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| King Prajadhipok |
Mr.Chairman, Ladies and Gentleman :
May I begin with something
tangential to the core substance of my contribution. It is to ask you to join
me in paying a tribute to His late Majesty King Prajadhipok, after whom KPI was
named.
Today is the 119th Anniversary of His Birth. A
snippet of information from the Documentation Center at the King
Prajadhipok Museum tells us that in 1934
the King visited the British
Houses of Parliament at Westminster. It was part of his sojourn to as many as
nine European countries as Siam’s first constitutional monarch.
On May,8, 1934, King Prajadhipok,
seated upstairs, witnessed at first hand
how the elected House of Commons
deliberated on the issues of the day, Furthermore, he lunched on site in the
company of members of the Houses of
Commons and Lords, thereby going on record as the first monarch in the world to
have done so.
A week earlier, the King visited 10
Downing Street, the office-cum-residence of the British Prime Minister. There,
he had discussions over lunch with James Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour
Party (a democratic socialist one) Prime
Minister, ministers, the Leader of the Opposition and some MPs.
Throughout his European trip, the
King exchanged views with a diverse range of people, royalties, politicians of
different political ideologies,
including Italy’s Mussolini and
Germany’s Hitler, and also intellectuals. These latter included Aldous
Huxley, the author of the futuristic novel, Brave New World, published two years earlier, and
H.G. Wells, the author of the science fiction, The Time Machine, for
instance.
Thus, the picture emerges that the
King was very intent on learning at first hand the political and ideational
currents then flowing in Europe, just before the turbulence of the Second World
War.
He was dutifully and keenly did all
this at the same time as he was
comtemplating whether to abdicate the Siamese throne. He did so on March
2, 1935 from his rented house near London.
Performing his duties earnestly and
properly to the very best of his abilities and perseveringly to the very end,
was King Prajadhipok’s hallmark.
It is for this that we should remember him today.
[PJ
/tribute to R.7/Nov2012]
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