Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy

A Restless Victorian in the Malay States

Tristram Charles Sawyer Speedy (1836–1910) was a British military officer turned colonial administrator whose brief but consequential career in Malaya (1871–77) made him the first European to administer a Chinese mining district in the Malay Peninsula. His tenure as Assistant Resident of Larut in Perak, from January 1874 to late 1877, coincided with the birth of the British “Residential system” under the Pangkor Treaty and placed him at the centre of the most economically significant tin-mining area in the region at that time [1, pp. 1–2]. Larut, at its peak before the civil wars of 1872–73, had employed 40,000 Chinese miners and produced $1 million worth of tin annually [1, p. 14]. Speedy’s administration saw the Chinese population recover from 4,000 in January 1874 to 27,000 by December of that year, and tin production stabilise at approximately 3,000 piculs per month by 1876 [1, pp. 36].

Early Career and the Abyssinian Expeditions

Born at Meerut in northern India on 26 November 1836, the son of a lieutenant in the 3rd Regiment of Foot, Speedy was commissioned an ensign in the 41st Regiment at the age of seventeen in 1854 [1, p. 2]. He served in the Punjab during the Indian Mutiny campaign and in the “Eusoffian Expedition” of 1858 before selling his commission in December 1860 [1, p. 3]. His subsequent career was marked by restless movement: he spent eighteen months as a guest of King Theodore of Abyssinia (1860–61), served briefly as vice-consul at Massawa under Captain Cameron (1863–64), and then went to New Zealand, where he held a commission in the Militia [1, pp. 3–5].

Speedy’s most distinguished service came as personal interpreter to General Sir Robert Napier at the 1868 British expedition to Magdala, undertaken to liberate European prisoners held by King Theodore. Recruited from Australia at a salary of £100 per month, Speedy was employed on dangerous political missions to Abyssinian chiefs ahead of the main column [1, pp. 6–7]. Napier’s official despatches described him as “invaluable as an interpreter and envoy,” noting that his “familiar knowledge of the Amharic language and the character of the Abyssinians” had earned him immediate acceptance as “a guarantee of good treatment and mutual confidence” [1, p. 8]. After the fall of Magdala on 13 April 1868, Speedy undertook the care of Theodore’s young son, Prince Alamayu, escorting the boy to England where he was educated at Cheltenham College and later Rugby School [1, pp. 9–10]. Alamayu died of pleurisy at the University of Leeds in November 1879 [1, p. 82].

Administration of Larut

Speedy arrived in the Straits Settlements in 1871 and was appointed Superintendent of Police at Penang, where he became involved in the Penang repercussions of the Larut civil war [1, p. 11]. In July 1873 he resigned his permanent police appointment to raise a force for the Mentri of Larut, recruiting 110 Punjabis and Pathans in India [1, pp. 26–30]. His arrival at Larut in September 1873, with a flotilla of two steamers and fifteen sailing craft, proved decisive in breaking the Ghi Hin blockade of the Hai San-held mines [1, p. 30].

When the Pangkor Treaty of January 1874 brought Perak under British protection, Speedy was appointed the first Assistant Resident of Larut at a salary of £1,500 per annum [1, p. 34]. His immediate tasks were to settle mining disputes, disarm the Chinese, and restore economic production. A boundary commission, of which he was a member, divided the mining area between the two factions, destroyed stockades, collected arms, and restored forty-five women and children held captive [1, p. 36]. Speedy also made the establishment of Chinese secret society lodges in Larut a penal offence, with the concurrence of the Chinese headmen [1, pp. 38–39].

His administration was not without controversy. The opium farm controversy of April 1875, in which Resident Birch imposed a Singapore-based tax farmer on Larut, caused an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Chinese miners to leave the district, a loss described as irreparable [1, p. 45]. Speedy’s handling of the Chinese was criticised by some contemporaries as too lenient; Swettenham, then a junior official, complained that Speedy was “still given to temporising with the Chinese” [1, p. 38]. Yet the Chinese themselves petitioned the government in 1873 that Speedy’s departure from Penang would be deeply felt, praising his “stern efficiency” and “straight-forward impartiality” [1, p. 26].

The Jervois Controversy and Resignation

The relationship between Speedy and Governor Sir William Jervois deteriorated sharply after the Perak War of 1875–76. Jervois, who had succeeded Sir Andrew Clarke as Governor in May 1875, was determined to remove Speedy from his post [1, p. 71]. In a private letter to the Colonial Office in August 1876, Jervois described Speedy as “altogether an inferior order of being” who took “a delight in dressing himself in a gorgeous leopard skin, with a grand turban on his head” while playing the bagpipes [1, p. 1]. The letter further alleged that Speedy had been appointed only because it was “necessary, as it were, to buy him up” after his employment by the Mentri [1, p. 34].

Jervois’s subsequent despatch of October 1876 went further, suggesting by innuendo that Speedy might have been in league with the Mentri during the 1875 Malay revolt. Gullick demonstrates that this charge was unsupported by evidence: the Perak Commission of Enquiry showed that the Mentri was openly hostile to Speedy in 1875, and that Speedy had actively worked to suppress the Mentri’s preparations for revolt [1, pp. 73–75]. The Colonial Office’s unpublished minutes reveal that the salary reduction from £1,500 to £750 was deliberately calculated to induce resignation: “We reduced it as low as we could in the hopes of getting rid of Captain Speedy” [1, p. 72].

Speedy returned to Larut in December 1876, was transferred to the less congenial posting of Durian Sabatang in Lower Perak, and resigned in late 1877 [1, pp. 75–80]. He made three further trips to Abyssinia (1884, 1897) as an adviser on local affairs before dying at Chatsworth, Shropshire, in August 1910 at the age of seventy-three [1, pp. 83–88].

Research and Documentation

The principal scholarly treatment of Speedy remains J. M. Gullick’s monograph-length article “Captain Speedy of Larut,” published in the JMBRAS in 1953 [1]. Gullick drew extensively on Colonial Office records at the Public Records Office in London, Sir Hugh Low’s unpublished Perak Journal, and the files of the London Illustrated News [1, p. i]. The article’s central contribution is its critical assessment of Jervois’s allegations, which Gullick subjects to detailed scrutiny against the evidence of the Perak Commission of Enquiry and the testimony of Speedy’s contemporaries, including McNair, Swettenham, and Birch [1, pp. 67–75]. The paper was published in the same volume that contained C. D. Cowan’s edition of Swettenham’s Perak Journals 1874–6, providing a contemporary documentary framework against which Gullick’s narrative could be cross-referenced [1, p. 103]. Earlier accounts, including Swettenham’s Footprints in Malaya (1942) and McNair’s Perak and the Malays (1878), offer valuable but partial perspectives, the former coloured by Swettenham’s youthful impatience with Speedy’s methods and the latter by McNair’s evident admiration [1, pp. 38].

MBRAS Sources

• J.M. Gullick (1953). Captain Speedy of Larut. JMBRAS 26(3): 1–103

References

1. J.M. Gullick (1953). Captain Speedy of Larut JMBRAS 26(3): 1–103.