When we first acquired Kimansi Estate, our access to it across the Tungud River was by means of a ferry which had been lashed-up by Kong Miew. However, as development proceeded, the ferry became inadequate to handle all the traffic. Plantations Group agreed with us that the properties must be linked by a bridge, especially since, at full maturity, an average of over 500 tons of fruit per day would have to be transported to the mill.
We enlisted the help of a civil engineering company, Steen Sehested. Their local representative was a Sabahan, Nasir Yeo, a young Chinese civil engineer who had got his qualifications and early training in UK. In the course of time he left Steen Sehested and went into business on his own.
Nasir designed the bridge for us. It was about 300 feet long in all, and it had to be built well above the level of the highest known floods. We put the bridge construction out to tender in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong. As usual when it was found that it had to be built in the interior, in an area inaccessible by road, the tenders we received were absurdly high. The cheapest tender was over $2 million. We decided that we would build the bridge ourselves with Nasir acting as our on-site consultant.
The Unilever engineer, John MacDonald, who arrived to take charge of the construction of the new mill, was given, as his first job, the task of constructing the bridge. Nasir’s design had called for the piles to be driven to a depth of 30 feet below the bed of the river. We hired a Chinese pile-driving expert from Hong Kong for this part of the operation. John Macdonald then completed the steelwork and the concrete decking, using Kong Miew and his local building workers.
When finished, the bridge had cost us just under $300,000. Over the next few decades, Nasir’s design was frequently put to the test when the Tungud was in flood. It withstood every one. I am sure that a hundred years from now it will still be there, a monument to one of the first Sabahan civil engineers.
Tan Sri Richard Lind was the Resident in Sandakan over this period. He followed with interest our progress with the bridge. He arranged for a big government delegation including Chief Minister Tan Sri Peter Lo and two other state Ministers to come up for the official opening. The ceremony took place on Sept 5, 1966.
In his speech, Peter predicted that before many years passed, the bridge would become a vital link in Sabah’s road network, connecting the lower Labuk to Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu. He hoped that the pioneering work being done by Unilever in the Labuk Valley would encourage other investors into the oil palm industry, and he foresaw the Labuk region becoming one of the main centres of oil palm development in the state.
He also suggested that with the increasing amount of activity in the Labuk Valley, it would be very helpful not only to our company but also to the expanding community and to the state government, if we were to build an airstrip on the estate.
He told us that the government was planning to introduce a regular internal air-service connecting a few places in the interior to Kota Kinabalu and Sandakan; he promised that, if our strip was up to the standard required, he would have Pamol put on to a regular twice-weekly scheduled service.
This was too good an offer to miss. Joe Joyce and his road-team completed the new runway in a couple of months. The opening of the airstrip was another important step forward for the project. Peter was as good as his word and when the scheduled service was introduced a year or two later, Pamol became one of the scheduled stops for the internal service of Borneo Airlines.
From 1965 to 1967 in addition to completing our original development programme, we were also very preoccupied with the erection of our factory. At that time, the only company which could build a standard turnkey palm oil mill on contract was Messrs Stork of Amsterdam. CDC in Tawau had already commissioned them to build their factory and it had been opened – the first palm oil mill in East Malaysia – the previous year. The H&C development at Giram followed the same procedure.
The Stork’s erection team arrived on their estate, built a standard palm oil mill to a tried and tested design, and departed once it was commissioned. I was keen that we should follow their example and get Storks to install one of their off-the-peg plants on Tungud. I felt that our management team had enough to worry about without getting involved in all the problems of erecting a factory ourselves.
It was not to be, however. It was decided in London that we would build our own factory to Plantations Group’s own design. This was, I grumbled, typical of London Office. Not only did they choose a flood-liable, leech-infested tidal swamp in the most inaccessible area they could find for our first project in Sabah, but now they wanted to complicate matters further by asking us to build the factory ourselves!
In-house design
David Martin explained their thinking to me with his usual tact and forbearance. Unilever’s engineers had, he said, been involved throughout the 1950s in experimental work at a mill in what was then Belgian Congo. This had resulted in several innovative improvements in the extraction process and in the design of palm oil machinery. It was felt, correctly in the light of subsequent turbulent events in Congo, that much of this work might be lost.
The Board had decided therefore that as many as possible of the findings from Congo would be incorporated into the Tungud factory. In several ways it would be a departure from past designs and it was necessary therefore that we should build it ourselves. Unilever hoped that the Tungud Mill with its many processing improvements could become the first of the next generation of palm oil factories throughout the industry, and that it might result in some improvement in the quality of the palm oil exported.
John MacDonald, the man they selected to do the work at our end, was a Glaswegian. He had operating experience in Unilever palm oil factories in Nigeria and Cameroons. He was also a competent construction engineer as he had already demonstrated to us by erecting the Tungud bridge.
In view of the remote situation of the estate, he was faced with a formidable task. The lead times were of course horrendous. The steel-work for the buildings came from Japan, the boilers from UK, the turbines from Germany, the presses from France, and the centrifuges from Westphalia in Sweden.
From the date of designing and ordering these items, to the time they were assembled in Europe, shipped to the East, unloaded in Sandakan, put on a skow to be taken up the river, and finally transported by tractor from the riverside to the factory site, could be as much as three years. And as we found, things could go wrong at every stage.
We made great use of network analyses, a management technique which was then in its infancy in Sabah, to ensure that each major item of plant was on site at the time it was needed but not too long beforehand. It was a complex and time-consuming business.
It was however finally completed within the original estimated budget, and exactly on time. As it happened, I was being unfair to our Engineering Department in London when I grumbled about the cost of the factory. It was indeed more expensive than an off-the-peg standard factory.
The reason for this, however, was the number of innovations they built in. Also, with their long experience of building and running mills in remote parts of Africa, UPI Engineering Group were conscious of the necessity of building in sufficient stand-by units right at the outset. This avoided the long waits for spare parts to be sent out from Europe when a breakdown occurred.
When I was the Chairman in London many years later, Ho Sui Teng, who was by then the GM of Tungud, reported the achievement of an astonishing record. The factory had milled a million tons of bunches over 20 years, without a single day being lost to breakdowns. Nowadays oil palm mills are much bigger, however, I doubt if many palm oil factories in the world could make that claim.
The factory was finally opened on target, on Nov 15, 1967. The event was widely reported in the Malaysian press. Tun Mustapha had hoped to perform the opening ceremony; however, he was overseas at the time and he deputised a member of the Cabinet, Datuk Pang Tet Tshung, to act for him. The ceremony was attended by Lord and Lady Cole, Sir Michael Walker, the British High Commissioner from Kuala Lumpur, and many of our friends and colleagues from the Sabah plantation industry and the state government.
With the opening of the factory and the planting up of 10,000 acres of palms, we had now completed the original project. Lord Cole was delighted that, in spite of the many vicissitudes encountered, we had done it within the original capital grant.
While congratulating us on our achievement he reminded us that, now that we had completed the first phase of the development within the budget, the next thing we had to do was to show that we could produce a return on the shareholders’ investment. This proved, however, to be a much harder task than any of us anticipated.
Datuk Leslie Davidson
Author, East of Kinabalu
Former Chairman, Unilever Plantations International
This is an edited chapter from the book published in 2007. It can be purchased from the Incorporated Society of Planters; email: isph@tm.net.my
