As a sponsored documentary intended for company workers, Dunlop in Malaya serves primarily to highlight the welfare of its workers within Malaya. This is undoubtedly a trope within post-war sponsored documentaries (e.g. Achievement in Africa, 1960) with companies responding to international criticisms of colonial exploitation by promoting their development and welfare programmes, though similar welfare themes are also evident in non-colonial industrial films. From the outset, the commentator explains that Dunlop ‘assumes the responsibility for the welfare and employment of 20,000 people of widely differing nationalities, traditions and creeds’, as the film shows the modern housing, medical facilities, schooling, and recreational activities provided by the company. Although the film does offer some detailed footage of the industrial process, showing the clearing, ‘bud grafting’, tapping, and collection and transport of latex, this footage appears later within the film and again serves, in part, to highlight the increased responsibilities (and technological advancements) provided for the local workers under European guidance.

The film relates the industries and activities directly to Britain. The commentary opens by describing this as a story ‘of British achievement’ and reiterates in the final lines that ‘this service is a British achievement to which they [the Dunlop Malayan estates] can be justly proud’. In appealing to a British audience, the film uses British points of reference – the 13 rubber estates are ‘the size of the county of London or one and a half times the size of the municipality of Birmingham’ – and, in concluding with footage of ships sailing overseas, shows the economic benefits of the industry to this audience. It presents a model of post-war imperialism, of social development and technological ‘progress’, administered through business. In this respect it can be connected to a large number of industrial films within the colonial archive, which promote ideals of corporate welfare together with policies of colonial ‘development’.

While showing some skilled local workers (for example, carrying out laboratory tests), the film still endorses a traditional hierarchical structure, which acknowledges the primacy of the British worker: ‘European technicians and administrators are the hard core, around which is fuelled a team made up of native Malayans, Indians and Chinese who have been settled in the country for generations’. Ultimately the film celebrates the work of the British administrators and, in the traditions of industrial filmmaking, aligns heroism and stoicism with company loyalty. ‘To men such as these there is only one consideration’, the commentator observes, ‘the job of improving the yield and quality of the plantations which will always be their first concern’.

For colonial historians, the film is perhaps of most interest for its coverage of the Malayan Emergency. Unmentioned throughout the first half of the film, later sequences show guards firing shots on the estates, and carrying out security checks. The audience is offered no political or social context to the Emergency, and these sequences instead once more illustrate the company’s welfare work and its modern technological advances. ‘The company has installed the latest high frequency radio telephone network and maintained a fleet of 70 armoured cars’, the commentator explains, before adding that ‘the company has spent over half a million pounds on security measures for the personnel on the estate’. These security measures were essential in protecting the economic interests of the company (for example, guarding the plantations), but again the film relates these measures directly to the workers. Furthermore, despite the widely acknowledged Communist support among many rural Chinese rubber tappers, the film dismisses any suggestion that company workers may have been willingly involved with the insurrection. The security checks, we are told, are implemented ‘to control those who may be terrorised into supplying the bandits with food and other necessities’. It is, finally, labour, and the production of profit, that can effectively unify the diverse workforce (‘A whole vivid, varied, vigorous, community united by a common purpose’). The film indulges in a fantasy of ethnic harmony here, enforced by extracting surplus value from colonial lands and people.

Tom Rice (February 2010)