Major events of this
period
Sivadas s/o Sankaran, 82, is a retiree. He was a journalist with The Straits Times from 1947 to 1951. He became a sub-editor with the same paper after that and stayed with ST till 1971.
I was actually friend with "The Plen" (Fong Chong Pik or Fang Chuang Pi) without knowing it! You see, I knew this reporter from a small Chinese paper. I knew him as Fan, quite a common Chinese surname. He was a thin man, slightly taller than I -- I am about five foot three inches (about 1.6m).
He was very friendly, and I saw him many times because we did things together as reporters. We would go together to the police station or to the courts to get stories for our respective newspapers. If there were any big stories, he would call me up, tip me off. We often covered assignments together, we went in my small car.
If there was a big case, all the reporters present would have lunch together at the invitation of the defence lawyer. For instance, I remember there was once a big case where more than 100 people were charged with belonging to an illegal society. After covering the story, we all had lunch together, including Fan.
Only much later did I find out he was what Lee Kuan Yew called "The Plen" or plenipotentiary. I always knew him as a reporter, and we were friends. At that time, I thought he was a good man, very friendly.
One night, Fan rang me and asked me to go with him to the CID to check their diary. (It was the night reporter's job to check for any incident reported at CID.) There, he pointed out a diary item about a factory fire.
Then we went together to the factory and interviewed the watchman. By the time we got there, the fire had been extinguished. He alerted me to the fire, so that I could report on it too and interview the watchman.
Now, thinking back, perhaps Fan didn't want his paper to be the only one to have the story, otherwise he would be questioned as to why he knew about the fire so quickly (which could expose his Communist links as the fire involved the Communists). So he made me an accomplice!
My editor congratulated me for writing a good story.
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