The late Professor Tom Elliott, a member of the sub-committee which conceived the Pulau Senang concept told me, long after the trial, (I made a note at the time), that he had come to the conclusion that the very success of the project had defeated its objectives. He said that the basic idea had been to lead men back to decent society by proving to them that creative work was more satisfactory, more worthwhile, than gangsterism. At Pulau Senang the creative work had almost ended: work had become routine. “To be successful there must be continuous pioneering effort. Men who did work hard and had proved to themselves and to authority that the basic ideas of Pulau Senang were right, had returned to normal society. They left Pulau Senang, leaving the bad stuff behind,” said Elliott sadly. “These incorrigibles influenced the newcomers. Ideally, there should have been several islands to be worked. Once Pulau Senang has passed the pioneering stage, the settlement should have been institutionalized. Pulau Senang had stopped being a pioneering effort. It had become an accomplished fact, with roads and rules. Detainees were demanding regular hours of work, more leisure facilities. There was ample time for discontent, complaints and conspiracy. In this atmosphere, intrigue led to plotting.” That, in his view, was why the experiment failed. Yet to the end, Professor Elliott continued to believe in the principle of the experiment. He was convinced gangsters could be, and should be, helped to become decent citizens. This was not an opinion shared entirely by Major James. James thought that most gangsters had a serious character flaw, otherwise they would not become members of a secret society. Most of them were beyond redemption and should be kept away from the rest of society.
We will probably never know why Pulau Senang exploded that sunny afternoon. The truth lies buried somewhere in the ruins. We shall never know for sure why the experiment failed. There is Major James’ explanation. There are other theories. Why did they kill and destroy? Reflecting upon the, to me, utter senselessness of the riot, (for the rioters must have realised there was no escape from inevitable punishment, though a few hoped to swim to freedom, or of getting to Indonesia by boat), I am inclined to favour the belief that the forty-minute murder and destruction was not a violent effort to free everyone on the island, but a deliberate attempt by the secret society leaders to prove publicly that they, not Dutton or the government he represented, controlled their members. The government could order gangsters to build, to create. They did. Pulau Senang became a showpiece. But the gang-leaders could order them to destroy and they would be obeyed. In this way, the gang-leaders could prove that their hold over them was absolute, even when they were all under detention. That was why the gang-leaders ordered Dutton and the others to be killed, Pulau Senang to be destroyed. That was why they ordered their men to smash and burn what they had sweated to create. Like automatons, the secret society gangsters, sworn to obey, raised their weapons and attacked. Less than an hour was needed: Dutton’s mutilated body lay amid the debris. A blood stained shirt fluttered from a pole, an emblem of victory. Still clutching their weapons, they strutted like prize cockerels. Others sang and danced in celebration.
Those who organized the riot (and undoubtedly it was organized: it was not an impulsive gesture), might have argued that the punishment which would follow could not be much worse than what they were already suffering. What could the authorities do to them? Not much, except to throw them back into jail. The Government could not hang them all for Dutton’s death. No one need suffer if they all stuck together, as obedient secret society members, remembering their oaths, were supposed to behave. No government, they might have muttered during their whispered conspiracy, would dare to hang them all. If they thought along these lines, they were wrong on two points. Faced with death, strong men wilted: secret society discipline faltered and crumbled. For various personal reasons some of the mob talked to save their skins. Others followed. That was one point. The other was that they completely misunderstood the mood of the Government. This was a government fully prepared to use the due process of the law to hang them all, every single one of them, providing an impartial judge and jury were satisfied that they were members of that illegal assembly.
Soon after election to office, this new, inexperienced, fearless government had announced its determination to stamp out secret societies. The Government said they were prepared to meet the challenge head on. They knew there was no alternative if they, and not the mobs, were to govern Singapore. The full weight of the law would be used to crush them. If the law demanded that all 300-odd detainees must die for the murder of Dutton and his colleagues: they would die. Nobody doubted the Government’s firm resolve when, in due course, 71 suspects stood before the magistrate, charged with murder.
What did the government believe caused the experiment to fail? No formal statement was ever issued. Soon after the riot, the government announced that a high court judge would hold an inquiry. Wiser counsel prevailed: plans to hold an inquiry were abandoned when it was decided to bring charges against those detainees believed to be implicated in the affair. No attempt was made to resuscitate Pulau Senang. Eventually the Government decided to make the ‘Isle of Ease’ a target for the bombs of the airforce and the shells of the army. Devious minds wondered if this decision was a deliberate reflection of the attitude of a wiser, more experienced, government towards the experiment that failed: an expression which said that in certain circumstances, efforts to rehabilitate can be wasteful if not useless, that some things, some people, can never be changed, and realism in the world in which we have to live, demands that when society is challenged by gangsters, domestic or international, the government of the day must be prepared, if necessary, to meet force with force.
My own view is that while this might well have been the belief of a realistic government, by now much learned in the ways of secret societies, it had nothing to do with their decision to turn Pulau Senang into a bombing and firing range. That was not meant to be a sign that the Government had forever abandoned attempts to restore gangsters to normal lives. This goes on all the time in different ways. True, Pulau Senang failed, but not all had been lost in that hour of destruction. For those concerned with the problem of rehabilitating gangsters, the island experiment must have provided much useful, if tragically costly, information, (not all of it of negative value), which need not be wasted. There will be other experiments. I refuse to believe that Daniel Dutton died in vain.
Dutton died a terrible death trying to prove that evil men could be brought back to conventional life through hard work. He did not succeed with his experiment and he paid for failure with his life. His mistake was not in his handling of the experiment so much as his inability to understand how evil some wicked men can be. Dutton took no precautions against his own idealism. Until the end he wanted desperately to believe that the better bad-men on the island would restrain the evil bad-men. He was convinced the good bad-men would stand by him, protect him. He was wrong. By believing that, Dutton signed his own death warrant. He should have known that mob hysteria causes men to sink to the lowest level, rarely to rise to the nobler levels of human behaviour.
