Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Bangkok, including Hua Lampong Railway Station, designed a rotunda for the main en-
trance and a single-storey building with classical Romanesque interior columns, teak win-
dow frames and beautiful wood flooring. King Rama
VI
presented a large writing desk,
bearing the royal insignia, which is still used today.
Nowadays the rotunda entrance is closed because of its proximity to the busy street,
and the entrance is to the side of the building, via a tree-shaded courtyard. The dome is
used as an art gallery, but everything else remains the same as the day the library opened,
there having been only a brief period of closure when the Japanese Army used it as a bar-
racks. The library is staffed entirely by women volunteers, following the wishes of Dr Hays,
who wanted the tradition of the original Association to continue, and it is run by a com-
mittee of twelve women. Dr Hays himself died two years after the library opened, at the
age of 70, and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery with Jennie.
Next to the Neilson Hays Library stands the British Club, set well back from the road,
its 1910 clubhouse being visible only to members and their guests, who pass through a
gateway emblazoned with the bc plaque and find themselves contemplating a large lawn,
a number of tennis courts and a pleasant swimming pool. Inside, with the sombre wood
panelling and the ceiling fans, it is almost as if the past century never happened. The club
was founded on St George's Day, 23
rd
April 1903, by a small group of British businessmen
and diplomats, and occupied a small wooden building standing on the same plot of land
as it does today, Surawong Road having only recently been completed. It was, of course,
solely a male preserve. To the eastern side of the club stood the Danish-owned Siam Elec-
tricity Company's Bangkok Lawn Tennis Club, and a small canal ran along the west side
to join the Silom canal. Membership grew, and in 1910 the present clubhouse was built,
the old house being demolished to create space for what is now the front lawn. In 1919
the tennis club was acquired and gave the club the seven tennis courts it has today, and
increasing the land area to three-and-a-half acres. As with the Neilson Hays Library, activ-
ities were cut short in December 1941 when the Japanese invaded Siam, using the club as
an officers' mess. The club was reclaimed after the war, and was back in business by 1946.
The British Club and the Neilson Hays Library share a back gate onto a lane that leads
to Silom, and opposite here, on both sides of a thoroughfare that the taxi drivers know
as
soiprachaafarang
, or “foreigners' cemetery lane”, are the remains of several old grave-
yards. The most prominent is a now defunct Catholic cemetery, distinctive because of its
two-storey gatehouse on Silom Road, but with the graves now removed and the plot over-
grown, waiting for a destiny at present unknown. At the rear of the cemetery, where a wall
divides it from a modern office block, there is a gap between the old graveyard wall and
