KINARUT MANSION : New German Township and Administration Centre at North Borneo after World War One ??

SEJARAH NORTH BORNEO SABAH 

Special Edition Untold History

KINARUT MANSION : 

New German Township and Administration Centre at North Borneo after World War One ??

Mark Whitton of North Borneo Trading in 1946-1947 had to visit the Estate for a Lloyd's insurance claim but had a most interesting visit to Kinarut.

This was his recollection:.......

‘Hornet’ Williams was an occasional, but welcome visitor to the mess, a rubber planter from an estate some way up the railway line at Kinarut.

As with all commerce, rubber estates had been left to go to ruin during the occupation and the estate he managed was no exception.

Hornet, who wore the thickest of pebble glasses, had decided to inspect a remote part of the estate which had last been visited in 1941, to see if it was worth opening up again for tapping, provided labour was available.

He was pushing through the overgrown track when a branch rebounded, hooked over his glasses and flipped them off.

Being quite blind he spent some hours crawling round very carefully feeling for them. “No one knew where I was and I would have died there if I hadn’t found them.”

It transpired that he had bought an Electrolux kerosene refrigerator from us and it had arrived damaged but nonetheless in working order. To enable us to claim for the damage against insurance we had to provide a Lloyds Survey which certified the damage and the probable value or cost of repairs, and how the damage had occurred.

The responses to the printed questionnaire were more or less routine in a case like this which involved a dent or two and little else.

The procedure was however designed to take in such minor accidents as this, up to the grounding or loss of a vessel.

None the less I was designated to go up the line to examine the refrigerator and fill in the report one Sunday.

Hornet met me at the estate station, a short platform with a shed for storing rubber prior to being shipped down to Jesselton for overseas shipment.

The estate had a light railway used to take the rubber from the factory some four miles away to the station as roads were non-existent at that time and vehicles were expensive to buy and run. We seated ourselves on a bench fixed to a four wheel trolley and two of the labour force push started it then sat on it, keeping the momentum with an occasional kick on the rails from time to time. The track was level, mostly through swamp land, so while leisurely, our progress was relaxed all round.

Hornet seemed more anxious that I tour his factory and coolie lines than examine the fridge. Personally, suffering from a hangover from Saturday night I was more interested in the fridge, and more particularly in its contents. As a guest I perforce deferred to my host and had my first of many visits to rubber factories, which processed raw latex into sheet rubber.

That over we repaired to the place where Hornet and the refrigerator lived.

“This estate employed four European assistants; two hundred tappers all controlled by one manager, pre-war.” Said Hornet. “Now I have about forty tappers and do everything else myself with the assistance of two overseers and a clerk in the office. All the accommodation was destroyed during the war, the tappers and families live in temporary accommodation and I live in the old estate club.”

We walked there and as we came out of the shade trees fringing the sea there appeared what I suppose would have been called a hut, but what a setting. It beat our Tg Aru house hands down. A white coral beach, coarse grass lawn up to the building with a headland at one end of a crescent bay and a small island at the other.

Going closer there was a verandah from which to take in this view and two immense cannons mounted one each side of the steps leading up to it. We entered and I finally viewed the refrigerator which had a couple of scratches and a bit of paint off the outside and cold beer inside.

We settled on the verandah and took in the view and a beer while I filled in the Lloyds survey and my host arranged a cold lunch and told me a bit about the estate.

It appeared that during the period prior to the First World War, when rubber was a boom crop, and communications were slow between Borneo and Europe, the manager, a German national, had had the tip that, when the ‘Drang nach Ostern’ was achieved, it would be necessary that a more suitable centre of government be located on North Borneo for the incoming German administration.

The manager, a patriotic gentleman, did what he thought was right. He selected a site on the hills overlooking the estate and the sea as a suitable place for Government House, designed an impressive mansion and arranged for the shipment of suitable materials and artisans from Hong Kong to build it. He laid out the adjacent flat land between hills and the sea, behind Hornet’s present abode as the future capital, built roads and installed street lights on hardwood posts, lit by oil lamps.

The directors in London began to have misgivings after a year or more with no money coming from the far east and after eighteen months sent an inspector out who soon discovered that the proceeds of the sale of rubber had been diverted to the building of an alternative capital for North Borneo. Hornet showed me some of the marble columns from the house.

“It had fifty Tukan ayers (water carriers) which gives you some idea of the size of the place.” He said as we walked up one of the streets, the old lamp posts topped by skeletons of the lamps marking the route through the high lalang grass.

“The management couldn’t do much with the marble columns, but built four pretty luxurious bungalows with the timber and other materials they salvaged after the first war, so I expect I’ll have to live in the old club for the rest of my time.”

“There’s no job for an overseas assistant and prices are very shaky at present with the American stockpile liable to be released at any time and synthetic at a price comparable with natural.”

We walked back to the factory along the seaside into the shade of huge mangroves over the path. “Those are the wharves where lighters berthed to carry our rubber to Jesselton before the railway was built.”

The dry stone walls reminded me of the Inca ruins in South America though smaller and still in good condition, though the berths had silted up and the mangroves were taking over.

A long narrative and written by my father's colleague and dear friend Mark Whitton at North Borneo Trading, but when he was new to BNB in 1946 or 1947 and working for Harrison & Crossfield courtesy David Porter.

Edited by : Kumis Kumis