MALAYA: Servant of Empire

Sir Henry Lovell Goldsworthy Gurney, 53, High Commissioner for the United Kingdom to the Federation of Malaya, was a man who seemed to be precisely what he was — a stern and incorruptible servant of Empire. Like a hundred colonial administrators before him, he was a public-school man (Winchester) and an Oxford graduate. He served his apprenticeship in jungles from Jamaica to the Gold Coast, and everywhere earned a reputation as “a man who got things done.” The conversation of friends discussing Sir Henry in clubs near Whitehall was seldom if ever leavened with warm, personal anecdote, but words like “courage,” “imperturbable” and “dogged determination” invariably punctuated it.

Defiant Pennant. In 1946 Henry Gurney was appointed to the ticklish post of Chief Secretary to the embattled British mandatory government of Palestine. He called for martial law, and applied the stringent methods he had learned in the jungle to Irgun’s terrorists. Then in 1948, British High Commissioner Sir Edward Gent died in an airplane crash on his way home to London to report on the rising Red menace in the jungles of Malaya. Sir Henry Gurney was ordered to Malaya. In London, the Opposition questioned his fitness for the job (he had never been to Malaya), and the local planters were not reassured when he arrived, as he put it, “with an open mind and no knowledge of the country.” But the rebels were more respectful. They threatened to kill him.

Sir Henry replied in kind:’ “We are fighting militant Communism and we intend to finish it off.” With calm assurance, he urged planters and tin miners to stay at their posts. He pleaded with Whitehall for more troops, built up the native army from four to six battalions, and launched a vast resettlement scheme to separate the Communists from their sources of supply. His men razed whole villages for aiding the Reds and penned up 120,000-Malayan Chinese. He constantly left his snug headquarters at Kuala Lumpur to roam the jungles in his car, his official red-striped pennant a conspicuous target for snipers. He became, as he intended, a symbol of British determination and doggedness.

At Marker 56. Last week, word flashed through the jungles that Sir Henry and his lady would take a weekend holiday at the British resort of Eraser’s Hill, 64 miles north of the capital, deep in Communist country. For several days, police and soldiers combed the road in search of possible ambush points. They found none as far as they went, but unaccountably turned back at the 56-mile marker. (Had they gone half a mile farther, they might have found, along a 400-yd. S bend in the highway, 38 skillfully concealed positions, some of them constructed of firewood faggots.) Next day, with his pennant bravely flying and escorted by an armored truck and a radio van, Sir Henry’s official Rolls-Royce set out. As they reached the double hairpin turn beyond the 56-mile marker, a volley crackled. Sir Henry’s driver fell dead. Two tires squished flat and the governor himself felt the sting of a bullet. He pushed Lady Gurney to the floor of the car, told her to stay down, opened the door and staggered, badly wounded, along the road, deliberately drawing the fire away from the Rolls. A fusillade of shots followed his staggering figure; he fell face down in the road. For 20 minutes the police exchanged shots with the ambuscaders, then reinforcements arrived and the Communists fled. Sir Henry Gurney was past help by then. His wife was unhurt.

Five companies of British and Gurkha troops combed the vicinity but failed to turn up the bandits. Finally, in outrage and frustration, the R.A.F. flew in and bombed the whole area steadily for five hours.