A Company of Planters
Confessions of a colonial rubber planter in 1950s Malaya

by John Dodd

Through a collection of real letters written to his best friend and father in England, and from his own personal diary entries, the young planter John Dodd has bequeathed us a fascinating, and often hilarious, memoir of what life was really like on Malaya's rubber estates in the late-1950s. With true stories that would make even Somerset Maugham blush, we discover the full extent of the emotional toll exacted on the planters by their isolation. Life was more than just a series of stengahs in the club house, dalliances in the Chinese brothels of Penang, itchy skin rashes and charming ‘pillow dictionaries’—there were strikes, riots, snakes, plantation fires and deadly ambushes by Communist terrorists to contend with.

This fascinating observation of life in 1950s Malaya is all the more interesting as it is set during the Emergency period, the rise of nationalism and the country's subsequent Independence. It is also a very personal and moving account of the sexual awakening of a young man, the stigma associated with cross-cultural relationships in the face of colonial prejudices and the many other highs and lows of life as a young colonial planter.