Richard Willoughby Wood was born in London in June 1916,
the youngest son of W. W. Wood, a former manager of the Bombay Burma Trading
Corporation in Chiang Mai and Bangkok; his mother had been Matron at the
Bangkok Nursing Home. He was brought up in the English countryside of
Somerset and Devon and educated at Wellington College and Peterhouse,
Cambridge, where he read ‘Greats’ (Latin and Greek).
In 1937, following in his father’s footsteps, he
arrived in Burma as a forest assistant with BBTC and spent two happy years
in the forest. On the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the British
Army in Burma and was commissioned in 1939 into the Burma Rifles. He served
throughout the retreat of 1942, thereafter in intelligence patrol work on
the Chindwin front until Christmas 1944, when scrub typhus very nearly
finished his military (or any other) career. He rose to the rank of major
and was awarded the Military Cross and a Mention in Dispatches. After the
war he stayed on in Burma, with the Burma Frontier Service but eventually
left Burma following independence, after 11 years there.
In 1948 he joined the forest staff of the Borneo Company
Ltd and was posted to Chiang Mai. He became forest manager in 1953. In 1960,
when the Thai forests were nationalized, he was posted to Sabah, East
Malaysia, where he married Khun Fongkham Nantiwongse. He stayed in Sabah
until his retirement in 1965 to Chiang Mai as a pensioner of the Borneo
Company.
Dick was elected a member of the Chiang Mai Gymkhana Club
on 20th December 1948 and later was elected a Patron of the Club, of which
his father, W. W. Wood, had been a founder member in 1898. Dick visited the
club almost daily and took a close interest in its affairs right up to his
last days.
After his retirement, Dick devoted much of his time to
gardening and wrote a pamphlet ‘Amateur Flower Gardening in Chiang Mai’
(Hudson Enterprises, Chiang Mai, 1974, 2nd ed. 1991). He travelled widely
throughout Eastern Asia and appeared on BBC Television as a narrator in a
programme on elephants for ‘The World About Us’. He was a committee
member of the Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery for many years and author of ‘De
Mortuis - The Story of the Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery’.
Dick was a good all-round sportsman, particularly tennis
and cricket. In 1985 he presented The Wood Cup to the Gymkhana Club for an
annual cricket match between the Chiengmai Gymkhana Club and the British
Club, Bangkok and personally presented the cup to the winning team following
the match in January 2002, which, to his delight, was won by the Gymkhana
Club.
Dick died peacefully at Rajawej Hospital on Monday, 2nd
December 2002. He is survived by his wife.