In 1952, when the Malayan Emergency was in unlovely bloom, I was the Assistant District Officer of Kampar, in Perak. The town railway station had recently been incinerated. So, on a single night, had the timber frameworks of seven Chinese-owned tin mines. There were ambushes, bus-burnings and abductions. Intimidation and extortion were growth industries. The bandits, to give them their contemporary nomenclature, were doing all right. The police and a company of the Malay Regiment kept things under some sort of control, but as in most other Emergency Districts, we were reacting to events, not controlling them. We were sure that we would win in the end, but aside from being optimistic, we were baffled. We knew what we wanted to do. The components of the machinery necessary to do it were available. What was lacking was a master mechanic to strip, reassemble and tune the machine, and kick it from time to time.

It was in this ambience that I first met General Sir Gerald Templer, the new High Commissioner. His predecessor, Sir Henry Gurney, had died bravely on the Gap road in Pahang. When the ambush was sprung, Gurney's concern was for his wife, who was with him in the car. He walked straight towards his attackers. His wife lived. Gurney had been hard-working, conscientious and dedicated to the wellbeing of the people for whom he was responsible, Malayans of all races. His merits did not include a disposition to make extensive tours of Emergency areas. He was respected, but remote.

There was an interval of some months between the Gurney ambush and the appointment of Templer. None of we ill-informed and parochially-oriented resident Europeans in south Peak had heard of him. Less surprisingly, nor had the Malays or Chinese. Insofar as he was mentioned at all, the mood was of reserved scepticism.

The General arrived in Kampar after arrangements made with secrecy and with an armoured car escort, an encouraging indication that he was reluctant to get shot. The death of Templer the man would have left us unmoved. The death of a second High Commissioner would have had a calamitous effect on public morale.

He was lithe, athletic, well-briefed and incisive. His dress was an elegant jungle-green tropical uniform splashed with a colourful display of medal ribbons. His voice rasped. In conversation, he pushed his red-banded cap to the back of his head, shifted his glasses to the end of his nose and peered disconcertingly over the top, the meanwhile making gestures with the swagger cane he carried. He looked a dangerous sort of general.

His interrogation of me started with a jab in the navel from the cane, a move I found unendearing. The exchanges were crisp, he providing the crispness.

"How long have you been here?"
"Six weeks, Sir."
"Where were you before?"
"Tapah."
"For how long?"
"Eighteen months."
"Before that?"
"Trinity," I said. I should have added 'Dublin', but decided against it. The poke in the stomach still rankled.
"Oxford or Cambridge?"
"Trinity," I repeated stubbornly.
"TCD?"
"Yes, Sir."

This biographical fragment seemed to cheer him up markedly. He pushed his cap even further back, beamed and thumped me on the shoulder.

"Arraboy," he said approvingly, "We'll show these English bastards how to run a war."

Sir G Templer, it became clear, was one of that band of Ulster exports, generals. His regiment was the Royal Irish Fusiliers. His style, as demonstrated in the next few hours, was unorthodox, perceptive, imaginative and sometimes downright alarming. He was scrupulous in sticking to the timetable in the short programme we had for him, and impatient of the prepared patter customary on these occasions. He rapped out a staccato stream of pointed enquiries, praise, reproach and accusation. He turned his attentions to bemused, or gratified, police constables, shopkeepers, housewives, rubber tappers and chance passers-by, drawing them into discussions about the cost of living, their aspirations, their children, schooling, the water supply, the curfew. On any matter, officially or unofficially raised, that could usefully be followed up in Kuala Lumpur, the Military Assistant made a note. (They were followed up too.)

When the armoured car convoy had departed to enliven some other District, the members of the Kampar War Committee, administration, police and military held a short impromptu conference. The consensus was that things were looking up.

THE NEW BROOM SWEEPS CLEAN
In the next few months, the general covered an impressive amount of ground. In a country with no television and in which the high hills and tropical storms did no good to radio transmissions, the public covering of his journeys was limited largely to that in the Straits Times and in the few vernacular newspapers. But word spread fast. There was this vigorous general with the critical eye and the caustic tongue popping up unexpectedly all over the place, dissecting everything he was shown and a great deal he wasn't meant to see, encouraging, threatening, rebuking, helping.

For we officials, the message was more explicit. As simultaneously High Commissioner and Director of Operations, Templer had enormous and unprecedented authority. He used it without inhibition. His aims were unambiguously expressed. Successful military action was essential but secondary. The central problem was political. Win the hearts and minds of the people (then a less hackneyed and thus less risible sentiment than it has since become), get their co-operation in beating the bandits - thenceforth to be styled Communist Terrorist or CTs - and give independence when terrorism was convincingly defeated. This programme was orchestrated by a autocratic, liberal-minded soldier who abhorred racial prejudice, no-hopers and inefficiency, knew what he wanted, and was ruthless in seeing that he got it.

The Emergency was transfigured. A new, exhilarating spirit had been born in the land. Firm, clear directives on the conduct of all aspects of the Emergency appeared. ("An instruction is an instruction. It is not a basis for discussion.") And in the wake of this necessary tightening-up there began what today are known as redundancies. The victims were the slothful, the incompetent, the unnecessary and, in some cases, the unlucky.

A compact dialogue that took place during an unheralded call by the general on a government office in Kuala Lumpur is illustrative of his technique.

"What's your job?"
"Adviser on Civil Defence against Nuclear Warfare, Sir."
"What's your estimate of the likelihood of a nuclear strike on Malaya in the next ten years?"
"Nil."
"I agree. You're sacked."

"JOBLOODYHORE" - CITY OF SIN
Towards the end of the year I was transferred to Johore Bharu, the capital of the southernmost state in the Federation. Perak, where I had spent the previous two years, had been fairly rough. In Tapah, the first District I had been in, over a hundred policemen and soldiers had been killed in one year. Johore - Jobloodyhore in the Templer terminology - was in a class of sinfulness by itself.

I was the new Executive Secretary of the Johore State War Executive Committee and Secretary to the British Adviser. (Malaya was a great place for grandiloquent job descriptions.) Johore was in a mess. The administrative officers, policemen and military in the Districts were busily sorting it out. My task was to channel decisions of the State War Committee to these embattled rustics, to field their responses, and to service the War Committee. In sum, to co-ordinate action settled upon by the general in Kuala Lumpur, as refined by the Committee in Johore Bharu, as practised in the Districts by the people who were actually doing the work. There was an immense amount of paper. My predecessor had been sacked.

Among the packet of mail that came in one day whilst I was struggling with all this weight of written words was a secret message from Kuala Lumpur. Its heading was intriguing: "The use of geese as watchdogs". General Templer had been pondering on Roman history. Had not the noise of disturbed geese alerted the citizens of ancient Rome to the dangers of an impending attack? Could there be a tactical lesson in this precedent applicable to modern Malaya?

The context in which the question was to be answered was the defensive layout of the New Villages. The resettlement of half a million Chinese squatters, and some others, into these had curtailed the supply of food to the terrorists. Food suppliers who had formerly operated under duress now had a good excuse to discontinue their contributions. Those motivated by enthusiasm had found their problem to be infinitely more complex and highly dangerous. The villages had double perimeter barbed-wire fences, with a 15-yard gap between the outer and the inner, but it was difficult for the police to cover their entire length. Some CT foodlift parties were still getting through. Would geese between the fences provide a useful warning? Planning Staff to arrange field trial. Detailed report required in three weeks.

I wasted some time on trying to calculate which of the administrators in the Districts would be the softest touch on whom to unload this chore and found no comfort. They were all equally over-worked and hard-nosed. Then I recalled one of the general's recent circulars. Some of the specialist officers he had seen on his tours had been unimpressive in their attitude towards the Emergency. These technicians from the departments of public works, forestry, education and suchlike had put forward the view that their role in life was to concentrate upon their professional fields, leaving the administrators, the police and the soldiery to deal with insurgency. Well, said the message in loose translation, they couldn't be more wrong. The Emergency was of overriding priority. All government departments must take an active part, within the bounds of their competence, in bringing it to an end. It was forthright stuff, impregnated with an unexpressed whiff of the availability to dissentients of one-way tickets to the United Kingdom.

I was unsure whether geese came under agriculture or veterinary, but settled on the State Agricultural Officer as a suitable investigator. His office was nearer. He was a charming man, deeply preoccupied with some complicated research into the bud-grafting of rubber. He listened to my pitch with great courtesy. Of course he'd do whatever he could to help. Why, only a few weeks ago he'd seen some sort of exhortation from Templer on the whole subject of helping. Very interesting concept, really. Mind you, Templer was a strange fellow...

The research was clearly in good and professionally-qualified hands. I returned virtuously to my stack of paperwork, wondering gloomily of they would benefit from bud-grafting, and marked the geese file 'KIV 2 weeks'. ('KIV' meant Keep in View.)

After two weeks, the geese project duly came back into a view that was more obscured than comforting. Telephoned for a progress report, the experimenter said Yes, he did recall a rather interesting chat about birds some time since, but he hadn't really had time to get round to doing anything about it. The point was that fascinating developments in the world of bud-grafting were coming to light and...

I went to see him and became eloquent. This geese thing was straight from Templer. Three weeks meant three weeks. A Templer instruction was not a basis for discussion. We had one week to go. Unless something happened fast, what was likely to go was us, him and me. He was a little obstinate at first, but the one-way ticket spectre seemed to shake him, doubtless because it could separate him from his bud-grafting material. He would start at once, he said.

MALAYAN GEESE VS ROMAN GEESE
The State Legal Adviser came to see me two mornings later, looking furtive. One of our senior European colleagues had gone mad. Public knowledge that the government was harbouring a lunatic amongst its officials at a time of sustained Communist mayhem would be damaging. It was a matter for the British Adviser to deal with, but he was on tour. I was his private secretary and representative. My work gave me Service contacts. Would I arrange for the RAF in Singapore to fly this backslider home, if necessary under restraint? Once we had a firm take-off time, the Legal Adviser and I would personally secure the patient, escort him to the RAF base, and hand him over in privacy.

Before committing myself to a crash programme of a kidnapping followed by an attempt to smuggle a possibly resentful captive through the Customs and Immigration posts on the Jahore Causeway, I asked for more details. I did this with tact. The Legal Advisor was very much my senior.

It began, he explained, when he was shaving that morning. He glanced out of his bathroom window and saw through the shrubbery the outlines of what looked like a large hen run, newly set up in the garden of the house next door. The keeping of poultry on urban domestic premises contravened the Town Board Enactment and, once dressed, he went to remonstrate with the culprit. This was the State Agriculture Officer who, still in his pyjamas, was crawling on his stomach over the lawn towards four wired-in geese. Asked to explain himself, he looked round, put his forefinger to his lips and said "Shhh." Asked again he said "Shut up, will you." He then rose to his feet, retreated to the far end of the garden and once more approached the geese. This time he was upright, but moving cautiously, with jerky steps like a child playing Grandmother's Footsteps. There were several subsequent manoeuvres, with procedures varying from a series of dashes from bush to bush to a sort of knuckling monkey run on his hands and knees. Before withdrawing to his house, he turned to the Legal Adviser and said: "Don't talk about this. It's secret. I'm doing it on the personal orders of the High Commissioner."

I persuaded the Legal Adviser that an abduction would be unnecessary and hurried off in search of experimental data to pass to Kuala Lumpur. There was the usual struggle to wrench the discussion away from bud-grafting and a terse summary of his findings. Nothing.

"Nothing?"
"They didn't make a sound."
"You mean it doesn't work?"
"I didn't say that. I said that in the conditions prevailing when I carried out the test, there was no response from the geese."
"Is that what you'll say in your report?"
"Report? Who said anything about a report? All I was asked to do was to conduct a test. I have. I've more than enough on my..."
"Okay," I said. "I'll write it."

I resisted a powerful temptation to kill the whole issue with a blunt statement that trials had demonstrated that Malayan geese were militarily inferior to Roman geese. The difficulty was that any unqualified assertion might stimulate an embarrassing inquisition into the nature of the evidence on which the conclusion was based. I substituted a short paragraph paying tribute to the Agricultural Officer "who supervised the work personally" and regretting that the results were inconclusive. The time-scale had been too short for a thorough examination. Initial goose reaction had been disappointing but the consequences of such variables as temperature, humidity, sunlight, moonlight and background noise could not be studied adequately within the available period.

The Planning Staff were grateful and told me to mount a more prolonged experiment. This time I took no chances. I wished the problem onto the Administrative Officer, Segamat, the District furthermost from Johore Bharu, a recommendation in itself. Subsidiary advantages were that the man was so busy he could seldom leave his District, the bandits kept cutting the telephone wires, and all but the most necessary correspondence was discouraged at the time. I left Johore before any definitive evaluation of the use of geese in guerrilla warfare was put forward.

A FITTING END
Over four years later, in 1957, I was back in Johore again, this time as the next-but-one successor to the hard-pressed administrator onto whom I had loaded the geese enquiry. The times were exciting. Over a hundred armed CTs were still at large in the Segamat District, but the old frustrating days of reacting to bandit initiatives had gone for ever. These bandits were hungry and hunted. Their supply lines were crippled by the central cooking of rice in the villagers and estate line-sites. Sophisticated Special Branch operators logged their movements. A Gurkha Brigade harried them in the rubber and deep jungle. Voice aircraft invited them to surrender. Police and Home Guards guarded everything worth guarding. Malay, Chinese and Indian leaders went in concert throughout the District, urging large audiences to help get it over with.

A trickle of CT surrenders became a small stream. Brilliant exploitation by Special Branch turned it into a flood. The pressure was kept up. Malaya became independent. Food controls, check points, curfews restrictions of all sorts were abolished overnight. For the first time since the Japanese invasion of 1941, people of all races were free of fear. They could go where they liked, do and eat what they liked, when they liked. If asked to name the architect of all this, few of us who had been around in the early days would have thought of anyone but Templer. He had moved on two years previously, but his had been the design and the driving force. He had also, it occurred to me one day, once had some curious ideas about geese. I sent for the file on the Segamat end of the investigation.

Its contents were sparse. My predecessor but one, whose thought processes seemed to have paralleled my own, had consigned the geese experiment to a village as far as possible from his District headquarters. There the birds had prospered, but with no recorded observations about their defensive potential. No-one now knew why the geese were there. An old man, financed by some long-forgotten source, fed them regularly and complained about the mysterious depletion of his flock one Chinese New Year. There was a plea for guidance from a police lieutenant, temporarily stationed in the village, who took the line, at odds with the original concept, that to let geese roam about between the fences was an invitation to the bandits to come and help themselves to free food.

The final solution had been the brainchild of a passing Police Field Force officer, concerned about the morale of the garrisons of isolated jungle forts. He made enquiries about geese ownership, found no claimants, and appropriated the lot. Accompanied by cooking hints, they were air-dropped to the forts as the main course for Christmas dinner.

I met the general again - by then a field marshal - a few years later. We did not talk about geese.

POSTSCRIPT
After an interval of more than 30 years during which it would have been an exaggeration to claim that I put in any time at all in serious repentance for my part in the passing by of one of the great might-have-beens of military history, I showed the typescript of this piece to Renny Bere. Mr Bere is a scholarly practical naturalist, ornithologist and wildlife enthusiast. He spent a distinguished working life in the Colonial Service in Uganda, where he was a provincial commissioner and the director and chief warden of the Uganda National Park. He is at present the president of the Cornwall Naturalist Trust. He had once told me that General Templer had stayed with him in Uganda. It was this last information, and not a search for further education about geese, that led me to believe that he might be interested in some retrospective impressions of his one-time guest.

He was. He was also informative about a few things that had escaped notice in Kuala Lumpur in the early 1950s. He started from the assumption, flatteringly untrue, that I knew all about Manlius. If I had ever heard of Manlius, I have long since forgotten the name. (I'm prepared to bet that when the goose inspiration struck Templer all those years ago, he couldn't remember who Manlius was either.) Manlius, some elementary research disclosed, "a brave patrician", who subsequently went wrong and was judicially thrown over a cliff, was a leading spirit in the defence of the Roman capitol against a force of barbarian Gauls led by a man named Brennus. Brennus' people had already overrun and looted most of the city. Repeated attempts on the capitol, the last outstanding bastion, had been repulsed. Brennus was just about to abandon the operation when one of his soldiers, more or less by chance, identified a stepped path leading to the summit of the rock. A picked assault team made a silent approach at midnight. They were close to the wall where "the sentinel was asleep on his post", when a nearby flock of geese, kept for sacred purposes in the temple of Juno, began an unstoppable gabble. The garrison stood to, and in a few lively minutes disposed of the foe. Manlius himself contributed an addendum to personal leadership by throwing two Gauls bodily over the ramparts in a rather striking reverse rehearsal of what was later to happen to him.

Were any of the lessons learned from this spirited action really applicable to the Malaya of the Emergency? There is at least one familiar constant, "the sentinel asleep on his post". Malay Special Constables were a likeable and willing body of volunteers whose dedication was demonstrated by their losses of 593 killed in the Emergency. But they had as much trouble in keeping awake as the next man, particularly when engaged in static guard duties of stupefying boredom in a soporific climate. The predispositions of sentries aside, the Roman precedent offers no identifiable parallels. The scale of things in the night attack on the capitol was larger than might have been expected in, say, Bukit Siput New village. Malayan opportunities for throwing opponents over cliffs were limited. A constable with the physique and skills of an Olympic shot-putter could conceivably have lobbed a couple of small CTs across the eight-foot high barbed wire-mesh perimeter fences but, as far as I know, the occasion never arose. There remains the performance of the geese.

From the information summarised above, admittedly based upon deplorably shallow research and subject to modification by the erudite, there seems to be a certain woolliness of interpretation about what set the Roman geese a-gabbling. That the start of the noise coincided with the arrival at the capitol wall of the leading element of the assault party is not in dispute. But was this necessarily a product of cause and effect? It probably was, but the evidence is not conclusive. What about a reaction to some providential adjustment of temperature, humidity or moonlight, factors listed in the Malayan context by the State Agricultural Officer, Johore. What, also, about a chance infectious surge of indigestion, frustration, irritation, depression, lust, hunger or plain bloody-mindedness amongst the gaggle conscripted for unspecified duties in the temple of Juno? What, for that matter, about the geese simply sounding off just for the hell of it as other animals, including humans, do?

That dependable warnings of the approach of intruders cannot be left to any old geese is suggested by a further finding of the admirably thorough Renny Bere. His preamble about the muscular doings of Manlius and his support team was followed by a reference to more recent developments in this form of defence. Geese, he wrote, have since "been trained by others, notably Konrad Lorenz in Bavaria in the 1930s and after the war." Mr Bere believes that Lorenz did teach them to become watchdogs, but from an understandably cursory search was unable to confirm this.

This emphasis upon a training requirement puts the problem in an altogether new light. It is now clear that if the Director of Operations Planning staff had had their wits about them in 1953, they would have directed their enquiries not to Johore but to somebody like an experienced circus ringmaster with a sound classical education.

The US Army has been using geese to guard a base in West Germany on a trial basis and it seems that the experiment has been successful. This achievement prompts some questions. Did the US Army start from scratch? Or did they benefit from the Konrad Lorenz studies? Is there a secret classicist in the Pentagon? Whatever the answers, I hope that when future historians analyse the steps that led up to the breakthrough, they will give appropriate recognition to three of the pioneers of the genre: General Sir Gerald Templer; the State Agricultural Officer, Johore; and me.