Katya & The Prince of Siam

Her spontaneous response to the beauties of Siam, its people, architecture and moving ritual customs, is tempered by frequent denigration of ‘paganism’ and condescending pity for the ‘heathen’. This ambivalence was largely due to the proselytising Christianity of that epoch for, in declaring itself the only true faith, its followers felt it their bounden duty to disparage all others, including of course Buddhism.

At one point, for instance, Anna describes King Mongkut as ‘envious, revengeful, subtle and cruel’, but at another pays tribute to him as ‘the most remarkable of the Oriental princes of the present century … the most progressive of the supreme rulers of Siam’. She also relates an incident that clearly demonstrates the ‘pagan’ monarch’s typical Buddhist respect for the religious beliefs of others:

‘Visiting a temple in company with the King and his family, I called his Majesty’s attention to the statue at the Beautiful Gate as that of a Christian saint. Turning quickly to his children and addressing them gently, he bade them salute it reverently. “It is Mam’s saint”, he said; whereupon the tribe of little ones folded their hands devoutly and made obeisance before the effigy of St. Peter.’

A dark-eyed, strikingly handsome young woman – who might well be taken for an Indian – there is every reason to believe that her gift for veiling reality in clouds of fancy was already highly developed long before her arrival in Siam, for her story of her own past in Margaret Landon’s book is, according to the painstaking research in William Bristowe’s book, Louis and the King of Siam, an undoubted fabrication.

According to him, the facts are that her grandfather was one John Glasscock, a gunner in the Bengal Artillery, and that his child by an Eurasian or Indian woman, Mary Ann, was Anna Leonowen’s mother, which would account for Anna’s exotic appearance. In 1829 this Mary Ann Glasscock married Sergeant Edwards, and they had two children – Eliza born 1830 and Anna (Leonowens) born 1831. Anna’s version which imparted a high gloss of gentility to her antecedents and her past, recounts that she and Eliza were born in Wales, daughters of Captain and Mrs Crawford, their mother’s maiden name being Edwards (her married name in reality) who came of ancient Welsh stock. In 1840 the two little girls were left in Wales with an aunt, while the parents went to India, Captain Crawford being ADC to the Commander of British troops in Lahore where he was killed in 1841.

When Eliza was sixteen and Anna fifteen, they went to India to join their mother, who was now remarried to ‘a man in a senior position in the Public Works Department in Poona’. Anna’s story was that she hated him because, although she was in love with a ‘young officer’. Thomas Leon Owens, her stepfather tried to marry her to a rich merchant who, with Colonel Rutherford Sutherland (a non-existent character with a name straight out of Ouida), was joint-executor of her father’s will.

She was then sent – rather strangely – ‘on an educational tour of the Middle East with the Reverend Percy Badger’ (in reality a well-known oriental scholar) and ‘his wife’. Badger was in fact unmarried.

On her return, Anna married Thomas, whose second name and surname were now amalgamated into ‘Leonowens’, and they set up house ‘with many servants on fashionable Malabar Hill’. After the death of her mother and their first child, the Leonowens set sail for England but, shipwrecked off the Cape of Good Hope, they were picked up by a vessel bound for Australia and landed there instead. Eventually they did reach England, where two children, Avis and Louis, were born in 1854 and 1855 respectively in St James’ London.

After three years in London, Thomas, now promoted ‘Major’ Leonowens, rejoined his regiment in Singapore accompanied by his family. In 1857 Anna lost her small fortune in the collapse of the Agra Bank in India and, still worse, in 1858 Major Leonowens ‘died of sunstroke, returning from a tiger shoot with brother officers’. Anna founded a little school for officers’ children, but it only afforded her a bare living so when the post in Siam was offered in 1862, she was glad to accept it.