The North Borneo Police Force (NBPF), colloquially known as the Constabulary, officially known before 1 January 1950 as the North Borneo Armed Constabulary, and before 1926 as the British North Borneo Constabulary, was the sole police force and military unit raised by the British North Borneo Company for the protection of British North Borneo. After 1946, the Constabulary would become a function of the Crown Colony of North Borneo and the Colonial Police Service. Several smaller and more elite units fell under their command, such as the North Borneo Volunteer Force and the Mobile Police.
Overview The Constabulary was created by William Hood Treacher in September 1881, shortly before the signing of the Charter of North Borneo. When the Constabulary was established, its headquarters were on a hill overlooking the town of Kudat called Fort Hill, but when the capitol was moved to Sandakan, they were at a building called The Barracks in Sandakan. Within a decade, they were at the Victoria Barracks in Jesselton. After the Second World War, they were moved to the Marina Barracks at Kepayan, which were dedicated by the Duchess of Kent. The leadership of the Constabulary primarily comprised several British officers, while the enlisted ranks were mostly indigenous troops. While originally limited to North Borneo alone, the Constabulary Ordinance Amendment No. 22 made provisions for reciprocal service between North Borneo and neighbouring territories in British Borneo.
As it was both a police and military organisation, in addition to solving crimes, the Constabulary participated in wars, battles, and expeditions. They participated in the colonial wars of the company to pacify local rebellions against colonial rule, such as the punitive expeditions launched against the Mat Salleh Rebellion. They also fought piracy in the Sulu Sea. From the inception of the Constabulary in 1881 until the invasion of the colony by the Empire of Japan in World War II, they were an extension of the Chartered Company. During the war, the Constabulary was split in its functional capacity; Officially, the Constabulary was made the police force of Japanese North Borneo. Unofficially, most of its members became guerrilla resistance fighters and spies for the British Armed Forces, resisting the Japanese administration and working to free prisoners of war (POWs), who were placed under the command of Lionel Matthews. During the Cold War, the Constabulary was deployed to combat communist insurgencies throughout the jungles of Borneo.
After the war, the company could no longer afford the management of a colony, and the Constabulary became a function of the Crown Colony of North Borneo from 1946. On 31 August 1963, the Crown Colony was disestablished when Sabah entered into self-governance, and the Constabulary fell under the independent Sabah State until the signing of the Malaysia Agreement on 16 September 1963. Shortly afterward, the Police Force was merged with the Sarawak Constabulary and the Royal Federation of Malayan Police to create the Royal Malaysia Police. Sabah possessed a British police commissioner until 1967.
Composition
Officers On the Constabulary's first day, there were only 3 gazetted officers; a Commandant of the Constabulary, Arthur Montgomery Harington, and two Sub-Commandants, who oversaw a force of non-commissioned officers and constables. The number of officers increased to 6 in 1903. The officership ranks of the Constabulary were nearly all white British officers, trained at military and police establishments in Britain. Specifically, the Company recruited the officers for both the Civil Service of North Borneo and for the Constabulary in London.
After the Constabulary was brought under the authority of the Crown Colony and the Colonial Police Service, more indigenous persons were raised through the ranks, and by the mid-1950's, at least several district Superintendents were indigenous.
NCOs and enlisted
Initially, the corps of non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and their enlisted constables were almost exclusively non-white. Foreign constables were imported from elsewhere in the British Empire, including a large contingent of Sihks brought from the British Raj and Perak, Dyaks from the Crown Colony of Labuan and elsewhere, Somalis from British Somaliland, and Malays from throughout the South China Sea. There were also at least several Chinese constables. Into the turn of the century, the constabulary employed Dusuns, Muruts, Tegaas, Sea Dyaks, and other local tribes. In the year 1957, the Constabulary employed 566 Dusuns, 155 Muruts, 4 Malays, 31 Chinese, 11 Indians, 9 Pakistani, 17 Sikhs, 74 Bruneis, and 104 people of other ethnicity (Dyaks are not mentioned in the 1957 report).
After the establishment of the Police Training School, the Constabulary became mostly composed of local tribes, including local Dyaks. However, the Dyaks were not the only tribal corps employed by the Constabulary, as especially notably are the Bajau and Orang Laut who were employed along the north coast for their speciality in anti-piracy operations.
In 1916, the Company created the Volunteer Corps, but this was disbanded in 1920. In July 1938, the North Borneo Volunteer Force was created as a supplement to the Constabulary with two platoons of 50 men; one at Sandakan and the other at Jesselton. The Volunteer Force employed many Chinese people, enough to make up two full companies of soldiers. When the Attack on Pearl Harbor took place, the combined forces of the Constabulary and the Volunteer Force was 650 men. The governor requested an extra battalion from the Crown, but there were none available, so he increased the force by 50 men.
Organisation The Governor of North Borneo was the Commander-in-chief of North Borneo, and the ultimate authority over the Constabulary. Underneath the Governor, in the hierarchy of military and police matters, were Company-appointed – Crown-appointed after 1946 – government officers known as Residents, who were in charge of the Residencies of North Borneo. District Officers (D.O.'s) were responsible for managing the military and police matters of each district.
Charles Bruce writes that:"The term "District Officer" probably conveys little or nothing to the generality of my readers... In the early nineteen hundreds, a District Officer in North Borneo had to assist him in his job probably one Malay-speaking clerk and twenty police. With this staff he had to administer an area of possibly two thousand square miles and a population of perhaps ten thousand. He was to all intents and purposes the untrammeled king of this realm. Although hardly out of his teens, the bounds to his sway – at any rate in the remoter districts – were mainly theoretical. Various codes of law were there to guide him in court, it is true, but their provisions were not too rigidly followed, and custom tempered with common sense played a prominent part in the administration of justice. A monthly report was expected, but more as a pious hope than as a really serious obligation."
Commandants and Commissioners
The Constabulary itself was led by a Commandant of the Constabulary, which was a title, not a rank. Commandants were usually gazetted as Captain within the British Armed Forces. For some years, this person also served as the Inspector of Prisons. As policing in the British Empire evolved, the Constabulary evolved with different positions, such as the superintendent ranks. By at least the 1960s, the position of Commandant was replaced by the rank of Police Commissioner.
The first Commandant of the Constabulary was Arthur Montgomery Harington, the grandson of the Reverend Charles Sumner Harington. Harington was recruited from the Rifle Brigade, where he maintained his commission during his tenure in Borneo. He resigned in 1883 out of disgruntlement with his bosses and their lack of willingness to supply funds and personnel to the Constabulary. Harington later became the Commandant of the Constabulary in Alexandria, before moving to London. In London, at the end of his life, Harington served as the Managing Director for the Langkon North Boreno Rubber Company at Threadneedle Street.
Arthur Harington's nephew was Charles H. Harington, who was the longest-serving Commandant of the Constabulary. By the year 1960, the commissioner of the North Borneo Police Force commanded the following branches; Prisons Special Branch Criminal Investigations Department Police Band Immigration Department Road Transport Marine Police Branch Police Training School
History
Anti-piracy operations and Marine Branch Fighting piracy was one of the Constabulary's primary functions from its inception, and as such, it had a close connection to both the Royal Navy, and had its own maritime patrols. One people-group particularly associated with piracy in the region were the Illanun, who would regularly target schooners of both the Dutch operating out of Batavia, Java, and the British at Singapore. The colonial newspaper of the Straits Settlement, The Daily Times, during the 1870's labeled them as "almost exclusively devoted to piracy," written over thirty years after their villages in West Borneo were burned by Sir Thomas Cochrane, whereafter the pirates retreated to the and Tungku in East Borneo.
From before the establishment of the colony at Sabah, the local Bajau people living here also thought of the Illanun people as an oppositional force. Owen Rutter writes:"There is no love lost between the Bajaus and the Illanuns. The Bajaus believe that the lllanuns have occult powers, enabling them to turn themselves into fish and to become evil spirits at will; that they chiefly delight in eating the flesh of corpses, and a continuous watch is kept over the dying or the newly-dead to balk these human vultures of their prey."Another "piratical group" mentioned in the 1870's were known as the Balignini (also sometimes called Balinini or Balanguini), who have been categorized as a subgroup of the Bajau people.
Many faux-anthropological descriptions, however, must be read with caution as to the colonial age in which they were written, especially that of W. B. Pryer, who describes the Bajau as "...a curious wandering, irresponsible sort of race, rather low down in the scale of humanity, and live almost entirely in boats, in families." While descriptive of the people group being a sea-fairing culture, this is also an overtly racist description, and must be consumed with caution.
When North Borneo was in the process of obtaining its charter, Henry Richard expressed great concerns that these "pirate" attacks in the area of the Sulu Sea were not acts of piracy at all. He lamented to William Gladstone that James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, had used the excuse of piracy to commit "...one of the most frightful and wholesale massacres of Natives that is recorded in history." Instead, when the Parliament of the United Kingdom debated this issue, Richard said:
Semporna pirate attack (1954)
On 29 March 1954, two kumpits of Moro pirates, armed with fully automatic rifles, landed at the jetty in the costal town of Semporna. Members of the NBPF defended the town, but several were killed. Forrest Department officer named T.R. Barnard was buried the next day at Lahad Datu. Posthumously, Singh was awarded as a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
Merger with Malaysia Just prior to the Colony's merger with Malaysia in 1963, a British officer from the Marine Police Branch told a reporter from The New Yorker that:"They're a raggle-taggle lot, these pirate fellows, and when you do catch up with them, you find that they're knock-kneed, cross-eyed, unshaven, and mean, and you can't get a word out of them. It's an odd thing, chasing pirates in a world where so much of great importance is going on—nuclear bombs and spaceships and new nations like Malaysia—but I've rather taken a fancy to it."