IN his book, “The Singapore Story”, (Times Editions, 1993) Lee Kwan Yew describes Duncan Sandys, the Secretary of State For Commonwealth Relations as a person in authority who could be “direct and brutally frank”. Lee noted that Sandys, the son-in-law of Winston Churchill, “had enormous determination and courage, and did not lack self-confidence”.
He also observed, and this might be quite significant as we shall see, that Sandys had suffered a leg injury in a car accident during the war, and was often in pain, took painkillers, limped around in a walking stick but pressed on with life regardless