Heng Chee

David Marshall was part of the nationalist political struggle after WWII, the first elected chief minister during the most turbulent and difficult political days of the 1950s. His professional success as a lawyer and his colourful personality and life would have beckoned many a writer to tell his tale, but his significance is more solidly based, as this book will show. Inevitably, a political biography becomes a study of a man as a prism of his times. Even though Marshall was a member of a minority community in Singapore, his childhood recalls a familiar immigrant family history; his struggle for a career in a colonial society, his survival through the war, and his failures all reflect the historical, social and political context and enable one to understand the larger society from which he came.