TRIBUTE ABDUL - Perdana Library

The Verdict of History
(Gerald Hawkins O.B.E )
The Muse of History is an austere and forbidding
female with a particularly sharp eye on heroes
and hero-worship. To anticipate her verdict is a
piece of presumption so great as to amount to contempt
of the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, it is
worth trying and it is fascinating to imagine what
she, with the advantages of perspective and hindsight,
will have to say on the man who has been guiding
Malaya for the first six years of independence.
She has seen many such changes where the new
presbyter was but the old priest writ large, where
the new commissar is a more ruthless Tsar, where
in the French Revolution the dictator Napoleon
followed the democratic Mirabeau.
She will look first at his character, background
and aims. His background is royal but he is, genuinely
and sincerely, a good mixer. His scholastic
career was as undistinguished as Sir Winston
Churchill's. Tn his early, pre-war government
service he was regarded as pleasant, indifferent and
averse to the inevitable routine of the service, though
at least one shrewd judge, the late S.W. Jones, noted
that "he had quality". The outbreak of war
revealed him as a man of courage and resource.
He is a keen sportsman. No one, least of all himself.