Obituary: Baron Riccardo Carini, KCHS Founder of Thai Children's Trust

Riccardo on an early visit to Pattaya

Obituary: Baron Riccardo Carini, KCHS, KC SG, Founder of Thai Children's Trust

1930-2014

Riccardo Carini was born in London in 1930 to Italian parents. His brother Romolo followed four years later. They were inseparable. Shortly afterwards Italy declared war on England, and the Carini brothers endured six years of war bearing an Italian surname in a London that was more openly xenophobic even than today.

Young Riccardo was forged with the fierce family loyalties and staunch Catholicism typical of his Sicilian forbears. He was endowed with huge abilities – including an extraordinary appetite for hard work.

Past 60 he was still capable of working until three in the morning on the Trust’s records. He had a real tough-mindedness, capable of dispassionate analysis of any problem, and would adhere firmly to his perceived solution against any opposition. He was sophisticated, charming, a gifted linguist, fluent in English, French and Italian. This gift, following a short but educational career in banking, enabled him and Romolo to set up as a ‘confirming house’ when only in their twenties. But they were a confirming house with a very proactive and mercantile approach: Riccardo was a businessman to his fingertips, and a good one, so he was able to retire in considerable style whilst in his early fifties.

At this point fate directed him to Pattaya. Riccardo had heard Pattaya was a ‘pleasant little fishing village with a few palm trees, an hotel and some fishing boats’ by a friend who had been there in 1965. The intervening Vietnam war changed Pattaya permanently into sin city on the sea, the place for US servicemen to rest and relax. When Riccardo arrived in 1982 it was thriving by selling to tourists what it had previously sold to visiting American servicemen – sex! The Baron, fastidious, was appalled by the vulgarity. Of the entertainments available, only two appealed; the Elephant Farm and the Pattaya Orphanage. The Orphanage was run by a priest, so Riccardo went there first. He went back every day, with sweets for the 70 children, because he fell under the spell of Fr Raymond Brennan who had founded the Orphanage ten years earlier. When the time came to leave, Riccardo said ‘I am not going to write you a cheque today, because if I do I‘ll go away and forget about you. If I don’t, it will worry me, and I‘ll do something more useful.’

‘More useful’ was the Pattaya Orphanage Trust, (now Thai Children’s Trust) which Riccardo founded and which he served as Director, Trustee and latterly President for the rest of his life. The friendship between Fr Brennan and Riccardo was hugely productive. With Riccardo working hard to produce a regular stream of cash donations, exercising his charm and his considerable business skills, Fr Brennan was able to found schools for blind children, deaf children and children with disabilities. He was able to build a huge ‘Street Kids Home’ (since renamed the ‘Fr Ray Children’s Home’). They changed hundreds of young lives. In some ways they helped change Thailand by changing attitudes to disability. They were united in their work, united in their faith, but very different. Riccardo, urbane, opera loving, the epitome of the cultured city-dweller, enjoyed the fruits of his business success. Fr Brennan’s truly formative years had been spent in the backwoods of North East Thailand amongst lepers, war and poverty.

Riccardo’s achievements did not go unrecognised. He was appointed Knight of St Gregory by the Blessed Pope John Paul II, later advanced to Knight Commander with star, decorations of which he was proud. He was thrilled to be appointed a member of the Order of the Direkgunabhorn by HRH the King of Thailand, and invested by the Thai Ambassador at a ceremony in the Embassy in London. He was recognised by his Catholic peers by invitation to join the Order of the Holy Sepulchre.

Riccardo’s last years were marked by pain and illness. The loss of his friend Fr Brennan in 2003 was a heavy blow, but not so heavy as the loss of Romolo in 2008, which left him alone, heartbroken and touchingly lonely. Whilst his faith remained strong to the end, heart surgery, deep-vein thrombosis and cancer conspired cruelly to break down his previously robust physical health. Finally he was frail, his voice a whisper, troubled by increasing deafness. His last days were made bearable by his band of cheerful carers, and by a few devoted friends.

Riccardo Carini never married and has no surviving family. But thousands of children in Thailand have reason to be grateful that he chose to visit the orphanage, not the elephant farm, and that his effective and deeply Christian energies were subsequently applied to ensuring their welfare.

RIP Baron Riccardo Carini, KCHS, KCSG, Order of the Direkgunabhorn. 1930-2014

For more information on the Thai Children's Trust see: www.thaichildrenstrust.org.uk/catholic-charities/