1915 Singapore Mutiny
[2] Even before its departure from India the 5th Light Infantry suffered from weak senior leadership and discord amongst its British officers (see details of Court of Inquiry report below).
The Court of Inquiry report, as well as contemporary accounts of the mutiny, saw it to be essentially an isolated affair - resulting from internal problems arising within a single poorly-led unit on overseas service.
On the morning of 15 February, the General Officer Commanding Singapore addressed a farewell parade of the regiment, complimenting the sepoys on their excellent turnout and referring to their departure the next day, without mentioning Hong Kong as the destination.
[18] Three Britons and one German were wounded but survived the attack, as did eight Royal Army Medical Corps personnel in the camp hospital, including one who managed to escape under heavy fire to raise the alarm.
[6] A group of mutineers laid siege to the bungalow of the commanding officer of the 5th Light Infantry, Lieutenant-Colonel E. V. Martin, which effectively blocked the route into Singapore Town.
Attached to the 5th Light Infantry at Alexandra Barracks were a detachment of 97 Indian officers and men of the Malay States Guides (MSG) Mule Battery.
[27] Sir Evelyn Ellis, a member of the Legislative Council in Singapore and of the official court of enquiry that investigated the mutiny, publicly described the revolt as "part of a scheme for the murder of women and children".
Lacking strong leadership, the mutiny had started to lose direction – a large number of the mutineers surrendered immediately, and the rest scattered in small groups into the jungles.
[33] As offices were closed for the Chinese New Year and the town was in a state of siege, Rospopov had difficulty finding formal and conclusive information about the mutiny through official sources.
[33] It was only on the 18 February that Rospopov eventually received a telegram from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and another from the Commander of the Russian Pacific Squadron, Admiral Schulz (ru), instructing the Orel to depart quickly for Singapore from Penang and to exercise "extreme caution and military preparedness en route".
Within 15 minutes of its arrival, the Russians were preparing for military action at the end of the railway line in the northern part of Singapore to intercept any fleeing mutineers.
Spurred by the last tsar's Asiatic Mission and his visit to South East Asia as part of his world tour of 1891, the Russian government appointed its first ethnic-Russian Consul, V. Vyvodtsev, to Singapore as early as 1890.
[33] The Russian presence in Southeast Asia during the last quarter of the 19th century was meant not only to safeguard its economic and strategic position in China but also to carefully observe the designs and advances of its imperialist rivals in the region, foremost among them being the British empire.
[33] This history of suspicion and rivalry explains why Rospopov sent a secret telegram on 21 February expressing his reservations at placing the Orel and its accompanying men and guns under the command of the British military in Singapore.
[33] Eventually the French admiral was able to assuage the fears of Rospopov and assured him that Russian aid at this point would serve as a good means to strengthen Anglo-Russian relations.
Commanding Officer of the Third Squadron, Rear Admiral Tsuchiya Mitsukane apparently expressed his displeasure in dispatching help as he believed that being a signatory of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Japan should not interfere in the internal affairs of another country without attaching collateral conditions.
[35] Seeing that he had no choice but to follow orders from the Japanese Government and Naval Headquarters, Tsuchiya secretly advised his land forces not to kill or wound any sepoy intentionally but to simply encourage them to surrender as the former had no enmity with the latter.
[31]The remnants of the 5th Light Infantry, numbering 588 sepoys plus seven British and Indian officers, left Singapore on 3 July 1915 to see active service in the Cameroons and German East Africa.
[42] The specifically military grievances that led to the mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry centred on the personality of the commanding officer at the time, Lieutenant-Colonel E. V. Martin.
The issues, which might, under ordinary circumstances, have been of limited impact, were aggregated by the disruptive external influences of the Ghadar Party propaganda noted above and the entry of Turkey into the war.
[5] While he cared for the welfare of his men and saw that their living conditions were improved, he was described as being too much of a "soldier’s friend",[5] to the point that other British officers found that this attitude and work ethic of Martin's severely undermined their authority over the sepoys.
According to Harper and Miller this was to give the public the impression that the mutineers “were being tried for mutiny and shooting with intent to kill and not, as alleged for refusal to go to the Ottoman Empire".
Contrary to official British colonial authorities, the mutiny was not an isolated case of a purely local affair but was instead part of a wider anti-British and pro-Muslim battle.
They were encouraged to turn their guns against their British commanding officers and contribute towards the war against the kafirs who were battling Muslim brothers who were defending the Caliphate in the West.
The British Court of Inquiry speculated that as the news of the fatwa issued by the Ottoman Sultan spread, an anti-British movement spearheaded by the Ghadar Party was also disseminating special pamphlets in a variety of languages which were reaching the sepoys through secret channels.
[47] There was also awareness in Singapore of the Komagata Maru incident in which Canadian authorities refused to allow a ship with 376 Indian passengers to land and forced them to stay aboard for two months in difficult conditions.
[46] It appears that information was reaching the sepoys through a wide range of channels, from origins as diverse and distant as North America, Britain, the Ottoman Empire and India.
Much of this information was obtained locally, but even so it was being mediated through a host of international and external actors, including a wide array of Indians from across the subcontinent, British officers and Arab and Malay co-religionists.
To enhance the protection of its crown colony further from internal skirmishes and attacks, in August 1915, the legislative council passed the Reserve Force and Civil Guard Ordinance.
[49] This was the first Act passed in a British colony which imposed compulsory military service on all male subjects between the ages of 15 and 55 who were not in the armed forces, volunteers, or police.
