Roderick MacLean was the civil servant who presided over the evacuation of the inhabitants of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands — an archipelago of 27 small coral islands in the Indian Ocean — for a new life in Australia and North Borneo in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

He had been appointed administrator to oversee the islanders’ departure which would be voluntary. He was to carry it out “by local custom”. And in general he believed it was done without the bitter aftermath of enforced British evacuations elsewhere.

The once uninhabited islands were first recorded by a Captain William Keeling in 1609, but had been governed and developed only since 1829, under one family, the Clunies-Ross from the Shetland Islands. The Cocos became a British colony in 1856 and latterly a part of Singapore. The staple food, rice, had to be shipped in regularly. And there was little truly fresh water. Outgoing trade was principally copra (coconut).

During the war it was kept secret that the undersea cable between Britain and Australia, maintained by Cable & Wireless on Direction Island, one of the Cocos isles, was still functioning despite false news that it had been closed down. A skeleton staff remained at the station, left as if derelict, after an attack by a Japanese ship. In fact, it was fully operative. Throughout the war a merchant ship always got through safely to deliver essential supplies from Ceylon (Sri Lanka) despite the Japanese-controlled waters.

The colony was formally handed to Australia, which wanted to control the airstrip, in 1956, along with Christmas Island. The islanders would be offered new homes in Sabah (North Borneo), or on the West Coast of Australia. MacLean maintained that the migration was voluntary although some islanders did make efforts to return.

MacLean recalled: “I called a Grand Durbar and the entire population came to the garden of John Clunies-Ross’s house. I explained to them: you have seen the Governor of Singapore, because he has been here. He is my boss. He gets his orders from King George VI, and he passes them on to me. I am the man on the spot. King George has decided that in future he will send his orders to his Big Man in Canberra. And he will tell me what to do. It is just a change of bosses. ‘Are you happy?’ I asked them. They said, if the Tuan thinks it’s OK, then we have no problem.”

He continued: “So the locals had been consulted and didn’t object. I don’t think I could have done it any other way. I also had radio sets sent down from Singapore. I put them in the kampong for public hearing, and got some of the headmen into my house to listen on my more powerful radio to Malay speakers from Singapore, and from Jakarta — because the Cocos islander was a melange of different races, speaking what would now be called Bahasa-Indonesi — Malay with many Javanese words. Some were probably descended from Papua New Guinea; others were of Cape Malay origin, maybe intermarried with Hottentots.”

MacLean administered the migration from 1948, mainly to Sabah. When he left in late 1951, the island population had been reduced from 3,100 to about 500 Cocos Malays.

Roderick MacLean was born in Cardiff in 1921. His father was Professor of Botany at Cardiff University. MacLean was educated at Oundle School and went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, when the Second World War interrupted his studies for the Overseas Civil Service. He first served in the Cheshire Regiment 1940-41. He then joined the largest group of Volunteer soldiers in the UK influence: the 3 million Indian Army. He went to OTS in Bangalore, then was commissioned into the 7th Bn 10th Baluch Regiment (or 7/10th Baluch). He was part of the Burma Campaign and at the Sittang River retreat he had to swim across when his armoured vehicle was shot from under him at a road block. He had reached the rank of major when released to resume his education at Cambridge. He then joined the Malayan Civil Service, going first to Singapore as a colonial officer in 1950.

After service with the Malayan Ministry of Education he joined the North Borneo Civil Service, in which he became responsible for the first five-year Malaysian development plan in Sabah. He was appointed OBE in 1968. In 1967 he transferred to the Colonial Secretariat in Hong Kong, and ten years later was back in Singapore where he eventually became the second full-time executive of the Singapore International Chamber of Commerce.

MacLean retired to Edinburgh in 1988. He had adopted a son in Singapore, Paul Chia, whom he had helped to educate. He also regarded a Cocos islander as an adopted son: Hj Hautman, who migrated to Sabah.

MacLean died in Edinburgh with Paul Chia by his side. He and Hj Hautman survive him.

Roderick MacLean, OBE, civil servant, was born on June 11, 1921. He died on May 16, 2008, aged 86