Katya & The Prince of Siam

Another factor playing a part in a potentially explosive situation was the resentment of educated commoners, numbers of whom had held high office during the two previous reigns, at their virtual exclusion from Government, a state of mind which led them to begin questioning whether autocratic rule in the modern world was not beginning to be an anachronism.

 

King Rama VII in the ceremony at which Siam received a constitution.

 

Although Prajadhipok himself was aware of the dangerous state of affairs (which Chula had also foreseen), and had actually considered granting a constitution of his own accord, Sir Josiah Crosby, Great Britain’s Minister at Bangkok from 1934 to 1941 writes in Siam at the Crossroads that he ‘had it from the King’s own lips that he was dissuaded from such a wise course by his uncles and brothers who were unable to believe that anything untoward was in the air’.

It was certainly ironic that the Supreme Council appointed by Prajadhipok himself, to help and advise him, should so signally have failed him at this crisis. Even the action of the Chief of Police, who had discovered the plot the night before the rising and had hastened to call on one of the princes of the Supreme Council for permission to arrest the ringleaders, was of no avail, for the prince in question blandly stated that he had heard such rumours before, that all had proved false, and he refused to sanction any measures whatsoever being taken.

In the event, therefore, the conspirators, consisting of young intellectuals and army and navy officers, found themselves staging a coup d’etat which met with almost no resistance and the first the capital knew of it was the ominous rumble of tanks moving in to the grounds of Prince Boripatra’s palace at dawn. The Prince – President of the Supreme Council – was seized and conveyed, still in pyjamas, to Dusit Palace where he was joined by several more princes and a minister or two, all rounded up as hostages. Prince Svasti escaped, having dashingly commandeered a detached railway engine and escaped in it to Hua Hin. There he found the King on holiday in his new Palace ‘Klai Kangwol’ whose name ‘Far from Care’, proved to be something of a misnomer.

The ultimatum, delivered next day by warship, informed the monarch of the formation of a Peoples’ Party, whose ‘principal aim’ – according to the Bangkok Times – was ‘the creation of a constitutional monarchy’, and warned that, ‘if members of the Peoples’ Party receive any injuries, the princes held in pawn will suffer in consequence’. ‘But’, the document continued, ‘we enjoin Your Majesty to return to the capital to reign again as King under the constitutional monarchy as established by the Peoples’ Party’. The King accepted, returned to Bangkok, and negotiations were begun. The princes were released though compelled to quit the posts they had held. Phraya Mana, Chief of the Supreme Court, was elected Prime Minister. A permanent constitution was duly signed on 10th December 1932, and a new era began.

 

XIV

Motor-racing

 

 

Princess Chavalit and Prince Amorn Kitiyakara.

 

As not infrequently happens, dramatic coincidence can play a part in real life which would be dismissed were it written in a book or play as being unlikely or far-fetched. That same year, Katya heard to her astonishment that Chavalit, whom she had never expected to cross her path again, was actually in Paris. Married to Prince Amorn and the mother of five sons, the erstwhile pretty and lively charmer, still young, but now ravaged by illness, had been brought, as a last resort by her wealthy husband to Europe, in a despairing search for a cure.

Chakrabongse’s former aide-de-camp, Tapong, was now the Siamese ambassador in Paris and being an old friend of Katya’s, he frequently asked her to dine at the Siamese Legation. One day she was shocked to hear that he had seen Chavalit and was horrified to find her so changed. ‘He said that she looks quite green as a dead person, that she doesn’t eat, has no flesh at all, just bones, and that doctors who saw her don’t give much hope’. After dinner, the door suddenly opened to admit Chavalit’s husband. ‘He had changed so much and got old so quick’ that Katya failed to recognise him, and had to ask who he was. And she adds – feminine vanity uppermost – ‘I am sure he was surprised to see me so young looking!’, and goes on: ‘I feel again I was in Bangkok when Chakrabongse died and the whole picture of old days passed in my brain.’