A Company of Planters

Through a collection of letters written to his best friend and father in England, and from his own personal diary entries, the young rubber planter John Dodd has bequeathed us a fascinating, and often hilarious, memoir of life as a colonial rubber planter.

With true stories and confessions that would make even Somerset Maugham blush, we discover what life was really like for young colonial planters in late-1950s Malaya. Increasing daily rubber output may have been their goal but for the young planters the bigger picture of chasing girls and finding a "keep" was of much greater importance.

But life was more than just a series of "stengahs" in the clubhouse, dalliances in the Chinese brothels of Penang and charming "pillow dictionaries" - there were strikes, riots, snakes, plantation fires and deadly ambushes by the Communist terrorists to contend with. Set against the backdrop of the Emergency period, the rise of nationalism and Malaya's subsequent Independence, 'A Company of Planters' is a very personal, moving and humourous account of one man's experience on the frequently isolated rubber plantations of colonial Malaya.