That would have made the point with the Chinese-speaking, and although the English-educated government servants would still be unhappy, they would not have been so shaken.

The episode, however, had shown up their lack of political understanding and the need to re-orient them, to make them aware of the dangers and difficulties ahead.

It confirmed the decision Keng Swee, Kenny and I had taken before we took office, to set up a political study centre to teach top-ranking civil servants about the communist threat and our social and economic problems.

To be successful, however, we had to win their confidence and convince them they were not simply being brainwashed.

We chose George Thomson to run the centre. Thomson was in his 40s. He had a good mind, was well-read, and was an earnest speaker in his strong Scots accent. He had been a lecturer in history, and an effective one because he was full of enthusiasm for whatever he taught.

He understood what we wanted and soon grasped the part he had to play. He chose as his assistant Gerald de Cruz, a former communist who had broken away from the MCP because he could not accept their discipline and disagreed with their policies. He had ended up as paid secretary of the Labour Front, working for David Marshall and then for Lim Yew Hock.

As finance minister in charge of personnel, Keng

Swee took a large colonial government bungalow in Goodwood Hill for the study centre. I opened it on Aug 15. Its objects, I said, were:

"Not only to stimulate your minds but also to inform you of the acute problems that confront any popularly elected government in a revolutionary situation... Once these problems have been posed to you, you will be better able to help us work out the solutions to them, by making the administration more sensitive and responsive to the needs and mood of the people."

Some of my ministers and I came to the centre to give it a practical approach by discussing real situations we had to wrestle with immediately.

At first the civil servants were sceptical, but the lecturers were obviously not communists, and they quickly got over their initial suspicion that this was an exercise in Marxist indoctrination.

Because the teachers were of a similar cast of mind as their own, they accepted that the government was on the level, that the problems were real and seemingly intractable, and that we wanted them to work with us to find and implement solutions.

Thomson did a good job and over the next four to five years educated the senior echelons of the civil service in the theory of communism, the possible democratic answers to the social ills that fostered its growth, and the practice of guerilla insurgency.

They came to understand what was happening in the wider world, the causes of revolution in South-east Asia, and the need for a fundamental shift in attitudes and policies to meet the challenges. But for a long time, our relations with them remained uneasy.