Anna and Louis Leonowens

Known now primarily from films and the musical The King and I which are based on her book The English Governess at the Siamese Court, the autobiographical details she gives in this book vary widely from the truth as revealed in army and other records.

Her real background
According to W.S. Bristow, who did extensive research on her background for his biography of her son Louis, Anna Harriett Edwards was born in Bombay, India in 1831. Her mother was Mary Anne Glasscock and her father, Thomas Edwards, was a sergeant who died almost penniless three months after Anna's birth. Five months later, the widowed Mary Anne married a corporal, Patrick Donoughey, who was soon demoted to private, and Anna and her older sister were sent to her father's relations in England. When she was about fourteen, Anna returned to India. The life of her family must have been penurious because of the low rank of her stepfather. She met a thirty-five year old, unmarried clergyman, George Percy Badger who took her on a tour of Egypt. On her return to India she married Thomas Leon Owens who was a clerk in a government office, not an army oficer. He didn't make much money, and they moved frequently, finally going to Australia. Somewhere along the line they had two daughters who died. Later they had another daughter, Avis, and a son, Louis. No birth records of either exist. They returned to Southeast Asia where Thomas died of apoplexy in Malaya. She was then hired as an English teacher to the children of the King of Siam.

Her story as she told it.
She was born in Caernarvon, Wales in 1834. (No one there remembered her, and there are no records.) Her mother was Selina Edwards from an ancient Welsh family, and her father was Captain Thomas Maxwell Crawford. When she was six, her father was sent to India as the aide to the Commander of the British troops at Lahore. He was killed by rebel troops in 1841, leaving Anna a considerable fortune in his will. Her mother then married a man with a senior position in the Public Works Department who happened to be the executor of Anna's fortune. He tried to marry Anna to a rich merchant, but she was in love with an officer, Thomas Leonowens. To keep them apart, she was sent on a tour with Badger and his wife! On her return to India, she married Leonowens, and they lived in a fashionable community with many servants. (She was annoyed by the racial arrogance of the British.) Later they sailed to London but were shipwrecked and spent sometime in Australia. When they did reach London they lived in the fashionable St. James section where Avis and Louis were born. (There is no record of either birth in the London records of the time.) Three years later they were sent to Singapore where she learned the money her father had left her was all gone. Thomas, now a major, died of sunstroke when he was returning home from a tiger hunt with other officers. She was hired as governess to the royal children where the members of the harem regarded her as a sort of guardian angel and spokesperson for them to the King.

Her story as she told it is so different from the truth that everything else she reported is immediately suspect. Add to that the romanticized version by Landon, the changes make for the 1948 movie with Rex Harrison and the further changes and additions made by Rodgers and Hammerstein, it is no wonder Thais take exception to The King and I.

Anna and the King
Keeping all of the above in mind, the following is her version of her life in Bangkok as interpreted by Landon.

After her husband died, Anna started a school in Singapore but it was not a success. She was offered the position of English teacher to the King of Siam with the proviso that she not attempt to teach Christianity. She sent her daughter back to England and took Louis to Siam with her.

When her ship arrived in Bangkok, the Kralahome came on board and was indifferent to the fact that she had no friends other than her son, her two Persian servants and a large Newfoundland dog. Since no provision had been made for her accommodations, she spent the night on the ship. The next day the harbor master John Bush took her to his home where she stayed until the Kralahome finally sent for her. She stayed in his palace, not in the royal one. She was deeply offended by the personal questions asked her by the Siamese, was disdainful of them in general and of the interpreter in particular. He turned out to be the Kraholme's half-brother and became her implacable enemy. The ladies of the Kralahome's harem could not understand why she would not like to be in their position with all their jewels and other privileges.

She was visited by Robert Hunter, the King's English secretary who informed her the King was too busy with ceremonies to see her for a while; meanwhile she was free to roam about the city. She socialized with the missionaries and other Europeans, studied Siamese with Hunter and kept asking for the promised home of her own. She had one brief audience with the King at which he asked her a number of personal questions and introduced her to his first wife, Lady Talap, who wished to learn English. He then dismissed her and said he would send for her later.

At her second audience she learned she was to live in the King's harem. When she refused and demanded her own place he found her a smelly hovel which she indignantly refused. The Kralahome finally found something more suitable for her and her household. Once more she was brought to the palace. This time she was introduced to the royal children, but the teaching did not start until many months later.

Landon's description of the scene with the globe and the maps is as depicted in the play. The King did offer President Buchanan (not Lincoln) elephants but that was before Anna arrived. The story of the dinner party in the play is complete fiction. There was no Sir Edward Ramsey, nor did she waltz with the King. Mongkut did want to impress European visitors so he picked a few of his most attractive wives and dressed them in European clothes which were made in less than two days. (There was no underwear.) Their teeth, black from chewing betel, were scraped white and their faces were whitened. They were then posed behind a curtain and told that when it was drawn they were to rise, bow and retire backward. That was all. However, they were so frightened by the beards and monocles of the European men that they panicked, threw their skirts over their heads, fled, and could not be coaxed back.

After Anna had been in Siam a number of years she received a message from the Kralahome by means of the interpreter telling her to resign and leave. She refused. When, after five years, she did wish to leave to take Louis back to England to school, the King refused to let her go. However, after another six months she at last got his consent and left in July 1867. He died before she could return, and she never did go back. The King remembered her and Louis in his will, but she never received anything.

Such is Landon's version, the ultimate source for The King and I.

According to Bristow and others, Anna made many slips in protocol right from the beginning, showing her disdain for the Siamese whom she regarded as little more than savages and thinking officials were too disrespectful toward her. Contrary to what she wrote, the officials at the consulate remained aloof. Her only European associates were the Protestant missionaries who did not mix with the consular staff and who reinforced Anna's perceptions of the King.

On their return to England, Louis was put in school in Ireland, and Anna travelled to Canada where she lived for most of the rest of her life and helped bring up her daughter's children. She died in 1916 at the age of eighty-five. As a sidelight, her great-grandnephew became the actor known as Boris Karloff.

In sum her influence in Siam was never as great as she portrayed, and her accounts were full of inaccuracies. Her knowledge of Siamese history and language was shaky at best. (She claimed to be fluent in the Thai language, but her attempts to write it are so bad they do not make any sense.) Some things she described were clearly impossible. For example, she spoke of underground prison cells, but the water table at Bangkok is much too high for anything underground.

LOUIS
Anna was not the last Leonowens in Siam. Louis had been very happy there as a child. King Mongkut was fond of him and treated him almost as an adopted son, giving him special privileges. As children, he and Chulalongkorn became good friends.

After finishing school in Britain at the age of fifteen he joined Anna in Canada. Later he moved to Australia where he became part of the police force for a mine but later returned to Bangkok. He renewed his friendship with the now King Chulalongkorn and became a captain in his army. However, a wanderer like his father, he became bored in a few years and joined a surveying trip to the north of Siam. There he recognized the potential of the vast teak forests and started a teak business, becoming an important factor in the Siamese economy. He married Caroline Knox, a daughter of the British Consul, and they had two children before she died. They were sent to Anna in Canada to be brought up with the six children of Anna's daughter Avis. Louis later remarried. His story is told in W.S. Bristow's book Louis and the King of Siam.

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