Templer's Dream Read it here
I don’t know exactly when I got interested in joining the Royal Military College, RMC, the school built in Port Dickson in 1953 by General Sir Gerald Templer, the last British Governor General of Malaya. But I know it was before I moved to Victoria Institution that I first heard about it.
Just in the final term of Std Six, I moved from my cousin’s house near the old Taiping airport to another relative’s house in Assam Kumbang, a suburb nearer to Taiping town centre, with a bus service that would take me past KE. Bang Alias was a cousin of Bang Kassim, my elder sister’s husband who drove a taxi plying between Pantai Remis, near Kg. Panchor where they lived, and Taiping. Bang Alias, a government servant, had, besides a three-year old daughter, two boys, the elder one Zainal Abidin, we call him Sobri, already in Form 2 in KE, the younger brother one year behind me. I used to play kick football with them and a few other local boys, together with Ahmad Nazri, a Perak State player and a fullback for the Malayan national team. He had featured in the first Merdeka football tournament initiated by Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, as an annual commemorative showcase in conjunction with the country’s Independence in 1957. It was for a while the major football tournament in Asia at the time. Ahmad Nazri, greatly admired, served as a kind of mentor/coach to us. It must have been during one of those non-competitive sessions that I heard that Sobri was joining the Boy’s Wing of RMC.
General Templer’s vision for RMC was the training of boys to become eventual leaders in the armed forces, the civil service, academia,
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