Katya & The Prince of Siam

Under Chakrabongse’s direction, German and Austrians were interned, and about forty merchant ships were successfully taken over by the Siamese Navy, after an abortive attempt at blowing them up on the part of the Germans in order to foil their capture. A great extra burden of work was now laid on Chakrabongse’s willing shoulders, and he dreamed of commanding a mixed brigade in France if sufficient modern equipment could be supplied by the Allies. They, however, only agreed to accept a motor transport corps and about one hundred pilots. This reluctance, rightly or wrongly, was interpreted in Siam as being due to racial discrimination. In the event, the Motor Transport Corps saw some service, but the Siamese pilots were still being acclimatised and trained in France when the fighting ended with the declaration of the Armistice in November 1918.

One minor result of Siamese involvement in the war, was the redesigning of her flag. Until then, this had shown a white elephant on a scarlet ground. But as the representation of this revered animal, when flown on Allied occasions, appeared to Western eyes to resemble that more homely creature, the pig, Rama VI decided that five horizontal stripes in red, white, dark blue, white and red, would be more seemly and render further misapprehension impossible.

Working longer and later than even he had done before, Chakrabongse was probably unaware of how profoundly Katya suffered, not only from the known disastrous facts about her country, but from an ever-darkening cloud of uncertainty and apprehension that worse was to come. In the past, she would have been able to share her anxieties and grief with him, but swept along and away from her by a heavy programme of duties, he could not realise how isolated she felt. In addition, her health had not improved, and she was considerably debilitated by two distressing miscarriages.

Her Slav temperament, prone to extremes of ebullient joy or black despair, hindered her from rising above her deep depression and, although complying with the demands made on her by her position, she felt them as ‘demands’ and did not undertake them wholeheartedly. For underlying all she did was a nostalgia for Russia – the snow, the bubbling samovar, and voices speaking her native tongue, voices that for all she knew might now be stilled in death or only faintly heard in echoing vaults of prisons.

During October 1917 there had been serious flooding, causing hardship and grave damage to city and countryside. The carefree young in Bangkok, paddling boats along the drowning avenues and boulevards laid out by Chulalongkorn, took thoughtless pleasure in the disaster. But Katya’s beautiful gardens at Paruskavan as they slipped and gradually disappeared beneath the rising flood, washed away her remaining equilibrium and she underwent a severe nervous breakdown.

She was so unwell and so unlike herself, and her ‘lovely smile’, that her mother-in-law had remarked on long ago, became so marked by its absence that Chakrabongse, during his rare hours of leisure, many of which were spent at Hua Hin, grew to rely on the more active companionship of a group of young people, one of whom was his niece Princess Bimrambai, daughter of his half-brother, Prince Rabi. Here, while Katya worked alone in the garden she loved and had created, he played tennis, swam and went for strenuous climbing expeditions with this pretty lively girl and her light-hearted friends, finding in their undemanding company, relaxation from the exhausting days of driving work in Bangkok. At length he suggested that Katya might benefit from a complete change. He was far too busy to take a holiday himself, and in any case it seems that at this stage of their marriage, both welcomed the prospect of being apart for a while.

In April 1918 therefore, Katya set off on an extended tour of China, Japan and Canada, travelling with her faithful Cham. By this time, her brother Vanya was living in Peking, as were many escaping Russian refugees. No doubt, if she could not go to Russia, the thought of seeing her brother again and meeting other Russians must have seemed better than nothing. She was also accompanied by Edward Healey, architect of their house at Hua Hin, who had become something of a family friend and in this instance was to act as a sort of courier, responsible for smoothing out the irritations and difficulties of foreign travel. Well known later for his design of the Siam Society building on Astoke Road, photographs show him to have been good-looking and moustached with a genial expression and a certain rakish tilt to his panama – an odd choice as an escort, one would have thought, for a young married woman on her own.

 

Edward Healey who accompanied Katya on her trip to Japan and Canada in 1918.