Introduction

On Monday 15 February 1915, the Chinese New Year holiday, the Indian 5th Light Infantry mutinied at Alexandra Barracks in Singapore. The regiment, made up entirely of Muslim troops, was the mainstay of the garrison on the island. At around 3pm, shots were fired; soldiers broke open the magazine and cut the military phone lines. The regiment's British officers were off-duty, resting at home or on the beach, and news of the uprising was slow to spread. No one, it seems, thought to tell the police. One party of rebels headed towards Singapore's Chinatown, killing Britons they met on the way. Others headed to a nearby battery, manned by locally recruited Sikhs of the Malay States Guides: they killed the British officer and foisted guns on the Guides, but most of them fled into the nearby jungle. The largest and most resolute band of rebels headed west to Tanglin Camp, where 307 German internees and prisoners of war were held, and offered them guns and liberty. But colonial hierarchies held: in the reported words of a naval lieutenant, ‘a German officer does not fight without his uniform or in the ranks of mutineers’. Some of the military men and a few businessmen, however, took the opportunity to escape. In the confused fighting across the island, 47 soldiers and civilians were attacked and killed: five Chinese and Malays died, but most were British men, targeted on the golf courses, and in cars and carriages.