G. G. Thomson

 

Attuning the Civil Service to New Times

 

Former Briton George Gray Thomson headed the Political Study Centre from 1959 to 1969, and trained Singapore’s first generation of post-colonial civil servants.

 

In 1959, after more than a century of colonial rule, Singapore was granted self-government. After the PAP swept to power in the May 1959 Legislative Assembly election, the government formed a Political Study Centre. Its aim was to reorient the mindset of civil servants—who had been used to serving the British—to help PAP leaders build a new social order to ensure Singapore’s survival.

George Gray Thomson was chosen by the government to head the centre. According to then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who wrote this of Thomson in his memoir The Singapore Story, “He had a good mind, was well-read, and was an earnest speaker”. Thomson, who held a Master of Arts degree from Oxford, started working in Singapore in 1945 as the deputy director of the British administration’s Publicity and Printing Department. After the department changed its name to the Department of Public Relations a year later, Thomson became the government’s public relations officer.

In 1957, he gave up his UK citizenship and became a citizen under the Singapore Citizenship Ordinance, which offered Singapore citizenship to British citizens who had resided in Singapore for at least two years, along with those who had been born in Singapore or Malaya. Though he never explained explicitly why he had put down roots here, his son, Alexander Thomson, said in a 1979 interview with The Straits Times, "[My father] had an extraordinary imagination—Singapore gripped his imagination when he thought of what could be done.”

The Political Study Centre at Number 4 Goodwood Hill conducted programmes to apprise senior civil servants of the communist threat in Southeast Asia, the political changes in Singapore and the urgency of getting economic development underway. During the courses, civil servants discussed international trends and Singapore’s position in the world. In the early years, the focus was on Europe and the United States, and later it shifted to Singapore’s position in Southeast Asia. In these classes, Thomson assessed domestic politics in the Southeast Asian countries. After lessons, ministers would stop by the centre sometimes to gather feedback from the civil servants about how things were run in the country. The establishment of the Political Study Centre was not without controversy. British civil servants felt that it was demeaning to attend courses taught by locals. Gerald de Cruz, Thomson’s deputy and a permanent lecturer at the centre, recalled in an oral history interview in 1981, “To think that our own Singapore people had anything to teach them, they found that extremely difficult to swallow, except for one or two among them.” Another debate arose as to whether the lecturers were meant to influence civil servants to support the PAP.

At a December 1960 Assembly sitting, A. P. Rajah, Member of Parliament for Farrer Park, remarked, “Some of the lecturers, tutors or whoever may be, perhaps without the knowledge of the Minister, do adopt a line which quite blatantly praises the party in power and quite openly runs down the other political parties in Singapore.” Then-Foreign Minister S. Rajaratnam countered that assertion with the comment that one of the aims of the Political Study Centre was “to provide the Ministers with an opportunity to get ordinary members of the civil [service] to be critical. Very often they are very critical of Government policy”.

The appointment of Thomson as head of the centre also drew comments, even though he was a Singaporean. There were questions of whether he was working for the MI5, Britain’s secret service. Former Chief Minister David Marshall said in his oral history interview in 1984, “[Thomson] may have well been entrusted with the job of seeing that there was stability in Singapore and that the British were kept informed of all relevant matters that affected the security [of the] colony.”

Thomson persisted in what he had been tasked to do. And he did it well. His lessons on various aspects of politics, such as “The Evolution from Colony to Nations”, “The Civil Servant in a Changing World” and “The Communist Challenge”, became so popular that he received requests to carry out courses for principals of local English schools and civil servants from other territories of Malaysia. From 1962 to 1964, he ran five courses in Kuching, two in Sibu and one in Jesselton, now known as Kota Kinabalu. The courses in Kuching were attended by 36 officers of the Sarawak state government. In a radio talk in 1966, he pointed out that Singapore’s survival depended on more than just winning battles. “It is axiomatic that the prime purpose of any foreign policy is to ensure survival […] Survival is not merely life distinct from death. It is survival in as great security as possible and with as high a standard of living as possible, in order that we can develop our own way of life from our own nature, enriched by our own experience.” Thomson headed the Political Study Centre for 10 years until it was closed in 1969.

Thomson was then assigned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as deputy secretary for training and research. He stepped down in 1971. As an advocate of heritage preservation, Thomson regularly wrote to the press and emphasised in his letters that modernisation should not destroy heritage. In 1971, he argued that a proportion of Singapore's income should be set aside for the preservation of historic buildings, like those in Chinatown, and for sights by the Singapore River. Today, both areas have been simultaneously conserved and adapted for commercial use. Thomson was deeply involved with many aspects of life in Singapore. Before his death in 1979, he was part of at least 30 societies and organisations and was well-respected by the civil service and welfare groups.

References

David Marshall, interviewed by Mrs Lily Tan, August 16, 2015, accession number 000156/08, transcript, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore.

Gerald De Cruz interviewed by Miss Foo Kim Leng, September 23, 1981, accession number 000105/12, transcript, Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore.

Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew
(Singapore: The Straits Times Press, 1998).

Nancy Chng, “A man Who Identified Himself Totally With the S’pore Experience,”
The Straits Times, July 27, 1979.

Parliament of Singapore, “Annual Estimates of Expenditure for Public Services and Development Estimates for 1961,” December 12, 1960.

Parliament of Singapore, “Budget, Ministry of Finance,” 16 November, 1964.

“Son Flies out for Thomson’s funeral,” The Straits Times, July 24, 1979.

 

 

G G Thomson
United Kingdom, 1902-1979