An Unsolved Murder in Colonial Malaya The biggest Christian cemetery on Penang Island is Western Road Cemetery and includes graves of Commonwealth servicemen and police officers killed during the Malayan Emergency (1948-60). Their headstones are a standard design but in the same section is the grander tomb of John St Maur Ramsden who: ...
Penang's colonial era post boxes According to the Royal Mail there are around 115,500 post boxes across the UK so that 98% of the population live within half a mile of one. Roadside post boxes were introduced following the introduction of adhesive stamps for pre-payment of postage in 1840. The growth in demand for postal services and the need for more convenient places where letters could be...
" With all my heart I still love the man I killed...." Bette Davis in 'The Letter', Warner Bros. Pictures 1940 (Source: Getty Photos) Colonial Malaya's most shocking murder case Long Read In 2003 Hong Kong's ‘Milkshake Murder’ was a brief distraction from the SARS outbreak that dominated the news. Sixteen years later COVID-19, a more deadly respiratory illness, escalated to the level of a...
'I realise that the Police have been and are the spearhead of our attack as well as the main source of our defence against the bandits in Malaya.’ General Sir R.M.M. Lockhart, K.C.B., C.I.E., M.C., Director of Operations Federation of Malaya 1951-52 THE FEDERATION OF MALAYA POLICE Warrior Square next to Kuala Lumpur’s Lake Gardens is a monument to Malaysian police officers killed in the line of...
On January 27th the author Andrew Barber was invited to Penang’s Eastern & Oriental Hotel to discuss his novel ‘Fortress Penang’. Andrew is a former British diplomat, living in Malaysia whose previous books include: ‘Penang at War’, ‘Kuala Lumpur at War 1939-1945’, ‘Malaysian Moments-A Pictorial Retrospective’, ‘Colonial Penang 1786-1957’ and ‘Doris Van Der Stratten’. Andrew turned to...
In March 2020, after 28 years in Hong Kong, I moved to Penang as a base to travel in the region. The Covid 19 pandemic ended that plan and I spent much of the time re-reading books I had collected over the years. The only new book I bought was ...