A stalwart of the British and Malayan police service remembered
I FELT it important to pay tribute to 104-year-old KT Mathew of the Malaysian police who died in Kerala, India, on Sept 21. Mathew, while serving the British Military Police in Malaya in the early 1940s, bluntly rejected the order by Japanese occupying forces to serve the Liberation Army along the Thailand-Burma border during WWII. While being escorted out on a country road for a certain execution, he seized an opportunity to make a dramatic escape into the jungle. He surfaced only three years later, after the Japanese surrender in 1945.
While in hiding, we can surmise that with his expertise, Mathew may have aided the resistance forces (part of the famous Force 136) behind Japanese lines. He continued to serve the British police and later went back to his native state of Kerala. After a break, he returned to Malaya and saw service as a civilian of the Malayan Police (in the Finance Department, specifically) till the 1960s.
He was a prolific writer, contributing articles regularly to the Malayan Police Magazine .Inone article dated June 1960, “Life in Finance Branch”, he wrote that “On pay day, the Finance Office assumes an air of gaiety. A clerk or two from the other building will drift in to our office on the pretext of looking for files; but their very lack of enthusiasm betrays the fact that files are of secondary importance for that day. They have come to see for themselves if the pay packets are ready”.
Mathew had a way of relating interesting anecdotes, and these casual little snippets give us a sense of what life was like back then.
I regret that I was only able to speak with Mathew in February 2020, because by then he was hearing impaired and had significant memory loss, which meant we had to prompt him to recollect events in Malaya.
Mathew’s funeral was held on Sept 23 at the Mar Thoma Church in Kozhenchery, Kerala. This majestic sanctuary was built by his late father, the Reverend KT Thomas of the Syrian church, hailed as a denomination belonging to the “oldest Christian community outside Palestine”.
We salute the centenarian’s service to Malaysia.
Note: The letter writer is the former president of the Regional Relations Association, Kuala Lumpur.