Chapter 1 Episode 5: Templer's Dream

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, the professions and industry, to serve the young nation.  Appropriately, its motto is “Serve to Lead”.  There were of course other elite schools, civilian, aimed at the same goal.  Besides VI, there were King Edward, Malay College Kuala Kangsar, Penang Free School, Johor English School, Malacca High School and King George V School in Seremban, to name a few.  But only RMC was run as a military school. 

Picture from Seouled out in Seoul blogspot

The college had two wings; the Boy’s Wing was patterned after Eton, the famous English public school, while the Cadet Wing trained as the name suggests the future officers of the armed forces, and was for the army modeled on Sandhurst Military Academy in the UK.  The Boy’s Wing functioned like a normal fully residential secondary school, later to proliferate in the 70s, starting from Form One on to Sixth Form.  In 1962 after the College was moved to its Sungei Besi campus, it only admitted those entering Form Four after successfully passing the Lower Certificate Examination (LCE), and a special entrance examination conducted by the College.  After sitting for the Cambridge O-level Exams in Form Five, students make a choice whether they want to continue to the Sixth Form or join the Cadet Wing for another two years.  Transition into Lower Six then was only possible after passing a special qualifying exam, those not able to make it left the Boy’s Wing to join other schools, while those passing the military entrance exam went into the Cadet Wing, just in another part of the RMC campus, down 365 steps to where Dewan Templer and the parade ground were located.  Outstanding candidates of the latter selection process got to go to Sandhurst or Portsmouth Naval Academy, also in England.  After 1990 the Cadet Wing became the Armed Forces College, which still later was upgraded into the Malaysian National Defence University.

A group of us from VI took the special exams to enter RMC a couple of months before the end of 1961, as recommended by our form teachers; Fadhil Azim, Raja Malek and Chong Sun Thien, the VI champion miler, besides me passed both the IQ and physical exams, and the oral interview after that.  My exposure to the Red Cross and the ATC in VI as well as being the school under-15 football team captain, and a brother-in-law in the air force, must have contributed to my getting through the whole selection process.  The day early in 1962 arrived when those from KL joined other successful candidates from the rest of the country at the KL railway station to board several three-ton military trucks standing by to transport us to the Sungei Besi Camp.  These military trucks were to be our means of transport for the next four years to all college activities, whether to outside games, inter-school activities, weekend camps, even to Friday mosque.  That day there was great excitement and chatter amongst the new “recruits”, new friends immediately made, and much anticipation.  I was delighted to be reunited with Hayatuddin, a former classmate in SMC in King Edward VII School, who also made it to RMC that year.

The Boy’s Wing was divided into eight companies, so called in keeping with military organization, of roughly forty students each.  I was assigned to B Company. The head of a company was a Senior Under Officer (SUO) selected from the senior classmen, assisted by three Junior Under Officers and a Senior Boy; they get to wear the appropriate epaulet every time they are in uniform.  The rest of the company were called of course just Boys.  The company was supervised by a company master, a senior teacher assisted by another teacher, usually one from the science the other from the arts stream.  We get to wear green military uniforms, free even for the underwear, and free laundry, free books and food.  We also get a monthly allowance of RM20 per month, called “stoppages”.  This was a degree of economic independence much appreciated for students like me.  

The college was run along strict military lines.  Discipline was enforced in the Boy’s Wing by the SMO, the Senior Military Officer, and on the parade ground by the Sergeant-Major, a large Scotsman with an equally impressive curled moustache and a baton under his arm to fit and ready to strike fear into a young boy’s Saturday existence.  Reveille was at 6 am, and roll-calls were called in drill formation by company before dinner every evening.  Then “prep” (preparation) sessions took place for two hours before “lights out” at 10pm at night.  During morning breaks of class, the “Orders of the Day”, a daily briefing, was read to the assembled company by the Senior Boy to announce news and company activities for the day.  Meals were taken together at fixed times, organized in rows of tables by company in the Dining Hall, the SUOs occupying the High Table.  Tubs of margarine, sugar and bread were at the students’ disposal during afternoon tea every day before they go to the fields for sports activities. The Last Post was played every 6.00 o’clock in the afternoon, where you were to stand still in remembrance of the fallen soldier, wherever or whatever you were doing at the time.  Any infringement of the college code of conduct, like if you were caught smoking, or even caught malaria (you are supposed to take the anti-malaria paladrin pill every day!), you will be “gated”, which required the offender to report in full drill uniform to the guardhouse a kilometer and a half away, every hour at the weekend; and grounded, meaning you cannot apply for leave for the weekend as your other colleagues can.

But, life in RMC was a dream for any 15-year old, though a few much coddled in childhood maybe could not stand the rigour and discipline of a military-like environment.  But if you had survived the “ragging” by seniors, usually from other companies to avoid lasting damage to relationships, that took place as soon as you were oriented into the company in the first couple of weeks after admission, you have much to enjoy and learn in and out of the classrooms in these college years.  Most of the ragging were mild and given and taken in good humour, such as when I was made to count the number of steps in our block, as punishment for not naming the “bannisters” correctly; some more severe, like when the freshmen were woken up in the early hours of the night, made to put black shoeshine on our faces, have a quick shower, and have to sit under a fan for hours, and interrogated and teased/humiliated.  After these raggings got out of hand, as I heard some years after I had left RMC had occurred on one occasion leading to a death, they were banned, on pain of expulsion for the perpetrators.

I had a lovely time in RMC; to me the four years I spent there was a more adventurous extension of school life after KE and VI.  It was to be a period of bloom and achievement when the boy emerges to become a young adult, as liberating as the butterfly emerging out of its cocoon: a time of intellectual growth, a rounded development of personality and the maturation of character.  I participated in everything, in class, on the sports field, and in college societies and activities.  And I enjoyed the compulsory company weekend camps in Kuala Kubu Baru, and the two annual college camps for the non-exam Forms four and lower six.  The opportunities were open to everyone, and most of us took advantage of them.  Some were better in scholastics, others as sportsmen, yet others as great debaters and excelled in theatre and the arts.  Of my classmates, Shamsul Akmar excelled in boxing, Yusof Hashim in model planes and photography, Dahan in oratorial competition (“Four score and seven years ago….”) and acting, and I represented the College in football when Ghanalingam was the captain, who later became the owner and CEO of Westports, and was reunited with Sobri in the team.  I played sepak takraw, now an international sports, with the likes of Halim Ali, who later went on to become the Chief Secretary to the Government, and Aziz Hassan, my wing man on the college team who concluded his career as Deputy Army Chief.  These sporting skills I had hewn in Kg Baru during my VI days.  One year I was also the college backstroke champion, having learnt to swim in the Semanggol canal, improved later in the Mindef swimming pool and in VI, where the biggest test was swimming twenty-five laps of the twelve and a half-meter pool for qualifications.

From left Dahan, me and Hadi in sixth form 1965

When in Upper Six, an exam year, I wrote, produced and directed a musical pantomime play for the Persatuan Kebudayaan Kebangsaan, PKK, of the college, having been impressed by the stage effects of VI’s Theatre Club production of King Lear, performed in the KL Town Hall, when I was in Form Three.  Raja Malek worked with me on mixing the music, combining Tschaikovsky, the Beatles (“Roll over Beethoven”) and some Malay Asli tunes.  The musical drama called “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” was performed in the Dewan Templar attended by the whole college.  Rahman Embong, who had left college the year before, thought the production was a success and wrote about it.  After that successful staging, only the Director of Studies could stop me from taking on the directorial role in an English play for the theatre club that final year.  Together with Hayatuddin, I also started a magazine for the college economics society called “The Entrepreneur”, under the then tutelage of our teacher Anwar Fazal, who later went on to become the famous consumerist.  I wrote about Walt Rostow’s stages of economic growth in the inaugural issue, which continued to a total of five issues after I left the college.  While Azat Kamaluddin, Dahan and Gurdial Singh, Chua Jui Meng and company acted in plays and took part in debates, I and Hayatuddin were busy representing RMC in inter-school economics and geography quiz competition, for me a throwback to class quizzes in Victoria Institution.

In the first year in RMC, I was placed in the science stream in Form Four, maybe because of my better performance in the science subjects I took in the LCE.  I particularly liked chemistry (and balancing the chemical formulaes) and mathematics, but didn’t care too much for biology.  But, towards the end of the first term, I felt  drawn to the arts subjects, missing geography and literature.  I sought the advice of my chemistry teacher, Mr. Eddy Shun, who happens to also be my assistant Company master, who consented to my transfer to the arts stream.   So the next term I was admitted to Form 4 Arts (2); except in Sixth Form, there were two classes in each stream in Forms four and five.   Mr. Gopal was the class teacher and took on the literature class, while Mr. Liew taught us mathematics.  We got to read Winston Churchill’s My Early Life (what prose, from a master of the English language!) and The Great Ascent, a true account of Edmund Hilary’s conquest of Mt. Everest.  We all had our own mountains to climb, and climbed we all did.  

By Form Five I moved to the A class, and Shakespeare (Macbeth and Julius Caesar), and Mr. C.T. Thomas for our maths teacher (he never failed to draw a perfect circle in free hand on the blackboard!), who made, and as only he can make, the mathematics of navigation so very interesting.  Mr. Michael Loh taught us English, Mohamed Dahan and Munir Majid in the year after us were his favourite students.  Once when Mr. Loh asked whether anyone of us knew of any humorist writer, I blurted out the American James Thurber to the surprise of the class, their not knowing that I had already read his biography in the USIS library some years ago.  Mr. Augustine Ooi was our class teacher as well as B Company master, a geographer famous among the boys for his story of “the three wells” (Well! Well! Well!). 

In sixth form, there was Flight Captain McConnell, our Lower Six teacher and my favourite; he would lead our class in geography and general paper.  I wrote a class paper for him on communist China trade relations which impressed him enough to mention it to the class.  Then there was Mr. Subramaniam for history, Mr. Davidson later Mr. Balakrishnan, (who was the teacher that had encouraged the formation of  Old Putra Association, OPA, the college old boys association) for Government and the already mentioned Anwar Fazal for economics.  For Malay language and literature we had Cikgu Idris Tain, who later became the Director of Education in Negri Sembilan, and his place was taken over by Cikgu Ismail.   Rahman Embong and Aziz Rahman were among the leading lights of the Malay class and favourites of Idris Tain, and each in turn would lead the PKK. Mr. Tan who took General paper was also the new Director of Studies (DoS) in charge of all academic matters in the college; he later after I left the college went on to become headmaster of VI.  He took over the DoS post from Mr. Walwork in my lower sixth year.  What impressed me most about Tan Cheng Or was his ability to talk for hours on the turn of a word; he was the one more than Michael Loh was for the others, who inspired in me the love for, as Stephen Spielberg once said in his Oscar acceptance speech for direction of Schindler’s List, the Word.  

It was also at the start of Lower Six in 1964 that Fadhil Azim introduced me to Theodore Schultz’s, The Making of the President 1960, about Jack Kennedy’s ascent to the presidency of the United States.  In the year before that on November 22nd, at the moment when everyone remembered what exactly he was doing, or he was at, for us during that evening’s roll-call, that we all heard news of his assassination.  In that moment’s minute silence that we observed in respect for Kennedy, our minds may have collectively though fleetingly as mine did cast to the fragility of our own dreams. 

1999 Class of 1963 Reunion. All grown up, some with wives.

RMC had many things to commend itself.   For my Class of 63, (a naming convention recommended by Habibur Rahman from the common Form Five year of our enrollment, between those that spent two years and those four years in college, that was adopted by the OPA), as with all other cohorts, RMC was an incomparable breeding ground of leaders.  Not only for its sporting and scholastic excellence through the decades of its existence; but none more important than for its impact on annual groups of young boys in the prime of their youth, drawn from a multi-racial stock with diverse economic backgrounds, and going through four years of living, studying, and playing together in an educational mission to build character and leadership unique in its disciplined military-style context.  It had produced over nearly sixty years since it opened its doors in 1953 cohort after cohort of generals, civil servants, industry and civic leaders including politicians, entrepreneurs, academics and yes, even a smattering of “rebels”, who have contributed much to society and in their own personal lives, in one way or another.  It is perhaps in the DNA of RMC that explains how even those who spent only two years in the Boy’s Wing, or who didn’t excel academically or in sports during their full term in the college, or those who didn’t go on to Sandhurst, that they had later bloomed in their military and civilian careers and made significant leadership contributions in their chosen field, even in comparison to those who had outstanding careers in college.  Whatever it is their experience in college had created bonds of friendship, loyalty and camaraderie that had lasted decades, and that are now being celebrated as fifty-year anniversaries, often repeated, cohort by cohort to extend well into the rest of this decade.   At a National Education Brains Trust in 1996, held at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies in Kuala Lumpur, attended by luminaries in the education field, one recommendation was for the government to establish five new residential schools throughout the country patterned after RMC.  That was indeed a backhanded compliment to the achievements of the one existing RMC.

The success of RMC was the ultimate fulfillment of Templer’s dream.   At one point, at a conference on Vision 2020 organized by the PM’s Office in early 1993 at a Genting Highlands resort, there were simultaneously twelve secretary generals of ministries and director-generals, two of whom would beginning eight years later assume over a six-year period one after another the Chief Secretary to the Government posts, three chiefs of the armed forces, a few senior politicians, ambassadors, and several senior academics, who were all former students or Old Puteras of RMC.  If they were a political party they could have formed the government then and run the country over the ten years to and beyond the 1998 Financial Crisis.  Or formed a junta.  But, fortunately for the country, there was already a civilian government.   As it turned out, these graduates of RMC even missed the chance to take a group photograph that day!

My four years in RMC was definitely up by the time we all set for the Higher School Certificate (HSC) Exams in November of 1965.  One day during the revision period before the exams, Basri Hamzah had caught me while playing a game of sepak takraw with news that I had been awarded the Director of Studies Prize for best scholar of the year.  Later news broke that Syed Mustafa had won the Governor’s Prize for best sportsman, and Raja Malek the Commandant’s Prize for the best leader. We were all to receive our prizes during the coming passing-out parade.  

Us on Federal Territory Day class of 1963 reunion 2015

After dinner one evening the week before the actual HSC exams, the whole college assembled to hear the announcement by the DoS of the scholarship winners for the graduating sixth formers to further their studies in university, some to the UK, some to Australia and New Zealand, and others to University of Malaya under various scholarship schemes.  Nobody won the coveted Shell Scholarship that year.  I was awarded a Colombo Plan scholarship to study in Australia.   After the traditional dunking in the company bathroom, I spent talking into the wee hours and eventually slept on the open veranda with my friend SUO Khalid Hussein.  We only had the exams and later the Sovereign’s Parade to look forward to, our actual last day of college.  “Prep time” was over, we now go on to pursue our own dreams.

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