Anthony John Noel Richards: 1914-2000.

Anthony Richards was born at Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire, on 3 December 1914 and later moved to France Lynch, where his father, Kenneth Keble Evan Richards, was Vicar. After "Prep" school near Chepstow he attended King's (Cathedral) School, Worcester, between 1929 and 1934 where he studied Classics and earned the sobriquet "Tex" after an American boxer he was thought to resemble. He then went up to Oxford University on a minor scholarship to read History at Hertford College, graduating in 1937. He was a keen amateur photographer and sportsman.

Anticipating a career in the colonial service, he went on to complete the First Devonshire Course at Oxford in 1937-38 under the tutelage of the redoubtable Margery Perham. Together with W.G. (Bill) Morison, another Hertford student, he was encouraged to apply for the Sarawak service while awaiting the outcome of his examination for the Malayan Civil Service. Perhaps his interest was longstanding, as suggested by a childhood game in which "Sarawak" was the exotic name he gave to a favorite wild part of the garden. He and Morison were both accepted after their interviews with the Rajah's brother, Bertram Brooke (better known as the Tuan Muda), and went out together to Singapore on a Blue Funnel Line ship, arriving in Kuching on the Vyner Brooke on 9 September, 1938.

Anthony Richards' first lesson in Sarawak politics came from Captain Benfield of the Vyner Brooke, a veteran observer who had been plying between Singapore and Kuching for almost twenty years. To his Oxford friend, Brian Walsh Atkins, he wrote:

   He [Benfield] is of the opinion that the present government is
   selfish--and each man for himself--and has not the confidence and
   wholehearted backing of the people. They refer to 'The Rajah' and
   mean the former one, who was a martinet, but knew his business: he
   was a ruler whom these folk could appreciate.

Anthony was fortunate enough to spend his first year in the Government Secretariat in Kuching under the tutelage of the new Secretary for Native Affairs, Andrew MacPherson, who had an original and inquiring mind as well as a good knowledge of the Iban and other interior peoples. A vigorous but humorless Scot, he spoke fluent Malay and Iban. At that time, the Sarawak administration was going through something of a crisis. The third Rajah, Charles Vyner Brooke, had lost all interest in government (if, indeed, he had ever possessed any) but was unwilling to give a larger role to his younger and much more able brother, Bertram, despite the provisions made by their father, the second Rajah, in his political will for what amounted to a shared responsibility for governing.

In this power and policy vacuum the senior bureaucrats of the Secretariat, constituted as a Committee of Administration, became the effective executive and began to tighten the strings of centralized control in what had traditionally been a loose and decentralized system. Rebelling against this, the outstation officers, the District Officers and Residents who had always been the core of Brooke government (Vyner unkindly called them "little tin gods"), made their views known in no uncertain terms. Amidst this bitter rivalry, the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, Cyril Le Gros Clark, was one of the few men capable of independent and lucid thought. Commissioned by the Committee of Administration, he produced a report which made recommendations on every aspect of government, notably education and the need to strengthen the Native Officer and Junior Administrative Services with a view to their taking over more responsibility. Not surprisingly, the report was left to gather dust.

One of Anthony Richards' first tasks (no doubt on MacPherson's orders) was to write a memorandum on policy in which he revived many of Le Gros Clark's ideas. This was a thoughtful and sophisticated (if somewhat sharply expressed) document in which his study of history shines through. It would be claiming too much to suggest that he could have done anything to rescue the terminally afflicted Brooke regime, but he certainly provided a brilliant diagnosis of its problems. This is how I summarized his views in The Name of Brooke:

He saw two major faults in the old Residential system: firstly, that it encouraged the growth of different policies, 'in so far as there were any at all' in different areas; secondly, that there were no means, short of change of regime, of 'ensuring any progress within those territories, distinct as they were, and jealous of each other and "interference." Altogether, it was static and inward-looking, 'outpaced in the course of progress', and therefore 'best left for dead'. Reversion to this system as it had operated was 'ridiculous.' The new [centralized bureaucratic] system, on the other hand, lacked adequate staff, the delegation of power from Kuching and a definite plan of implementation, so that while the old system was being destroyed, there was a hiatus of uncertainty and disbelief.' Contrasting the two, he described the old system as being forced into centralized execution but lacking centralized policy and control, while the new system wrongly attempted 'centralized execution of a scrappy and non-existent policy.'

Privately, he was highly critical of his fellow officers. Writing to his parents in March 1939 he described how

   a crowd of outstation officers (down for the races) came trooping
   out of the CS's [Chief Secretary's] office. A bigger crowd of the
   most ultimate saps you never saw: one with a ludicrous moustache
   (who looked, as Bill [Morison] said, like something that crept out
   of a tree after a rainstorm)--and another looking very straight and
   prim but with an odd droopy air about him, others redfaced and
   fairheaded and brainless, and all grinning and talking nonsense.
   Spose they're alright though....

In the meantime, festering tension between the senior bureaucrats of the Committee of Administration and the outstation officers was coming to a head. Championing the cause of a junior officer whom he considered to have been the victim of high-handed action, the Rajah's nephew, Anthony Brooke, was encouraged by his uncle to hold an inquiry which resulted in the resignation of most of the Committee and a six month interregnum when he held the reins of power as Rajah Muda, or Heir Apparent. During these months MacPherson's influence was considerable, but it all came to an end when the Rajah returned in September and repudiated his nephew's actions, describing him as being "as yet unfit to rule." It was a symptom of the dynastic row that only ended with the Rajah's decision to cede his sovereignty to the British government in October 1945.

Anthony Richards was scathing about these proceedings in his letters home to his parents and to Brian Walsh Atkins. In post-war years he was not to be one of those orang dahulu (pre-war officers) who mourned the passing of Brooke rule and railed against the new British colonial system, and yet most of his time in Sarawak was to be spent as an outstation officer. For all his criticism of what was going on, he had a strong romantic streak. "But there's hope," he told his parents in late March 1939, "and Brian Atkins' little dream of 2 years ago--how good it would be to be entirely cut off among savages and be able to build up a little state of one's own. Perhaps! ..."

In mid-October 1939, Cadet Richards was posted out of Kuching to distant Bintulu on the coast of the Third Division where he passed two levels of Malay examinations within a few months as well as picking up the routine of a District Office. This involved extensive traveling in the Batang Anap region in a boat with a new-fangled 9 hp engine and in the sole company of Abang Metali, a very senior Malay Native Officer who spoke no English. Transferred to Sarikei and then to Binatang on the lower Rejang in May 1940 and appointed Magistrate 3rd Class, he was now a full-blown outstation officer with an altogether different perspective on things. In June 1941 he wrote to his mother from Binatang:

      Now that I come from the outstations I cannot help begrudging
   all the money that's spent in Kuching when we need it so badly out
   here where that same money is actually made. And the First Division
   just doesn't understand the Third. The Chinese there are mostly old
   settlers and accustomed to the way things are done by Government,
   much more pliable and reasonable. Up here the Foochows are turning
   it into a different country, with much less regard for Government
   or anything but their own families and profits....

Transferred again in October 1941 to Betong on the Batang Saribas, he began to learn something of Iban language and culture. It was there, too, that he followed the old Brooke custom of taking a local wife [Doris Chew Ah Kiaw, who bore him a son, David Richards, now retired and living in Kuching with his mother and family, Editor]. At first retreating to Lubok Antu near the Dutch border when news came of the Japanese invasion, he changed his mind and together with Bill Morison returned to his post.

Arrested by the embarrassed local police at Betong on Japanese orders, he was imprisoned at Simanggang before being taken to Kuching and incarcerated there at the Batu Lintang camp for the next three and a half years. His prison camp experiences (recorded by the BBC's Charles Allen in 1982) reflected his positive and innovative attitude to things, as well as a strong and resilient philosophy of life. His facility with his hands in fixing things up for people led to him being called "Rigger Richards." His handmade chess set is the most poignant memento of that difficult time [see also the remembrance of W.G. Morison]. Frustrating the expectations of his Australian liberators in September 1945, he did not feel any bitterness towards his captors and disapproved of the little humiliations that were arranged for the ex-prisoners' supposed benefit.

Returning to Sarawak in mid-July 1946 after a long recuperative leave in England during which he was married to Daphne Oswell, a childhood friend, he served briefly in the Secretariat once again before being posted as District Officer to Kanowit and Meluan (Mujong) on the Rejang. After a year there during which he was promoted to Magistrate 2nd Class, and a year back at Oxford taking the 2nd Devonshire Course, he served from July 1948 for three years as District Officer, Bau. The principal diversion there was catching the illegal gold-miners and smugglers from Sambas in Indonesian West Kalimantan:

      The former were always jovial [he wrote to me in November 1997],
   with improbable explanations for their carrying pick-axe and
   sledge-hammer in areas of plain rock--they were looking for a place
   to plant padi! The smugglers were usually brazen and cross-tempered,
   affecting not to recognise our authority as valid....

Now a permanent member of the Colonial Administrative Service, he spent the next few years on the Rejang at Kapit, Kanowit, and Sarikei where he was able to resume his study of the Iban. At Kapit from late 1951 he had become closely acquainted with Temenggong Koh and Temenggong Jugah and their families. Anthony and Daphne's eldest child, Anne, went to the Methodist mission school in Kapit with Jugah's son, Linggi, now Datuk Amar Leonard Linggi Jugah. From March 1955 he spent some months at Simanggang as Acting Resident, 2nd Division, before serving two years in Kuching as Resident of the 1st Division. In mid-1957 he was once again posted to Simanggang where he remained until June 1961.

It was during those years that he developed his extraordinary expertise in every facet of Iban life, recording oral traditions and word use which were to be the building blocks of his dictionary. He also developed a keen interest in the genealogies of the Malay Native Officers on his staff, all of whom were related to one another in some way. One of his Iban transcriptions was published by the Borneo Literature Bureau in 1962 and an important article on the Malays of the Saribas appeared in the Sarawak Museum Journal in 1963. He also contributed articles on a wide range of subjects to The Sarawak Gazette.

Anxious to utilize his knowledge, the colonial government allocated him to Special Duties in the Secretariat in January 1963 and gave him the task of compiling all that could be found out about Iban adat (traditional) law so that land reform legislation could be brought in to quell the land hunger of the Chinese and allow the Iban to capitalize their assets in land for other enterprises. He was also a member of the three-man committee whose job it was to design draft legislation. The outcome of this major enterprise (and of earlier work) was three important publications which remain the authoritative works on the subject: Land Law and Adat (1961), Dayak Adat Law in the Second Division (1963), and Dayak Adat Law in the First Division. Adat Bidayuh (1964). However, the politics of putting through land reform proved to be too difficult after Malaysia. One of his principal regrets was that the whole business was not sorted out before he left Sarawak.

Sarawak's joining the Federation of Malaysia in August 1963 inevitably spelled the end for British administrative officers, although the departure of some of the senior men was delayed by the first Chief Minister, Stephen Kalong Ningkan, partly to tap their expertise and partly to hold off the appointment of Malay bureaucrats from Kuala Lumpur to take their place. The Richards family (there were now a girl and three boys) packed up their belongings and left for England in March 1964, leaving behind a host of local friends. After seven years in Cambridge going through the difficult business of adjusting to English suburban life, they settled at Little Eversden, a village just south of Cambridge. Anthony's adjustment was probably made easier by his employment as secretary-librarian for the South Asian Studies Institute at Cambridge University in 1965, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. At the same time, he sang in the Cambridge Philharmonic Choir and busied himself in the affairs of St. Helen's, the local Anglican Church, using his skills in genealogy in compiling church, cemetery and local history records. He also acted as church warden for almost twenty years. It was his way of putting down roots, of learning the adat lama of his own people. Active involvement in the Sarawak Association's affairs also meant that he and Daphne kept up contact with a good many fellow retired officers and their wives and children. However, his only return visit to Sarawak was for a month in the late 1960s to check information for his dictionary.

It is difficult to say exactly when the Iban-English Dictionary project first suggested itself to him, but he was closely involved by the time of his Cambridge appointment and his spare time over the next fifteen years was to be almost entirely devoted to it. As his own autobiographical note of 1981 indicates, the Dictionary was far more than a lexicon, it was a compilation of everything that he had learned about Iban culture, seasoned with a wide reading of the historical influences which it could be seen to reflect. Reading it is like reading an encyclopaedia of Iban life. Just to take one example, I had been told that the Iban had sent a coded or riddle-message down from the upper Rejang about the landing by parachute of Allied guerilla forces in the Kelabit highlands in early 1945. And sure enough, there it was in the Iban-English Dictionary:

      Babi belang siko', manok belang siko', nadai celum sarambar,
   enggau gawa' ka orang ke udah parai enti' ngaga' kereja nya'
   apai-indai aki'-ini' idup magang, pulai ka menoa tu' lalu badu'
   parai.

      [One white pig and one white fowl, with no dark colours on them
   at all, are the things to redeem those who have died, when the rite
   is performed fathers and mothers, grandparents and all will live
   again and come back to earth, risen from the dead.].

When I sorted through the papers in the study of the house to which Anthony and Daphne had later moved in Cambridge, his modus operandi became clear. All his many notebooks on things Iban had been carefully scrutinized and carded for use, great care being given to contextual use as the best way of conveying meaning. At the same time, I saw from his extensive files of correspondence how unendingly patient and generous he had been to other researchers seeking his opinions and drawing on his long experience. As well as his old friend Robert Nicholl's mass of letters on all kinds of things, there were those of Rodney Needham, Derek Freeman, Stephen Morris, Vinson Sutlive, Terry King, Cliff Sather, Robert Pringle, Michael and Marguerite Heppell, Beatrice Clayre, Traude Gavin, Vic Porritt and many more. I even found my own file, going back to 1973 when I first interviewed him in connection with my doctoral research on the 1946 cession. Of all the pre-war officers (or at least, those of them still living and accessible in the mid-1970s) he was the most illuminating on what Brooke rule had been like. However, he could not bear the thought of writing his reminiscences. "I've never written memoirs," he told a correspondent, David Tham, in May 2000, "having seen so many dreadful and dull ones when working at the South Asian Studies Institute...."

He was a most generous and agreeable man and I feel very happy that I was able to visit him on three or four occasions during those latter years of his retirement when the inevitable conversation about Sarawak could go on for most of the day. Daphne, whose time in Sarawak had been mostly taken up with pressing domestic responsibilities (colonial service wives in Sarawak were far from being pampered "mems"), excused herself from these talkfests after feeding us with her inimitable pies and apple tarts but her respect and love for her husband was always tangible.

Anthony Richards was one of the great authorities on the Iban; he was a pesaka, or cultural treasure, in his own right. He would never have thought of himself as a scholar, however, but as a perpetual student who was always finding interesting new things to be explained and suggesting new links to be made. His Iban-English Dictionary, the distillation of his many years in Sarawak, is as fine a memorial as anyone could wish to have. For the Iban, he was Tuan Richards, the orang buti' who could ngajat (perform a war dance) and drink tuak (rice wine) all night with the best of them and then go on to the next longhouse for a repeat performance. Nya' pungka' lelaki amat! (Bob Reece, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia)

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLISHED WORKS BY A.J.N. RICHARDS:

"The Migrations of Ibans and Their Poetry," Sarawak Museum Journal, Vol. V, No. 1 (1949), pp. 77-87.

Land Law and Adat. A Report by A.J.N. Richards. Kuching: Government Printer, 1961.

Dayang Isah Tandang Sari. Translated by A.J.N. Richards. Kuching: Borneo Literature Bureau, 1962.

"The Descent of Some Saribas Malays," Sarawak Museum Journal, Vol. XI, No. 21 (New Series) (1963), pp. 99-107.

Dayak Adat Law in the Second Division. Compiled by A.J.N. Richards. Kuching: Government Printer, 1963.

Dayak Adat Law in the First Division. Adat Bidayuh. Compiled by A.J.N. Richards. Kuching: Government Printer, 1964.

"Sailing Boats of Western Sarawak," Mariners" Mirror, May 1967, Vol. 53 (2), pp. 161-169.

An Iban-English Dictionary. Compiled by Anthony Richards. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

(editor), Sea Dayaks and other Races of Sarawak: Contributions to the Sarawak Gazette between 1888 and 1930. Compiled by A.J.N. Richards. Kuching: Borneo Literature Bureau, 1963.

Sarawak Gazette [thanks to Otto Steinmayer who compiled this list of Anthony Richards' Sarawak Gazette publications]:

"Pasai Siong," No. 1088 (1 November 1948), pp. 220-221.

"Binatang," No. 1089 (1 December 1948), pp. 270-271. (See also, No. 1090 (3 January 1949), p. 3.)

"The first full moon," No. 1092 (7 March 1949), p. 65. (This refers to a festival celebrated by the Chinese of Bau and Siniawan.)

"Two stories from Jagoi Dayaks," No. 1092 (7 June 1949), p.142.

"Model sailing boats," No. 1105 (7 April 1950), p. 102. (See also, No. 1108 (7 July 1950), p. 193.)

"The small boy, the dog, and the cat," No. 1112 (10 November 1950), p. 281.

"Jubilee recreation ground fund: income and expenditure a/c for the year ended 31 December 1955,"No. 1181 (31 July 1956), pp. 197-198.

(Review of A Dictionary of Sea Dayak, by N.C. Scott), No. 1185 (30 November 1956), p. 300.

"Rowing in Sarawak," No. 1187 (31 January 1957), pp. 14-15.

"Down to the sea in ships," No. 1188 (18 February 1957), pp. 37-38.

"The Peoples of Sarawak: Sea Dayaks-Ibans," No. 1205 (31 July 1958), pp. 125-129. (See also, No. 1206 (31 August 1958), p. 151.)

(A Malay vocabulary), No. 1233 (30 November 1960), p. 250. (See also No. 1245 (30 November 1961), p. 223, for expressions borrowed from English.)

"Priest and poet," No. 1242 (31 August 1961), pp. 130-143. (This refers to the conference on Dayak customs held at Simanggang, 3-7 July 1961.)

"One cent a mile," No. 1243 (30 September 1961), p. 166. (This refers to Syn Kapit No. 2, a passenger launch operating between Sibu and Kapit.)

"The Coast," No 1245 (30 November 1961) p. 213. (This refers to the area in and around Bintulu.)

Obituary: Hermanus Assan, No. 1255 (30 September 1962), pp. 198-199