Soldier, Intelligence Officer, Scholar, and Publisher – The Life of Leon Comber
The Asian Crime Century briefing 25
(The picture above shows the Officer Commanding Kuala Lumpur Jungle Squad, John Gladwell, making an announcement from the control room with Inspector Alma Singh at left and Sub-Inspector Rustan Ali, about 1958).
For an understanding of the origin and history of Triads and Secret Societies, the books of Dr. Leon Comber are essential reading. Leon Comber, who passed on 11th May 2023 aged 101, was an officer in the Indian Army who fought against the Japanese in World War Two, a Colonial Police officer in Malaya serving in Special Branch during the Emergency (when he was married to author Han Suyin), an executive for several major publishing houses, and the author of definitive books regarding Chinese Triad societies, the Malaya Emergency as well others telling stories of Chinese culture. What an extraordinary life.
Leon Comber is one of many officers who left their home in Britain to serve overseas during a period of turbulence and British decline. Comber is an inspiration for those Westerners who seek to better understand aspects of Asian cultures that have been largely closed to outsiders. Such an area is Triads and Secret Societies, which Comber studied through his work in Special Branch and later as a writer. His insight into Triads and Secret Societies remains significant and authoritative.
Born in London in 1921, Leon Comber was the son of a master bookbinder and typesetter, which surely influenced his later passion for books. He was studying law at King’s College when World War Two commenced and in 1940 he became an officer in the Indian Army, ending as a Major. In September 1945, he landed on the West coast of Malaya and in due course after the war ended he moved to Special Branch in the Royal Malayan Police. He was a speaker of Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), as well as Hindi and Malay.
Comber and The Malaya Emergency
Comber served as an officer in Special Branch in Malaya during the Emergency, the period when the communist Malayan National Liberation Army MNLA) conducted an insurgency against the colonial British government.
Comber was married to Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou, better known by her pen name of Han Suyin, in 1952. That same year, Han Suyin published her most famous novel, ‘A Many Splendoured Thing’, that was later used as the story for the movie ‘Love is a Many Splendoured Thing’ with William Holden and Jennifer Jones. The novel and the movie tell the autobiographical story of Han Suyin’s love affair with married Australian correspondent Ian Morrison who was killed in Korea in 1950.
Han Suyin’s more controversial work at the time was ‘And the Rain My Drink’, a novel published in 1956 that describes the methods used by the British authorities as well as the MNLA during the Malayan Emergency and how this affected the lives of local people. Some of the inspiration for the book came from Han Suyin’s work at the Johore Bahru General Hospital, and she criticised both the terrorism of the MNLA as well as the counter-terrorist methods of the British colonial authorities. For the wife of a colonial police Special Branch officer such as Comber to publish such a book was inevitably career ending, and Comber left the police in 1956. He is reported to have later said that “The novel portrayed the British security forces in a rather slanted fashion, I thought. She was a rather pro-Left intellectual and also a doctor. I understood the reasons why the communists might have felt the way they did, but I didn’t agree with them taking up arms.”
Sir Gerald Templar, British High Commissioner for Malaya during the Emergency, reportedly was irate with Comber and tried to ban Han Suyin’s book, although Comber defended her right to write what she wanted to. Their relationship was lost, partly it seems due to other reasons also, and Comber and Han Suyin divorced in 1959.
In later years Comber made great contributions to the study of the Malayan Emergency with multiple books on the subject. These are ‘Malaya's Secret Police 1945-1960: The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency’ (2008), ‘Templer and the Road to Malaysian independence: The Man and His Time’ (2015), and ‘Dalley and the Malayan Security Service, 1945-48: MI5 vs. MSS’ (2018). As the Foreword by Anthony Short to Comber’s 2008 book states, “Leon Comber knows how Special Branch works, knows what happened during the Emergency, what went right and what went wrong. He knows because he was there from the beginning and because he has studied, collected, collated and assessed his material for a large part of his life.”
Comber’s writing in later life of the Malayan Emergency was not academic history, and as he mentioned in the book he sent a copy to General David Petraeus, the US Army commander in Iraq, “to see whether a study of the recent past might be of some use in the shaping of the intelligence war in Iraq.”
Triads and Secret Societies
Comber’s further contributions to understanding closed aspects of Asia came through his writings on Triads and Secret Societies. In the 1950s he wrote and published ‘Introduction to Secret Societies’, ‘Traditional Mysteries of Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya’ (which were later combined in ‘The Triads: Chinese Secret Societies in 1950s Malaya and Singapore’), and ‘Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya: A Survey of the Triad Society from 1800 to 1900’. These are important works describing in detail the origin, history, and nature of Triads and Secret Societies in Asia.
Comber wrote in the Preface to ‘Chinese Secret Societies in Malaya’ that “The research necessary for a survey of this kind has extended over twelve years’ residence in Malaya, including nine years as an officer in the Malayan Police when I had the unique opportunity to come into first-hand contact with Chinese secret society activities.”
His attention to and insight into Chinese culture was illustrated in the closing lines of the book, describing Chinese secret societies at the end of the 19th century, where he wrote that “The situation was aptly summed up in an old Chinese proverb: “The Mandarin derives his power from the law. The people from the secret societies.”
Chinese culture
From 1960 to 1985, Comber was Managing Director of Heinemann Publishers Asia Ltd., based in Hong Kong, and later was Director of the Hong Kong University Press. His love of Asian culture is clear from his books such as ‘Favourite Chinese Stories’ (1967), ‘Chinese Ancestor Worship in Malaya’ (1954), ‘Chinese Temples in Singapore’ (1958), ‘The Strange Cases of Magistrate Pao: Chinese Tales of Crime and Detection’ (translated from the Chinese and retold by Leon Comber, 1970), ‘The Golden Treasure Box: Favourite Stories From the Orient’ (1979), ‘Through the Bamboo Window: Chinese Life and Culture in 1950s Malaya and Singapore’ (2009), and ‘Singapore Correspondent: Political Dispatches from Singapore, 1958-1962’ (2012).
Leon Comber emigrated to Melbourne, Australia in 1991 with his second wife, Madam Takako Kawai, and their daughter, Akii. As a fitting tribute to his intellect, he gained a PhD in Asian Studies at the age of 76.
Dr. Leon Comber was a soldier, a police intelligence officer, a writer, publisher, and a decent man. He remains an inspiration to all of us who study Asia.