who arrived from the northern states were secretly put up at the Residency (now the Yang di-Pertua Negri’s residence, Seri Mutiara) and fed for three days by Sara.

Speldewinde’s hero, M. Saravanamuttu, meets Lord Louis Mounbatten, South-East Asia Supreme Allied Commander, at the Bayan Lepas aerodrome in 1945. In the centre is Straits Echo chief reporter Chia Po Teik.

Speldewinde recalls the dangerous mission to help the officers escape under the cover of darkness: “Together with another SSVF volunteer, Oswald Foley, who was driving the truck, Sara and I went to pick up the British officers and take them to the mouth of Sungai Pinang where a tongkang (boat) was waiting to take them to Singapore.

“Had we been caught, our heads would have been chopped off,” says Speldewinde grimly.

Sara’s committee was disbanded on Dec 23 when the Japanese-elected Penang Preservation Committee began functioning. Sara himself was jailed on Christmas Day; he ended up spending nine months incarcerated. Speldewinde left to work on his family’s tea plantation in Cameron Highlands, Pahang, returning to Penang in May 1943 to marry Molly McIntyre, a relative of the Quays family whom he had met before the war.

The couple returned to Cameron Highlands before moving to the Gunung Batu Puteh forest near Tapah, Perak, to join a band of orang asli in a guerrilla resistance. Dressed like the natives, the armed Speldewinde and his men patrolled the area and met fighters from the Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army and, later, the famed Force 136. Due to his association with the communists who smuggled food to his family, the Japanese put up a poster offering a $500 reward for Speldewinde’s capture on the suspicion of him being a communist. The war ended without any combat in the jungle.

As for Sara, the post-war period saw his meteoric rise in diplomatic service as Ceylon’s Commissioner in Singapore and Malaya from 1950 to 1957, Ceylon Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to Indonesia from 1954 to 1957, and Honorary Consul-General for Ceylon in Bangkok from 1958 to 1961.

Before his death in 1970 at the age of 75, Sara wrote and published a book on his life’s experiences entitled The Sara Saga that includes accounts of life in Penang during the Japanese Occupation. The book also describes the role of the short-lived Penang Service Committee in keeping peace, saving rice from looting and distributing it, clearing and disposing of corpses, safeguarding petrol and issuing it only to those involved in essential work, like doctors.

“Uncle Sara was a newspaperman who expressed his opinions freely and was the bravest man I have ever met,” concludes Speldewinde. – By CHOONG KWEE KIM