Richard James Wilkinson

Richard James Wilkinson CMG (29 May 1867 – 5 December 1941) was a British colonial administrator, scholar of Malay, and historian. The son of a British consul, Richard James Wilkinson was born in 1867 in Salonika (Thessaloniki) in the Ottoman Empire. He studied at Felsted School and was an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was multilingual and had a command of French, German, Greek, Italian and Spanish, and later, Malay and Hokkien which he qualified in, in 1889, while a cadet after joining the Straits Settlements Civil Service. He was an important contributor to the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS). On 7 November 1900 Wilkinson presented a collection of Malay manuscripts and printed books to the University of Cambridge Library. He was appointed CMG in 1912.

Wilkinson arrived in Singapore in 1889 and was appointed Cadet in the Straits Settlements Civil Service. In December 1895, Wilkinson, who was then a district officer in the Malay States and by then considered well-versed in the native language, joined the Foreign Office. He then rejoined the Colonial Civil Service and was the acting superintendent of education at Penang, after which, by the end of March 1897, he became a police magistrate at Singapore. By January 1899, Wilkinson was serving as the acting inspector of schools. In April 1907, his book Malay Beliefs was released. His An Abridged Malay–English Dictionary (Romanised) was released in August 1908. At that time he was serving as Assistant to the Resident of Perak. In 1911 he was Colonial Secretary for the Straits Settlements and an official member of the Legislative Council. In 1912 he was appointed to the Commission of the Peace (Singapore).

31 March 1914: As the Straits Settlements Colonial Secretary at Singapore, Wilkinson called on the Japanese Consul in Singapore, Fujii Minoru to inform him that the government was banishing 37 nationals identified as pimps from the colonies.

Wilkinson was appointed the Officer Administering the Government, and Vice Admiral, in June 1914 upon the departure of Governor Sir Arthur Young on leave, and served in those roles until the Governor's return later that year. One of his first acts was to issue, in August, a proclamation informing the citizens of the Straits Settlements that war had "broken out between His Majesty King George V and The Emperor of Austria-Hungary and between their respective subjects."

Wilkinson's short term as head of the Straits Government was not an easy one, and one of the biggest challenges he had to face was the difficult state of the finances of the Federated Malay States.

There was a cash deficit of $30,000,000, although its assets exceeded its liabilities. The bulk of the assets were in the form of securities purchased that could not readily be disposed of. In short, the Federation faced a liquidity or cashflow problem. Projects that had been heavily spent on included the railway line running through the Peninsula to Siam (present-day Thailand) and the construction of the battleship HMS Malaya. The application by the High Commissioner to the Secretary of State for the Colonies had not yielded any immediate results: the Secretary of State had advised deferring the loan to 1915 owing to the state of the money market in Europe at that time. And with war having broken out, it was not likely for the Federation to be able to secure a loan in 1915 either.

The press noted that Wilkinson was "a man of exceptional financial capacity, and at the critical moment in Malaya, after the declaration of war," had "revealed a grasp of administrative finance, and even of the intricacies of banking, commerce, and exchange which astound men whose whole lives are given to such things."

Taking the responsibility on his own shoulders, Wilkinson saved Malaya from, as the papers put it, "one of the worst disasters in its history." Wilkinson resolved that the Straits Settlements Government would buy F.M.S. tin at a fixed price, which stabilised the market, and Malaya's finances, at a time when the metal market in London closed down owing to the war. The smelting companies by then had acknowledged that there was a limit to their ability to purchase ore, when there did not appear to be any market to sell to. The Straits Government also decided to make advances to companies against stock, or other securities, averting the fear and anxiety being experienced then. He had employed the resources of the Straits Settlements to preserve the industrial equilibrium of the Federated Malay States. The papers described his position at that time as "one of extraordinary delicacy and difficulty for an acting Governor," and noted that if he had not taken on the responsibility of stabilising Malayan industry, "there would have been greater disaster than most folk care to acknowledge." F.M.S. had overextended itself, committing to many large projects including the H.M.S. Malaya and the railway line up north, and a bridge connecting Johore and Singapore, and then discovering it could not pay for these. Wilkinson had made their problem, his problem, and fixed it.