Anthony Brooke

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Biographical Information

Anthony Walter Dayrell Brooke (1912 – 2011) was appointed His Highness the Rajah Muda of Sarawak. wiki

"Brooke's English family had been the absolute rulers of Sarawak for three generations. Popularly known as the White Rajahs, they had their own money, stamps, flag and constabulary, and the power of life and death over their various subjects – Malays, Chinese and Dyak tribesmen, a few of whom still indulged in the grisly custom of headhunting... On his return to London, Brooke was presented to Queen Victoria as Rajah of Sarawak, and knighted. In Sarawak, meanwhile, he won a devoted following with his integrity and frank exuberance. Each day he would stroll about the Malay kampungs, Chinese shophouses and Dyak longhouses, chatting to his subjects, and he was always open to visits at his bungalow. He introduced a just code of laws and enlisted the help of his friend Admiral Henry Keppel to clear up the piracy along Sarawak's coastline.

"...Anthony, he grew up in England, where he was educated at Eton. After a year at Trinity, Cambridge, he studied Malay language and Muslim law at the School of Oriental Studies in London, before travelling for the first time to Borneo in June 1934...

"...Anthony was back in England, enrolled as a private soldier in the British Army. In 1944, by which time he was on Lord Louis Mountbatten's staff in Ceylon, the British government approached Rajah Vyner suggesting they discuss how Sarawak and Britain might be "marched together in the future"....

"In the late 1950s, he led a campaign to put morality back into British politics, and in the 1960s he toured the world on a "peace pilgrimage", meeting Nehru, Zhou En-lai and U Nu of Burma, and walking across the Punjab with the Indian saint Vinoba Bhave. He lived with the New Age commune at Findhorn, in the northeast of Scotland, adopting their belief that flying saucers would bring "peace on earth and the brotherhood of man".

"After divorcing his first wife in 1973, he married Gita Keiller, from Sweden, 18 years his junior, and together they founded Operation Peace Through Unity, which produced a quarterly newsletter, Many to Many, with "news items, strategies, poems and letters from around the world, for use in the cause of peace, environmental protection and the rights of indigenous peoples".

"They continued their globe-trotting campaign until the late 1980s, when they came to roost in a wooden villa on a hill above the town of Wanganui on the north island of New Zealand. Towards the end of his life, Anthony Brooke remained saint-like in his good nature, and remarkably forgiving about those members of his family who had conspired to deprive him of his singular inheritance."