Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  Mr Kukrit was related to the royal family. He had a title, Mon Rajawong, abbreviated to M.R., which he jokingly dismissed as standing for minor royalty. He might have spent his life as a courtier, dispensing wit and wisdom. However, as a young man, he was sent to Britain to discover the world outside. When he returned to Thailand in 1934 after a spell at Oxford, a constitutional government had taken over. “As a true aristocrat,” he recalled, he was overjoyed at the end of absolute monarchy.

  He had jobs in banking and the civil service. But the true aristocrat needed a stage. Mr Kukrit entered parliament in 1946 and started a newspaper. He gained fame as a scathing opponent of the military dictators who ruled the country for many years after the second world war. Once, he sent out his reporters to count the number of windows in the interior ministry. It was, he said, a pointless exercise, but it would baffle the censors. He was a hero to the students who waged sometimes bloody battles against governments run by the army.

  In 1963 Mr Kukrit caught the eye of Hollywood. In “The Ugly American”, a film occasionally still seen on late-night television, he plays (see picture, right) the prime minister of a tottering Asian country threatened by Vietnam. Marlon Brando plays the American.

  Mr Kukrit became a real prime minister in 1975, when the army gave way, briefly, to civilian rule. For 13 months he led a fractious coalition. As in the film, Vietnam was a menace. Mr Kukrit feared that, having beaten America, the Vietnamese would invade Thailand. There was already a communist insurgency in the country. Mr Kukrit swallowed his loathing for communism and went to see the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. This finished the communists in Thailand, and the Vietnamese held off.

  There was a price to pay. Mr Kukrit closed the American bases in Thailand. The country’s defences were weakened, but Mr Kukrit told himself that at least Thai culture was being spared further western influence. One of his dogs, he liked to say, only bit foreigners. However, the brothel industry that had grown up to serve the Americans continues to thrive on tourism.

  Mr Kukrit never held office again. Such has been the fickle nature of Thai politics that, to date, it has produced 21 prime ministers. Mr Kukrit settled into the role of an influential elder statesman. This, after all, was the man who had haggled with Mao, stood up to the generals and spoken firmly to America.

  Mr Pramoj was admired by Thais, not only as an emblem of democracy, but of the best of Thailand itself: a Buddhist (and briefly a monk) but mischievous; pluralist but monarchist. But he had his weaknesses, at least for those who prefer single-mindedness in a leader. Kukrit Pramoj had many distractions. He was a novelist, he taught classical Thai dance. In his Bangkok house there were 2,000 fish, all of which, he said, had names. The Thai ideal, he wrote, was “an elegant sort of life, with adaptable morals and a serene detachment to the more serious problems of life”. This attitude informed Mr Kukrit’s politics, which were those of a gifted amateur. The problem in Thai politics is the machinations of the professionals, particularly in the army.

  Rama Rao

  Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, Indian politician and film actor, died on January 18th 1996, aged 72

  When Rama Rao died, four of the many Indians who worshipped him committed suicide. Others, no less devoted, stoned some of his political rivals. Worshipped, devoted? The words are not inappropriate. As a film actor Mr Rama Rao was often cast as a Hindu god, and this role seemed to stay with him during his later career as a politician. The attention accorded to him sometimes bordered on religious ecstasy. Admirers lined up in postures of prayer outside his house daily.

  It would be misleading, though, to assume that they were fools ignorant of the difference between a god and an actor. Many other actors in India have played the role of god but none has excited such popular frenzy as Mr Rama Rao.

  The Rama Rao phenomenon has been much discussed by political observers. They noted that he was the hero in more than 300 films, about one a month over three decades, an astonishing number even for India’s relentlessly productive world of dreams. As well as playing god, Mr Rama Rao portrayed rural underdogs fighting against and triumphing over feudal exploiters. A plausible view was that, as an opponent of villains and tyranny, he was a drug that eased the harsh life of ordinary Indians. But his acolytes dismissed such intellectualising, and claimed simply that Mr Rama Rao’s concern for humanity was so transparent that people were instinctively drawn to him.

  In 1982 Mr Rama Rao stepped from the screen to test this appeal in the real world. He founded a party called Telegu Desam (Land of the Telegus). Telegu is the language of the state of Andhra Pradesh, where Mr Rama Rao was born. He decided to fight the Andhra Pradesh state assembly election called for 1983. Many of his admirers felt he was making a mistake. The Congress party, which then, as now, ruled nationally, controlled the state, one of India’s largest with a population of 70m. The prime minister, Indira Gandhi, had shifted her parliamentary constituency to Andhra Pradesh. But Mr Rama Rao saw the Congress party as a corrupt monster that needed to be challenged where it appeared strongest. It was a shrewd decision. Enormous crowds responded to his appeal to Telegu pride, which he said had been hurt by the contempt with which the Gandhi family treated local politicians. At campaign meetings he would dress in the robes he wore in films where he played god, and spoke from a pick-up truck made to resemble, as he put it, a “chariot of valour”. His party won with a massive majority, and Mr Rama Rao became chief minister of the state.

  The poor of Andhra Pradesh were rewarded with cheap, subsidised, rice. As a result of Mr Rama Rao’s generosity the state’s finances began a long slide that has not ended even today. The Congress party set out to bribe assembly members of Mr Rama Rao’s party to defect, a common practice in India. The governor of the state, a Congress party man, dismissed him as chief minister, claiming he had lost his majority. Mr Rama Rao rallied his forces, fought a fresh election and again won resoundingly.

  But he was more popular with voters than with his own colleagues. Gods do not look kindly on dissent. The autocratic Mr Rama Rao humiliated even his ministers in public, making it clear he regarded them asminions who must obey orders. He stuffed the state government with relations. There was no shortage: he had 11 children.

  He spent long hours with astrologers and mendicants, and on their advice was said to wear saris and earrings in bed in the hope that such rituals would help him to become prime minister of India. Meanwhile, the corruption he had accused the Congress party of began to permeate his own party. Though his personal reputation remained untarnished, that of some of his relations did not. To nobody’s surprise, his party was thrashed in the general election of 1989 and the subsequent state election. But the indefatigable Mr Rama Rao refused to give up. He made a few more films, which no doubt added to his appeal, and in 1994 he again won a crushing victory in Andhra Pradesh, his third. Some observers believed that, as leader of a coalition with other parties, he could win the Indian general election due this April, and national power would be his.

  It was not to happen. Some of his relations holding top positions in the Telegu Desam decided that Mr Rama Rao’s ambitious second wife, Lakshmi Parvathi, was beginning to dominate the government. Led by Mr Rama Rao’s son-in-law, they staged a palace coup and formed a new government without him. The old man swore revenge. He toured the state condemning as traitors those who had flung him out. He might have triumphed again, but a heart attack did for him. It was a dramatic ending, even though Mr Rama Rao, the eternal hero, would have written it differently.

  Allen Read

  Allen Walker Read, etymologist, died on October 16th 2002, aged 96

  For much of his long career studying language Allen Read sought the origin of OK, perhaps the most useful expression of universal communication yet devised. You can use OK not simply to indicate agreement but, with appropriate facial expressions, shades of agreement, even disagreement. It is a vocabulary in itself. No wonder that OK has found its way into nearly every language in every country, and beyond. It was the
fourth word, if you can call it that, heard on the moon, spoken by Buzz Aldrin. For etymologists, establishing the origin of OK became something of an obsession, equivalent to mathematicians’ long quest for the proof to Fermat’s last theorem.

  For years Americans assumed that OK must be of American origin, if only because it was so successful. Some doubt about this claim arose in the second world war when American soldiers discovered that OK was already familiar in other countries; in Britain, of course, but in Japan and even (according to H. L. Mencken, an American writer on language) among the Bedouin in the Sahara.

  Some linguists suggested that OK was of European origin. After all, the Europeans had been knocking around the world long before Americans got on to the scene. Germans said it was the initials of the fiercely-sounding rank of Oberst Kommandant. The French put in a claim for Aux Cayes, a town they had established in Haiti that produced superior rum. A British scholar said the use of OK in Britain predated any American influence and had probably come from Elizabethan English. Things were getting serious in the world of etymology. Step forward the Americans’ champion, Allen Walker Read.

  As early as he could remember Mr Read was interested in the origin of words. In Minnesota, where he was born, he sought the source of local place names, and wrote a paper on the subject while studying at Iowa University. He had a spell in England as a Rhodes scholar and returned to teach English at various universities in the midwest. He sought words that he said had “a racy, human quality”, and there were none racier than the graffiti collected by Mr Read during a trip of several months through the western United States and Canada in the summer of 1928.

  He put together the results of his trip in a book entitled “Lexical Evidence from Epigraphy in Western North America: a Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary”. Notwithstanding the academic title, the book contained material unacceptable for publication at the time in America. One of the milder entries, found by Mr Read on a monument, reads: “When you want to shit in ease / Place your elbows on your knees / Put your hands against your chin / Let a fart and then begin”. Mr Read had the book printed in Paris in 1935, perhaps encouraged that James Joyce had first published “Ulysses” there in the 1920s. Even so, only 75 copies of “Lexical Evidence” were printed and issued privately to “students of linguistics, folklore, abnormal psychology and allied branches of social sciences”. The book was published in the United States in 1977 as “Classic American Graffiti”.

  Mr Read, who was professor of English at Columbia University in New York for nearly 30 years from 1945, published several other books and hundreds of papers, mainly on American English. Discovering the origin of OK was, he said, no more than an agreeable diversion from his main work. It was fun to do the research, helped by his wife Charlotte, a scholar in semantics. But for envious fellow etymologists it was the pinnacle of his career.

  In his hunt for the origin of OK he was offered dozens of theories. The first to go were the European ones. They were appealing: Mr Read liked what he called “frolicsome” ideas. But they had no substance, he said. He was convinced that OK was American. He warmed to the idea that the popularity of Orrin Kendall biscuits, supplied to soldiers on the Union side in the civil war, had lived on as OK. He noted there was a telegraph term known as Open Key. But OK proved to have been used much earlier. Writing in American Speech in 1963, Mr Read said that he had come across it in the Boston Morning Post in 1839. In what was apparently a satirical article about bad spelling it stood for “Oll Korrect”. The next stage in OK’s popularity was when it was adopted by followers of Martin Van Buren, who in 1836 became the eighth president of the United States, and unsuccessfully stood for re-election in 1840, by which time he was widely known as Old Kinderhook, a nickname he derived from his home town. “Vote for OK” was snappier than using his Dutch name.

  Mr Read showed how, stage by stage, OK was spread throughout North America and

  the world to the moon, and then took on its new form AOK, first used by space people and frowned on by purists. This being an exercise in the academic world, there remain some doubters. Some believe that the Boston newspaper’s reference to OK may not be the earliest. Some are attracted to the claim that it is of American Indian origin. There is an Indian word, okeh, used as an affirmative reply to a question. Mr Read treated such doubting calmly. “Nothing is absolute,” he once wrote, “nothing is forever.”

  Robert Rich

  Robert Rich, inventor of frozen non-dairy topping, died on February 15th 2006, aged 92

  AS SALES presentations go, the one Robert Rich gave in Long Island, New York, in the summer of 1945 was one of the more nerve-wracking. Eighteen sales reps faced him. Mr Rich had brought along some samples of his new invention, a concoction of soy-oil shortening, isolated soya protein, corn syrup and water, in the hopes of persuading them that this could taste as yummy, and whip as lightly, as heavy cream. To keep them from the heat, on the long train journey from his home in Buffalo, he had wrapped the samples stoutly in dry ice and newspaper. Now they hit the table with a thud, frozen solid.

  Mr Rich kept talking. As the words flowed, he took a knife surreptitiously to the chunks of “cream”, trying to soften them. When words ran out, he turned the hand-beater on them; and they whipped like a dream. White, unctuous, splendid stuff rose up in mounds, as in the picture above, where Mr Rich holds the bowl.

  Few revolutions have been made with a hand-beater. But Mr Rich’s was one. Before he began to experiment with flaking and precipitating soyabeans, whipped cream was a hit-or-miss affair. It would not keep, especially in the humid South. Nor would it freeze. Over-beating produced a buttery mess, and ambitious decorations sank gradually into gloop. To top it all, in wartime, heavy whipping cream was a banned substance. All available milk was needed fresh for the people, or dried and condensed for the troops. To dream of an éclair or a cream puff, even of a modest dollop nestling a cherry or topping off a sundae, was close to a traitorous act.

  Mr Rich, however, dreamed often of whipped cream. His boyhood had been spent in and out of his father’s ice-cream plant, and in 1935 he started such a plant himself, the Wilber Farms Dairy in Buffalo. He should have been fat, but he was a fine and fit sportsman, captain of both football and wrestling at university. Possibly he might have gone into sports professionally. But Mr Rich became fascinated with the process by which, through a series of vats and pipes and settling beds, the humble and ubiquitous soyabean could be made to do the work of a cow.

  Henry Ford, as it happened, was then attempting the same thing. When Mr Rich went to Michigan as the government’s local administrator of milk orders, in 1943, he inspected Ford’s soya-milk-making machinery and was offered a licence to the process for a dollar a year. That offer was later withdrawn (Ford officials telling him, with attractive candour, that they sold a lot of tractors to dairy farmers). Mr Rich therefore devised his own in the garage of his dairy, adjusting it to turn out cream. As his chemists laboured to find the best emulsifiers and flavourings, the world’s first non-dairy topping, Delsoy, was creeping from rival nozzles elsewhere in the state. But since Delsoy could not be frozen, it never got beyond Detroit.

  Mr Rich’s topping did. Before his trip to Long Island he had promoted it rather diffidently to customers on his milk round. Afterwards, knowing that his invention both froze and could be whipped from frozen to three or four times its volume in minutes, he began to sell it everywhere. His topping could be kept, without spoiling, for six months; it kept a hard, neat edge in decoration; it was twice as nourishing as cream, but cheaper and non-fattening. The taste, especially once he had added corn syrup and coconut oil, was plausibly that of cream. His name did it no harm either. “Whip Topping” was bland; but “Rich’s Whip Topping” hinted effortlessly at an experience that was thick, indulgent, faintly golden and utterly unwarlike.

  Utterly uncreamlike, too, cried the dairy trade, and raced to court to stop him. On 42 separate occasions from 1949onwards, Mr Rich had t
o defend his topping and, later, his non-dairy Coffee Rich whitener from furious milk men. He was not imitating cream, he argued, but replacing it with something better, as the car had replaced the horse. Mr Rich became a leading light in the new National Association for Advanced Foods, with other soyabean experimenters, and let the red-faced representatives of unadvanced foods impound his coffee whitener if they felt like it. He won every case.

  Meanwhile, he had also diversified into éclairs, cake frosting and (less successfully) Chil-Zert, a soya-based ice cream. He began to bake dough for pizza companies and supermarkets, and to make desserts for schools. His topping spread across America. Today’s Rich Products Corporation website shows desserts almost unimaginable before his revolution: a world of pies topped with white peaks, swirls, whirls and swags, of multicoloured doughnuts and flawless, thick-frosted cakes. One sequence shows a strawberry milkshake with a perfect red rose, but still missing something. Smoothly, Rich’s Whip Topping morphs on.

  Eventually, Mr Rich’s business became, as it remains, the biggest family owned food-service company in America, with 2,300 products, sales of $2.5 billion last year and plants all over the world. In 1990 Mr Rich was among the first four people inducted into the Frozen Food Hall of Fame. He joined Clarence Birdseye and his fish fingers; but, unlike Birdseye, he had not really meant to freeze his “cream” at all.