LITMIR.BIZ

       3

       A Profound Sensation

      The Proudlock case transfixed Malaya. ‘In the history of the FMS,’ said a Mail editorial, ‘the case is without a parallel … It is not exaggerating … to say that news of the death sentence passed upon the accused woman came as a great shock throughout Selangor and further afield.’

      To understand the trial’s impact, it is necessary to bear in mind that, in 1911, there were only 700 Britons in Kuala Lumpur and a little over 1,200 in the entire FMS. This was a relatively small group whose members, bound by culture and language and social background, took an obsessive, almost familial interest in one another. No matter how trivial, everything they did was considered news. In the Mail, items such as, ‘Mr P. C. Russell has taken to a motorbicycle’, and ‘We regret to learn that Mrs Noel Walker is laid up with rheumatic gout’, were daily fare. Banal fare, perhaps, but then British Malaya was a banal place. Nothing much happened there. The British were ever complaining that the country was dull. Ethel Proudlock changed all that. One of their own had been convicted of murder. Not only was the victim English – which introduced an element of fratricide – but the perpetrator was a woman. Ethel Proudlock had violated two taboos – three if you counted her infidelity. The British in Malaya were understandably stunned.

      What worried them particularly was the impact this would have on their standing, not just locally as the standard-bearers of civilization, but in England, where many people saw them as sybarites, a charge that deeply offended them. In their own estimation, they were models of rectitude: conscientious, enterprising, industrious – everything one would expect of a group whose job it was to build an empire. At great risk to themselves, they believed, they had come to Malaya to bring civilization to a backward people And did those at Home (in the Mail, ‘Home’ was always capitalized) thank them for it? Quite the contrary; they were defamed and vilified.

      Few in England knew anything about Malaya. They were ignorant of the heat, the insects, the monotony, the risks to life and limb. They couldn’t even find it on the map. Letters were for ever turning up in the FMS capital addressed to Kuala Lumpur, India; Kuala Lumpur, China; Kuala Lumpur, Tibet; even – and this is my favourite – Kuala Lumpur, Asia Minor. ‘This diversity, of course, has its charm,’ the Mail remarked in 1910, ‘but it’s not particularly gratifying to those who think that the FMS should, owing to their increasing importance, be brought geographically to an anchor.’

      They had been brought to an anchor now. Word of the Proudlock trial quickly spread beyond Malaya. It became a topic of conversation not just in India and Australia, Canada and New Zealand, but in the British capital itself. ‘Several London newspapers which arrived … last night’, the Mail reported with some embarrassment, ‘publish fairly long reports of the Kuala Lumpur tragedy. One paper devotes nearly a column to the affair under the heading, Sensational Case in British Colony.’ (Another gratuitous offence, this: the Straits Settlements were a colony; the Federated Malay States were a protectorate.) People were finally talking about Malaya, but what they were saying did not redound to its credit.

      Small though the British community was, Steward’s murder polarized it. Some saw the trial as a travesty and claimed that a gross injustice had been done. A decent woman had defended her honour and, instead of being celebrated for her courage, now found herself under sentence of death. It was unconscionable, these people said, none more passionately than ‘Irishman’.

      In a letter to the Mail, ‘Irishman’ described Mrs Proudlock as a modest, quiet and unassuming woman, devoted to her husband and her daughter. ‘I put it to the community at large,’ he wrote, ‘is not a woman justified in defending her honour which, to many, is dearer than their lives? Or are we to consider our wives and daughters so little above the brute creation that a defence of their honour is unjustified by the laws of the land we live in.’ Having had his say, he felt compelled to explain himself: ‘I append the nom de plume Irishman … because although we are impulsive and demonstrative as a race, in no country in the world is the honour of women held in higher reverence.’

      There were other testimonials. ‘Having known Ethel Proudlock intimately for the past 11 years,’ ‘FMS’ wrote, ‘I feel it is due her to say that, in all those years, I have found her to be sincere, truthful, modest and chaste in conversation.’ Another letter a day later applauded her bravery: ‘The death sentence is little likely to prevent the English woman doing her duty in a similar emergency, I trust. Thank God that there are many of them of Mrs Proudlock’s pluck.’

      Modest? Chaste? Death before dishonour? Even in 1911, there were parts of the world where much of this would have sounded dated. British Malaya, though, was not one of them. Though Victoria had died a decade earlier, Kuala Lumpur was still very much a Victorian enclave. Many of its inhabitants had come to the FMS in the 1890s and, by 1911, the values and attitudes they’d taken with them, instead of withering had, if anything, grown more vigorous. An example of this is the view they took of women.

      One of the most popular books in the Kuala Lumpur Book Club – facetiously known as the Dump of Secondhand Books – was John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. The volume contained what may be Ruskin’s most famous lecture, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’. The lecture – a key Victorian document and hugely influential – defined the ideal woman as a creature both sweet and passive, obedient and gentle, pliant and self-deprecating. The title refers to Ruskin’s view that a home run by a woman conscious of her responsibilities is more than just a dwelling place; it becomes a place of enchantment, a garden graced by a queen.

      In 1911 in Malaya, women were still expected to conform to the Ruskin paradigm: a person who didn’t seek to realize herself, but was content to be her husband’s instrument – his subject, even. Always aware of the duty she bore him, she ministered to his needs and deferred to his better judgement. If called upon to do so, she was ready ‘to suffer and be still’ – the words Sarah Stickney Ellis used in 1845 to describe a woman’s highest duty. But a life of self-renunciation was not enough; she had also to be pure. Purity was a woman’s greatest asset. Take it away and she promptly became a brute. It was a woman’s job to civilize men, to raise them up. (Here, her task was analogous to that of Malaya’s empire-builders.) She had to be ‘the angel in the home’, a moral touchstone to whom others turned for guidance. It was on this account that the so-called fallen woman inspired such horror. A woman who strayed from the path of virtue didn’t just jeopardize her own life, she jeopardized the lives of those who most depended on her: her husband, whose shame now made him the object of scorn; and her offspring, who would ever bear

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