Article

William Bloomfield Douglas

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

William Bloomfield Douglas

Early Life and Naval Career

William Bloomfield Douglas was born at Aberystwyth, Wales, on 25 September 1822, the son of Richard William Clode Douglas, who had served briefly as an ensign with the 73rd Highland Regiment of Foot [1, p. 49]. He appears to have been the grandson of the Reverend James Douglas (1753–1821), a pioneer of British field archaeology and a chaplain to the Prince Regent, whose circle included Benjamin Bloomfield, first Baron Bloomfield [1, p. 49]. His mother, Mary née Johnson, was the sister of a Somerset clergyman who had married Emma Brooke, sister of James Brooke, founder of the Sarawak dynasty [1, p. 49].

Douglas entered the Royal Navy in January 1842 and served as captain’s steward on H.M.S. Wolverine at Hong Kong before resigning to join his kinsman James Brooke in Sarawak, where he served as second mate and later master of the schooner Royalist, conducting surveys of the North Borneo coast [1, p. 49]. He subsequently served in the East India Company’s navy and, in late 1847, became a chief coastguard officer in the Royal Navy, serving in northern England and Scotland until 1852 [1, p. 49]. In 1848 he married Ellen Atkinson, a farmer’s daughter of Northumberland [1, p. 49].

South Australian Service and the Northern Territory

In 1852 Douglas returned to sea in the merchant marine and, in February 1854, became master of the Bosphorus on a voyage to South Australia, where he remained and was appointed Harbour Master of Port Adelaide [1, p. 50]. Over the following two decades he held a succession of senior posts: Naval Officer, Chairman of the Harbour Trust, President of the Marine Board, Master of the local Trinity House, and, from 1858, Collector of Customs [1, p. 50]. In 1870 he became the first Government Resident of the newly acquired Northern Territory, serving at Palmerston (now Port Darwin) until his resignation in 1873 [1, p. 50].

Resident of Selangor, 1876–1882

In 1874 Douglas went to Singapore to explore the possibility of recruiting Chinese labour for the Northern Territory but instead obtained a post as stipendiary magistrate, which he held until November 1875, when he volunteered to replace Frank Swettenham as Assistant Resident of Selangor [1, p. 50]. He became Resident in April 1876 upon the serious illness of his predecessor, J. G. Davidson, and served in that post until his enforced resignation in August 1882 [1, pp. 5].

The diary, which extends to some 150,000 words, records a man who was “a brusque and rather unimaginative martinet who to the very end of his days in Malaya failed to master the Malay language” [1, p. 5]. His administrative policy was stated at the outset: “I shall go on one policy, the advancement of the country without reference to individuals. The Raja element must come down and the real government must be the Sultan or his Viceroy and his Resident” [1, p. 6]. He maintained a monthly correspondence of visits with Sultan Abdul Samad at Kuala Langat, and his relations with both the Sultan and Tunku Kudin, the Viceroy, were “much more friendly and frank than might have been expected” [1, p. 5].

Douglas made a series of long and exhausting trips by pony, boat, or on foot through the hitherto unexplored interior of Selangor. His July 1876 journey from Kuala Lumpur through Ulu Selangor to Ulu Bernam made him the first European to traverse that route on foot [1, pp. 38–47]. He recorded population estimates of approximately 1,000 Chinese and 1,000 Malays at Ulu Selangor, with six mines in operation, and noted the mixed cultural origins of the interior communities—Pahang, Menangkabau, Rawa, and Bugis—which created significant governance difficulties [1, pp. 42–43].

His tenure was marked by several contentious episodes. The Tunku Panglima Raja affair of April–May 1878, in which Douglas brought charges of bribery before the State Council and provoked a Colonial Office directive that “Residents have been placed in the Native States as advisers and not as rulers,” drew a public rebuke and forced the reinstatement of the accused chief [1, pp. 18–21]. In August 1878 he publicly rebuked Raja Hitam of Bernam on the deck of H.M.S. Fly, an act for which he received only a mild censure [1, p. 21]. He also orchestrated the first visit by a Selangor ruler to Kuala Lumpur in over a century, persuading the aged Sultan to make the journey in May 1879 [1, pp. 31–35].

Legacy and Documentation

Douglas’s enforced resignation in August 1882 resulted from a combination of factors: deductions from the Sultan’s allowance for Western clothing and furnishings, which contravened orders given in 1880; the land auction scandal involving his son-in-law, Dan Daly; and allegations by James Innes [1, p. 15, n. 34]. He went to London in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the Colonial Office to reverse the decision, then joined his daughter in North Borneo before settling in Canada, where he held minor posts in port administration on the coast of Nova Scotia until his death in 1906 at the age of 83 [1, p. 50].

Sir Frederick Weld, the Governor who had removed him, wrote to the Colonial Office: “As Resident of Selangor Mr. Douglas, a man of warm heart and strong impulse was not without his merits as well as his faults. He was more active than most men of younger age, courageous, energetic and zealous in many directions; and I still believe that personally his loss will be regretted by the Sultan and by a great part of the Malays” [1, p. 51].

The original diary manuscript, comprising four volumes, is in the possession of Douglas’s grandson, Mr. E. Douglas Potter; one or possibly two volumes appear to be missing between the extant volumes 3 and 4 [1, p. 48]. J. M. Gullick’s 1975 article in the JMBRAS remains the principal scholarly treatment of the diary, offering selections “mainly concerned with the situation and affairs of the Malay community in Selangor at this time” [1, p. 5]. Gullick prepared the article in the United Kingdom and was unable to consult the Selangor Secretariat files in Malaysia, a limitation acknowledged in the editor’s note [1, p. 51].

MBRAS Sources

Bibliography

References

  1. J.M. Gullick (1975). Selangor, 1876–82: the Bloomfield Douglas diary JMBRAS 48(2): 1–51.