René Henry de Solminihac Onraet (b. 6 April 1887, Darjeeling, India1–d. 8 May 1952, Burley, Hampshire, England2) was Inspector-General of the Straits Settlements Police from 1935 to 1939, noted for his success against gambling and Communism.3 After World War II he prepared a significant report on rebuilding intelligence capability in Malaya.4
Early life
Onraet attended Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, England, before joining the Straits Settlements Police Force in Singapore in August 1907 as a cadet.5 After a few months in Singapore, he spent 20 months in Amoy (Xiamen) absorbing the Chinese culture and Hokkien language and later learned Malay.6 In 1914, he attended a training course at the Royal Irish Constabulary Depot in Dublin, Ireland.7 Onraet found that cultural and religious complexities made policing in the Far East more interesting than in the UK.8
Major accomplishments
Early successes
He rose rapidly through the ranks and made his mark in the 1910s by capturing the organised gambling syndicate in Penang.9 His actions netted previously elusive criminal masterminds and corrupt policemen. Onraet also obtained the gambling operators’ ledger books and even a six-inch tiger model, which he presented in court as the idol of the gambling operators, hence the evidence of a gambling den.10
Gambling spread to Singapore and was based in Chinatown. With his flawless Hokkien, Onraet infiltrated the dens, disguised as a Chinese drain inspector. After gathering enough evidence, he raided the dens, closing them down and banishing 30 ringleaders.11
Onraet became the first gazetted officer (as opposed to an ex-army man) to head Detective Branch, which handled serious crime and needed reform.12 During his short directorship, he transformed it from a nest of jealous rivals into a cohesive unit.13
Head of Special Branch
Apart from starting the traffic branch and organising the detective branches,14 Onraet was also made superintendent and director of the Criminal Intelligence Department in 1922, later called Special Branch.15 He served as its second director for 11 years until 1933.16
Special Branch dealt with racial and religious issues but chiefly confronted political threats in the colony and monitored regional developments.17 A major threat that Onraet recognised early came from Communist subversives.18 Onraet provided dogged and clear-sighted leadership but still worked in the field, even dressing up as a coolie and pulling a rickshaw to help locate Communist agents.19 In 1928 he led the assault on a Balestier Road bomb-making factory, seizing equipment and documents, including the seditious “How to carry out a revolutionary movement in the South Seas”.20 Special Branch earned an international reputation during his leadership.21
The Ducroux case
Onraet believed that sedition was invariably foreign in origin,22 and in 1931 he struck hard against communist activity in Asia.23 Learning that French Communist courier Joseph Ducroux was coming to Singapore posing as a salesman for timber equipment, police monitored Ducroux’s Collyer Quay office from within the building, intercepted his mail and searched his rubbish.24 They then stormed Ducroux's office on 1 June 1931, where Onraet recognised one of his visitors, Wong Muk-han, as a Balestier Road bomb-maker who was supposed to have been banished from Singapore in 1929.25
Ducroux’s address book provided information leading to further arrests, including those of Ho Chi Minh in Hong Kong and Comintern agent Hilaire Noulens in Shanghai.26 Noulens’s documents revealed a pan-Asian contact network, which would have serious implications on the political stability in the region.27 However Onraet was dismayed by the lenient sentences.28
Inspector-General
After serving as Chief Police Officer of Perak from 1933 to 1934 (having earlier held posts in Penang and Province Wellesley (1911–17), Malacca and Singapore),29 Onraet was named Inspector-General of the Straits Settlements Police Force in 1935.30
He continued his anti-Communist campaign by recruiting double agent Lai Tek from the French sureté in Indo-China, who as secretary-general of the Malayan Communist Party provided intelligence for years.31 The following year Communists exploited outrage over Japan’s invasion of China, by using demonstrations and patriotic boycotts to incite trouble.32 Onraet flew to Penang to quell a riot that had raged for two days over the sale of soya beans and other goods imported from Japanese-occupied Manchuria.33
Besides the riots caused by anti-Japanese sentiments, he was concerned about Japanese espionage. Hence he created a division to monitor it and called for a limit on Japanese migration to the colony, to reduce possible Japanese spies.34 His request was rejected.35 Nonetheless, for his sterling service, he was made a Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George on his retirement in February 1939.36
Wartime and post-war activities
Onraet moved to Britain and offered his services immediately to the spy agency MI5 when the Second World War broke out.37 The Colonial Office appointed him to a commission advising the West Indian police. In 1944 he completed his memoir, Singapore: A Police Background. It was published in 1946 after a delay caused by a paper shortage.38
After the war, the British Military Administration in Malaya sought to restore Special Branch and engaged Onraet as their police affairs adviser.39 He issued a report that led to the formation of Malayan Security Service,40 though some of his recommendations were dismissed as old-fashioned or draconian.41 Resuming control of the press and compelling registration of secret societies clashed with officials’ liberal new mood.42
More importantly, the separation of intelligence-gathering from powers of arrest made Malayan Security Service less effective than Special Branch, and his vision of a pan-Malayan/Singapore force was not realised. The eruption of the Malayan Emergency vindicated his grave warnings about communism.43
After completing the report, Onraet retired to Hampshire in England and died on 8 May 1952.44 Two years later, the road built for the new rank-and-file quarter of the police training school off Whitley Road in Singapore was named in his honour.45 Even more fittingly, the Internal Security Department Heritage Centre opened there on 20 March 2002.46
Publications
René Onraet, Something about Horses in Malaya (Singapore: Kelly and Walsh, 1938). (Microfilm: NL 18602)
René Onraet, Singapore: A Police Background (London: Dorothy Crisp & Co., 1946).
Singapore Polo Club
1924–25, 1930: Honorary secretary
1931: Captain
1938–39: President47
Family
Wife: Muriel Buryhope.48 They met and married in Penang in 1914.49
Author
Duncan Sutherland and Lee Meiyu
References
1. “Death of Mr Onraet, the Singapore Policeman,” Straits Times, 11 May 1952, 9 (From NewspaperSG); J. S. Fisher, ed. and comp., Who's Who in Malaya 1925 (Singapore: J.S. Fisher, 1925), 142.
2. “Onraet’s Cases,” Straits Times, 26 February 1939, 10 (From NewspaperSG); Fisher, Who’s Who in Malaya 1925, 142.
3. “Death of Mr Onraet”; “Gamblers, Gangsters, and Goodbye,” Straits Times, 19 March 1939, 9. (From NewspaperSG)
4. John Coates, Suppressing Insurgency: An Analysis of the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1954 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992), 24–25. (Call no. RSING 959.5104 COA)
5. “Death of Mr Onraet”; Wendy Hutton, The Singapore Polo Club: An Informal History, 1886–1982 (Singapore: Girdwood Enterprises, 1983), 51. (Call no. RSING 796.3530605957 HUT)
6. René Onraet, Singapore: A Police Background (London: Dorothy Crisp & Co., 1946), 38, 53; R. H. de S. Onraet, “How Internal Security Was Established,” Straits Times, 14 January 1946, 2. (From NewspaperSG)
7. Onraet, “How Internal Security Was Established.”
8. Onraet, Police Background, 37.
9. Onraet, Police Background, 138–39; “Gamblers, Gangsters, and Goodbye.”
10. Onraet, Police Background, 138–39; R. H. Onraet, “Carnarvon Street in Its Glory,” Straits Times, 22 August 1949, 4 (From NewspaperSG); “Gamblers, Gangsters, and Goodbye.”
11. “Gamblers, Gangsters, and Goodbye.”
12. Onraet, Police Background, 81; R. H. Onraet, “Birth of Modern Detective Force,” Straits Times, 11 September 1950, 6. (From NewspaperSG)
13. Onraet, Police Background, 81; Onraet, “Birth of Modern Detective Force”; Ban Kah Choon, Absent History: The Untold Story of Special Branch in Singapore, 1915–1942 (Singapore: Raffles/SNP Media Asia Pte Ltd, 2001), 134. (Call no. RSING 327.125957 BAN)
14. “Governor’s Tribute to Retiring I.G.P.,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 17 February 1939, 2. (From NewspaperSG)
15. “Death of Mr Onraet.”
16. John Drysdale, In the Service of the Nation (Singapore: Federal Publications, 1985), 15 (Call no. RSING 354.59570074 DRY); “From Day to Day,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 30 October 1933, 8; “Man Who Broke Communism in Malaya,” Straits Times, 5 February 1939, 15. (From NewspaperSG)
17. Ban, Absent History, 75.
18. “Death of Mr Onraet.”
19. Peter Elphick, Far Eastern file: The Intelligence War in the Far East, 1930–1945 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), 127 (Call no. RSING 327.12 ELP); Ban, Absent History, 75.
20. “Communist Party in Malaya Begins to Crumble,” Straits Times, 5 March 1939, 16; “Communists in Singapore,” Straits Times, 9 March 1928, 9. (From NewspaperSG)
21. “Rene Onraet Obituary,” Malaya: The Journal of the Association of British Malaya (June 1952): 45. (Call no. RCLOS 959.5 BRI)
22. Ban, Absent History, 75.
23. Drysdale, In the Service of the Nation, 15.
24. Elphick, Far Eastern File, 127; Harry Miller, Menace in Malaya (London: George G. Harrap & Co Ltd, 1954), 26. (Call no. RCLOS 959.5 MIL)
25. Elphick, Far Eastern File, 128; Miller, Menace in Malaya, 26–27.
26. Miller, Menace in Malaya, 28; Elphick, Far Eastern File, 128.
27. Miller, Menace in Malaya, 28.
28. Onraet, Police Background, 108；R. H. de S. Onraet, “Malayan Communism and Lefranc,” Straits Times, 18 January 1946, 2. (From NewspaperSG)
29. “Man Who Broke Communism in Malaya”; “Inspector-General,” Straits Times, 28 August 1950, 9 (From NewspaperSG); “From Day to Day.”
30. Elphick, Far Eastern File, 134; “Gazette Notifications,” Malaya Tribune, 30 March 1935, 7. (From NewspaperSG)
31. Ban, Absent History, 77; Leon Comber, Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–60: The Role of Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2008), 32 (Call no. RSING 363.283095951 COM); Leon Comber, “Traitor of All Traitors – Secret Agent Extraordinaire: Lai Teck, Secretary-General, Communist Party of Malaya (1937–1947),” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 83, no. 2 (299)(December 2010): 5. (From JSTOR via NLB’s eResources website)
32. Miller, Menace in Malaya, 31.
33. Miller, Menace in Malaya, 31; Onraet, Police Background, 111–12; “Communism and Labour Troubles,” Straits Times, 19 January 1946, 2. (From NewspaperSG)
34. Ban, Absent History, 169.
35. Elphick, Far Eastern File, 51.
36. “Birthday Honours for Malaya Announced,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Adviser, 8 June 1939, 13 (From NewspaperSG); “Onraet’s Cases.”
37. “Rene Onraet Obituary,” 45.
38. Onraet, “How Internal Security Was Established”; “Extortioners Brought Fear to Singapore,” Straits Times, 18 July 1949, 4. (From NewspaperSG)
39. “Building the Special Branch,” Straits Times, 18 September 1950, 6. (From NewspaperSG)
40. Coates, Suppressing Insurgency, 24–25.
41. Robert Heussler, Completing a Stewardship: The Malayan Civil Service, 1942–1957 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983), 159. (Call no. RSING 354.5951006 HEU)
42. Heussler, Completing a Stewardship, 159.
43. Coates, Suppressing Insurgency, 24–25.
44. “Death of Mr Onraet.”
45. Victor R. Savage and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Toponymics: A Study of Singapore Street Names (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004), 285. (Call no. RSING 915.9570014 SAV)
46. “ISD Heritage Centre,” New Paper, 21 March 2002, 6. (From NewspaperSG)
47. Hutton, Singapore Polo Club, 52.
48. “Mr R.H. Onraet Married,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 17 March 1914, 6. (From NewspaperSG)
49. “Mr R.H. Onraet Married”; “Untitled,” Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser, 21 March 1914, 2. (From NewspaperSG)
The information in this article is valid as at August 2021 and correct as far as we are able to ascertain from our sources. It is not intended to be an exhaustive or complete history of the subject. Please contact the Library for further reading materials on the topic.
The information on this page and any images that appear here may be used for private research and study purposes only. They may not be copied, altered or amended in any way without first gaining the permission of the copyright holder.