To forget one’s ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.
– Chinese Proverb
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Looking back, I can attribute my 50-year career as a journalist to three people — my English grandfather and Eurasian parents.
My maternal grandfather British Major Leopold James Pierson was a First World War volunteer who fought in Eastern Europe.
Grandpa ‘Pierson’, whose descendant was a member of the elite bodyguards of King Leopold, was twice injured — once in the shoulder, apparently from a shrapnel from a shell in the Battle of Gallipoli.
In the 1915-1916 WW1 battle, 73,485 British, Irish and French troops were killed in the failed capture of the Dardanelles Straits.
I was six when he regaled me with his wartime stories which included a short stint in the Boer war in South Africa, and as young as I was, I could sing such as ‘Walk Eliza’ and ‘The Baby’s name’.
This included the more difficult Baby’s song which went:
‘The baby’s name is Kitchener, Carington, Methuen, Kekewich, White Cronje, Plummer, Powell, Majuba, Gatacre, Warren, Colenso, Kruger Capetown, Mafeking, French, Kimberley, Ladysmith, ‘bobs’ Union Jack and Fighting Mac, Lyddite, Pretoria, Blobbs.’
For his heroic efforts, he was promoted and enlisted as an officer in the army, rising to the rank of major and sent to Rawalpindi (now Peshawar) before being boarded out.
Grandpa told me stories of laughing jackals in the streets of Rawalpindi and even threw in a children’s Tamil nursery rhyme.
Sometime in the early 1920s, Major Pierson migrated to Malaya to join the Public Works Department (now called the JKR).
In 1923, Pierson befriended a Welshman from Cardiff, a chartered mechanical engineer, Isaac James Harpur, from the PWD in Jerantut.
Harpur started his career in Nyasaland’s PWD as an assistant engineer after the World War I in 1917.
In 1920, he was posted to Malaya and three years later to Kuantan in the East Coast as acting executive engineer where he met Major Pierson who was a Free Mason.
To assist Pierson, Harpur offered him a contract to supervise and build a section of the old Bentong-Kuantan Road.
As a child in the early late 1950s, I remember grandpa Pierson telling me the story of his encounter with a tiger (Panthera tigris jacksoni) while visiting the construction site in the days where hundreds of carnivores roamed the Malayan forests, especially Pahang and Perak.D
Pierson reminisced: “After arriving at the site in Jerantut, I was inspecting the road works when a tiger emerged from the jungle when I was all aloneD.
“The tiger must have also been surprised to see a strange human being with a large walking stick in shorts and stockings, wearing a solar hat.
“I froze at it circled around me a few feet away, sniffed at me because I did not look (or smell) like the locals (Malays or Orang Asli), then in a flash leaped back into the jungle and it was gone,” said my white-haired and stocky 6ft 3in tall grandfather.
It was in Pahang that Pierson adopted my mother Lily who was the daughter of Harpur and a young Malay from a village in Jerantut.
Lily was a fearless woman who first courted danger when she was living with Pierson in a hill top residence of the PWD engineer.
Raised by a Cantonese ‘amah’ my mother recalled: “I was about three when I noticed a small furry animal with stripes playing on our lawn and thought it was a cat.
“I ran out of the bungalow and picked it up and wanted to carry the animal back into house when our Chinese amah screamed. She ran out, grabbed hold of me, rushed into the house and locked the main door and the windows.”
Minutes later my mother heard growls outside the premises.
The tigress had sniffed the human scent right up to the locked entrance as our amah held my mother tightly, praying quietly.
Fortunately, the tigress changed its mind about tearing down the wooden entrance and within seconds disappeared with its cub.
After the incident, Pierson sent my mother to Ipoh to live with a community of Chinese Thai Eurasians and met my father who was seven years her senior.
When my mother was in her teens, she was sent to Hong Kong for a nursing course while the retired major had a ‘live-in’ Japanese mistress for 15 years.
Grandpa said his wife left for Hiroshima just before the Japanese landed in Kelantan on December 8, 1941.
My father was a Scottish-Thai-Hokkien Eurasian who was born a posthumous child in Ipoh on January 20, 1915.
The son of a Scotsman Alexander Hector Ritchie of Bucksburn, Aberdeen, his Scottish forebears were relatively prosperous farmers.
The oldest son of William Ritchie who owned a 148-acre cattle farm called Bucksburn House, Alex was in his 20s when he left Scotland to settle in Malaya.
He married into a wealthy Ipoh Chinese-Thai Tan Kim Phoon whose family owned a 30-acre parcel of land not far from town, and had two sons.
Grandad Alexander was 34 when he died and was buried at ‘God’s Green Acre’ cemetery at Batu Gajah in Perak which is now a British war memorial.
Sadly, grandmother also died after contracting Bubonic plague when my father was 12.
Apparently, the plague spread to Ipoh through flea-carrying rats in wooden crates from an Eastern European country.
Known at the ‘black death’, an estimated 50 million people from Europe or 65 per cent of the population, died at the height of the pandemic between 1346 and 1353.
My father wrote: “The plague spread to our country when the first casualty was a six-year-old boy who had high fever (but) my mother took care of him and contracted the disease. She died within three days.”
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.
