Anna claimed she was born in Wales in 1834, which would have made her 28 when she arrived in Bangkok in 1862. Though not wealthy, her family was distinguished; her father was an army captain and her mother came from an ancient Welsh family. When Anna was six, she and a sister were left behind while her parents were posted to India where, shortly afterwards, her father was killed in battle on the northwest frontier.

Anna said she completed her education in Wales and at the age of 14 or 15 sailed for India. There an unpleasant surprise awaited in the form of a new stepfather to whom she took an intense dislike. One reason was he wanted to marry her off to a wealthy merchant twice her age, while she in turn had fallen in love with a dashing young army officer named Thomas Leonowens. To escape the situation she went on a long tour of the Middle East with a well-known scholar, the Reverend Percy Badger, and his wife, presumably friends of the family. According to the distinguished traveller Dame Freya Stark, who wrote an introduction to a 1952 edition of The Romance of the Harem, she returned from the trip "with a character already strongly formed, both for tolerance and independence." She was independent enough to defy her stepfather and elope at the age of 17 with her young officer. They were blissfully happy, despite the death of their first two children in infancy; two more, a boy and a girl, were born and survived in London, where the couple lived for three years.

In 1857, Leonowens, by then a major, was posted to Singapore and it was there Anna heard the bad news that a small fortune left to her by her father had been lost in the collapse of a bank during the Indian Mutiny. Worse was to come. A year late Major Leonowens suffered a stroke on a tiger hunt and died, leaving her with two small children and no money. She started a small school, bringing in enough to send her daughter Avis back to England but not much more. A new challenge came with an invitation from King Mongkut to go to Siam. With characteristic pluck off she went, accompanied by her young son, Louis. A refined gentlewoman, marked by personal loss but brave and determined to bring light to less fortunate lives - that is the image of Anna drawn by herself, by all the actresses who have portrayed her on stage and screen and even by historians who accuse her of wilfully maligning a great man.

The first person to question the image, almost accidentally, was Dr W.S. Bristowe, an academic whose specialty was spiders but who also wrote on other subjects. Dr Bristowe was a frequent visitor to Thailand and in the early 1970s he decided to writer a biography of Louis T. Leonowens, founder of the company that still bears his name. Not many people read the book that resulted, entitled - perhaps inevitably - Louis and the King of Siam, which is unfortunate, for Dr Bristowe's deft detective work on Anna's past revealed an extraordinary story.

It began in London with a routine check to ascertain the exact date of Louis' birth. He found nothing, either for Louis or for Avis. Nor, when he looked further, could he find anyone named Thomas Leonowens who had served in the army, in either India or England. Nor did the army know anything about the man Anna claimed to be her father. Strangest of all, Welsh archives failed to yield any mention of Anna herself.

Dr Bristowe now set about tracking down the elusive Anna with all the enthusiasm he normally gave to a rare species of spider. Here is what a diligent search of Indian office records eventually revealed. Anna was born, not in Wales but in India, not in 1834 but in 1831. Her father was Thomas Edwards, a cabinet-maker from Middlesex who enlisted in the Bombay infantry and went to the subcontinent in 1825. There he married Mary Anne Glassock, the daughter of a gunner in the Bengal Artillery and a local mother who, in all likelihood, was Eurasian.

The couple had two daughters, Eliza and Anna, and Thomas died three months before the birth of the latter, leaving his wife penniless. When Anna was two months old, her mother remarried, this time to a corporal who not long afterwards was demoted to private. Here the record blurred, but somehow - possibly through the assistance of a charity - Anna and Eliza were sent to her father's relations in England, where they presumably received an education.

They returned to India in their early teens and entered a home which Dr Bristowe claims "must have appalled them," for the life of a private soldier at the time was a squalid one of "drunkeness and fornication." Eliza was married off at 15 to a 38-year-old sergeant and something similar was clearly planned for Anna. Instead, at 14 she went off to the Middle East with the Reverend Badger. How she met the clergyman (later to become a noted oriental scholar) is uncertain.

Anna married when she was 18, not to a dashing young officer but to a 22-year-old clerk whose name was not Leonowens but Thomas Leon Owens. He did not seem to hold any job for long and the couple moved about frequently. Dr Bristowe never did pinpoint the precise birth dates of Louis and Avis and finally concluded they must have taken place on board a ship. At some other unknown time Leon Owens changed his name to Leonowens, and the doctor did find a record of his death - of apoplexy - in Penang, on May 8, 1859, where he was listed as a "hotel keeper."

According to Dr Bristowe, Anna was already busily burying her past when she arrived in Singapore, so successfully not even her own children penetrated her disguise. Among other things, this required a complete break with her sister Eliza back in India, a step she may have been doubly glad she took - given the social prejudices of the time - if word ever reached her that Eliza's eldest daughter married a Eurasian named Pratt. As thorough as ever, Dr Bristowe traced that family, too, and made the engaging discovery the youngest child of the union - that is, Anna's grand-nephew - became the actor Boris Karloff, of Frankenstein fame.

There is also evidence to suggest Anna's performance may not have been flawless during her five years in Bangkok. The capital's small British colony of merchants and consular officials never asked her into their circle, despite her position at court. The only respectable foreigners willing to take her at her word were American Protestant missionaries, particularly the formidable Dr Dan Beach Bradley, their senior member. These men and women gave her the friendship she needed so badly.

The inventions and distortions of her books may have been partly designed to boost sales, as Prince Damrong, one of King Mongkut's sons, suggested to Dr Bristowe in a 1930 meeting. It could also be argued, they were also possibly aimed at convincing her missionary friends that Anna Leonowens was truly a virtuous Christian woman, worthy of their trusting kindness.

After leaving Thailand, Anna spent some years in America, where her books were written, and eventually settled in Canada with her daughter. There she died in 1915 at the ripe old age of 85 (not 82 as her family and friends thought), still playing, by now with accomplished skill, a role that might have challenged the best of her later impersonators.

Sources of information: Background historical research was mainly done by Dr. W.S. Bristowe, an English scholar. The above information was extracted from an article written by William Warren and published in the fascinating Traveller's Tales - Thailand. A copy of this book can be bought on-line at a discounted price at amazon.com Visit the website now for a review and the latest price.

[ return to Anna and the King ]