‘My dear treasurer’: Rajah Charles Brooke’s correspondence with F.H. Dallas, 1902-1917
Bob Reece’s 2008 article in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society draws on the previously underutilised correspondence between Rajah Charles Brooke and his Sarawak Treasurer, F. H. Dallas, to reconstruct the final fifteen years of the second White Rajah’s life. Written mostly from Chesterton Lodge in Gloucestershire between 1902 and 1917, the letters reveal a man simultaneously managing the detailed administration of a tropical state, pursuing territorial expansion in Borneo, and maintaining the persona of an English country squire, all while growing increasingly alarmed by the failings of his heir, Vyner Brooke.
Summary
The correspondence, held in thirteen chronologically ordered files at the National Archives, Kew (PRO 30/79/1–13), was deposited as a private collection and had not been subjected to serious scholarly attention before Reece’s intervention (p. 4). Dallas, who served as Treasurer from 1903 until his retirement in 1917, had become Charles Brooke’s closest confidant through a combination of administrative efficiency, discretion, and a shared love of reading. The Rajah wrote to him two or three times a week from England, and Dallas in turn provided a steady stream of intelligence from Kuching, making the exchange a de facto channel of governance during the Rajah’s prolonged absences (p. 4).
The letters document Charles Brooke’s single-minded campaign to absorb the remaining territories of the Sultanate of Brunei and, ultimately, British North Borneo itself. His acquisition of the Lawas district from the British North Borneo Company in December 1904 was explicitly framed as “a stepping stone to get Brunei” (p. 16). Despite energetic lobbying through the press and politicians, the British government negotiated a supplementary treaty with the Sultan in December 1905 providing for a Resident, effectively closing the door on Brooke’s ambitions. His interest then shifted to acquiring British North Borneo from the Chartered Company, a bid that also met with official resistance (pp. 16–17).
Equally prominent in the letters is the domestic drama surrounding the succession. Charles had little confidence in his eldest son Vyner, whose “lugubrious” correspondence and refusal to lead a punitive expedition in 1908 provoked sharp criticism (pp. 5–6, 17). Vyner’s marriage to Sylvia Brett in February 1911 compounded the Rajah’s fears, and by 1912 the family had fractured to the point where Charles issued a proclamation recognising his second son Bertram as “part of the Government of the State” (p. 22). In response, Charles established a Sarawak Advisory Council in London and a Committee of Administration in Kuching, both designed to constrain Vyner’s authority after his death (pp. 22–23).
Key Findings
- The letters reveal that Charles Brooke conducted much of Sarawak’s detailed governance remotely through Dallas, explicitly instructing him in January 1906 that “if the rules that you have from me from time to time are not carried out, you are responsible, whatever order the Rajah Muda may give you” (p. 5).
- Charles Brooke’s territorial expansion was driven by a conviction that Brunei was a “garden of weeds” that needed to be “swept away” to protect the surrounding districts he had already acquired, including Trusan (1885) and Limbang (1890) (p. 16).
- The Rajah’s financial entanglements with his family were substantial: he increased the Ranee’s allowance by £500 per year, lent their son Harry £2,000 for a newspaper venture that ultimately cost him £4,000, and provided a £3,000 loan to the Ranee’s brother Harry de Windt (p. 13).
- Charles Brooke’s political views were distinctly anti-imperialist and Liberal: he deplored British treatment of Indians in South Africa, supported Irish Home Rule, and declined to attend a Straits Association dinner in London because he “should hate” hearing “something resounding about the wonderful extent of the glorious Empire” (pp. 9–10).
- A hunting accident in November 1911 cost him the sight of his left eye, ending his daily participation in the Gloucestershire Hunt, which he described as “over for ever” (pp. 8–9).
- His final letter to Dallas, written from the Hyde Park Hotel in London in January 1917, expressed the conviction that “there are only two courses open—to give it up entirely or to continue to hold it entirely,” choosing the former and intending to return to Sarawak (p. 24).
Conclusion
Reece’s definitive takeaway is that Charles Brooke, though long overshadowed by the romantic figure of his uncle James, was in many ways the most significant of the three White Rajahs: the man who gave Sarawak its present boundaries, organised its government along rational bureaucratic lines, and introduced its key technological infrastructure. Yet his posthumous legacy was undermined by the very succession he had tried so carefully to manage. Vyner, freed from the constraints of the Advisory Council and Committee of Administration, presided over what Reece characterises as “the slow slide of Brooke rule towards bankruptcy of policy, stagnation of government, Japanese occupation, cession of sovereignty by Vyner in February 1946, and, finally, British annexation in July 1947” (p. 25).
Context
- The Dallas correspondence (PRO 30/79/1–13) is held at The National Archives, Kew, and was deposited as a private collection, likely by a member of the Dallas family. A further file (PRO 30/79/15) contains Vyner Brooke’s letters to Dallas, 1907–1912 (p. 4, n. 16).
- Reece notes that the vast store of Brooke records in Rhodes House Library, Oxford, had not been used in prior biographical studies of Charles Brooke, and that the Oxford University Colonial Records Project, which began depositing Sarawak records at the Bodleian from the 1960s, was itself prompted by the Rajah’s expressed interest in the idea (pp. 2, 21).