Introduction
Previous: 1928 and 1929
Next: 1931 and 1932
Little John continues to grow; but the global recession bites, and Billy loses his job and the family moves back to Europe.
This is a relatively short chapter, but it comes between two much longer years (1929 and 1931) which are in turn bracketed by two much shorter years (1928 and 1932), so I am presenting 1930 on its own, while combining 1928/29 and also 1931/32.
The 1929 memoir ended with Dorothy’s father and stepmother arriving to visit her, Billy and John in Malaya.
I told Zora that Papa was looking very well, not too fat nor too thin, and of course he was interested in everything, and asked endless questions, many of which no one could answer.
I asked Papa about lending us money, but he said he couldn’t, that he had had to borrow on his securities to come out and visit us – which struck me as rather funny. He realised, for I told him, that we were very hard up, but he took it very cheerfully and seemed to think it would do us no harm. However he did say to Sally that perhaps they shouldn’t stay for four weeks as they had planned, because of the extra expense to us, but she assured him that I’d be most hurt if they didn’t – she told me all that herself. After they’d been with us for a bit he decided that he’d like to use the other room as a dressing-room, but she wouldn’t allow it. She said it was just an idea of his and he was perfectly all right as they were.
See Dorothy’s profile of her father, Henry Deming Hibbard (1856-1942), which also describes his second wife Sally Brookes, née Ames (1858-1946). They lived in New Jersey, and had arrived in Malaya just after Christmas 1929.
Zora was Dorothy’s beloved aunt, Lily Gordon Wickersham (1870-1956), her mother’s sister, who she corresponded with extensively; these memoirs are largely reconstructed by Dorothy in the 1960s and 1970s from those letters.
One afternoon we all went to the Fletchers for tennis, then they wanted to play bridge; Billy had to go home and I had to go to put John to bed, but we said we’d send back the car for the family later. Papa wanted to stay and we thought it was all settled when Sally insisted on coming away with us, so of course Papa came too. I thought Sally had wanted to play bridge, so I asked her why she hadn’t stayed, but she said that when she’d said she wanted to go, Mrs. Fletcher hadn’t urged her to stay so she evidently didn’t want her! Of course Mrs. Fletcher wouldn’t have dreamed of urging her; she probably thought she was tired – or bored!
John had begun feeding himself a bit, but while I was taken up with Papa and Sally when they first came I let Amah give him his tiffin and found she was doing what all Chinese amahs did – and perhaps still do – she was feeding him herself while he played with his toys. So I decided that must stop and I gave him his dinner one day and left him to feed himself. He yelled for amah, but I wouldn’t let her go, and when he wouldn’t eat I took away his plate as though he’d finished. Next day when I gave him his dinner I sat and read aloud to him. He kept looking at the plate, and smelling the food, and looking at me – I could see him out of the corner of my eye – and then as I just went on reading aloud he seized his spoon and devoured everything on his plate. I went and got Papa to come to see him without his seeing us, and there he was steadily eating away. There was no more trouble after that.
At first they used to go back to the other bungalow after breakfast Papa and Sally, but later they took to spending the whole morning with me. Billy was out on the estate, and in the mornings I always had lots to do, and I cooked all John’s food, and so on, so it was all a bit disconnected. Then Papa with his insatiable thirst for knowledge was always asking Billy endless questions, even when he came in very tired and just wanted to sit in silence, as he could have done if we were alone. I even asked Papa to talk to me rather than to Billy, but he said Billy was always cheerful and ready to talk to him – he couldn’t see what an effort it was.
They both loved John – anyway Papa did, and Sally liked him, I think; anyway I got on better with her than ever before.
Dorothy’s brother had no children of his own (he later married a widow who had a son by her first marriage), and I don’t think my father’s younger sister Ursula ever met her grandparents. So my father was the only grandchild that Dorothy’s father knew. Sally’s younger son from her first marriage, Van Wyck Brooks, had two sons, born in 1912 and 1916, so she was probably up for more grandchildren, and no doubt my father’s arrival helped smooth the somewhat strained relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter.
Papa was very anxious to see a tin mine, so Billy arranged it and the three of us went. Sally stayed at home; she didn’t want to walk much as Papa had stood on her foot at the Great Wall of China – which made it sound a most impressive injury. Apparently they were standing by the wall, and Papa thought he could go up some steps, and Sally was begging him not to. He agreed to come down and stepped on her foot and that was a grievance for a long time. I don’t know how badly she was hurt, and I don’t think she saw a doctor, but I’m sure it did hurt her a certain amount.
The implication is that the Hibbards had stopped off in China en route to Malaya. The President Van Buren, on which they had arrived in Singapore, stopped only in Shanghai, which is very far from the Great Wall, so they must have crossed the Pacific on a different ship.
Before I forget, Billy couldn’t always understand her though he understood Papa easily. [Reminder that Billy’s hearing had been badly damaged by a brucellosis infection in 1905.] One day Sally asked him if we had many moths there. She pronounced it ‘mawths’ and he said no, we hadn’t any. Later he asked me what mawths were, and I told him and he laughed; he said she must have wondered what he had meant as there were masses of them about.
To go back to our visit to the tin mine; I forget which one it was, or where, but it was very interesting and Papa enjoyed it thoroughly. The one thing I remember clearly was walking up a hill; I was in front, I think with Billy, and the Manager of the mine and Papa were coming behind us, when I heard the manager say: “Really, sir, I think you had better keep your hat on,” and looked round to see Papa coming up the hill bare-headed in full tropical sunlight. Of course people do go about bare-headed in the tropics now, but then it was considered very dangerous indeed. I persuaded him to put his hat on again.
In 1930, indeed from the 1880s to the 1970s, Malaya / Malaysia was the largest tin producing country in the world, mostly from the state of Perak just south of Penang (Perak means ‘silver’ in Malay). This of course was a big factor in the Japanese invasion a few years later. Henry, Dorothy and Billy probably visited the tin mine at Larut near Taiping in Perak, which was both the oldest and one of the closest to Kuala Muda. The distance is about 100 km, 60 miles, which is about right for a special day trip for visiting relatives. Google Maps tells me that it would take about two hours by car today, much of that time stuck in Penang traffic.
As for the hats, I quote Noël Coward again:
In the Malay States there are hats like plates
Which the Britishers won’t wear
At twelve noon the natives swoon
And no further work is done
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun
But Papa was always very reckless and I often felt sympathetic with Sally when she fussed. It wasn’t safe to go about the bath-rooms barefoot, as so many of the tukang ayers [water carriers] had hookworm, and we had explained that to them, but from something they said I realised that Papa was doing it all the same. However I think he was more careful over that when I got Billy to talk to him of the dangers. There were so many things to watch out for there! Every time you put on shoes you knocked then sharply against something, upside down, to knock out any lurking scorpions or centipedes. One day I was taking a book out of the bookcase without looking, and touched something; I drew back my hand quickly and got the book out carefully by holding the sides, and found a scorpion curled up on top of it – quite a small one, but it could have given a horrid bite all the same. Billy killed a huge centipede in John’s bathroom one day.
Papa got some golf, which he loved; Mr. Hume lent him clubs, and he played on the course at the Sungei Patani Club. [I am glad to report that the Sungai Petani Golf Club is still going strong.] Another day we took them both to Alor Star. I think they enjoyed their visit. I suppose they left at the end of January, but my letters from January 12th are missing, until July 11th.
I tentatively identify Mr Hume as Thomas David Cottingham Hume (1888–1952) and his wife as Mabel Rose Cottingham (1886–1965).
I have moved two paragraphs placed here in the original typescript to the 1929 section, as they were out of place. We resume:
Now to go back again to July 1930, we went for a rest up to the Crag. The new assistant on Kuala Muda, a nice young man called Brash – I seem to remember that he wore the first Oxford bags I’d ever seen – had asked us to stay at the house his father had up the Hill; he said we’d find it completely furnished and ready, and his father had told him he could lend it to anyone he liked. So we arrived complete with cookie and boy and ordered food and then found the whole place was locked up except for two bedrooms and the living-rooms – all the servants’ quarters, ice-chest, cupboards, cooking things etc, were locked up, so we could only have slept there. So we went to the hotel, and I suppose sent the cook and boy back.
I have not been able to identify young Brash.
By this time the Depression was well under way, and everyone was depressed. Billy went down to Penang on business one day and came back to say he felt quite despondent as everyone looked so miserable.
But the change did us all good, and I have some lovely snapshots I took up there. H.O. and Marjorie Maas and the children were living up there – or were the children at home? I think they must have been as I don’t mention them, and Mrs. Wilson came up for the day with her little boy Brian, aged 6, whom John adored and who was very good and most paternal with John.
Marjorie Maas (1893-1988), was born Marjorie (“Nana”) Pope in Massachusetts, married Robert Hiram Turner, an American doctor, in Paris in 1915, had sons with him in 1915 and 1916, divorced him in 1922 and married Henry Oscar (“H.O.”) Maas, the anglicised son of the Consul-General of the Netherlands in London, in 1923 and had two more sons in 1924 and 1928.
Mrs Wilson was Violet née Moore (1897-?), married to John Bernard Maxwell Wilson (1887-1944). They were both born in Dublin, as indeed was Billy. Their son Brian Denis Wilson was born in Penang in 1924, and died a month before his hundredth birthday in 2024.
Zora had written to me that Alan Bott was married to Josephine Blumenfeld.
Dorothy leaves this sentence to speak for itself in her typescript. Alan Bott (1893-1952) had been her most serious boyfriend before Billy. They were involved for about a year, from late spring in 1925 to about the same time in 1926, as described in her memoir for those two years. Alan was already famous as an air ace when Dorothy knew him, and went on to found Pan Books. His wife Josephine (1903-1982) was the daughter of Daily Express editor R. D. Blumenfeld. They had three children, who all lived into the next century.
I told Zora that John knew nearly all the alphabet and loved shouting out the names of the letters on his bricks. Penang was almost deserted. No one was buying things in the shops and the hotels were empty. Lots of the Chinese estates were already up for sale. No firms had yet failed but everyone was expecting that there would be failures. People were nearly frantic.
I see from my photograph album that we were up Penang Hill January 5th – 15th, so the family must have left before the 25th – or perhaps we drove them down and saw them off and went up ourselves the same day. Incidentally we had a very nice car, an elderly but very good Buick which we had bought second-hand. I think while we were on Krian the Griersons were home on leave and lent us their car and sais.
The Griersons are probably Douglas Foster Grierson (1889-1970) and Vera Elizabeth Beatrice née Stewart (1890-1969).
My letters for the rest of our time there were largely taken up with financial worries, servants, and John – who was happy and healthy and, as I said to Zora, didn’t worry about the depression at all. But the servants were a bother. Everyone was beginning to economise, and most people were getting rid of at least one servant. My amah was the most expensive of the staff; I think we paid her 40 dollars. I wasn’t satisfied with her anyway. She was the second one we’d had; the first one, when John was tiny, was nice but a bit ancient and rather stupid, and anyway she only liked tiny babies. I think she gave notice but I am not sure. Anyway by the time he was four months old he had another who was young and active and really quite good in many ways, but like all Chinese she yelled at John and he was beginning to yell back. Then he got dengue fever, I think in August, and amah encouraged him to say “ta mau”- don’t want – [strickly “tak mahu”] to everything and wouldn’t stop though I told her to. I said to Zora I’d have sacked her for that if for nothing else. She didn’t want to go – or, I think I’d said first that we must reduce her wages and then she herself gave notice. Anyway she left.
Mrs. Aitken had had a Malay for Mary Rose (whom John called Gaily Loo) and I had noticed how gentle and kind she seemed, but Mrs. Aitken said she was leaving, I forget why, and I thought I’d try her. She was a success; John liked her and treated her with respect from the first and called her “kaka” which means elder sister. Meanwhile the boy, or cook, rather – he was Billy’s old boy promoted to cook – was getting slack and cooking badly and cheating us dreadfully, and he simply had to go. I warned him once and he improved for a bit but then went off again, and it was hopeless. We felt rather badly as he had been with Billy for so long, but we just couldn’t keep him. Then I got another cook who cooked very well, but gradually got worse and got dirty himself, and the kitchen got dirty too, so he had to go – he may have been an opium smoker in excess, I’ve only just thought of that.
Mary Rose Aitken (1927-2005) was the daughter of William Inglis Aitken (1896–1968) and Violet Melville née Law (1894–1964).
So then I said to Ah Ghee, John’s ayah (the Chinese nurses were amahs and the Malay ones ayahs) that I was thinking of trying a woman cook, and she said she hadn’t liked to say it, but she could cook herself, and would I try her. She had been married to a Chinese who was a cook, and had learned a lot. I remembered then that Mrs. Aitken had told me she could cook – in fact she had had a job at that for a year. She suggested that her son Hassan should come as boy, and she’d get a girl for tukang ayer and to do the washing. Al1 of this happened and was quite successful. They were slower and less efficient than good Chinese servants, but they were so much nicer – as Billy said, it was worth putting up with a lot to have pleasant people about us. The three of them cost much less than the Chinese; I wrote to Zora that their wages were 30, Ah Chee, 15, Hassan, and 15 for the tukang ayer, as against 40, 30 and 20 for Chinese, and I had no amah’s wages to pay at all. Ah Chee took John out in the mornings when I went for my walk, and was with him sometimes in the day too, and the little girl looked after him some of the time.
Our routine was always much the same; tea on the verandah at dawn, about 6 o’clock, then Billy went on the estate and I went for a walk. Breakfast – a substantial one – about 9:30. Luncheon about one, then I went to my room and John either rested or played quietly in my room; Billy sat for a bit on the verandah and then went to the factory. We had tea about four, I think, and then most people went to the club but we seldom did. Dinner was about eight – it got dark about six and the people at the club played bridge etc., but we read and talked and played with John till his bedtime.
Sometime in August or September we moved to Kellang Lama Division [Kelang Lama is a suburb of the town of Kulim, in Kedah, just east of Penang], and the MacKayes went to Johore, as they had been on Kellang Lama. They left two beautiful Persian cats, Kick, a big orange Persian and his wife Smoky who was grey. She was very timid and never got really friendly, but Kick adored John, who talked to him by the hour, and showed him all his bumps and bruises, and you would have thought Kick understood it all. One day when we hadn’t been there long I heard John grunting as though he were making a great effort over something, and went to see what was going on; he had got Kick round the neck and was staggering off, tripping over Kick’s long tail. Of course I made him put down the poor beast at once, but Kick never attempted to escape though he was so big and strong he could have ripped John to pieces.
As I remember those cats just ignored Bintang and her kittens, and also Jane, and were ignored in turn. Smoky had two kittens once but they both died, I don’t know why. One died almost at once and the other lived for a few days; I kept it in a box with hot water bottles and tried giving it brandy, but it seemed very feeble and just died. While I’m on the subject of the cats I must tell what happened when we left. We got a very good home for the two Persians – I think Mrs. MacKaye knew someone who wanted them and then I had to arrange for Bintang. Mrs. Fletcher was anxious to have her, as she had always wanted a Siamese, and she said that though her husband didn’t like cats he would never be unkind to her. But when Bintang went to them she decided that Mr. Fletcher was the one she preferred – I mean Bintang decided it and from then on she adopted him and spent all her time with him, and he became her slave – Mrs. Fletcher wrote to me about it and said it wan very funny as he had never liked cats at all, but he adored her. She had great personality.
I have not identified the MacKayes or the Fletchers.
We had to have all the dogs put down; we’d seen all too often what happened to dogs whose owners went home. [I have no idea what this means. Presumably the fear was that the dogs would become feral, and/or catch rabies?] We got the estate dog-shooter to came (because of Rabies all stray dogs had to be shot and he was an excellent shot). The dogs were brought out one by one and fed, and while they were eating he shot them; Billy saw it and said he killed each one instantly. I can’t remember what happened to all the kittens that Bintang had had, but I think we had either found homes for them or that they had gone wild, as those cats often do – we never knew who their father was and he may have been wild himself.
One day we went to see the Tyndall-Powells. They had a big black gibbon called Kuku which Mrs. T. P. adored and treated like a baby. It was very friendly with me, jumped into my arms and hugged me, but when it saw John it chattered and glared, and she said it hated children, so I told Amah to take John to the far end of the garden. Mrs. Tyndall-Powell was holding the end of Kuku’s chain and playing with it and Billy and I never took our eyes off it; Billy told me afterwards he was all set to jump and catch it if she dropped it. We never took John there again. Her own children were at home at school. Those wah-wahs, as the gibbons out there were called locally, were almost human but it wasn’t safe to have them with children as a rule.
The Tyndale-Powells (not Tyndall-Powells) were Reginald Oliver Tyndale Powell (1902-1941) and Penelope Margaret nee Hopper (1904-1965). Like Billy and Dorothy, they had married in August 1927 and had a son born in 1928. They went on to have a daughter together in 1932, but divorced in 1934. Both married again and had more children. Reginald was killed in action in 1941. Penelope Powell, as she preferred to be known, became one of England’s best known cave-divers.
That happened while we were still on the Home Division, and the tiger episode happened then too, though the letters in which I tell about it are lost. One morning when I was walking before breakfast I went near a patch of jungle, and the wind was blowing from it. There was a strong smell which reminded me of the lion house at the Zoo, but I didn’t think anything of it. However at breakfast Billy told me he had just heard there was a tiger about and that John mustn’t go out till we knew it had been shot or driven away. Later that morning the boy rushed in to say – at least I thought at first he said – that a lime had eaten a cow. I thought he meant it the other way about, and wondered vaguely if limes were poisonous for cows. The Malay word for tiger is rimau, but as the Chinese say L for R it sounded like limau, lime. When he saw I hadn’t understood he ran in and brought out one of John’s toys, a small tiger, to show me what he meant. He said we must none of us go out. When Billy came back for tiffin he said it was quite true, that the cow had been killed about half a mile from the bungalow (in quite a different direction from the patch of juggle where I’d smelt it that morning). The tiger hadn’t eaten much of it, but had left it to get nice and ripe in the sun; we went to see it that afternoon but the stench was awful. That night two of the young assistants sat up all night in a machan in a nearby tree hoping the tiger would come back to the kill, but it didn’t.
Next it was heard of on the next estate, which had a Malay manager, who was walking along his drive one evening and met it. However he knew the right spells [!] and things to use to a tiger and when he said them it jumped off the drive into the rubber and vanished. However the coolies were all getting worried – it hadn’t killed a human being yet, but one never knew when it might start – and it was decided to fire the lallang grass behind the bungalow to drive it quite away. Incidentally this was on Kellang Lama, not on the Home division, I remember the firing of the lallang perfectly. It was done at night and was such a fine sight that I got John out of bed to look at it; he can still remember that. We didn’t hear any more about the tiger after that, so presumably it left the district.
When we went to Penang for the day we went to the Wilsons’ and John played with Brian. Marjorie Maas had gone to Switzerland, as there had been a crisis there. She had taken Peter some time before to a very good Swiss surgeon as he, Peter, had a bad squint, and then her mother came from America and Marjorie left both children, with a nurse, with her and came back to Oscar, and they had been up Penang Hill. But then she got a cable saying the nurse had left and she had to go back. Apparently the mother had gone away, leaving the nurse with the children, and the nurse got very odd and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and so were the children, and the doctor sacked the nurse and got Marjorie’s mother to come back and look after Peter, and put Jeremy in a children’s clinic to recover.
Peter Nicholas Maas lived a long life, from 1924 to 2015. Jeremy Stephen Maas, later a well-known art dealer in London, lived from 1928 to 1997.
I liked Mrs. Wilson very much and I thoroughly approved of the way she brought up Brian – he is almost the only child I speak of with approval in my letters. Another person we got to know well and liked very much was Mrs. Fletcher. She and her husband were Scottish and she was very reserved, it took a year or two to got to know her, but Billy said she was the only woman near that he found really interesting to talk to. I’m sorry I lost contact with her; we wrote once or twice after I left but I had no answer to my last letter – of course she may not have had it, or I may not have had her answer.
Our time on Kuala Muda was nearly up, though we didn’t know it. Rubber was going down still further, everyone was economising, and we were told we would have a 20 p.c. cut in salary in the New Year. All that was gloomy enough, but then some of the other managers sent a letter to Hume demanding that Billy should be sacked, as he was the latest arrival on the staff, and they were prepared to do his work if they didn’t have salary cuts themselves. At least this is what we heard, though I never knew – or I don’t think we knew whether all the managers joined in or not. Anyway Hume gave Billy notice, and as there was no chance of a job out there we just had to come home. It was all very sudden and we had little time to brood over it. We left in December, but I’m not sure of the date – I know we spent our last night in Penang with the Peales – I don’t know why we didn’t go to the Wilson’s. My last letter from the estate is dated October 14th, and of course we knew nothing then. I don’t know why Zora didn’t keep my letters after that; if she had, I could tell more about it.
I have not been able to identify the Peales.
One rather amusing incident happened in October there was a meeting of the Poppy Day Fund collectors at the Club, and I went. It was like a skit on a Women’s Club meeting, I wrote to Zora. We all voted unanimously against selling poppies to Asiatics [The mind boggles! As if there had been no Asian soldiers fighting for the British in the Great War?! As a woman of her time and place, Dorothy was casually racist by instinct, but it’s rare that this surfaces quite so bltntly.], never the less we discussed it – after having voted – for an hour. Then we discussed giving a show at the local cinema in aid of the Fund. There was some argument as to whether the show should be on Wednesday the 4th or Monday the 17th. Then some bright soul discovered that Wednesday was the 5th, not the 4th, which upset us all. However we voted on that three times, with the same result each time. Then Mrs. Chantler, the chairman, called in Mr. Hume and Mr. Baber to help us, though I didn’t quite know why. Mrs. Fletcher proposed appointing a committee, and we all heaved a sigh of relief, but Mr. Hume said oh no, we hadn’t discussed it nearly enough. Just what we were discussing by that time I really don’t know. Any way most of us were tired and suddenly a lot of us got up and went home. I wrote to Zora a few days later that the meeting might still be going on, for all I knew.
I have not been able to identify either Mrs Chantler or Mr Baber. I suspect that the latter is a misprint, probably for Barber.
Poor Glory had had a serious operation; I think it was cancer but am not sure; then she had a second one, and died. It was tragic yet she did so hate to grow old. She was in the South of France at the time.
Madelon Battle “Glory” Hancock (1881-1930), later Countess de Hellencourt, is one of the most glamorous names to appear in Dorothy’s memoirs. She threw herself into battlefield nursing at the outbreak of the first world war, and was reputedly the most decorated nurse of the entire conflict. She had visited Penang the previous year, 1929.
The sequel to the meeting was amusing too. Mrs. Hume had gone home again, and Mrs. MacCormac was the leading lady on the estate. As she wasn’t at the meeting Mrs. Chantler asked me to let her know what we had decided (if anything). I sent her a note and got a wildly incoherent reply. She said she had never had a notification to attend and seemed furious about it, in fact I gathered that she didn’t think the meeting should have been held without her. She was also furious that I should have told her about it instead of the Chairman herself. The next day we took John to the Aitkens for tea, and who should appear but the MacCormacs! So, as I said, we had it out except that I would not argue and just agreed with her that she was the proper person to direct things, and that I would do whatever she wanted. Then she started running down Hume, which seemed to me a bit thick in front of people not on the estate, so I turned and started talking to Mr. Aitken,
Then she seemed faintly to realise she had gone too far, so she changed and proceeded to attack Mrs. Aitken’s sister-in-law, whom they all adored. Happy party!
I have not been able to identify the MacCormacs.
Maisie and Ken came one day, but I can’t remember if they stayed or just spent the day. They had been driving up the peninsula on business. They were such darlings and we loved seeing them.
Mary Jacqueline “Maisie” Bideleux (1902-2002) was one of four Anglicised sisters from Le Havre who had been very friendly with Dorothy since early in her Paris days. She had married William John McKendrick “Ken” Warden (1904-1980) in 1928 and they lived in Singapore. They were a formidable mixed doubles tennis team in Singapore in the 1930s.
However, soon we left. I remember nothing about Christmas, and I don’t know if we spent it at sea or at Cannes with Zora – we were certainly with her and Dollie later. We stayed [in Cannes] till at least April 1931, as I have snapshots taken then. I can’t remember what ship we went home by, though I think it was Blue Funnel. There weren’t many people on board, but there were several children. John made great friends with the captain, who spoke Malay – and from the time we got on the ship John refused to speak anything but Malay.
Billy’s sudden unemployment, at the age of 50 and disabled by his deafness, must have been an immense blow to the small family, which Dorothy rather bravely skates over. One can read a little between the lines – Dorothy has blanked out almost everything else that happened for the next few months, while little John, aged two and a half, would only use the language he had used with his Amah. (Wisely, Dorothy does not seem to have insisted on him using English.)
Apart from part-time duties with the Home Guard in the second world war, Billy never had a paid job again. Dorothy also picked up bits of war-time voluntary work, which may have been compensated, but otherwise I don’t believe that she was in paid employment for a single day in her life. They both still had some unearned income, Billy from his shares in Hibernia and Dorothy from her aunt, but they were not comfortably off.
I am very glad that they did not stay in Malaya. The winds of war were starting to blow, and the Japanese occupation of Penang from 1941 to 1945 was brutal; Billy, who turned 60 in 1940 and had a weak heart, would have been unlikely to survive the prisoner camps – his second cousin Neil Killick, also a rubber planter in Malaya, did die in captivity in 1945.
Next: 1931 and 1932