Prince Chula of Siam

My dad Donald, and his brother and sister Sidney and Joan, grew up in the Portland Arms Hotel, in Cambridge. Their parents Rue and Maud took it over in about 1924, when Donald was five, Joan six and Sidney eight. Donald always had so many stories to tell us about the pub and his life there, wonderful stories but I never went into the pub until I was an adult. Rue had died the November before I was born in the January, and Maud several years later, so it was not in the family when I was a child.

As well as the pub there were stables at the back and the young gentlemen from the University kept their polo ponies there, and probably other horses as well. If you look on the right hand side of the picture of the Portland, you can see a grey building at the back with a green door, that was the stables. One of those young gentlemen was Prince Chula of Siam. He was a great animal lover and he had a water trough erected just by the pub in memory of a faithful pet dog.  The inscription read

In memory of Tony, a dog who gave him friendship and happiness during his Cambridge years.

As a child I thought this was wonderful – as indeed it was.

I didn’t know anything more about Prince Chula until recently when I looked him up; Prince Chula Chakrabongse was born in 1908 to another prince of Siam and his Ukrainian wife. Chula came to Britain for his education, first to Harrow School, then to Trinity College in Cambridge.

He married an English woman and had a daughter, and they lived in Cornwall… and last Sunday in Cornwall I came across this familiar sight: