Food Shortage

3 Sept 1946, Sunday.

3rd appearance of Killearn in so many days. Kwan really had it for him. Either that or the situation in 1946 was very dired - food shortage, corruption, rampant black market, incompetency and inefficiency of the returning British forces and government. The people had it, even for the English-educated like Kwan. These laid the seeds for the postwar anti-colonial movement.

You could read more about these in the books by Kevin Blackburn, Karl Hack and Paul Kratoska about the Japanese Occupation in Singapore and Malaya and its aftermath. Mark Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow's Singapore A Biography also contained scathing comments about the British Military Adminstration (BMA). The bad times are recorded in the various oral history tapes in the National Archives of Singapore. Also captured in Beyond The Empires: Memories Retold.