A Company of Planters: Confessions of a Colonial Rubber Planter in 1950s Malaya

A Company of Planters: Confessions of a Colonial Rubber Planter in 1950s Malaya

Author: John Dodd
Publisher: Monsoon Books
ISBN: 9781912049103
Weight: 
Pages: 
Year: Jan 2018
Price: RM55

Through a collection of letters written to his best friend and to his father in England, and from his own personal diary entries, John Dodd's memoir offers a fascinating and amusing glimpse of life as a colonial rubber planter. With true stories and confessions that would make even Somerset Maugham blush, we discover what life was really like for young colonial planters in late-1950s Malaya. Increasing daily rubber output may have been their goal but for the young planters the bigger picture of chasing girls and finding a ‘keep' was of much greater importance. But life was more than just a series of stengahs in the clubhouse, dalliances in the Chinese brothels of Penang and charming ‘pillow dictionaries' – there were strikes, riots, snakes, plantation fires and deadly ambushes by Communist terrorists to contend with. Set against the backdrop of the Emergency period, the rise of nationalism and Malaya's subsequent Independence, A Company of Planters is a very personal, moving and humorous account of one man's experiences on the frequently isolated rubber plantations of colonial Malaya.

John Dodd (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) left Britain for colonial Malaya in 1956 aged 21; he now calls Malaysia home. In 1991 he was awarded an MBE for services to agriculture.