With all his responsibilities, it was unsurprising that Angus’s letters home were infrequent

Although officers were allowed into clubs and invited to play on residents’ tennis courts and swim in their pools, these offers did not apply to NCOs or Indian officers. In general, the Singaporeans were not overly friendly. Some officers resented these people’s stand-offishness, especially when “up country” in Malaya the planters were “incredibly hospitable.”

Away from such sprees with his brother officers, Angus Macdonald attended more formal social engagements. In his 1940 New Year missive he informs his mother that he and Jim Cunningham were invited to a reception at Government House.

Officers regularly received invitations to tea parties and dances there and they usually accepted as this was one way of getting to know “suitable” young women.

This time it was to meet Lord Willingdon on his way to New Zealand, as the country was celebrating its centenary and the retired Viceroy of India was representing Britain in this event.

Angus would have strolled on the Padang, patronised Raffles and worshipped in St Andrew’s Cathedral with its array of whirring fans hanging from the neo-Gothic ceiling. However, Europeans were only a part of the Singapore community.

Impermanent

Not far from the plush, residential precincts of Orchard and Holland Roads were narrow, crowded streets with impermanent dwellings where transient workers and their families eked a living. Angus Rose visited these parts where Singapore’s Entertainment Worlds (New World, Happy World, and Great World) were situated.

Angus Macdonald was sure to have accompanied him to places where reputedly “no white man came”. In this part of the city, Chinese, Muslim, Malay, and Japanese plays were staged. When, in 1936, the French playwright, Jean Cocteau, viewed these different examples of oriental drama, he described them as “interminable monologues with no sign of a beginning or an end to the performance.” He observed that some plays lasted five hours.

At these Entertainment Worlds, men could buy 10 dances with a pretty Chinese girl for 50 cents but he was not allowed to touch her. On one occasion, Rose and his friends sampled a Japanese dinner in a Singapore restaurant.

In a spotlessly clean room, guests sat, tailorfashion, around an 18-inch high circular table with a hole in the centre. First they drank rice wine, followed by a dish of bamboo shoots, vegetables, chicken, raw eggs and soya-bean sauce sautéed in butter.

After the meal, geisha girls performed. This agreeable ceremony with its display of the gentle arts was Angus’s introduction to Japan. If my uncle had cared to learn more about the oriental nation, he would have discovered Japan’s other customs: its tea ceremonies, pottery skills, calligraphy, flower arrangements, poetry, courtesy, discipline, truthfulness, and honour.

However, Angus, his brother officers and, not least, the jocks themselves, were only to learn about Japan’s more brutal attributes.

With all his responsibilities, it was unsurprising that Angus’s letters home were infrequent. However, the odd one or two were important as letter-writing was the only way men serving overseas could keep in touch with their families.

Airmail

When war broke out, it took up to two months for a letter to reach Britain by surface mail from Singapore. A speedier alternative was to use airmail which was prohibitively expensive or, in an emergency, to send a telegram. Angus’s method was to encourage all female family members, his mother, sisters, and aunts, to pass his letters around; when he wrote to Daisy, she let Esther read his news. In a similar way, his sister shared Angus’s correspondence with her mother and aunts.

When he wrote to Daisy in early January 1940, Angus attributes his busy life not to the rigorous jungle training he and his battalion were undergoing, but to the New Year’s festivities.

“New Year,” he wrote, “was celebrated in the usual fashion. On New Year’s Eve, the sergeants came and saw the New Year in with the officers in the officers’ mess. On New Year’s Day the men ate heavily of turkey, plum pudding and beer. The Fancy Dress ball at the club was a great success.”

For Daisy there was a sense of déjà vu as she read what the jocks feasted on; as a 20-year-old, she had received a Christmas letter from her father, then Colonel Crabbe, when he was serving with the Grenadier Guards at Modder River in South Africa. Like his grandson 40 years later, Crabbe had told Daisy what his men ate on Christmas Day also.

Angus communicates well on paper and although we do not have her letters to him, we receive an impression that Daisy is an interested correspondent as her son offers snippets of gossip and discloses what is happening to his friends.

Giles Tweedie, newly arrived from Glasgow and brother of John, Angus’s predecessor, was in hospital for an undisclosed injury or ailment. Angus explains that he paid a visit to Tweedie who was sent back to Britain the following month.

Hector Greenfield’s son, James, disclosed that Giles had suffered a mental breakdown. It’s a tribute to Angus, as adjutant and the other officers of the battalion, that they treated this young officer with sympathy and respect.

Cheerful

Angus Rose left again on January 2 to Staff College, Quetta to attend a six-month course. “I shall miss him as he is always cheerful company,” writes Angus. On February 20, Greenfield returned to the UK on promotion to Colonel to take up a staff post, although at the time Angus wrote that nobody, including Greenfield himself, knew his destination or the exact nature of his posting.

With his departure, Colonel Stewart took command of the Argylls. The continual comings and goings of officers and men had to be accepted. Angus said goodbye to a number of friends when the battalion left Secunderabad.

John Lindsay MacDougall was due to sail with 2nd Argylls to Singapore but at the last minute was sent to Britain to train 8th Battalion destined for North Africa.

His trunk was left on the ship and put in storage in Singapore until the end of the war, when it made its way back to Lindsay MacDougall’s home at Lunga in Argyll. Aubrey Gibbon, who was to marry Lindsay MacDougall’s widow, went to 1st Battalion and to the Western Desert.