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Former British soldier remembers Lee Kuan Yew as an ‘austere’, ‘intense’ man

Former British soldier Peter West

Marc Lourdes reporting from London

“I met him a couple of times. I found him austere, clearly a man of immense intellect.”

82-year-old Peter West - he says his friends in Malaysia call him Batu (as in Peter, the rock) Barat - is telling me about his memories of late Lee Kuan Yew in the mid-50s. The octogenarian claims to have met the late prime minister a few times in the years before Lee’s People’s Action Party stormed to its 1959 election victory.

West remembers Lee back then as a man who "never smiled".

"He was a very intense man,” West says.

West and I had been seated at adjacent tables at the Indo-Malay restaurant in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue. At first I paid the elderly gentleman no mind. It had been a long day and all I wanted was to eat my rendang in peace and read the book I had brought with me. And then he ordered the ‘kari ayam’ in perfectly intoned Malay and followed it up with an equally impressive ‘terima kasih’ when his meal arrived.

Curiosity piqued, I leaned over, introduced myself and asked him where he learned to speak such good Malay. He said he had learned it as a British soldier in Malaya in the mid-50s, adding that he had picked up the language when he’d been stationed in Singapore, teaching Malay soldiers English.

That led to a two-hour conversation, during which he spoke about his years spent in East Asia, including the three stints he had in Singapore - the mid 50s, late 50s/early 60s and late 80s, when he came back to work in the insurance industry here.

West is a colourful character. A lot of what he says is fanciful to the point of being fantastic. This includes his claim that he helped Singapore’s first Chief Minister David Marshall campaign in the 1955 elections and that Marshall had never expected to win the elections, only taking part to get more exposure for his legal practice.

Fascinating as his reminiscing is, what I really want to know is what he remembers of Lee Kuan Yew.

West says he has never come across anybody as "sharply focused" as Lee, whom he described as a man ‘who brooked no argument about anything’.

“You’d had to be a courageous idiot to oppose him,” West adds, when asked to speak about Lee as he remembered him in the late 50s and early 60s.

West, describing Lee as "the ultimate rationalist", says the first time he was aware that Lee had a human side was during that broadcast when Singapore was "chucked out of the federation".

“He was shattered. He genuinely was heartbroken,” West says, adding that in his opinion, Lee genuinely just wanted what was best for his people.

“He had reservations about Singapore being able to survive (outside the federation), and he deserves a place in world history for what he has done with Singapore,” he adds.

I ask him how he would sum up Lee Kuan Yew’s legacy to the world.

“I cannot believe that any one man has created such an efficient, organised and stable state the way he has. He’s done it through the strength of character, personality and intellect. Singapore is one of the great success stories in the history of the world.”