There had been few applicants. The High Commissioner – later himself to die in ambush in Malaya – was anxious to get zealous men with a sense of mission. The task was difficult. Over half a million people, mostly Chinese small farmers, one in five of every Chinese in Malaya, one in ten of the whole population, were to be placed behind wire in over three hundred resettlement camps. In the first years of the Emergency the methods dictated by a frantic urgency had turned many against the British. Entire villages had been burnt down, pigs slaughtered, lorries full of people removed wholesale, unprovided with food or water, and brutality had reaped its dubious rewards. But now a new attitude was necessary. Resettlement, on the scale involved, could, if the temptations to harshness, short-term expedients, and the inevitable corruption arising from these vast scale displacements of helpless thousands were indulged, make the country more quickly communist than any terrorism could. Already it was said that this was war against the people, and not against the jungle.

But resettlement was always urgent, essential to the success of the military campaign; one made use of the men available. It was therefore a very mixed bag, ranging from ex-China missionaries to retired sergeant-majors, who went resettling in Malaya.

Before sailing from England Tommy Uxbridge was issued with a pamphlet entitled: Handbook to the Emergency. He flicked the pages, catching a paragraph or a sentence here and there: ‘The Briggs Resettlement Plan,’ he read, ‘is essentially military, to deny sources of food and supplies to the terrorists … There is an aura of hero-worship round the terrorists … during the last war the Chinese guerrillas who fought the Japanese from the jungle, and now form the hard core of the terrorists battling us, obtained their food, equipment, and recruits from Chinese farmers scattered on the lands at the edge of the jungle … land to which they had no title … no one else had the energy to clear or cultivate it … hence they are called squatters …’ Uxbridge turned the pages, his mind already dividing the new world to rule with near-absolute authority into ‘loyal’ people and ‘bad lots’.

‘The plan must resettle this half-million in compact areas, surrounded by barbed-wire fences, where they can be under police protection … By severing contact between the jungle and its supporters, it is hoped to starve the bandits into the open … Mines and estates will concentrate their labour forces behind barbed wire … Night time curfew everywhere … Anyone found with food beyond the wire fence, will be considered as aiding terrorists and under Emergency Regulations liable to penal servitude, or to death …’

‘We should have been as tough in other places,’ thought
Uxbridge of the shrinking Empire.

‘The greatly enlarged Police Force … guard these areas … military patrol the roads and jungle edge to catch the terrorists as they come out for food, and to make raids into the jungle … the first concentration of squatters in the State of Johore …’