Tales from the South China Seas: Images of the British in South East Asia…

The third book of a trilogy based on the personal, and recorded accounts of residents of the British Empire between the world wars; the first on India, the next on ‘The Dark Continent' and this work on the magical lands of the ”Far East”. These books are the edited extracts from a BBC Radio series. Charles Allen, the ‘oral historian’ for the series was himself born (1940) in India to a family of six generations who served in the British Raj.

Each of the chapters (of all the books in the series) are edited narrations from BBC radio 4 interviews with the actual raconteurs. Many of them, if not most, are now gone of course, so these works form their last true oral history.

The power of the magic of the South China Seas, that truly casts its spell on those of us who worked or lived there is from the peoples of those fragrant, busy and charming lands. Charles Allen makes the point in his introduction – “several races drawn to the same watery crossroads principally by the lure of trade but coexisting as more or less equals”. Later, in the prison camps under the chillingly brutal Japanese occupation, that same fraternity was in evidence as the enslaved races worked and survived together through the horror.

A tremendously different – taught and expected - attitude prevails in these personal accounts; being a Tuan in the Far East Colonial Services seems to have been the exact opposite of being a Bwana in British Africa or even a Sahib in India; “… one felt that one did indeed belong, and that they seemed to accept one as belonging to them”.

It is this need to be of service attitude that clearly rings out throughout these personal narratives.