In 1963, as we had feared after the flood, the question of scrapping the entire project was raised on the Unilever Board. Fortunately the Chairman, Lord George Cole, won the day. I received an instruction from Plantations Group not only that we were to go ahead, but we were to keep a lookout for further land for future expansion, preferably land less liable to flood.
Lord Cole visited us the following year. One evening, he told me with surprising frankness, something of the battles he had had in London to keep the project alive. He said that he had in fact threatened to resign if the Board did not agree to continue funding the development.
He outlined his strategic vision of the future of palm oil. In his earlier years, he had worked in Nigeria with Unilever’s famous subsidiary, United Africa Company, and he was familiar with the decline of the West African palm oil trade.
Lord Cole remained firmly convinced that, in spite of the flood and the other teething problems, our pioneering project would be the forerunner of a great development which would see Borneo become a major producer of vegetable oil. The island was, he said, a lush, fertile, undeveloped land, surrounded by teeming millions of hungry people in China and India – people whose annual consumption of edible oil per head was among the lowest in the world.
It was clear that our project was very close to his heart. There was one caveat which he and Plantations Group impressed on me. In view of the sensitivity on the Unilever Board, the project would be under a spotlight and we had to make very sure that it did not overshoot the original estimate. This, I felt, was not going to be easy.
In the absence of any cost figures from Borneo, the original capital project had been based on costs derived from Pamol Kluang in Johore. Working conditions in Malaya were very much easier than in North Borneo. From my own experience, it was easier to plant 1,000 acres in a year in Malaya than 100 acres in the interior of Borneo. On the plus side, although no yield figures were as yet available, it was thought to be almost certain that growth and yield of the palms would be better in Sabah because of meteorology and soil. I guessed that we might save money by bringing the palms into bearing six months earlier than in Johore, and by spending less on fertilisers.
In a letter to London in April, I assured them that, in spite of the floods which we must consider as a one-off occurrence, I was confident that we would complete the total project of 10,000 planted acres by 1966 and that we would do so within the original estimate. Our experience in the first two years had shown that the cost of almost every field operation was about three times what it would be in Johore. However, our workers were intelligent and industrious. As they and the headmen gained experience, we were hopeful that we would eventually be able to bring the costs down to the Johore levels.
In the absence of experienced agricultural contractors, we had to complete almost every operation ourselves. The emphasis for the first few years, I told them, had to be on training. This was a time-consuming business and we therefore needed Group to send us experienced Assistants from Unilever plantations elsewhere. If we were given the management resources, we would achieve by the end of the year the original 1963 planting programme of 1,200 acres, plus the replanting of the 93 acres which were lost in the flood.
By the end of May, my confidence was beginning to look misplaced. Things did not look too good. The dry weather which immediately followed the floods did not permit much planting and we had achieved only just over 100 acres out of the 1,200 acres I had promised.
To add to our problems, we suffered an unusually severe plague of rats and porcupines. The only green plants to be seen in the field for a few weeks after the inundation, were the palms. The rats and, on the jungle fringes, the porcupines, fell upon them ravenously. While these rodents are always a problem on oil palm estates, damage of this intensity was something new to us. We had to divert workers to putting wire collars around each palm. We lost a further 15 acres while this was in progress.
All was not gloom, however. Our house-building programme was going extremely well, and our building costs were well under the estimate. This was because we used very few imported materials. Kong Miew and his gang of locals produced sand/cement blocks cheaply and in huge numbers. The timber came from our own sawmill and the roofing tiles for the management houses were long-lasting belian shingles from the surrounding jungle.
The first permanent management house had been completed, and Olive and young Fiona were able to move up from the flat in Sandakan. They were delighted with the new house. It had three bedrooms, wide verandahs, a split-level dining room/lounge, and extensive servants’ quarters. After having lived in the attap hut for the first two years, it was the height of luxury for the family.
The second permanent house was also completed, and work was now underway on three further management houses. They were grouped on hills surrounding an open area on which I thought we might build a golf course in years to come, when the estate had reached the stage of making profits.
New arrivals
In late May, my appeal to London for more managers bore fruit. They transferred Bryson Middleton to us from Pamol Nigeria. Bryson was a young forestry graduate from Aberdeen University. He settled down very quickly. Whilst Donald Pettit continued to look after Ulu Division, I sent Bryson to open up a ‘Second Front’ on what was to become Bayok Division. David Marsh arrived on Oct 31, the day Olive gave birth to our third daughter Mary Anne in Sandakan Hospital.
The floods had closed down many of the up-country timber camps and we had a welcome influx of new workers. Once the rat attack was under control, although no planting was possible for a month, we took advantage of the dry weather to press ahead rapidly with the clearing operations.
In the last quarter of the year, when the normal weather pattern resumed, we were thus able to plant up palms faster than before. Another factor which helped us immensely, was the arrival of the roads engineer Joe Joyce; he was seconded to us for a few years from Unilever’s coconut plantations in the Solomon Islands.
Joe was exactly the man for the job. He was from Manchester and was considered to be a bit of a rough diamond. He had gained a reputation throughout Plantations Group of being “difficult”. He was a hard worker, however. I liked him, and we got on well.
He never learned to speak a word of Malay during his few years in Borneo. However, he accumulated a large gang of Filipino workers who had worked on construction jobs on various timber camps. They spoke American-English and Joe, with the help of some forceful gestures, seemed to communicate with them very well.
His arrival fortunately coincided with the arrival of our two replacement bulldozers, and some additional items of heavy machinery, such as earth moving-tractors and drain digging excavators. At last we began to see real progress.
One of our major problems as regards roads was the extensive area of peat we had to cross to get to the outlying fields. Of the 125 miles of road which we needed for the project, about 20 miles had to be constructed on peat; it would not support the weight of a man on foot, much less the weight of a loaded lorry.
We had consulted several experts and I had already had extensive correspondence with the Commonwealth Roads Research Institute about it. They all had varying solutions; most of them prohibitively expensive. One suggestion was that we should dig out all the peat until we reached a firm base and back fill with soil and gravel. Since in some places the peat was as much as 30 feet deep, a mile of such construction would cost more than the money we had allocated for the entire roads system. It was something that had me very worried.
Joe was an action man. His solution was simple. First, he got workers to lay logs from the surrounding fields across the road trace. He covered them with fascines made of bundles of twigs tied up with rattans. He then put his excavators in, supported on wooden platforms. They dug canals about 25 feet apart along each side of the road and spread the soil on top of the fascines.
After the soil had dried in the sun for a month or so, he finally spread a three-inch layer of river gravel on top. To the amazement of all the experts, it worked perfectly. The roads were, I suppose, really floating on the underlying peat; but 40 years later, Joe’s roads are still supporting 10-ton lorries transporting fruit to the central factory.
In the second half of the year, we had road access to our fields. We had an adequate labour force. We had experienced managers. We had typical Borneo weather with rain at nights and bright sunshine during the day. Finally, we had a sufficient number of healthy plants in our nurseries. By December, I was able to report to London that, during the year, we had planted 1,315 acres in addition to replacing all the dead palms in the 1962 area.
This really was the turning point of the project as regards field operations. We planted a further 1,910 acres in 1964; 2,336 acres in 1965; and 3,952 acres in 1966. By then, we had achieved the original target of 10,000 acres and, very importantly, we finally completed it at a total cost which was 8% less than the original project figure. By then, our main concern was getting the factory commissioned.
Datuk Leslie Davidson
Author, East of Kinabalu
Former Chairman, Unilever Plantations International
The second part will be published in the next issue. 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
