Sir Richard Winstedt, KBE, CMG, FBA, D. Litt (Oxford), MA, Hon LLD (Malaya)
Sir Richard arrived in Malaya as a “griffin” in the Federal Malay States Civil
Service. About late 1902, he was posted to Taiping as a junior administrator. His
impression of the Colonel Walker, Commander of the Malay State Guides (MSG)
based in Taiping, was pretty hilarious – “old hooky, as he was then known (his
nose was broken by one of Kipling’s Lang men of Laut) was recalled through one
of the many incidents:
The guides (MSG) fighting a few of
the Malay rebels, after many empty days of pursuit, the Indian Sepoys fired
wildly and shot one of the Colonel’s greatest friends, the Civil Commissioner,
through the back. “My God” shouted the Colonel, “he’s killed. Open a bottle of
beer.”
Colonel Walker was also figured in
Miss Bird’s travel book, the Golden Chersonese.
“ Because a man wears khaki and a
solar topi and has traveled 1,000 miles in a British Ship to a British Colony
to live among British settlers, the world is disposed to fancy that his life
bas been more venturesome than life in London. Are not Conrad and Somerset
Maugham witnesses that the Malay Archipelago pullulates
with romance?”
“Much as I enjoyed the free local
life of outstations, my temperament hardly fitted me to find romances there was
in types a born novelist would have loved; the Scottish planter, the Australian
miner, the New Zealand surveyor, the Irish doctor, the Cockney Inspector.”
Sir Richard’s personal motto
following a Malay saying:
“If you really want (to do)
something, there are 1,000 ways achieving it”
Another favourite saying and quote:
“When you tread the soil of a
country and live beneath the skies, follow the customs of that country”
Extracted from Sir Richard Winstedt’s
“Start from Alif, Count from One”
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