Charles Vyner Brooke - Rajah of Sarawak

Rajah of Sarawak

Following the death of his father, Vyner succeeded on 17 May and was proclaimed Rajah on 24 May 1917 at Kuching. He took the oath before the Council Negri on 22 July 1918. Vyner's early years as Rajah saw a boom in the Sarawak rubber and oil industries and the subsequent rise in the Sarawak economy allowed him to modernise the country's institutions, including the public service, and introduce a penal code developed on British India lines in 1924.

Granted a knighthood in 1927, Vyner continued to run a hands-off and relatively popular administration that banned Christian missionaries and fostered indigenous traditions (to an extent; headhunting was outlawed). Sarawak, however, was not immune to Japanese imperial ambition, which manifested itself in Sarawak on 25 December 1941. In that same year he withdrew £200,000 from the Treasury for his personal expenses, in exchange for limiting his powers by a new constitution. Vyner and his family were visiting Sydney, Australia, where he would remain for the duration of the war.

The Daily Telegraph described him as "a cloud-living Old Wykehamist, ... one of the few monarchs left in the world who could still say l'Etat, c'est moi." Similarly, his Who's Who entry read thus: "Has led several expeditions into the far interior of the country to punish headhunters; understands the management of natives; rules over a population of 500,000 souls and a country" 40,000 square miles (100,000 km2) in extent.