Katya & The Prince of Siam

In 1931, Chula returned to Siam, where he had not been for six years and where, to Katya’s joy, he was very well received by his uncle, now King Prajadhipok and his royal relatives. She had feared that, as he would have been heir-apparent to the throne had she not been Russian, they might have regarded him with misgiving, afraid that motives of advancement and ambition might lie beneath his natural wish to keep in touch with his father’s people and royal relations. On the contrary, her mind was set at rest on hearing his detailed account of the kind and royal reception he had received on his return, when he had been invested by the King with a personal royal order, the Ratanaporn First-Class, and met many people she had known, not least his old nurse Cham.

Chula, however, kept to himself that his stay in Bangkok ‘was, in part, spoiled by an undercurrent of political anxiety and unrest’. This led him to warn the King that he thought revolution of some kind was imminent, also going as far as to suggest that, as the following year, 1932, would be the celebration of 150 years of the Chakri Dynasty, it would be an ideal occasion to announce the creation of a constitutional instead of an Absolute Monarchy. In this he showed great perspicacity for, when staying with his mother in Paris, on the evening of 24th June 1932, on return from the cinema accompanied by Shura Rahm and Sophia – one of Katya’s friends – they found a note by the telephone that ‘Mr. Pila had rung from the Siamese Legation but left no message. ‘According to Katya’s diary, ‘Chula became very worried as he said when Mr. Pila calls so late, it’s always bad news and he’s sure someone died in Bangkok. I tried my best to calm him, but I felt worried too as he’s right, Mr. Pila never calls me so late for nothing’.

Morning brought confirmation of their presentiment, for when the maid brought Katya’s morning tea and the newspapers, she announced ‘that a very bad news are in the papers that revolution broke out in Siam’.

‘My heart nearly stopped’, Katya continues, ‘but I waited till ten then I went to waken Chula and tell him this awful news. I drew the curtains and spoke to him quite calmly, telling him he mustn’t worry as it may turn out very good yet, as I trust no Siamese would harm anyone of the royal family.’

All that morning friends telephoned Katya incessantly, either to find out if she knew more than they had learned from the newspapers or to express sympathy for the concern they were sure she must be feeling. ‘It was such a relief to hear so many friendly attentions’, as Katya puts it. The following day passed in the same atmosphere of apprehension as no-one at the Legation had heard any more except that ‘King Prajadhipok did not yet give no answer to the demand for a constitution, but had asked time to read and study it’. In the afternoon Chula and Shura went to the Legation to see if anything more had been heard, while Katya, left alone in her flat, ‘during everybody’s absence’ busied herself ‘making chocolate fudges’.

At dinner when only Sophia was present, ‘Chula was very excited and, explained to them the reasons why the revolution had happened. Talked very well all the time in French. Looking at him, I was thinking what a wonderful leader he would be’, she writes, clearly considering with maternal pride the possibility that, despite the disadvantage of having a Russian mother, her son might yet be called upon to play a part in Siam. ‘On the other hand’, she adds, ‘I don’t care of position, money and all these things; all I want is to see my child safe and happy… I let him talk’, she concludes, ‘as I knew it would be good for him.’

Later that same evening the Legation telephoned that a telegram had just come in and directly it was decoded they would ring back. When they did so it was to say that ‘the official news was that a constitutional monarchy had been established and that everything in Bangkok was quiet’. Here, unfortunately, this fragment of a diary only kept from 5th to 27th June 1932 and never resumed, ends abruptly.

The situation in Bangkok that precipitated the Revolution was as follows. On ascending the throne seven years previously in 1926, Prajadhipok, who took the title of Rama VII, modestly felt that his purely soldierly career had ill-fitted him for the role of absolute monarch. He had created a Supreme Council, mostly composed of his princely brothers and relatives, to advise him in reducing the heavy debt incurred in the Privy Purse by the personal extravagance of Vajiravudh, a proportion of which had fallen to the charge of the National Exchequer. These difficulties, compounded by the world economic depression of 1929, made stringent retrenchment necessary and one economy which caused great discontent was the sweeping reduction in official salaries, particularly among officers of the armed forces.