In our case the original, the natural variety, its seeds smuggled out of the Amazon in 1876 by Henry Wickham and propagated with almost religious fervour in S.E.Asia for the rest of the 19th Century by Sir Henry Nicholas ‘Mad’ Ridley, father of the tree-friendly ‘tapping’ technique and the first Scientific Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens. The rest is history, but one never short of innovation, fascination and a source of livelihood for millions.

Natural Rubber’s bibliography is extensive, much of it technical, but for easy reading, to get into Rubber’s soul, the following are a good place to start, easy to read, some even matching the best of the 20th Century’s thrillers. As a taster, short extracts from either the first sentence or page of each book is appended after the title details:

The Thief at the End of the World (Rubber, Empire and the Obsessions of Henry Wickham): Joe Jackson (2008) ‘Deep in the forest grew a ruinous tree. From its veins flowed a milky sap…..

The Soul of Malaya : Henri Fauconnier (French 1930, Eng. transl. 1931 - subject area Malaya) winner of the Prix Goncourt, the Archipelago Press edition beautifully illustrated by Charles Fauconnier ‘The anniversary of the armistice was celebrated in Kuala Paya by two minutes’ silence and two days’ orgy…..

Rubber: Madelon H. Lulofs (Dutch 1931, Eng.transl. 1933 - subject area Sumatra) ‘Twenty miles from Randjah, a little place in the interior behind the east coast of Sumatra…..

The Weeping Wood: Vicki Baum (1945 - the ‘first-half’of rubber’s general history and considered the ‘bible’ by many) Introduction: ‘In this book the author has attempted to tell the story of rubber in terms of people. What people did to rubber; more interesting yet: what rubber did to people…..

Sacrilege in Malaya: Pierre Boulle (French ‘Le Sortilege Malais’ French 1951, Eng. transl. 1959 On a stifling hot morning in December 1936, Maille, a new recruit to Sophia, was met at the station of Kuala Getah, the capital of Telanggor, by Reynaud, the Company Secretary…

Fordlandia: Greg Grandin (2009 - Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City) ‘January 9, 1928: Henry Ford was in a spirited mood as he toured the Ford Industrial Exhibit with his son, Edsel, and his ageing friend Thomas Edison….

I’ve put the Joe Jackson book at the head of the list as it’s surely the best illustration as to why the current value of a strategic, everyday commodity is not sustainable.

Pierre Boulle’s ‘Sacrilege in Malaya’, for those with a knowledge of the country, is a thinly disguised story but memorably told. Enlisted with the French army in Indochina during WWII as a secret agent and captured in 1943 on the Mekong Delta, the highly-decorated Boulle had first-hand experience for his subsequent but better-known work ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai’ and, later still, ‘The Planet of the Apes’, many of his French-language originals translated into English by Xan Fielding, himself an SOE operative with service in Crete, France and the Far East during WWII.

September 2018

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