What happens
Rubber planters in Malaya recall the industry's history after the Japanese occupation ended. A planter named Hankins and his family, who had worked their estates for three generations, return from India expecting ruin and find the plantations less damaged than feared, though labor had been diverted and some grounds were overgrown. The story traces the industry from the 1876 seed shipment from Brazil through booms, slumps, and the struggle to create a research institute and restriction agreements. It closes with the post-war effort to rehabilitate the estates and resume rubber shipments to the world market. The program is part of The Pacific Story, first broadcast on January 19, 1947.
Malaya and Singapore, with flashbacks to Brazil, the Amazon, London, and the Dutch East Indies, spanning the period from the 1870s to the years after World War II.
Characters: Hankins, Wickham, Wilkinson
Listen for: The account of how Malaya's rubber industry was founded, how planters responded to repeated boom-and-bust cycles, and what the returning owners found on their estates after the Japanese occupation.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.