D. Stevens (born 1916 or 1917) was a Singaporean politician, trade union leader, and shopkeeper who served as the general secretary of the Labour Party and as a vice-president of the Singapore Army Civil Service Union.
Stevens joined the Labour Party in 1948 and became associated with a faction led by P. M. Williams, which increasingly dominated the party's affairs. He was elected general secretary of the party in 1952. During the crisis that followed the expulsion of party chairman Lim Yew Hock, Stevens initially resigned as general secretary and from the party's General Council, claiming to have opposed the expulsion. He was subsequently persuaded to remain in the post. Stevens unsuccessfully contested the Rochore Ward in the 1952 Singapore City Council election as a Labour Party candidate.
Early life and education Stevens was born in the city of Madras in India in 1916 or 1917. He received his tertiary education at the Annamalai University in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu. He served with the British Indian Army for six years during World War II. He was demobilised in British Malaya.
Union work Stevens came to Singapore after the war. He was first a clerk and a teacher before he became a shopkeeper with the War Department. Stevens soon became involved with the Army Civil Service Union (ACSU). At the end of June 1950, he was appointed to a delegation of ACSU members alongside P. M. Williams, M. P. D. Nair, ACSU President V. K. Nair, S. Sankaran and How Chee Wah, who were to meet John Strachey, the Secretary of State for War of the United Kingdom, demanding that the 500 storekeepers of the War Department who were represented by the union be paid a housing allowance and that they be officially recognised as non-industrial workers as they had previously been just a year ago, thus allowing them to be entitled to the benefits that came with that status. As industrial workers, they were required to work longer hours for less pay, which they considered a "grave injustice".
The War Department refused to meet their demands, and so the ACSU voted on 1 July to call for a strike. Additionally, the War Department claimed that the union represented only clerks. In response, the ACSU formed a sub-group, the Store Personnel Group, representing the storekeepers, and Stevens was elected its chair. This was followed the day after by the formation of another sub-group representing telephone operators and supervisors, with plans for a third sub-group representing workers paid a daily salary. This was done to push the department to recognise the union as "representative of all Army civilian workers." He continued to serve in that post into the mid-1950s. He led a mass protest by the storekeepers on North Bridge Road in February 1951, declaring that their "patience had come to an end" after several rounds of failed negotiations. At the ACSU's annual delegates conference, held on 18 March, he was nominated to be elected as president, though he and Khng Jit Cheng followed M. P. D. Nair in withdrawing their nominations, though the lattermost would rescind his nomination and eventually win by one vote over S. S. Manyam.
In May 1953, Stevens was appointed to a nine-member committee, chaired by ACSU president S. T. V. Lingam, which was to survey the salaries of 25,000 unionised employees of the War Department across Singapore and the Federation of Malaya. The various unions representing the employees believed that the workers should receive a pay rise as there had not been an "adequate salary revision" since 1947. He was elected a vice-president of the ACSU alongside Chew Seng in March 1954, under Lingam as chairman and with P. R. Williams as general secretary and Wong Fook Lim as treasurer.
At the annual conference of the Singapore Federation of Services Union, held on 9 July 1950 after three years of the union "lying dormant", Stevens was elected to its General Council, alongside union leaders such as M. P. D. Nair and S. Jaganathan. V. K. Nair was elected the president and Williams an assistant secretary. The union pushed for amendments to the Trade Union Ordinance which would allow for the formation of a Singapore Trade Union Congress. These had previously been announced by the Commissioner for Labour.
In 1960, Stevens was invited by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Calcutta to teach a special course on "industrial relations law", catering to Asian union leaders, at its college there from 12 to 24 September, after which he would return to Singapore. He had previously attended the college as a student in 1957 and was made an associate of the institution. The course was attended by around 40 union leaders from across Southeast Asia.
Politics In 1948, Stevens joined the Labour Party (SLP), formed in September of that year to advocate for workers' rights by unionists, in particular M. A. Majid, M. P. D. Nair and P. M. Williams. It was the second political party active in Singapore at the time, after the Progressive Party (PP). The party was highly factionalised, with major groups including a "left-wing", comprising members such as Williams, V. P. Abdullah, and E. S. Moorthy. This faction of the party, considered more radical and comprising "white-collar office workers", was spearheaded in particular by P. M. Williams. They stood in opposition to a more moderate faction, the party's "right-wing", comprising mostly Chinese "professionals and businessmen", which came to be led in particular by Francis Thomas, a former chair of the SLP, and Lim Yew Hock, who succeeded Thomas as chair.
At the party's 1952 annual conference, held in March, Stevens was elected the SLP's general secretary, with his predecessor in the post, P. M. Williams, choosing not to contest the position. Lim was re-elected chair, and Thomas and the Williams brothers were among the 11 elected to the General Council. A new constitution was also adopted at the conference. In order to "prevent unauthorised releases" to the local press, it was decided that all official press releases of the SLP would be delivered by Stevens as the general secretary.
Candidate nomination dispute In July 1952, it was announced that Stevens was considering standing as a candidate in the upcoming City Council election. The SLP then had five candidates on the council: E. V. Davies, V. K. Nair, Lee Choon Eng, S. M. A. H. Chisty and Williams's brother P. R. Williams. Of these, Davies and Chisty in the North and Rochore Wards, respectively, had been elected on terms set to expire in December and were looking to run for re-election. Stevens was to apply to run on the SLP ticket as a candidate in the Rochore Ward, as was Abdullah. Ultimately, Abdullah decided against applying, leaving just Stevens and Chisty vying for the Rochore Ward ticket.
It was initially announced that the General Council would finalise the nominations for the election at a meeting on 9 August. However, Lim announced on 27 July that the council had already decided to nominate Stevens over Chisty for the Rochore Ward and Lee Yong Min in the East Ward. Stevens was to be aided in his campaign by the establishment of a Rochore branch of the SLP as part of its "vastly improved" machinery. On 9 August, the General Council finalised A. R. Lazarous as the candidate for the North Ward as opposed to Davies and P. M. Williams over Jaganathan in the South Ward, though it had not yet determined candidates for the City and West Wards. The list of candidates was opposed by a "dissentient" group of the SLP, over 2,000 members strong, who disagreed with the selections of Lazarous, Williams and Stevens. This group felt that the General Council had been "prejudiced" in choosing to field Lazarous, Williams and Stevens and threatened a "mass resignation", calling for an emergency meeting on the matter.
Davies then claimed that the General Council was ruled by a 'clique' which "lacked the confidence of the electorate". He revealed that the SLP allowed non-British subjects as members, and alleged that the annual conference earlier in the year was a "farce" that had been staged in part through bringing a "few lorry loads" of non-local members to vote for preferred candidates through a "stupid" constitution. He accused this General Council of attempting to control its members on the Legislative and City Councils and of making "fantastic pronouncements" for the SLP as a whole. He claimed to have not been aware of any action taken by the General Council which proved beneficial to the party, and felt that they were simply selecting those within their own faction as candidates.
A nine-member committee to represent 2,275 members of the SLP who disputed the selection was established. It submitted a memorandum addressed to Lim, who also opposed the list, on 20 August, stating that it "[could not] recognise the present Council as a valid body, nor can we accept decisions when it has so openly flouted the constitution, which it was elected to safeguard and honour". Copies were distributed to all of the party's representatives on the City Council and its sole member on the Legislative Council, C. R. Dasaratha Raj. The committee accused the council of being "improperly constituted" and a "battleground for personal ambitions" which had done little to progress the "upliftment and welfare of the working class", with its first act since the conference being the expulsion of Davies and Chisty. The committee called for the council to be dissolved and considered its decisions "null and void".
Stevens then told The Singapore Free Press on 19 August that there was no such 'clique' on the General Council, which he claimed was "trying to manage party affairs in a just way." This was followed the day after by an official statement by the SLP denouncing Davies's accusations as "grossly unfounded", claiming that Davies had not raised any objection to the constitution despite being present at the annual conference and that it seemed that he was willing to forego all of these criticisms hoping to be nominated the SLP's candidate for the North Ward. The statement in turn accused him of being "clearly unprincipled in his behaviour" despite being a leading member of the party. It was then explained that the General Council had voted for Lazarous over Davies eight to three as they felt that the latter's "frail" health could not "withstand the strain of elections". Additionally, the General Council attributed Lazarous's previous failure in the North Ward to the "lack of care and attention" Davies provided to his ward. After a three-hour meeting with the committee, Stevens declared on 28 August that the dispute had been "amicably settled." However, the committee disputed this the day after.
Resignation
The "rebel" committee gave Lim two weeks to organise a general meeting to "straighten out matters", through which it planned to oust the General Council. Lim agreed to hold a meeting on 31 October, while the General Council worked to expel Lim as chair, declaring the meeting Lim called "unauthorised and unconstitutional." The Council was successful in this, kicking Lim out on 27 October at a meeting attended by all nine members of the council at the time, Stevens, Lazarous, Abdullah, Reddi, P. M. Williams, P. R. Williams, Ho Wing Hon, Lee Yong Min, and N. A. K. Jothi. S. K. Reddi was then appointed to act as chair in the meantime. This led to another major split from the party, in addition to reportedly "[convincing] the public of the utter hideousness" of the SLP.