Their condition was desperate. Many arrived with nothing...

By Mary Gladstone

Paris’s party arrived in Padang a week after they left Singapore and a few hours before Lieutenant Forbes who, although he lost the race, managed to joke about it with his opponents. Angus and his brother officers either booked in at the Orangji Hotel near the seafront or at the Enderaach Club, which the Dutch had turned into quarters for British officers. Two local schools accommodated the other ranks.

Flanked on its western side by the Indian Ocean, Padang was the biggest community the evacuees had encountered on their escape through Sumatra. It was a well-laid out town with huge, yellow camphor trees lining the main streets.

There were Dutch colonial bungalows with wide verandas, well-kept lawns and tidy gardens where families sat and dined in the evening. The local people lived in the old town with its narrow streets and backto-back houses close to a river that ran down to the sea front. Here, long sandy beaches backed by coconut palms met huge rollers that arrived unimpeded from the Antarctic.

The influx of servicemen and civilians had interrupted the usual calm of this attractive town. Each street seethed with refugees, as the Dutch termed the escapees, waiting for a berth on a ship bound for India or Australia. Their condition was desperate. Many arrived with nothing and some, who were in rags, had lost their shoes.

Ugly mood

They needed food, clothes, footwear, a roof over their head and, in some cases, medical attention and a barber. All lacked cash so each serviceman received money, eight guilders for an officer and five for the other ranks.

However, many of the troops were in an ugly mood and the Dutch were worried to learn that some servicemen had sold their weapons on the way over.

Relations between the colonials and the local population had been far from cordial ever since the latter had tried to overthrow their European rulers in the late 1920s. To avoid trouble, the Dutch disarmed refugee troops when they arrived and, in spite of some soldiers’ bad behaviour, were helpful and generous.

It was not only the other ranks whose attitude and actions left a lot to be desired. The highest-ranking officer of the Australian Imperial Forces, General Gordon Bennett, had decided just before the surrender to leave Singapore without consulting his peers, particularly Lieutenant General Percival. Bennett’s actions angered many, in particular Brigadier Paris.

On his arrival in Padang, the Brigadier took over as the senior officer. When Bennett’s British aide-decamp approached him for funds for his Australian superior, Paris let rip: “Let Bennett collect the bloody money himself!”

I’ve wondered how Angus occupied himself during those tense days before his departure for Ceylon. The British officers listened to the calamitous news on the wireless; each officer and man knew how desperate their situation had become. Padang was sealed off both from the air and at sea by surface ships and submarines, while the enemy was only 60 miles away by road. They were virtually trapped.

On February 24, Colonel Warren returned to Padang. The following day, Paris relinquished his post as the region’s senior British officer when he learned that he was to sail with his Argylls on a Dutch ship called the Rooseboom. It arrived that morning from Batavia in Java en route for Ceylon’s capital, Colombo.

Harbours

In our taxi one late afternoon, we followed scores of people as they left Padang’s centre. Seated on scooters, women road pillion behind men, some carrying huge parcels, others babies or large bags of shopping. Small children, clasped by the driver, propped their chins on the vehicle’s handlebars. Most were unhelmeted. All streamed southward out of the city in the direction of Teluk Bayur harbour.

Before we hailed our taxi, I asked the travel agent in our hotel if Teluk Bayur was the old Emmahaven, the port Angus sailed from. A woman at the counter laughed when I asked if anyone there could remember as far back as 1942. “I could have asked my grandmother,” she said, “but she died last year.”

I consulted my Lonely Planet guide that indicated Padang had three harbours: one on the mouth of the river that handled boats to and from the Mentawai islands, another 45 minutes from the centre at Teluk Kabung, and the third was Teluk Bayur, the commercial freight port two kilometres south of the city. This had to be the old Emmahaven.

Since I spoke no Indonesian and our driver no English, communication was made through an intermediary, the taxi man’s colleague on his mobile phone. Agreeing to take us to the harbour and back for 30,000 rupiah (about £6), he followed the river; at its mouth we discovered a beautiful, natural harbour somewhat marred by a large coal depot, storage sheds and a lot of waste.

There were shacks and other dilapidated habitations and, by the road, barrow vendors selling soft drinks and snacks. We drew up at the harbour entrance and saw through the locked gate several docked ships.

Then our driver conveyed us round the left side of the horseshoe-shaped bay where on one side was a forested precipice and on the other, a mountain range. This was Emmahaven. I had read accounts written by fugitives who claimed their journey from town to harbour was made by train; and there before us was the railway line, disused, hugging the road.

Flanked by palm-fringed beaches, Emmahaven in Angus’s time was an important port, as it held warehouses stocked with tobacco, rice, and tin. At this unhappy period, the harbour was a mess, and, although the city had only been bombed once, the buildings at the docks were destroyed and stained black by the fires. Few vessels in the bay were intact and a flurry of masts from sunken ships stuck out of the water.

Small groups

Arriving in the early afternoon of the 26th were lorries with escapees — nurses, wives, children, soldiers and businessmen. As they alighted, they clustered in small groups waiting for the time when they could climb the ship’s gangway. At 3pm Paris entered the docks with his Argylls who wasted no time in setting up on deck Bren guns and rifles, which they were to man in case of an enemy air attack.

At 5pm, as evening and, most importantly, darkness approached, the Rooseboom weighed anchor and sailed out of the harbour. As one of the Argylls, Corporal Walter Gibson states in his memoir composed at least eight years after the event: “We could see the half-submerged ships, victims of the Japanese raid, which dotted the entrance to the harbour.

“But even so I found myself caught up in the spell of the sunset’s beauty – for the dying rays fell on a lush growth of tropical vegetation on the dozens of islands round about us, and there are few more beautiful approaches in the world than Padang’s Bremmerhaven.” Gibson was referring to Emmahaven. More tomorrow

The serial: Largie Castle, A Rifled Nest Day 94