Boom and bust in Sarawak

On stage at Wyndham’s Theatre just now, the curtain for Somerset Maugham’s The Letter is a map of South-east Asia, circa 1920. In the middle lies Sarawak, a slab of northern Borneo about the size of England. This is appropriate because Sarawak, which he visited frequently, was the mise-en-scène for much of Maugham’s work. Less appropriate is the fact that, along with Ceylon, Burma and Malaya, Sarawak is picked out in red. But Sarawak wasn’t a colony or a British possession; it belonged to a single English family, the Brookes.

The last king of that land, known as the White Rajah, was Vyner Brooke who married an Englishwoman called Sylvia Brett, the subject of this biography. I met the lady in question, my great-aunt, only once. She came to our house in Oxfordshire for lunch accompanied by a professional walker, waddling on slippered feet and aged 86. Nevertheless the lunch was a lively affair.