text:
Romsey

Romsey is a town in the Test Valley district of Hampshire, England. The town is situated 7 mi northwest of Southampton, 11 mi southwest of Winchester and 17 mi southeast of Salisbury. It sits on the outskirts of the New Forest, just over 3 mi northeast of its eastern edge. The population of Romsey was 14,768 at the 2011 census.

Romsey is one of the principal towns in the Test Valley Borough and lies on the River Test, which is known for fly fishing, predominantly trout. In 2019, the town centre underwent substantial remodelling, removing the roundabout around the statue of Lord Palmerston, and creating a pedestrianised area.

Romsey was home to the 17th-century philosopher and economist William Petty and the 19th-century British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, whose statue has stood in the town centre since 1857. The town was also home to the 20th-century naval officer and statesman Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who lived at Broadlands. Romsey Abbey, the largest parish church in Hampshire, dominates the centre of the town. Other notable buildings include a 13th-century hunting lodge, an 18th-century coaching inn and the 19th-century corn exchange.

Middle Ages to the Civil War
Romsey's name is believed to originate from the Old English Rūm's eg, meaning "Rūm's island". Rūm is probably an abbreviation of a personal name like Rūmwald (meaning "glorious leader"), and eg (meaning "island") may have denoted a monastic retreat in the Early Middle Ages, since it is common among religious place names.

The first church in Romsey was founded by Edward the Elder in 907 AD for his daughter, Ælflæd, a nun who became the first abbess of Romsey. Edgar the Peaceful re-founded the abbey under the Rule of Benedict in 967 AD, appointing as abbess a noblewoman named Merewenna in 974 AD. Merewenna was given charge of Edgar's stepdaughter, Æthelflæd, who later served as abbess herself. Both Merewenna and Æthelflæd are revered as saints.

The surrounding village prospered alongside the religious community. In 1003 the Danes sacked Romsey and destroyed the Anglo-Saxon church in retaliation for the St Brice's Day Massacre. While there is no record of the abbey's restoration, it is written that in 1012 Emma of Normandy gave lands to the abbey and that there were a total of 54 nuns in Romsey during the reign of Cnut the Great.

The Domesday Book of 1086 refers to a population of 127 households in Romsey, along with the earliest records of the watermills that would later establish it as an industrial town. Relative to other Domesday settlements, Romsey had a large population and paid a considerable amount of tax.

Along with Wilton Abbey nearby, Romsey Abbey became known as a place of learning in the High Middle Ages. In 1086, Matilda of Scotland was sent there to be educated by her aunt, Cristina, who was then the abbess. A number of hopeful suitors visited the princess in Romsey, including the later king William Rufus, whose advances were hindered by her aunt. William was killed in 1100 while hunting in the New Forest, after which his body was carried through Bell Street in Romsey on its way to Winchester Cathedral.

The existing abbey was built in the Norman style between 1120 and 1140 using Chilmark stone. It was likely designed by Henry of Blois, the brother of King Stephen and builder of the Hospital of St Cross in Winchester. The final three arches were added between 1230 and 1240, at which time more than 100 nuns belonged to the foundation. The north transept of the original Saxon church is still visible today.

Henry I granted Romsey its first charter, allowing it to hold a full market each Sunday and a four-day fair at the Feast of St Æthelflæd the Virgin. This was confirmed by Henry II in 1268 and extended to the Feast of St Philip and St James by Henry III in 1272. Given these charters, it can be assumed that Romsey was flourishing in the 13th century, perhaps supported by a lucrative woollen industry whereby wool was woven and then fulled or pounded before being dyed and exported from nearby Southampton. It is suggested that towns like Romsey and New Alresford prospered as a result of their location, which allowed them to exploit the downland sheep economy while retaining access to a major port to the south.

Romsey continued to grow and prosper until the Black Death struck the town in 1348–9, killing up to half its population of roughly 1,000 individuals. It is recorded that 90 nuns voted in the 1333 abbatial election but never more than 25 in elections held from 1350 onwards. Plague arrived again in 1526, with Henry VIII abandoning his plans to spend the eve of the Assumption in Romsey and instead heading to Winchester. Prosperity never returned to the abbey.

Romsey Abbey was finally suppressed by Henry VIII upon the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, during which time many religious buildings were destroyed. The abbey itself was saved from demolition, ostensibly due to a section dedicated to St Lawrence that was used as the parish church. In 1544, the townspeople were allowed to purchase the abbey from the Crown for a sum of £100. The section that saved it was subsequently demolished, however, with the remainder being used as the parish church that exists today.

By the mid-16th century Romsey's population was about 1,500, its woollen and tanning industries having fuelled growth. After his visit to Broadlands in 1607, James I granted the town a charter and made it a borough. This gave official status to an informal local government that had been running the town's affairs since the Dissolution in 1539. Romsey could now have a corporation comprising a mayor, six aldermen, twelve chief burgesses and a town clerk. There was also to be a local law court under a Court Recorder assisted by two sergeants-at-mace and, over all, a High Steward, the first of whom was the Earl of Southampton.

Romsey changed hands several times during the English Civil War, with both Royalist and Parliamentary troops occupying and plundering the town. Most significant were the events of 1643 in which William Waller, having captured Winchester, marched southwest to Romsey where his soldiers defaced the abbey and destroyed its organ. A skirmish on Middle Bridge, downstream of Sadler's Mill, may have preceded these events.

18th to 20th centuries
The town's woollen industry struggled through the 18th century, with competition from the North effectively halving the wages of woollen workers in the southern and eastern parts of the country by the 1770s. As the townspeople looked for more stable work in burgeoning industries like brewing, papermaking and sackmaking, Romsey continued to grow as a modern market town. In 1794 a canal was dug from Redbridge to Andover, passing through Romsey and thus improving its access to nearby trade centres. The town's population was 4,274 in the first census of 1801.

Lord Palmerston, the 19th-century British prime minister, lived at Broadlands in his autumn years. In the 1850s he delivered a number of political and religious lectures about the town, including one to the Labourers' Encouragement Society in 1859. Though he had hoped to be buried at Romsey Abbey, he was in 1865 given a state funeral and subsequently buried at Westminster Abbey. His statue, sculpted by Matthew Noble, has stood in Market Place since 1868.

Despite the arrival of the railway in 1847, the town's expansion slowed in the mid-19th century. Whilst its population had grown to 5,654 in 1851, it stagnated in subsequent decades and—by the time of the 1901 census—the population was just 5,597. The town also enjoyed a significant trade in corn: the Corn Exchange, which is a Grade II* listed building, was completed in 1864.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Romsey became known for making Berthon Boats, a type of collapsible lifeboat invented by Edward Lyon Berthon in 1851. In 1873, having been the vicar of Romsey Abbey since 1860, Berthon erected a shed outside the nearby vicarage to meet the increasing demand for collapsible boats in the 1870s. In 1877 he appointed his son as manager and moved the enterprise to Lortemore Place. The boatyard continued to make boats until 1917, when it became Berthon Boat Co. and relocated to Lymington. The abbey installed a window commemorating Berthon in 1902.

With Romsey's expansion as a brewing town in the mid-19th century, it became known for its extraordinary number of pubs and, more generally, its fashionable drinking culture. By 1911 it boasted more than 80 public houses, twice the national average and effectively one pub for every 151.5 residents. Based on the old Hampshire saying so drunk he must have been to Romsey, a book of the same name was published in 1974 as a comprehensive guide to the town's drinking establishments. The Willis Fleming family of North Stoneham Park were major landowners at Romsey from the 17th until early 20th centuries, and were lords of the manors of Romsey Infra and Romsey Extra.

Broadlands later became the home of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, known locally as 'Lord Louis'. In 1947 he was given his earldom and the lesser title of Baron Romsey, of Romsey in the County of Southampton. Mountbatten was buried in Romsey Abbey after being killed in an IRA bomb explosion in Ireland on 27 August 1979. After his death his titles passed to his elder daughter, Lady Brabourne, who thus became Countess Mountbatten of Burma. Her eldest son was styled by the courtesy title 'Lord Romsey' until he inherited the title of Lord Brabourne in 2005, and then the earldom in 2017.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was Mountbatten's nephew and, when he married Elizabeth II on 20 November 1947, the pair departed London by train and spent their honeymoon at Broadlands. They attended the service at Romsey Abbey the following Sunday. Like his parents, Charles, Prince of Wales and his first wife Diana, Princess of Wales spent the first part of their own honeymoon at Broadlands in 1981. In 2011, William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge broke tradition by spending their first night as a married couple at Buckingham Palace.

In 2007 Romsey celebrated the 400th anniversary of James I's charter with a programme of events hosted from March through to September, including a visit on 8 June from Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. The cost of the visit created some local controversy, with particular attention being paid to the £5,000 spent on a new toilet for Her Majesty's use, though in the event she did not make use of it.

Present
The town centre has had a large Waitrose supermarket since 1969, along with an independent department store named Bradbeers and a range of other independent shops and high street chains. Romsey was described by The Guardian as 'resoundingly, timelessly English' in 2014, with the newspaper remarking on the town's representation of bourgeois provincial life. It is popular among retirees.

Three industrial and trading estates focus mainly on service industries and small-scale manufacturing. Three scientific and high technology employers—Roke Manor Research, Southampton Science Park and IBM—have establishments nearby.

Governance
Romsey is part of the Romsey and Southampton North parliamentary constituency. Its current MP is Caroline Nokes of the Conservative Party. Elected in the general election on 6 May 2010, after boundary changes, she defeated the Liberal Democrat MP Sandra Gidley with a 4.5% swing to Conservative from Liberal Democrat and a majority of 4,156 votes. Gidley had held the seat since a by-election in 2000 in the former Romsey seat.

The town is part of the Test Valley district council which is controlled by the Conservative Party. Norton Knatchbull, 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma, grandson of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, is the current High Steward, a position which dates from the 17th century (see above).

Romsey Town Council holds its meetings and has its offices at Romsey Town Hall.

Romsey Abbey
Romsey Abbey is a 12th-century abbey built in the Norman style, probably by Henry of Blois, upon an earlier Saxon church dating back to the 10th century. Elements of the old Saxon church remain, including an exposed north transept and a 10th-century rood. The current abbey is the largest parish church in Hampshire and is generally regarded as cathedral-like by architects and observers. It is open daily to visitors.

Broadlands
Broadlands is an 18th-century country house located just outside the town centre. It was designed in the Palladian style by the famous architect Capability Brown before being completed by Henry Holland in 1788. It has had a number of illustrious occupants, including Lord Palmerston and Louis Mountbatten. Broadlands has been the setting of two royal honeymoons, namely those of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip in 1947 and then Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1981. The house itself is a Grade I listed building and the surrounding gardens are Grade II listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. Both are open to visitors on weekday afternoons in summer.

King John's House
King John's House is a 13th-century building that allegedly served as a hunting lodge for King John when he hunted in the nearby New Forest. This is unlikely, however, since it was built in 1256 and therefore 40 years after the king's death, though there is evidence that the beams were reused from an earlier structure. The original building and adjoining Tudor cottage have a number of unusual historical features, including 14th-century wall decorations and graffiti, a floor made from cattle metapodials, and a traditional monastic garden. Locals claim the house is haunted, with the Hampshire Ghost Society encountering a shrouded figure during their investigations between 2002 and 2008. The house is a Grade I listed building.

Embley Park
Embley Park, a country estate located on the outskirts of Romsey, was the home of Florence Nightingale from 1825 to her death in 1910. Known as the founder of modern nursing and for her work in sanitary reform, Nightingale is said to have received her calling from God in 1837 whilst sitting beneath a large cedar tree on the grounds. While a manor in Embley belonged to Romsey Abbey as early as the 10th century, the current building is of 18th- and 19th-century origin. The site is now home to Embley, an independent school. It is a Grade II listed building.

The White Horse Hotel
The White Horse Hotel is a Grade II listed, 18th-century coaching inn whose timber frames date back to the 1450s. Its medieval stone cellars indicate that the site may have hosted guests to Romsey Abbey as early as the 12th century. The existing assembly rooms are said to be where Lord Palmerston first engaged in political debate in the early 1800s. The building housed a hotel and brasserie, which until 2019, was owned and operated by Silks Hotels.

Sadler's Mill
The existence of Sadler's Mill, the only mill to be developed on the main course of the River Test, is first recorded in the 16th century, when it functioned as a corn and grist mill. It was at one time owned by Lord Palmerston and later the Broadlands estate before passing to various private owners. Milling ceased in 1932 and the building was left derelict for many years until its restoration in 2005. Carbon dating during this restoration placed the earlier structure in the mid-17th century. It is a Grade II listed building.

The Plaza
The Plaza, in Winchester Road, is a fully equipped 230-seat art deco style theatre, originally built as a cinema in the 1930s. It became a bingo hall until the 1980s. It was converted in 1984 and is now home to local amateur dramatics group, Romsey Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society (RAODS), who stage between ten and fourteen productions each year and hire the venue out for other local productions, concerts, and functions.

Memorial Park
The town's memorial park, which plays host to the annual Mayor's Picnic, contains a Japanese Type 96 15 cm howitzer, one of two captured by the British and brought back to Romsey by Louis Mountbatten. One was donated to the town and the other retained on the grounds of his country estate, Broadlands.

Romsey signal box
Built in 1865, the signal box controlled the freight and passenger trains running on the railway lines passing through Romsey until 1982. Rescued from demolition by Romsey and District Buildings Preservation Trust, it is now a working museum.

Other places of interest

 * Sir Harold Hillier Gardens – Gardens and arboretum
 * Mottisfont Abbey – National Trust property with nationally renowned rose collection
 * Paultons Park – Children's theme park

Events
The Mayor's Picnic takes place in early-mid summer and is held in Romsey's Memorial Park. There is music performed by local schools, a variety of stalls, and the popular Duck Race, in which numbered plastic ducks 'race' each other along the river Test, to be scrupulously retrieved before awarding a prize to whoever chose the winning duck.

The Beggars Fair is held in the streets and pubs of Romsey on the second Saturday in July. It is a free festival featuring all types of music, together with dance and other street entertainment.

Romsey Carnival takes place during a week in July with the highlight being the procession through the streets of Romsey on the final Sunday afternoon.

The Romsey Agricultural & Horse Show is a large agricultural show that takes place on the second Saturday of September every year at Broadlands. The show is one of the oldest in England, held annually since 1842. In addition, Broadlands has twice hosted the CLA Game Fair, the largest countryside show in the world, most recently in July 2006.

The Winter Carnival takes places each year when Romsey's Christmas lights are switched on.

The Romsey Arts Festival occurs every 3 years, showcasing talent from in and around the local area.

Romsey Beer Festival is organised by the local Round Table, and takes place in October or November each year, at Crosfield Hall.

Romsey has two Rotary Clubs which are active, working with local business partners and schools to raise charitable funds for the community. The Rotary Clubs organise the annual Walk The Test Way which has become popular with several hundred walkers raising money for charities.

Notable people

 * Reverend W. Awdry – clergyman, railway enthusiast and author of The Railway Series from which the character Thomas the Tank Engine originated
 * Edward Lyon Berthon – inventor and clergyman
 * Charles Butler – author of children's books
 * Martin Butler – composer
 * Laura Carmichael – actress in Downton Abbey
 * Andy Cook – footballer
 * Harry Dennis – footballer
 * Charlie Dimmock – TV gardening expert and presenter
 * David Gower – retired cricketer and television personality
 * Anthony Hayward – journalist and author
 * Giles Jacob – legal writer and lexicographer
 * John Latham – ornithologist and author
 * Ollie Locke – featured in Made in Chelsea and Celebrity Big Brother 2014
 * Ben Mansfield – actor
 * Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma lived at Broadlands
 * Florence Nightingale – founder of modern nursing
 * Lord Palmerston – statesman and Prime Minister
 * William Petty – economist, philosopher and co-founder of the Royal Society.
 * James Robertson-Justice - actor
 * John Russell Reynolds – neurologist and physician to Queen Victoria
 * Richard Sharp – banker and Member of Parliament
 * Tim Sills – footballer
 * Nigel Spackman – footballer
 * Kerrie Taylor – actress

State
Primary:
 * Braishfield School
 * Cupernham Infant School
 * Cupernham Junior School
 * Halterworth Primary School
 * Romsey Primary School
 * Romsey Abbey C of E Primary School

Secondary:
 * The Mountbatten School
 * The Romsey School

Independent
Primary:
 * Stroud School
 * Embley

Secondary:
 * Embley

Transport
Romsey is within 10 mi of both the M27 and M3 motorways, providing fast links along the south coast and to London, and to the Midlands and the North via the A34. The A36 runs a few miles west of the town, providing a direct but not particularly quick route to the West of England and South Wales. There are cycle links to Southampton and Salisbury via route 24 of the National Cycle Network.

Romsey has a railway station, managed by South Western Railway, which provides services between Salisbury and Romsey, via Southampton and Eastleigh. The station is also served by services on Great Western Railway, operating services between Cardiff and Portsmouth, via Salisbury, Bath, Bristol, Southampton and Fareham. A dedicated shuttle bus linking Romsey with fast London trains at Winchester was discontinued in 2009 despite a campaign to save the service.

Current bus services are provided by Bluestar within the town, as well as to Southampton and Eastleigh, Salisbury Reds to Salisbury and Southampton, as well as Stagecoach to Winchester.

Sport and leisure
One of the cricket clubs is Old Tauntonians and Romsey Cricket Club.

The Wessex League football club Romsey Town FC play at The Bypass Ground, South Front.

Romsey Rugby Football Club is based at Romsey Sports Centre. It fields teams of all ages each weekend of the playing season.

The town has a swimming pool, the Romsey Rapids.

Media
Published every Friday, The Romsey Advertiser is the town's newspaper printed at Redbridge, Southampton.

Media appearances
In Thomas Hardy's Wessex, the town of Deansleigh is based on Romsey; and Deansleigh Park, the residence of Lady Mottisfont in A Group of Noble Dames, is thought to be based on Broadlands.

In the 1980 and 1990s, Romsey was used as the location of fictional Sussex town Kingsmarkham in the television series The Ruth Rendell Mysteries. Romsey locations appear throughout the series concerning Inspector Wexford played by George Baker. The location used for the fictional police station was the former Romsey Magistrates' Court in Church Street.

A fictional "underground car park in Romsey" is referred to in an episode of the TV series Absolutely Fabulous.

Freedom of the Borough
The following people and military units have received the Freedom of the Borough of Romsey.

Individuals

 * Admiral of the Fleet Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma: 1946.

Military Units

 * The Royal Hampshire Regiment: 26 September 1959.
 * The Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment inherited the Freedom from the Royal Hampshire Regiment as a result of the 1992 Options for Change merger with the Queen's Regiment.

title: Romsey


text:
Malayan Emergency

The Malayan Emergency, also known as the Anti-British National Liberation War (1948–1960), was a guerrilla war fought in British Malaya between communist pro-independence fighters of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) and the military forces of the Federation of Malaya, British Empire and Commonwealth. The communists fought to win independence for Malaya from the British Empire and to establish a communist state, while the Malayan Federation and Commonwealth forces fought to combat communism and protect British economic and colonial interests. The term "Emergency" was used by the British to characterise the conflict in order to avoid referring to it as a war, because London-based insurers would not pay out in instances of civil wars.

The war began on 17 June 1948, after Britain declared a state of emergency in Malaya following attacks on plantations, which had been revenge attacks for the killing of left-wing activists. Leader of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) Chin Peng and his allies fled into the jungles and formed the MNLA to wage a war for national liberation against British colonial rule. Many MNLA fighters were veterans of the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), a communist guerrilla army previously trained, armed and funded by the British to fight against Japan during World War II. The communists gained support from many civilians, mainly those from the Chinese community. The communists' belief in class consciousness, and both ethnic and gender equality, inspired many women and indigenous people to join both the MNLA and its undercover supply network the Min Yuen. Additionally, hundreds of former Japanese soldiers joined the MNLA. After establishing a series of jungle bases the MNLA began raiding British colonial police and military installations. Mines, plantations, and trains were attacked by the MNLA to gain independence for Malaya by bankrupting the British occupation.

The British attempted to starve the MNLA using scorched earth policies through food rationing, killing livestock, and aerial spraying of the herbicide Agent Orange. British attempts to defeat the communists included extrajudicial killings of unarmed villagers, in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The most infamous example is the Batang Kali massacre, which the press has referred to as "Britain's My Lai". The Briggs Plan forcibly relocated between 400,000 and 1,000,000 civilians into concentration camps called "New villages". Many Orang Asli indigenous communities were also targeted for internment because the British believed that they were supporting the communists.

Although the emergency was declared over in 1960, communist leader Chin Peng renewed the insurgency against the Malaysian government in 1968. This second phase of the insurgency lasted until 1989.

Socioeconomic issues (1941–1948)
The economic disruption of WWII on British Malaya led to widespread unemployment, low wages, and high levels of food price inflation. The weak economy was a factor in the growth of trade union movements and caused a rise in communist party membership, with considerable labour unrest and a large number of strikes occurring between 1946 and 1948. Malayan communists organised a successful 24-hour general strike on 29 January 1946, before organising 300 strikes in 1947. To combat rising trade union activity the British used police and soldiers as strikebreakers, and employers enacted mass dismissals, forced evictions of striking workers from their homes, legal harassment, and began cutting the wages of their workers. Colonial police responded to rising trade union activity through arrests, deportations, and beating striking workers to death. Responding to the attacks against trade unions, communist militants began assassinating strikebreakers, and attacking anti-union estates. These attacks were used by the colonial occupation as a pretext to conduct mass arrests of left-wing activists. On 12 June the British colonial occupation banned Malaya's largest trade union the PMFTU.

Malaya's rubber and tin resources were used by the British to pay war debts to the United States and to recover from the damage of the Second World War. Malaysian rubber exports to the United States were of greater value than all domestic exports from Britain to America, causing Malaya to be viewed by the British as a vital asset. Britain had prepared for Malaya to become an independent state, but only by handing power to a government which would be subservient to Britain and allow British businesses to keep control of Malaya's natural resources.

Sungai Siput incident (1948)
The first shots of the Malayan Emergency were fired during the Sungai Siput incident, which happened on June 17, 1948, in the office of the Elphil Estate near the town of Sungai Siput. Three European plantation managers were killed by three young Chinese men suspected to have been communists.

The deaths of these European plantation managers was used by the British colonial occupation to either arrest or kill many of Malaya's communist and trade union leaders. These mass arrests and killings saw many left-wing activists going into hiding and fleeing into the Malayan jungles.

Origin and formation of the MNLA (1949)
Although the Malayan communists had begun preparations for a guerrilla war against the British, the emergency measures and mass arrest of communists and left-wing activists in 1948 took them by surprise. Led by Chin Peng the remaining Malayan communists retreated to rural areas and formed, on 1 February 1949, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).

The MNLA was partly a re-formation of the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), the communist guerrilla force which had been the principal resistance in Malaya against the Japanese occupation of Malaya during WWII. The British had secretly helped form the MPAJA in 1942 and trained them in the use of explosives, firearms and radios. Chin Peng was a veteran anti-fascist and trade unionist who had played an integral role in the MPAJA's resistance. Disbanded in December 1945, the MPAJA officially turned in its weapons to the British Military Administration, although many MPAJA soldiers secretly hid stockpiles of weapons in jungle hideouts. Members who agreed to disband were offered economic incentives. Around 4,000 members rejected these incentives and went underground.

The MNLA began their war for Malayan independence from the British Empire by targeting the colonial resource extraction industries, namely the tin mines and rubber plantations which were the main sources of income for the British occupation of Malaya. The MNLA attacked these industries in the hopes of bankrupting the British and winning independence by making the colonial administration too expensive to maintain.

Communist guerrilla strategies
The Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) employed guerrilla tactics, attacking military and police outposts, sabotaging rubber plantations and tin mines, while also destroying transport and communication infrastructure. Support for the MNLA mainly came from the 3.12 million ethnic Chinese then living in Malaya, many of whom were farmers living on the edges of the Malayan jungles and had been politically influenced by both the Chinese Communist Revolution and the resistance against Japan during WWII. Their support allowed the MNLA to supply themselves with food, medicine, information, and provided a source of new recruits. The ethnic Malay population supported them in smaller numbers. The MNLA gained the support of the Chinese because the Chinese were denied the equal right to vote in elections, had no land rights to speak of, and were usually very poor. The MNLA's supply organisation was called the Min Yuen (People's Movement). It had a network of contacts within the general population. Besides supplying material, especially food, it was also important to the MNLA as a source of intelligence.

The MNLA's camps and hideouts were in the inaccessible tropical jungle and had limited infrastructure. Almost 90% of MNLA guerrillas were ethnic Chinese, though there were some Malays, Indonesians and Indians among its members. The MNLA was organised into regiments, although these had no fixed establishments and each included all communist forces operating in a particular region. The regiments had political sections, commissars, instructors and secret service. In the camps, the soldiers attended lectures on Marxism–Leninism, and produced political newsletters to be distributed to civilians.

In the early stages of the conflict, the guerrillas envisaged establishing control in "liberated areas" from which the government forces had been driven, but did not succeed in this.

British and Commonwealth strategies

During the first two years of the Emergency, British forces conducted a 'counter-terror,' characterised by high levels of state coercion against civilian populations; including sweeps, cordons, large-scale deportation, and capital charges against suspected guerrillas. Police corruption and the British military's widespread destruction of farmland and burning of homes belonging to villagers rumoured to be helping communists, led to a sharp increase in civilians joining the MNLA and communist movement. However, these tactics also prevented the communists from establishing liberated areas' (the MCPs first, and foremost objective), successfully broke up larger guerrilla formations, and shifted the MNLA from a plan of securing territory, to one of widespread sabotage.

Commonwealth forces struggled to fight guerrillas who moved freely in the jungle and enjoyed support from the Chinese rural population. British planters and miners, who bore the brunt of the communist attacks, began to talk about government incompetence and being betrayed by Whitehall.

The initial government strategy was primarily to guard important economic targets, such as mines and plantation estates. In April 1950, General Sir Harold Briggs, most famous for implementing the Briggs Plan, was appointed to Malaya. The central tenet of the Briggs Plan was to segregate MNLA guerrillas from their supporters among the population. A major component of the Briggs Plan involved targeting the MNLA's food supplies, which were supplied from three main sources: food grown by the MNLA in the jungle, food supplied by the Orang Asli aboriginal people living in the deep jungle, and MNLA supporters within the 'squatter' communities on the jungle fringes.

The Briggs Plan also included the forced relocation of some 500,000 rural Malayans, including 400,000 Chinese civilians, into internment camps called "new villages". These internment camps were surrounded by barbed wire, police posts, and floodlit areas, all designed to stop the inmates from contacting and supplying MNLA guerrillas in the jungles, segregating the communists from their civilian supporters.

In 1948 the British had 13 infantry battalions in Malaya, including seven partly formed Gurkha battalions, three British battalions, two battalions of the Royal Malay Regiment and a British Royal Artillery Regiment being used as infantry.

The Permanent Secretary of Defence for Malaya, Sir Robert Grainger Ker Thompson, had served in the Chindits in Burma during World War II. Thompson's in-depth experience of jungle warfare proved invaluable during this period as he was able to build effective civil-military relations and was one of the chief architects of the counter-insurgency plan in Malaya.

In 1951, the British High Commissioner in Malaya, Sir Henry Gurney, was killed near Fraser's Hill during an MNLA ambush. General Gerald Templer was chosen to become the new High Commissioner in January 1952. During Templer's two-year command, "two-thirds of the guerrillas were wiped out and lost over half their strength, the incident rate fell from 500 to less than 100 per month and the civilian and security force casualties from 200 to less than 40." Orthodox historiography suggests that Templer changed the situation in the Emergency and his actions and policies were a major part of British success during his period in command. Revisionist historians have challenged this view and frequently support the ideas of Victor Purcell, a Sinologist who as early as 1954 claimed that Templer merely continued policies begun by his predecessors.

Control of anti-guerrilla operations

At all levels of the Malayan government (national, state, and district levels), the military and civil authority was assumed by a committee of military, police and civilian administration officials. This allowed intelligence from all sources to be rapidly evaluated and disseminated and also allowed all anti-guerrilla measures to be co-ordinated.

Each of the Malay states had a State War Executive Committee which included the State Chief Minister as chairman, the Chief Police Officer, the senior military commander, state home guard officer, state financial officer, state information officer, executive secretary, and up to six selected community leaders. The Police, Military, and Home Guard representatives and the Secretary formed the operations sub-committee responsible for the day-to-day direction of emergency operations. The operations subcommittees as a whole made joint decisions.

Agent Orange
During the Malayan Emergency, Britain became the first nation in history to make use of herbicides and defoliants as a military weapon. It was used to destroy bushes, food crops, and trees to deprive the guerrillas of both food and cover, playing a role in Britain's food denial campaign during the early 1950s. A variety of herbicides were used to clear lines of communication and destroy food crops as part of this strategy. One of the herbicides, brand name Trioxone, was a 50:50 mixture of butyl esters of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. This mixture was virtually identical to the later Agent Orange, though Trioxone likely had a heavier contamination of the health-damaging dioxin impurity.

In 1952, Trioxone and mixtures of the aforementioned herbicides, were sprayed along a number of key roads. From June to October 1952, 1,250 acre of roadside vegetation at possible ambush points were sprayed with defoliant, described as a policy of "national importance". The experts advised that the use of herbicides and defoliants for clearing the roadside could be effectively replaced by removing vegetation by hand and the spraying was stopped. However, after that strategy failed, the use of herbicides and defoliants in effort to fight the guerrillas was restarted under the command of British General Sir Gerald Templer in February 1953 as a means of destroying food crops grown by communist forces in jungle clearings. Helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft despatched sodium trichloroacetate and Trioxone, along with pellets of chlorophenyl N,N-dimethyl-1-naphthylamine onto crops such as sweet potatoes and maize. Many Commonwealth personnel who handled and/or used Trioxone during the conflict suffered from serious exposure to dioxin and Trioxone. An estimated 10,000 civilians and guerrilla in Malaya also suffered from the effects of the defoliant, but many historians think that the number is much larger since Trioxone was used on a large scale in the Malayan conflict and, unlike the US, the British government limited information about its use to avoid negative world public opinion. The prolonged absence of vegetation caused by defoliation also resulted in major soil erosion to areas of Malaya.

After the Malayan Conflict ended in 1960, the US used the British precedent in deciding that the use of defoliants was a legally-accepted tactic of warfare. US Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised US President John F. Kennedy that the precedent of using herbicide in warfare had been established by the British through their use of aircraft to spray herbicide and thus destroy enemy crops and thin the thick jungle of northern Malaya.

Nature of warfare
The British Army soon realised that clumsy sweeps by large formations were unproductive. Instead, platoons or sections carried out patrols and laid ambushes, based on intelligence from various sources, including informers, surrendered MNLA personnel, aerial reconnaissance and so on. An operation named "Nassau", carried out in the Kuala Langat swamp is described in The Guerrilla – and how to Fight Him ): "On 7 July, two additional companies were assigned to the area; patrolling and harassing fires were intensified. Three terrorists surrendered and one of them led a platoon patrol to the terrorist leader's camp. The patrol attacked the camp, killing four, including the leader. Other patrols accounted for four more; by the end of July, twenty-three terrorists remained in the swamp with no food or communications with the outside world.

This was the nature of operations: 60,000 artillery shells, 30,000 rounds of mortar ammunition, and 2,000 aircraft bombs for 35 terrorists killed or captured. Each one represented 1,500 man-days of patrolling or waiting in ambushes. 'Nassau' was considered a success for the end of the emergency was one step nearer."MNLA guerrillas had numerous advantages over Commonwealth forces since they lived in closer proximity to villagers, they sometimes had relatives or close friends in the village, and they were not afraid to threaten violence or torture and murder village leaders as an example to the others, which forced them to assist them with food and information. British forces thus faced a dual threat: the MNLA guerrillas and the silent network in villages who supported them. British troops often described the terror of jungle patrols. In addition to watching out for MNLA guerrillas, they had to navigate difficult terrain and avoid dangerous animals and insects. Many patrols would stay in the jungle for days, even weeks, without encountering the MNLA guerrillas. That strategy led to the infamous Batang Kali massacre in which 24 unarmed villagers were executed by British troops.

Royal Air Force activities, grouped under "Operation Firedog" included ground attacks in support of troops and the transport of supplies. The RAF used a wide mixture of aircraft to attack MNLA positions: from the new Avro Lincoln heavy bomber to Short Sunderland flying boats. Jets were used in the conflict when de Havilland Vampires replaced Spitfires of No. 60 Squadron RAF in 1950 and were used for ground attack. Jet bombers came with the English Electric Canberra in 1955 The Casualty Evacuation Flight was formed in early 1953 to bring the wounded out of the jungles; it used early helicopters such as the Westland Dragonfly, landing in small clearings The RAF progressed to using Westland Whirlwind helicopters to deploy troops in the jungle.

The MNLA was vastly outnumbered by the British forces and their Commonwealth and colonial allies in terms of regular full-time soldiers. Siding with the British occupation were a maximum of 40,000 British and other Commonwealth troops, 250,000 Home Guard members, and 66,000 police agents. Supporting the communists were 7,000+ communist guerrillas (1951 peak), an estimated 1,000,000 sympathisers, and an unknown number of civilian Min Yuen supporters and Orang Asli sympathisers.

Commonwealth contribution
Commonwealth forces from Africa and the Pacific fought on the British backed Federation of Malaya side during the Malayan Emergency. These included troops from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Kenya, Nyasaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia.

Australia and Pacific Commonwealth forces
Australian ground forces first joined the Malayan Emergency in 1955 with the deployment of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment (2 RAR). The 2 RAR was later replaced by 3 RAR, which in turn was replaced by 1 RAR. The Royal Australian Air Force contributed No. 1 Squadron (Avro Lincoln bombers) and No. 38 Squadron (C-47 transports). In 1955, the RAAF extended Butterworth air base, from which Canberra bombers of No. 2 Squadron (replacing No. 1 Squadron) and CAC Sabres of No. 78 Wing carried out ground attack missions against the guerrillas. The Royal Australian Navy destroyers HMAS Warramunga (I44) and HMAS Arunta (I30) joined the force in June 1955. Between 1956 and 1960, the aircraft carriers HMAS Melbourne (R21) and HMAS Sydney (1944) and destroyers HMAS Anzac (D59), HMAS Quadrant (G11), HMAS Queenborough (G30), HMAS Quiberon (G81), HMAS Quickmatch (G92), HMAS Tobruk (D37), HMAS Vampire (D11), HMAS Vendetta (D08) and HMAS Voyager (D04) were attached to the Commonwealth Strategic Reserve forces for three to nine months at a time. Several of the destroyers fired on communist positions in Johor State. New Zealand's first contribution came in 1949, when Douglas C-47 Dakotas of RNZAF No. 41 Squadron were attached to the Royal Air Force's Far East Air Force. New Zealand became more directly involved in the conflict in 1955; from May, RNZAF de Havilland Vampires and Venoms began to fly strike missions. In November 1955 133 soldiers of what was to become the Special Air Service of New Zealand arrived from Singapore, for training in-country with the British SAS, beginning operations by April 1956. The Royal New Zealand Air Force continued to carry out strike missions with Venoms of No. 14 Squadron and later No. 75 Squadron English Electric Canberras bombers, as well as supply-dropping operations in support of anti-guerrilla forces, using the Bristol Freighter. A total of 1,300 New Zealanders were stationed in Malaya between 1948 and 1964, and fifteen lost their lives. Approximately 1,600 Fijian troops were involved in the Malayan Emergency from 1952 to 1956. The experience was captured in the documentary, Back to Batu Pahat.

African Commonwealth forces
Southern Rhodesia and its successor, the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, contributed two units to Malaya. Between 1951 and 1953, white Southern Rhodesian volunteers formed "C" Squadron of the Special Air Service. The Rhodesian African Rifles, comprising black soldiers and warrant officers led by white officers, were stationed in Johore between 1956 and 1958. The King's African Rifles from Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia and Kenya were also deployed to Malaya.

The October Resolution
Later, MNLA leader Chin Peng stated that the killing of Henry Gurney had little effect and that the communists were already altering their strategy, according to new guidelines enshrined in the so-called "October Resolutions". The October Resolutions, a response to the Briggs Plan, involved a change of tactics by the MNLA by reducing attacks on economic targets and civilian collaborators, redirecting their efforts towards political organisation and subversion, and bolstering the supply network from the Min Yuen as well as jungle farming.

Amnesty declaration
On 8 September 1955, the Government of the Federation of Malaya issued a declaration of amnesty to the communists. The Government of Singapore issued an identical offer at the same time. Tunku Abdul Rahman, as Chief Minister, offered amnesty but rejected negotiations with the MNLA. The amnesty read that:
 * Those of you who come in and surrender will not be prosecuted for any offence connected with the Emergency, which you have committed under Communist direction, either before this date or in ignorance of this declaration.
 * You may surrender now and to whom you like including to members of the public.
 * There will be no general "ceasefire" but the security forces will be on alert to help those who wish to accept this offer and for this purpose local "ceasefire" will be arranged.
 * The Government will conduct investigations on those who surrender. Those who show that they are genuinely intent to be loyal to the Government of Malaya and to give up their Communist activities will be helped to regain their normal position in society and be reunited with their families. As regards the remainder, restrictions will have to be placed on their liberty but if any of them wish to go to China, their request will be given due consideration.

Following this amnesty declaration, an intensive publicity campaign was launched by the government. Alliance Ministers in the Federal Government travelled extensively across Malaya exhorting civilians to call upon communist forces to surrender their weapons and accept the amnesty. Despite the campaign, few Communist guerrillas chose to surrender. Some political activists criticised the amnesty for being too restrictive and for being a rewording of earlier well established surrender offers. These critics advocated for direct negotiations with the communist guerrillas of the MNLA and MCP to work on a peace settlement. Leading officials of the Labour Party had, as part of the settlement, not excluded the possibility of recognition of the MCP as a political organisation. Within the Alliance itself, influential elements in both the MCA and UMNO were endeavouring to persuade the Chief Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, to hold negotiations with the MCP.

Baling Talks and their consequences
In 1955 Chin Peng indicated that he would be willing to meet with British officials alongside senior Malayan politicians. The result of this was the Baling Talks, a meeting which took place between communist and Commonwealth forces to debate a peace treaty. The Baling Talks took place inside an English School in Baling on 28 December 1955. The MCP and MNLA was represented by Chin Peng, Rashid Maidin, and Chen Tien. The Commonwealth forces were represented by Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tan Cheng-Lock and David Saul Marshall. Despite the meeting being conducted successfully, the British forces was worried that a peace treaty with the MCP would lead to communist activists regaining influence in society. As a result, many of Chin Peng's demands were dismissed.

Following the failure of the talks, Tunku Abdul Rahman withdraw the amnesty offers for MNLA members on 8 February 1956, five months after it had been offered, stating he was unwilling to meet the Communists again unless they indicated beforehand their intention to make "a complete surrender".

Following the failure of the Baling Talks, the MCP made various efforts to resume peace negotiations with the Malayan government, all without success. Meanwhile, discussions began in the new Emergency Operations Council to intensify the "People's War" against the guerrillas. In July 1957, a few weeks before independence, the MCP made another attempt at peace talks, suggesting the following conditions for a negotiated peace:
 * its members should be given privileges enjoyed by citizens
 * a guarantee that political as well as armed members of the MCP would not be punished

The failure of the talks affected MCP policy. The strength of the MNLA and 'Min Yuen' declined to only 1830 members in August 1957. Those who remained faced exile, or death in the jungle. However, Tunku Abdul Rahman did not respond to the MCP's proposals. Following the declaration of Malaya's independence in August 1957, the MNLA lost its rationale as a force of colonial liberation.

The last serious resistance from MNLA guerrillas ended with a surrender in the Telok Anson marsh area in 1958. The remaining MNLA forces fled to the Thai border and further east. On 31 July 1960 the Malayan government declared the state of emergency over, and Chin Peng left south Thailand for Beijing where he was accommodated by the Chinese authorities in the International Liaison Bureau, where many other Southeast Asian Communist Party leaders were housed.

Casualties
During the conflict, security forces killed 6,710 MNLA guerrillas and captured 1,287, while 2,702 guerrillas surrendered during the conflict, and approximately 500 more did so at its conclusion. 1,346 Malayan troops and police were killed during the fighting. 1,443 British personnel died, in what remains the largest loss of life among UK armed forces since the Second World War. 2,478 civilians were killed, with another 810 recorded as missing.

Torture
During the Malayan conflict, there were instances during operations to find MNLA guerrillas where British troops detained and allegedly tortured villagers who were suspected of aiding the MNLA. Socialist historian Brian Lapping said that there was "some vicious conduct by the British forces, who routinely beat up Chinese squatters when they refused, or possibly were unable, to give information" about the MNLA. The Scotsman newspaper lauded these tactics as a good practice since "simple-minded peasants are told and come to believe that the communist leaders are invulnerable". Some civilians and detainees were also allegedly shot, either because they attempted to flee from and potentially aid the MNLA or simply because they refused to give intelligence to British forces.

Widespread use of arbitrary detention, punitive actions against villages, and use of torture by the police, "created animosity" between Chinese squatters and British forces in Malaya and "were therefore counterproductive in generating the one resource critical in a counterinsurgency, good intelligence".

Batang Kali Massacre
During the Batang Kali massacre, 24 unarmed civilians were executed by the Scots Guards near a rubber plantation at Sungai Rimoh near Batang Kali in Selangor in December 1948. All the victims were male, ranging in age from young teenage boys to elderly men. Many of the victims' bodies were found to have been mutilated and their village of Batang Kali was burned to the ground. No weapons were found when the village was searched. The only survivor of the killings was a man named Chong Hong who was in his 20s at the time. He fainted and was presumed dead. Soon afterwards the British colonial government staged a coverup of British military abuses which served to obfuscate the exact details of the massacre.

The massacre later became the focus of decades of legal battles between the UK government and the families of the civilians executed by British troops. According to Christi Silver, Batang Kali was notable in that it was the only incident of mass killings by Commonwealth forces during the war, which Silver attributes to the unique subculture of the Scots Guards and poor enforcement of discipline by junior officers.

Internment camps
As part of the Briggs Plan devised by British General Sir Harold Briggs, 500,000 people (roughly ten percent of Malaya's population) were forced from their homes by British forces. Tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, and many people were imprisoned in British internment camps called "new villages". During the Malayan Emergency, 450 new villages were created. The policy aimed to inflict collective punishment on villages where people were thought to be support communism, and also to isolate civilians from guerrilla activity. Many of the forced evictions involved the destruction of existing settlements which went beyond the justification of military necessity. This practice is now prohibited by Article 17 (1) of Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, which forbid civilian internment unless rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.

Collective punishment

A key British war measure was inflicting collective punishments on villages whose people were deemed to be aiding MNLA guerrillas. At Tanjong Malim in March 1952, Templer imposed a twenty-two-hour house curfew, banned everyone from leaving the village, closed the schools, stopped bus services, and reduced the rice rations for 20,000 people. The last measure prompted the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to write to the Colonial Office to note that the "chronically undernourished Malayan" might not be able to survive as a result. "This measure is bound to result in an increase, not only of sickness but also of deaths, particularly amongst the mothers and very young children". Some people were fined for leaving their homes to use external latrines. In another collective punishment, at Sengei Pelek the following month, measures included a house curfew, a reduction of 40 percent in the rice ration and the construction of a chain-link fence 22 yards outside the existing barbed wire fence around the town. Officials explained that the measures were being imposed upon the 4,000 villagers "for their continually supplying food" to the MNLA and "because they did not give information to the authorities".

Deportations
Over the course of the war, some 30,000 mostly ethnic Chinese were deported by the British authorities to mainland China. This would have been a war crime under Article 17 (2) of Additional Protocol II to the Geneva Conventions, which states: "Civilians shall not be compelled to leave their own territory for reasons connected with the conflict."

Headhunting and scalping
During the war British and Commonwealth forces hired over 1,000 Iban (Dyak) mercenaries from Borneo to act as jungle trackers. With a tradition of headhunting, they decapitated suspected MNLA members; the authorities held that taking the heads was the only means of later identification. Iban headhunters were permitted by British military leaders to keep the scalps of corpses as trophies. After the practice of headhunting in Malaya by Ibans had been exposed to the public, the Foreign Office first tried to deny that the practice existed, before then trying to justify Iban headhunting and conduct damage control in the press. Privately, the Colonial Office noted that "there is no doubt that under international law a similar case in wartime would be a war crime". Skull fragments from a trophy head were later found to have been displayed in a British regimental museum.

Headhunting exposed to British public
In 1952, April, the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker (today known as the Morning Star) published a photograph of British Royal Marines inside a British military base openly posing with severed human heads. By republishing these images the British communists had hoped to turn public opinion against the war. Initially British government spokespersons belonging to the Admiralty and the Colonial Office claimed the photograph was fake. In response to the accusations that their headhunting photograph was fake, the Daily Worker released yet another photograph taken in Malaya showing British soldiers posing with a severed head. Later the Colonial Secretary, Oliver Lyttelton, confirmed to parliament that the Daily Worker headhunting photographs were indeed genuine. In response to the Daily Worker articles exposing the decapitation of MNLA suspects, the practice was banned by Winston Churchill who feared that such photographs resulting from headhunting would expose the British for their brutality. However, Churchill's order to discontinue the decapitations was widely ignored by Iban trackers who continued to behead suspected guerrillas.

Despite the shocking imagery of the photographs of soldiers posing with severed heads in Malaya, the Daily Worker was the only newspaper to publish them and the photographs were virtually ignored by the mainstream British press.

Differences

The conflicts in Malaya and Vietnam have often been compared. However, the two conflicts differ in the following ways:
 * The MNLA never numbered more than about 8,000 full-time insurgents, but the People's Army of (North) Vietnam fielded a quarter of a million regular troops, in addition to roughly 100,000 National Liberation Front (or Vietcong) partisans.
 * The Viet Cong were agents of the government of North Vietnam and could count on substantial support from their "home" government; the MNLA had no such domestic state support.
 * North Korea, Cuba and the People's Republic of China (PRC) provided military hardware, logistical support, personnel and training to North Vietnam, whereas the MNLA received no material support, weapons or training from any foreign government.
 * North Vietnam's shared border with its ally China (PRC) allowed for continuous assistance and provided a safe haven for communist forces, but Malaya's only land border is with non-communist Thailand.
 * Britain did not approach the Emergency as a conventional conflict and quickly implemented an effective intelligence strategy, led by the Malayan Police Special Branch, and a systematic hearts and minds operation, both of which proved effective against the largely political aims of the guerrilla movement.
 * The British military recognised that in a low-intensity war, individual soldiers' skill and endurance were of far greater importance than overwhelming firepower (artillery, air support, etc.). Even though many British soldiers were conscripted National Servicemen, the necessary skills and attitudes were taught at a Jungle Warfare School, which also developed the optimum tactics based on experience gained in the field.
 * Vietnam was less ethnically fragmented than Malaya. During the Emergency, most MNLA members were ethnically Chinese and drew support from sections of the Chinese community. However, most of the more numerous indigenous Malays, many of whom were animated by anti-Chinese sentiments, largely remained loyal to the government and enlisted in high numbers into the security services.

Similarities
The United States in Vietnam were highly influenced by Britain's military strategies during the Malayan Emergency and the two wars shared many similarities. Some examples are listed below.
 * Both countries used Agent Orange. Britain pioneered the use of Agent Orange as a weapon of war during the Malayan Emergency. This fact was used by the United States as a justification to use Agent Orange in Vietnam.
 * Both the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force used widespread saturation bombing.
 * Both countries frequently used internment camps. In Malaya, internment camps called "New villages" were built by the British colonial occupation to imprison approximately 400,000 rural peasants. The United States attempted to replicate the New Villages with their Strategic Hamlet Program. However, the Strategic Hamlets were unsuccessful in segregating communist guerrillas from their civilian supporters.
 * Both countries made use of incendiary weapons, including flamethrowers and incendiary grenades.
 * Both the Malayan and Vietnamese communists recruited women as fighters due to their beliefs in gender equality. Women served as generals in both communist armies, with notable examples being Lee Meng in Malaya and Nguyễn Thị Định in Vietnam.
 * Both the Malayan and Vietnamese communists were led by veterans of WWII who had been trained by their future enemies. The British trained and funded the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army whose veterans would go onto resist the British colonial occupation, and the United States trained Vietnamese communists to fight against Japan during WWII.

Legacy

The Indonesia–Malaysia confrontation of 1963–66 arose from tensions between Indonesia and the new British backed Federation of Malaysia that was conceived in the aftermath of the Malayan Emergency.

In the late 1960s, the coverage of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War prompted the initiation of investigations in the UK concerning war crimes perpetrated by British forces during the Emergency, such as the Batang Kali massacre. No charges have yet been brought against the British forces involved and the claims have been repeatedly dismissed by the British government as propaganda, despite evidence suggestive of a cover-up.

Following the end of the Malayan Emergency in 1960, the predominantly ethnic Chinese Malayan National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the MCP, retreated to the Malaysian-Thailand border where it regrouped and retrained for future offensives against the Malaysian government. A new phase of communist insurgency began in 1968. It was triggered when the MCP ambushed security forces in Kroh–Betong, in the northern part of Peninsular Malaysia, on 17 June 1968. The new conflict coincided with renewed tensions between ethnic Malays and Chinese following the 13 May Incident of 1969, and the ongoing conflict of the Vietnam War.

Communist leader Chin Peng spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s working to promote his perspective of the Emergency. In a collaboration with Australian academics, he met with historians and former Commonwealth military personnel at a series of meetings which led to the publication of Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Communist Party. Peng also travelled to England and teamed up with conservative journalist Ian Ward and his wife Norma Miraflor to write his autobiography Alias Chin Peng: My Side of History.

Many colonial documents, possibly relating to British atrocities in Malaya, were either destroyed or hidden by the British colonial authorities as a part of Operation Legacy. Traces of these documents were rediscovered during a legal battle in 2011 involving the victims of rape and torture by the British military during the Mau Mau Uprising.

List of battles/incidents during the Malayan Emergency

 * 1) Batang Kali massacre
 * 2) Battle of Semur River
 * 3) Bukit Kepong incident

In popular culture
In popular Malaysian culture, the Emergency has frequently been portrayed as a primarily Malay struggle against the Communists. This perception has been criticised by some, such as Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin, for not recognising Chinese and Indian efforts.

A number of films were set against the background of the Emergency, including:
 * The Planter's Wife (1952)
 * Windom's Way (1957)
 * The 7th Dawn (1964)
 * The Virgin Soldiers (1969)
 * Stand Up, Virgin Soldiers (1977)
 * Bukit Kepong (1981)
 * The Garden of Evening Mists (2019)

Other media:
 * Mona Brand's stage production Strangers in the Land (1952) was created as political commentary to criticise the occupation, depicting plantation owners as burning down villages and collecting the heads of murdered Malayans as trophies. The play was only performed in the UK at the tiny activist run Unity Theater because the British government had banned the play from commercial stages.
 * The Malayan Trilogy series of novels (1956–1959) by Anthony Burgess is set during the Malayan Emergency.
 * In The Sweeney episode "The Bigger They Are" (series 4, episode 8; 26 October 1978), the tycoon Leonard Gold is being blackmailed by Harold Collins, who has a photo of him present at a massacre of civilians in Malaya when he was in the British Army twenty-five years earlier.
 * Throughout the series Porridge, there are references to Fletcher having served in Malaya, probably as a result of National Service. He regales his fellow inmates with stories of his time there, and in one episode it is revealed that Prison Officer Mackay had also served in Malaya.
 * Pennyworth

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Malayan Emergency


text:
The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers is an underground comic about a fictional trio of stoner characters, created by the American artist Gilbert Shelton. The Freak Brothers first appeared in The Rag, an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas, beginning in May 1968, and were regularly reprinted in underground papers around the United States and in other parts of the world. Later their adventures were published in a series of comic books.

The lives of the Freak Brothers revolve around the procurement and enjoyment of recreational drugs, particularly marijuana. The comics present a critique of the establishment while satirizing the counterculture.

Fat Freddy's Cat appears in many of the stories, spinning off his own cartoon strip (which appeared as part of the Freak Brothers comic page, in the manner of older comic strip double features) and later some full-length episodes.

An animated TV series adaptation, The Freak Brothers, was released on Tubi on November 14, 2021.

Publication history
The Freak Brothers first appeared in The Rag, an underground newspaper published in Austin, Texas, beginning in May 1968. Their debut was in an advertising flyer for a winter 1968 film short called The Texas Hippies March on the Capitol. Freak Brothers strips soon became popular and, thanks to the Underground Press Syndicate, were regularly reprinted in underground papers around the United States and in other parts of the world.

The Freak Brothers' first comic book appearance was in Feds 'n' Heads, self-published by Shelton in the spring of 1968 (and later re-issued in multiple printings by Berkeley's the Print Mint). They also appeared in the first two issues of Jay Lynch's Bijou Funnies. In 1969 Shelton and three friends from Texas founded Rip Off Press in San Francisco, which took over publication of all subsequent Freak Brothers comics. The first compilation of their adventures, The Collected Adventures of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, had its first printing in 1971 and has been continually in print ever since.

A weekly Freak Brothers comic strip was syndicated by Rip Off Press to underground and student publications in the 1970s, along with the related strip Fat Freddy's Cat. In addition to those strips, new adventures appeared in magazines such as Playboy, High Times, and Rip Off Comix; these too were collected in comic book form. Shelton continued to write and draw the series until 1992, in collaboration with Dave Sheridan (1974 – 1982) and Paul Mavrides (1978 – 1992).

The majority of the comic books consist of one or more multi-page stories together with a number of one-page strips; many of the latter have a one-row skit featuring Fat Freddy's Cat at the bottom of the page. Issues #8-10 contained only the long-form story "The Idiots Abroad", which The Comics Journal listed as #44 of the "100 Greatest Comics of the Century." The UK newspaper The Guardian said of a 2003 reprint of the story that, "The graphic quality is, even in slightly muddy reproduction, astonishing. Depictions of various European cities recall Hergé in their accuracy and detail ... As for the subject matter, considering the dates of composition, it has hardly dated."

Characters
The Freak Brothers are not siblings. They are a threesome of freaks (similar to, but distinct from, hippies) from San Francisco.

 * Freewheelin' Franklin Freek, although laid-back, is the most street-smart of the trio. Apparently he has always been on the streets and it appears that he is several years older than the others. He is certainly old enough to be troubled at times by impotence. In one story he reveals that he grew up in an orphanage and never knew his parents. Tall and skinny, he has a big bulbous nose, a waterfall mustache and a ponytail. He wears cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. In one strip, he runs into an ex-girlfriend who has a child that bears a striking resemblance to him. He does his best to evade them and is relieved when she does not recognize him. In another strip, when he meets his own (possible) father, the same plot is inverted. Depending on the level of colorization used in the strip in question, Franklin's hair is red, blonde, or light brown.

 * Phineas T. Phreak is the intellectual and idealist of the group. He has enough mastery of chemistry to create new drugs and takes an avid interest in politics. Of the three, he is the most committed to social change and environmental issues. He is from Texas and while his mother is relaxed and open-minded, his father is a card-carrying member of the John Birch Society. He is the hairiest of the brothers—tall and skinny with a thick bush of black hair, a beard, a nose bearing more than a passing resemblance to a joint, and glasses. He is the stereotypical left-wing radical, bearing a superficial resemblance to Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin.

 * Fat Freddy Freekowtski is the least intelligent of the trio and is most likely to be preoccupied with food. He is moderately overweight, with curly yellow hair and a mustache. His compulsion to eat is the subject of several of the adventures of the group. Fat Freddy frequently gets "burned" during drug transactions; when he does "score" he typically contrives to lose the drugs in various ways, such as by dumping them out of a shopping bag in front of a cooling fan, which then blows them out the window onto a police car. Fat Freddy comes from an unexceptional large family in Cleveland. In The Idiots Abroad, Freddy visits the Polish village of Gfatsk, where everybody happens to look like him. He is driven away by an angry mob as soon as they hear the name Freekowtski.

Other recurring characters include:

 * Fat Freddy's Cat appears mainly in his own, separate strip at the bottom of the one-page Freak Brothers strips (getting his start just as Krazy Kat did). He also has several multi-page stories devoted to him. Many of his strips parallel a storyline in the corresponding Freak Brothers story, and often have themes of a scatological nature. He has several "nephews" who refer to him as "Uncle F." and sometimes finds himself confronting an organized army of cockroaches or a huge tribe of mice who share the apartment with the Freak Brothers. He is far smarter than his owner (whom he frequently refers to as "the obese one") and regards the Freak Brothers with amused contempt, sometimes using their headphones as a litter box. He is also the subject of several spin-off collections of stories.

 * Dealer McDope, one of the trio's dealers. He is often mentioned in the strips but rarely appears in person. The character was initially created by Dave Sheridan for the Rip Off Press title Mother's Oats Comix.

 * Hiram "Country" Cowfreak, a hippy who grows vast quantities of marijuana at his isolated farmstead. He is referred to as the Freak Brothers' "cousin".

 * Norbert the Nark, an inept DEA agent who is continually trying, and failing, to arrest the Freak Brothers.

 * Tricky Prickears, The star of a comic book within the comic that the Freak Brothers enjoy reading. He is billed as "The Freak Brothers' favorite law enforcement officer" Tricky is a blind, deaf and reactionary detective and the character is a parody of Dick Tracy, to the extent that Shelton drew his stories in a different style, resembling that of Tracy's creator Chester Gould.

 * Governor Rodney Richpigge, a stereotypically rich, corrupt politician whom the Freak Brothers hold in general contempt. The Governor's son is a cocaine dealer.

Storylines and themes
Drug use is the predominant theme that runs throughout all volumes of this title. The protagonists "live in a state of blissful torpor relieved only by bursts of paranoia or stimulant-induced frenzy." Marijuana is the most frequently mentioned, but numerous other stimulants and hallucinogens are mentioned as well. Heroin is usually missing from the list. In one adventure, Franklin is shown to turn down an offer of "smack" when hitching a ride.

Food is a recurring subject. These stories most often involve Fat Freddy and his marijuana-induced "munchies" (increased appetite). The squalor engendered by the Brothers' indolence is often highlighted; several strips feature the household's cockroach population, ruled over by a fascist monarchy. Several stories satirize governments, particularly the U.S. government. These stories invariably show politicians and their agents as corrupt, incompetent, or both. The theme of foreign travel is sometimes explored, most notably in the three-part Idiots Abroad series.

It is common for the story-lines to begin with an air of realism, but rapidly descend into comic pantomime.

Classic Freak Brothers stories include:
 * Grass Roots: The Brothers find a year's supply of cocaine and move to the country with the proceeds. They snort it all in two days. The Brothers are joined by a trio of hippie women who join them in their misadventures: the dilapidated farmhouse, Freddy's run in with a hillbilly moonshiner, the rumor of gold on the property, and Phineas running for sheriff.
 * Chariot of the Globs: Fat Freddy's Cat is abducted by aliens.
 * The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in the 21st Century: The Brothers experience life in the future.
 * Knock 'em Dead: The Brothers form a punk band.
 * The 7th Voyage of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers: A Mexican Odyssey: The Brothers holiday in Mexico, are thrown in jail and escape with the help of shaman Don Longjuan, in an oblique parody of the Carlos Castaneda books.
 * The Idiots Abroad: The Brothers are split up attempting to travel to Colombia hoping to score cheap dope down there, yet none of them manages to reach Bogotá; Fat Freddy accidentally joins a group of nuclear terrorists in Scotland before disrupting the International Workers' Day military parade in Moscow, USSR and being subsequently sold to slavery in Africa; Franklin is almost killed by a native apocalyptic South American cult before joining a group of pirates; while Phineas ends up in Mecca and becomes the world's richest man after founding a new religion.

Film and TV adaptations
In 1978, the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers appeared in the full-length pornographic film Up in Flames. The story involves the brothers' attempts to raise cash to make their rent deadline (the trio being in danger of being evicted from their apartment). Fat Freddy gains employment at a local food store run by graphic artist Robert Crumb's character Mr. Natural.

In 1979, Universal Studios paid Shelton and Rip Off Press $250,000 for the rights to make a live-action Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers film. Shelton received the bulk of the money, which enabled him to live part-time in Europe. Meanwhile, the Universal-produced Freak Brothers film never made it to the production stage.

In 2006, the company Grass Roots Films began production on a feature-length clay animation film based on the series, called Grass Roots, co-produced by German distribution company X Filme. In 2013, work on the film stopped.

An animated television series adaptation titled The Freak Brothers, based on the characters and set in modern San Francisco, was released on Tubi on November 14, 2021. The series was preceded on May 6, 2020, by a mini-episode titled "Kentucky Fried Freaks". The series features Woody Harrelson, Pete Davidson, John Goodman, and Tiffany Haddish as voice actors for the three Freaks and the cat respectively. Courtney Solomon and Mark Canton serve as executive producers, with Jeffrey Scott Edell serving as Co-Executive Producer, alongside Adam DeVine and Blake Anderson who also provide voice acting. The series is animated by Starburns Industries studio, which also worked on Rick and Morty. In May 2022, the series was renewed for a second season. The series will be released on digital on April 17, 2023 by Lionsgate.

In popular culture
Fat Freddy's Drop, formed in the late 1990s, is a Wellington, New Zealand, band that took its name from the Freak Brothers comics. According to the band, individual doses of a certain type of LSD popular in Wellington at that time had the image of Fat Freddy's Cat printed on it. Dropping — common slang for taking LSD — Fat Freddies became the inspiration for the band's name.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson said the look of Joaquin Phoenix's lead character, Larry "Doc" Sportello, in Anderson's 2014 adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice, was based in part on Freewheelin' Franklin Freek: "[T]here's this documentary on Daniel Ellsberg, called The Most Dangerous Man in America. There's a great picture of a buddy of his who has this great set of glasses, a floppy hat and these mutton chops. I took a still frame from that and I sent it to [Phoenix], along with the omnibus collection of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic, by Gilbert Shelton—and that's probably the most we really talked about [Phoenix's portrayal of the character]".

Sports
The ultra supporters of Serie B Italian football (soccer) team Ternana Calcio, from the Italian Umbrian city of Terni are called "The Freak Brothers". Like many Italians ultras, they are linked with the political left.

Places
Fat Freddy's Restaurant, in Galway, Ireland, has arcana and other memorabilia relating to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy's Cat. There is also an inn in Olongapo, Philippines, called "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Stagger Inn".

The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers series
Almost all of the titles in the series have a title in words. Issues #0–7 and #12–13 are in black and white; issues #8–11 were produced in both color and black-and-white editions.

 * Freak Brothers No. 0: Underground Classics #1 (Jan. 1985)
 * Freak Brothers No. 1: The Collected Adventures Of... (1971)
 * Freak Brothers No. 2: Further Adventures of those... (Mar. 1972)
 * Freak Brothers No. 3: A Year Passes Like Nothing (1973)
 * Freak Brothers No. 4: Brother, Can You Spare 75¢ for the... (Nov. 1975)
 * Freak Brothers No. 5: Grass Roots (May 1977)
 * Freak Brothers No. 6: Six Snappy Sockeroos (June 1980)
 * Freak Brothers No. 7: Several Short Stories (1982)
 * Freak Brothers No. 8: The Idiots Abroad, Part I (1984)
 * Freak Brothers No. 9: The Idiots Abroad, Part II (1985)
 * Freak Brothers No. 10: The Idiots Abroad, Part III (1989)
 * Freak Brothers No. 11 (1990)
 * Freak Brothers No. 12 (1992)
 * Freak Brothers No. 13 (1997)—black-and-white reprints of stories from Thoroughly Ripped (Rip Off Press, 1978) plus a new cover and one story never before printed in the U.S.: "The Plant"
 * Fifty Freakin' Years with the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (Knockabout Comics, 2017)—new strips by Shelton, as well as his written introduction

Compilations and collections
Several compilation titles have been published that merge several of the original titles into one book.

 * Thoroughly Ripped with the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fat Freddy's Cat! (Rip Off Press, 1978) ISBN 0-89620-077-9—full-color collection of stories from High Times magazine published from Dec. 1976 to Sept. 1978 (as well as one story from Playboy magazine). Book came in two editions, one of which included a board game called "It's a Raid".

 * The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers in Grass Roots (Rip Off Press, 1984) ISBN 0-89620-090-6—full-color reprints of material from comic book issues #5 and 7.

 * The Complete Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Volume One (Knockabout Comics, 2001) ISBN 0-86166-146-X—reprints comic book issues #0–7 and 12

 * The Complete Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Volume Two (Knockabout Comics, 2004) ISBN 0-86166-149-4—color reprints comic books issues #8-11 and 13. (Note: according to the reverse title pages, the second volume has the same ISBN 0-86166-146-X)

 * The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus (Knockabout Comics, 2008) ISBN 978-0-86166-159-6—collection of the entire series, including some stories and covers done after publication of the "Complete" books. Includes everything from the two books above, except for the covers of Rip Off Comics 15 and 21, which do not show the Freak Brothers.

 * The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (Fantagraphics Books, 2022-?) a 7 volume hardback collection of the complete FFFB and Fat Freddy's Cat.

title: The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers


text:
Lamma Island

Lamma Island, also known as Y Island or Pok Liu Chau or simply Pok Liu, is the third largest island in Hong Kong. Administratively, it is part of the Islands District. Lamma Island is a rural area.

Name
The island was named Lamma because of a chart reading error by Alexander Dalrymple in the 1760s. He acquired a Portuguese chart of the entrance to the Pearl River. Close to the west of the island, the Portuguese owner had written "Lama". Dalrymple misinterpreted that as the name of the island. However, it was a Portuguese note describing the consistency of the seabed for the sake of anchoring there. The Portuguese word "lama" refers to mud. In early charts the name was spelled with only one "m". The island acquired a British name by error. The name was acculturated phonetically in characters, "Lam a" can mean "south fork" in Cantonese, with the original muddle being all but forgotten. At some point, things became further obscured by the addition of the second "m" in the English spelling.

In ancient times, Lamma used to be named as Pok Liu or Pok Liu Chau.

Geography
Lamma Island is located to the southwest of Hong Kong Island. It is the third largest island of Hong Kong, with an area of 13.55 km2 and a length of 7 km. The northern village is called Yung Shue Wan (Banyan Tree Bay) and the eastern village is called Sok Kwu Wan (Rainbow Bay, literally Cable Fishing Net Bay). Few people live on the southern part of Lamma. Access for much of this part is by hiking or private boat. Beaches along Lamma's south-facing edge include Yung Shue Ha Beach and Sham Wan.

Mount Stenhouse (, Shan Tei Tong) is the tallest mountain in Lamma at 353 m above sea level, situated between Sok Kwu Wan and Sham Wan. Unusually shaped rocks can be found all over this mountain, but a grueling hike is necessary to access these.

History
According to archaeological findings, human settlement on the northern and eastern part of Lamma Island can be traced back to around 4000–3000 BC, the Middle Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Yung Shue Ha, one of Lamma's earliest villages, was settled in the early 19th century by a clan from China's Bao'an County.

Demographics
Lamma has an estimated population of 5,900 people as of 2014. However, with future developments such as a planned beach community in Sok Kwu Wan the population capacity is expected to double to 11,000 residents.

Actor Chow Yun-fat grew up on the island in the village of Wang Long near Yung Shue Wan. His relatives used to operate a seafood/pigeon restaurant called "Shau Kee" in the main village.

Lamma has a significant Western and international population. As of 2021, the island is 55% Chinese , ethnic minorities include white (23%) and Filipino (11.4%).

The island has a reputation for alternative lifestyles and has a relaxed atmosphere. Lamma is being urbanised and property prices are increasing as a result of the attraction of this lifestyle.

Description
In contrast to Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, Lamma is peaceful and tranquil with an abundance of natural scenery. Buildings higher than three storeys are prohibited and there are no automobiles but diminutive fire trucks and ambulances, as well as village vehicles; distinctive open-back vehicles to transport construction materials. The community's only means of transport is either by foot or bicycle.

Lamma provides an alternative to the hectic life in the city. Property and rents are cheap compared with those of central Hong Kong. These factors have attracted a significant expatriate community to Lamma Island. It is also popular with younger people and a haven for artists and musicians.

Yung Shue Wan

Yung Shue Wan (Banyan Bay) is the most populated area on Lamma Island. Several decades ago, it was the centre of the plastics industry. The factories have now been replaced by seafood restaurants, pubs, grocery stores and shops which sell oriental and Indian-style handicraft. Hung Shing Yeh Beach, Lamma Power Station, North Lamma Island Public Library and Lamma Winds are also located in the northern part of the island.

Sok Kwu Wan

The big street of Sok Kwu Wan consists mainly of seafood restaurants. Sok Kwu Wan has the largest fish farming site in Hong Kong. Tourists can barbecue and fish at Lo So Shing Beach which is a ten-minute walk from the village. The trail between Yung Shue Wan and Sok Kwu Wan is surrounded by grassland and offers a picturesque walk. From there one can see a nice portion of the coastline of the island. It takes roughly an hour to walk the trail.

Walkers may notice a few 'caves' on the trail near Sok Kwu Wan, labelled on tourist signs as 'kamikaze grottos'. These caves were dug out by the Japanese during the war, to store munitions alongside the suicide boats. When the British Navy reclaimed Hong Kong, they discovered rows of speedboats with explosives rigged to the bow in Sok Kwu Wan.

In addition to the caves, the Japanese also dug tunnels into the island's peaks, including two known tunnels on Ling Kok Shan and one on Mt. Stenhouse.

Sham Wan
Sham Wan is one of the five most important archaeological sites in Hong Kong. The bay is the site of an important Bronze Age settlement which was unearthed by archaeologists in the 1970s. It yielded evidence of people living on Lamma during the "Middle Neolithic" phase (c. 3800–3000 BC).

Historically Sham Wan was also a place for green sea turtles to lay eggs. The endangered green turtles are a special group of marine organisms with distinctive navigation behaviour between their nesting, breeding, development and reproduction sites. As Sham Wan is the only existing nesting site for them in Hong Kong, every year there is a period of restricted access to it from 1 June to 31 October to allow the turtles to breed. The breeding site is about 5100 m2. The last known nesting at Sham Wan was in 2012.

Traditional festivals

Tin Hau temples are typical places of worship in Hong Kong's coastal communities because Tin Hau is believed to be the goddess of the sea and of fishermen, protecting them and ensuring full nets. There are three Tin Hau temples on Lamma, located in Yung Shue Wan, Sok Kwu Wan, and Luk Chau Village.

The Tin Hau Festival (twenty-third of the third month of the Lunar Calendar) is widely celebrated by the fishermen's communities in Lamma. Cantonese opera and floral paper offerings known as Fa Pau at both Sok Kwu Wan and Yung Shue Wan are the highlights of the celebration.

Lamma Island is also one of the few remaining places in Hong Kong where traditional Chinese New Year celebrations still take place: at the stroke of midnight, fireworks will be set off by the main families of the villages to frighten away the evil spirits, sending off a deafening thunder that can last up to 30 minutes.

Transportation

There are regular ferry services to Yung Shue Wan and Sok Kwu Wan from Central on Hong Kong Island, as well as to Yung Shue Wan via Pak Kok, and to Sok Kwu Wan via Mo Tat Wan, from Aberdeen. It takes about 25 minutes by ferry between Yung Shue Wan and Central. There are no cars on Lamma Island.

Two ferries collided off Yung Shue Wan on 1 October 2012 at 8:20 pm local time. With 39 killed and 92 injured, the incident was the deadliest maritime disaster in Hong Kong since 1971.

As the island is not connected by road to the rest of Hong Kong, the only vehicles on the island are those used by the emergency services, and village vehicles, which are used to transport goods. The main method of getting around the island is on foot or by bicycle.

Education
Lamma Island is in Primary One Admission (POA) School Net 96, which contains a single aided school, Northern Lamma School; no government primary schools are in this net.

Notable people

 * Chow Yun-fat, actor; born and raised on Lamma Island
 * John D. Romer, a British veteran, discovered a new species of frog, Romer's tree frog (Liuixalus romeri), an endangered species, in a cave in 1952.
 * Marli Siu, Scottish actress

title: Lamma Island


text:
Earl Mountbatten of Burma

Earl Mountbatten of Burma is a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, created in 1947 for Rear Admiral Louis Mountbatten, who in 1946 had been created the first Viscount Mountbatten of Burma. He was later promoted to Admiral of the Fleet.

The family seat is Newhouse Manor, near Ashford, Kent.

Creation
The Earldom was created in the Peerage of the United Kingdom on 28 October 1947 for Rear Admiral Louis Mountbatten, 1st Viscount Mountbatten of Burma.

The subsidiary titles of the earldom are Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, of Romsey in the County of Southampton (created earlier in 1946), and Baron Romsey, of Romsey in the County of Southampton (created together with the Earldom in 1947). All these peerages are in the Peerage of the United Kingdom and have the same special remainder (see below).

Lord Romsey was the courtesy title by which Lady Mountbatten's eldest son and heir was known until in 2005 he succeeded his father John Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne as Baron Brabourne, of Brabourne in the County of Kent. Subsequently, with the death of his mother on 13 June 2017, he became the 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma. As a consequence, both the Brabourne peerage and the Knatchbull Baronetcy, of Mersham Hatch, in the Baronetage of England (created in 1641 for Sir Norton Knatchbull) became subsidiary titles to the Earldom.

Lord Brabourne is now the courtesy title by which Lord Mountbatten's eldest son is known.

Special remainder
When elevated to the peerage, the first Earl had no son, and the letters patent creating the peerages granted to him were all subject to the following special remainder, in the absence of heirs male:

"...to his eldest daughter Patricia Edwina Victoria, Baroness Brabourne...and the heirs male of her body lawfully begotten; and in default of such issue to every other daughter lawfully begotten of the said Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas... successively in order of seniority of age and priority of birth and to the heirs male of their bodies lawfully begotten..."

As a result, since the first Lord Mountbatten never had a son, his elder daughter, Patricia, succeeded as the 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma upon her father's death. Should the legitimate male line of descent of the 2nd Countess become extinct, the peerages would be inherited by her sister, Lady Pamela Hicks, and her legitimate heirs male. (But there are ten living male-line descendants of the 2nd Countess, as of 2024.) Should the legitimate male lines of both sisters fail, the peerages would become extinct.

While the male-line heirs of Lady Pamela Hicks are in the line of succession to the earldom, they are not in line of succession to the Barony of Brabourne. Should the 7th Baron Brabourne's line become extinct, that peerage would revert to a male-line descendant of the 1st Baron Brabourne's 3rd son.

Earls Mountbatten of Burma (1947)
The heir apparent is the present holder's only son, Nicholas Louis Charles Norton Knatchbull, Lord Brabourne (born 1981).

Line of succession

 * [[Image:Coronet of a British Earl.svg|15px]] Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (1900–1979)
 * [[Image:Coronet of a British Earl.svg|15px]] Patricia Knatchbull, 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma (1924–2017)
 * [[Image:Coronet of a British Earl.svg|15px]] Norton Knatchbull, 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma (born 1947)
 * (1) Nicholas Knatchbull, Lord Brabourne (b. 1981)
 * (2) The Hon. Alexander Knatchbull (b. 2022)
 * (3) The Hon. Michael Knatchbull (b. 1950)
 * (4) The Hon. Philip Knatchbull (b. 1961)
 * (5) Frederick Knatchbull (b. 2003)
 * (6) John Knatchbull (b. 2004)
 * (7) The Hon. Timothy Knatchbull (b. 1964)
 * (8) Milo Knatchbull (b. 2001)
 * (9) Ludovic Knatchbull (b. 2003)
 * (10) Lady Pamela Hicks (b. 1929)
 * (11) Ashley Hicks (b. 1963)
 * (12) Caspian Hicks (b. 2018)
 * (13) Horatio Hicks (b. 2019)

Source:

Coat of arms of the 1st earl
Quarterly: 1st and 4th, azure a lion rampant double-queued barry of ten argent and gules armed and langued of the last crowned or within a bordure company of the second and third (Hesse); 2nd and 3rd, argent two pallets sable (Battenberg); charged on the honour point with an escutcheon of the arms of the late Princess Alice, namely: the royal arms differenced by a label of three points argent the centre point charged with a rose gules barbed Vert and each of the other points with an ermine spot sable. The shield is encircled with the Order of the Garter, of which the 1st earl was a member.

title: Earl Mountbatten of Burma