Charming, curious about the world, intelligent but still quite childlike, without a mother to guide her, Edwina came out in May 1920. A huge party, shared with Marjorie, was held at Brook House, a black jazz band played in the drawing room and a more traditional orchestra in the ballroom. She was now recognised as one of the most beautiful debutantes of her year – intelligent, elegant, a good dancer and conversationalist.
Through her grandfather she had met Cornelius and Grace Vanderbilt, whose $100 million fortune derived from his grandfather’s shipping and railroad interests. That summer she stayed with Grace, 30 years older and a sort of substitute mother figure, at Nuneham Courtenay in a house that they had taken for the summer. In August she was with the Barings at their house in Cowes – their daughter Poppy was a contemporary and friend – from whence she watched the racing during the regatta from the Vanderbilts’ yacht Sheela, before going on to stay with the Earl of Crawford in Fife.
She was not short of admirers. In the autumn, Charlie Rhys, an Old Etonian, who had won an MC with the Guards during the First World War, proposed whilst she was staying with his parents in Wales.73 ‘She intended to say yes, but at breakfast she decided he looked like a frog, and changed her mind.’74 Her life was, however, now about to take a new course.
* * *
Dickie spent the first three months of 1921 doing a sub-lieutenant’s course at Portsmouth, coming top in navigation. He still had hopes for his relationship with Audrey and in January they were reunited: ‘I had a marvellous 3 days in town with her and I never could have believed that I was ever going to love one small woman so much,’ he wrote to his mother. ‘Every time I see her she has grown more wonderful.’75 He saw her whenever he could, staying the weekend with her and her sister near Guildford, seeing each other in London or in Portsmouth.
‘Every time I see her I feel more and more sure of myself and she does too,’ he wrote to his mother at the end of January.76 There were plans for him to join her in Biarritz, where she was staying with a French family, after his course finished, especially as there were doubts about whether the Prince of Wales’s next tour, on which Dickie had been invited again, was going ahead.
‘The Admiral does not seem at all sure about the Indian trip. If it does not come off when shall we get married?’ he told his mother. ‘Early next year or this winter is what Audrey & I would like because it is so much harder to have to wait so long when one is living in the same country.’77
In April he was sent to Liverpool in command of a platoon of naval stokers to deal with a threatened strike in the coal mines. It was at the end of June, shortly after joining HMS Repulse for a three-month secondment as senior watch keeper and assistant torpedo lieutenant, that Audrey finally told him where he stood. ‘She says how miserable she is to have made me unhappy & how she can’t understand herself & how she has lost all faith in herself.
‘She even said she wasn’t good enough for me,’ he explained to his mother:
I have written back as nice a letter as I possibly could. It is hard to realise what we were to each other at one time (as she herself says in her letter) and to realise that all that is over. I try to be philosophical about it and to realise that it is probably all for the best & that I was anyhow too young – but it is rather hard.78
* * *
Edwina continued to act as her grandfather’s hostess and visit friends around the country – in July she had been part of a house party with Bertie, Duke of York and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, before joining Sir Ernest at Cap Ferrat, where he was supervising the rebuilding of the Villa des Cèdres, which he had recently bought from King Leopold of the Belgians.79 It was from the South of France that Edwina set off to stay, as customary for the Cowes Regatta, with Sir Godfrey and Lady Baring at their home, Nubia House in Cowes.80
Also in Cowes that August week was Dickie, still pining for Audrey (‘I really am beginning to forget Audrey occasionally’), who had been invited by the Vanderbilts on their yacht Venetia in the hope he might take an interest in their daughter Grace.81 It was not Grace who caught his eye, but Edwina, whom he continually ran into at social events throughout the week. She too was entranced.
Dickie and Edwina had already met at a ball at Claridge’s hotel in October 1920. Mountbatten later remembered, ‘We got on extremely well, had several dances, but nothing more followed.’82 ‘Dickie Mountbatten was not only virtually unknown to Edwina but also quite unlike the young men she did know,’ wrote Edwina’s biographer:
She had spent the past year with admirers who wore plus-fours, tweed caps and stout shoes; Dickie, keen and trim, always looked as if he were in uniform, as he often was. Other men played tennis, Mountbatten did acrobatics on the court. He was always on the move, turning somersaults on the deck of Venetia, shinning up on the rigging with his friend Dick Curzon. On a cloudy day with high waves he would put on a rubber cap and a bathing suit and aquaplane on a flat board towed behind a launch.83
At the end of the week, Dickie was due to stay with the Prince of Wales at his house on Dartmoor and Edwina was meant to be joining her grandfather for a motor tour of France, but a better invitation presented itself. The Vanderbilts had organised a ten-day cruise along the coast of Belgium and Northern France. Both Dickie, still regarded as a possible suitor for Grace, and Edwina were invited. Both seized their opportunity and gave their respective excuses to the heir to the throne and the millionaire. ‘There is no doubt that it was on this cruise that we really fell in love,’ Dickie later remembered. ‘It was lovely weather and we used to sit up in deck chairs by moonlight holding hands and we went ashore at each place and went to the local night club and had a very gay and amusing time.’84
Dickie’s first action on his return was to take Edwina to meet his parents, then living near Southampton, though he was shocked to discover: ‘When we went to catch the train to Southampton West, I found she had a third class ticket whereas I had got a first class ticket.’85 He duly paid for an upgrade. His parents were charmed by her. ‘Edwina is the most remarkable and charming girl of this generation that I have met,’ Mountbatten later claimed his father told him. ‘She’s got intelligence, character, everything. Now, you’re very young, but if you do decide to marry her, you have my wholehearted approval. She’ll make a wonderful wife for you.’86
The two lovers arranged to meet again as soon as they could. The Repulse, with Dickie’s father on board as a guest of its captain, Dudley Pound, was due in Inverness in mid-September. The Prince of Wales and Bertie were shooting at the Duke of Sutherland’s Dunrobin Castle, 60 miles north, and Dickie arranged not only for him to join them, but also Edwina. It was probably their last chance to meet before he left with the Prince of Wales on his tour of India in October.
At Inverness, Dickie headed for Dunrobin to be reunited with Edwina, whilst his father, who had caught a chill, took the night train from Inverness to London. It was a large house party, which included Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, but the young couple had been partnered at tennis and it promised to be a fun few days. ‘I spent most of the weekend in Edwina’s company and we were getting on like a house on fire,’ he later remembered, ‘and I had made up my mind to pop the question the last night of the weekend.’87
But events were to further delay a proposal. On the second day of his stay, 11 September, Dickie received a telegram to be told that his father, the man he hero-worshipped, had had a heart attack following influenza. At the age of 67, he was dead. Dickie immediately returned to London to deal with the funeral arrangements, followed ten days later by Edwina. When she arrived at Brook House, she discovered that a second tragedy had also taken place. Sir Ernest had suffered a heart attack whilst at his desk in the library, as she travelled back by train. He had never met the man his beloved granddaughter wished to marry. Edwina’s first thought was that she must see Dickie.
Early the next morning, she sent a note to him at York House, where he was staying. He arrived at noon and took her, unchaperoned, out of t
he house across the road into Hyde Park, where they walked and talked about the past and the future. They had been thrown together in their mutual grief and were now further brought together by others. Mrs Ronnie Greville, a great matchmaker, invited them to stay at the same time at Polesden Lacey; whilst George and Nada Milford Haven had them for the first weekend in October at their home, St George, in Southsea, along with Dickie’s mother and two sisters.
Dickie was due to sail in three weeks, but he felt it unfair to declare himself when he was about to disappear for eight months. However, late one afternoon, the two young people found themselves alone in the billiard room. Deeply in love and emotionally drained by the events of the last few weeks, Dickie declared his love and the two came to an understanding.88
Cassell’s death had changed Edwina’s life in many ways, not least her financial position. He had left almost seven and a half million pounds – over 300 million pounds in current values – with a 25/64 share to Edwina, which she would fully inherit when she married, or on her twenty-eighth birthday, whichever was sooner. This left simply on bank deposit would give her a weekly income of £2,000, when the average was £2.
Concerns remained. Both of them were young and emotionally immature – Dickie on the rebound from Audrey and his father’s death, and Edwina even keener, with her grandfather’s death, to create the family unit she had missed in her youth. There was also the huge disparity in their wealth and backgrounds. Dickie had his £310 a year naval pay, which was doubled with his private income, but it was nothing beside that of Edwina. In the circumstances, given Dickie was about to leave for eight months, the couple decided to keep quiet.
CHAPTER 4
Duty
On 26 October, the Renown set sail. The Duke of York and Prince Henry saw their brother off, whilst Dickie’s brother, mother and sister Louise came on board to say their farewells. Tactfully, Edwina was left for half an hour with Dickie in his cabin. He gave her a little watch to mark time whilst parted. As the ship pulled out, Dickie trained his telescope on the shore. That night he wrote:
My own beloved Darling, when you get this we will have been parted for the last time for a long while, and so I want to tell you that you will be truly ever in my thoughts, and you will be my ‘guiding spirit’ throughout . . . I shall try very hard to be worthy of your great love, though darling – it is difficult for a poor sinner like me to look up to such a wonderful, wonderful girl.89
Whilst Dickie wrote every day, bought her a birthday present and continued to tell her how much he missed her, Edwina was determined that separation would not change her life. She continued to go to the theatre and out dancing, and thought nothing of mentioning her admirers, such as the Harvard-educated banker and international sailor, Paul Hammond, who had been with them at Cowes.
‘I had great fun at Edwina’s. Her cousin Marjorie Brecknock was also there – most amusing. I have found out (which will please Harold!) that Edwina is a real flirt and anything but as innocent as Dickie thought her to be!’ wrote Michael ‘Boy’ Torby, brother of Nada Milford Haven, to their sister, Zia Werner. ‘They were awfully funny, as they both had a go at me to find out what sort of chap I was and were delighted when they found out I had a dirty mind like their own!’90 Dickie was left hurt and jealous. It did not augur well for a future marriage.
Edwina, in spite of her flirtations, was bored and lonely. Suggestions that she see Grace Vanderbilt in America or accompany Wilfrid and Molly to Italy came to nothing. What about India and seeing Dickie? She could always stay with family friends, the Viceroy Lord Reading and his wife. All she needed was the fare and a chaperone to accompany her. Her great aunt Mrs Cassell obliged with the first and a search through the passenger shipping lists provided a suitable, casual acquaintance – Mrs Carey Evans, a daughter of Lloyd George and the wife of the Viceroy’s personal physician, who was taking her two small children to India.91
The two women played poker with some of the officers each evening and Carey Evans ‘used to get cross with her because she always wanted to win. She was a spoilt little rich girl, and luck was usually with her’.92 She thought Edwina mixed with people who were ‘undesirable’, but only exercised her role as chaperone once when Edwina wished to go out late in Aden:
As a person, Edwina was quite fearless. Nothing seemed to frighten her, and I suppose the idea of going ashore late at night, when there could be dangers lurking round every corner, simply exhilarated her. But I’m afraid I never really liked her, and she always seemed to me to be a woman completely without warmth.93
* * *
One purpose of the royal tour had been to improve Anglo-Indian relations, especially after the 1919 Amritsar massacre, but the reception was not always favourable. The Indian National Congress had organised a boycott of the tour, there were demonstrations, and at Patiala shots were fired at the ADC’s car. In Allahabad, the young Jawaharlal Nehru and his father were locked up as the royal party passed through. The Prince pined for Freda and punished himself with violent exercise and a near-starvation diet.
Alongside the official functions, however, there was plenty of time for other pursuits. Apart from discovering polo, a sport that was to remain a passion all his life, there was pig sticking, hunting black buck from a Rolls-Royce with the Maharaja of Bharatpur, and shooting tigers and panthers – the latter taken from a zoo and doped.
At each port, Dickie’s letters awaited Edwina with everything from pen portraits of the royal party she was about to meet – Fruity Metcalfe, ‘the nicest fellow we have. Poor, honest, a typical Indian cavalryman’94 – to lists of precedence. ‘As a naval lieutenant mine is 78, as an ADC to the POW 74, and if I was out here as a member of the family you could take off 70.’ Knowing his real ranking, he could ‘laugh secretly at all these poor misguided people struggling to go even one place higher . . .’95 It was clear Dickie cared very much about such things.
Edwina arrived in Bombay in early February and that night caught the fast mail train for the 25-hour, 700-mile trip to Delhi. She was staying in the Viceregal Lodge with another guest, Mrs Ronnie Greville. That night, ‘We played happy families after dinner and then Edwina instructed me in all the new steps that have crept into London dancing since we left in Mrs Greville’s sitting room,’ Dickie scribbled in his diary.96
Writing to his mother a few days later, he confessed:
I have been here since Saturday and seen Edwina all day long for three whole days – quite enough for me to realise that she is the most wonderful person in the world and that life without her would seem a very bleak prospect indeed. This isn’t just purely physical attraction – it’s her whole nature and character I love. In fact everything & though you mayn’t believe it, it’s quite, quite different from what I ever felt for Audrey. Would you mind if I tried my luck while she’s out here – Mama? It’s a devil of a long time to wait till we get home and I’ve already waited four months to ask her. If I wait much longer, the opportunity might pass.97
That night, suitably on Valentine’s Day and four months after they had first met at the dance at Claridge’s, Dickie proposed in the Prince of Wales’s sitting-room, which he had put at their disposal. She immediately accepted. Only the Prince of Wales, who accepted the invitation to be best man, was told.98 ‘Miss Edwina Ashley is engaged to Lord Louis Mountbatten. What a waste,’ Anthony Eden noted in his diary.99
The next day Dickie confided to his diary that he was ‘happy beyond my wildest dreams’ and how, after a state banquet, they had ‘motored out to King Humayun’s enormous tomb, which we saw at 3.00 am by moonlight. Very wonderful and romantic.’100 Enthusiastic letters were written pledging his undying love and praising those bits of her body he had been allowed to see – a special pleasure was the discreet glimpse of her breasts, which he had named after two First World War campaign medals, Mutt and Jeff.
Now that Edwina had accepted, permissions had to be requested and arrangements made. Six days after proposing, the couple told their ostensible matchm
aker Mrs Ronnie Greville, the Viceroy and his wife. Mrs Greville, in particular, had her reservations:
My dear Viceroy, I am absolutely wretched about that child – I couldn’t sleep a wink, I have grave misgivings. They were both at me last night – & she will not be reasonable, all I begged for was that no engagement should take place now, in a year she will be sick of him . . . this is absolutely confidential only I feel she is being thrown to the wolves . . . I don’t dislike him but he is wily . . . she looked so white-faced and motherless last night. Dear Viceroy, please insist on no engagement.101
Lady Reading, writing to Wilfrid Ashley, put it more simply, ‘I hoped she would care for someone older, with more of a career before him.’102
On 21 February, their last day together, the young couple rode at dawn to the site of the 1911 Durbar, then spent the afternoon together at the Pavilion. ‘I took Edwina in to dinner tonight and danced with her and sat out with her till it was time to go (10.50),’ Dickie wrote in his diary. ‘She came to the station and saw us off. I hated leaving. I hated it very much.’103
That day he wrote as a courtesy to George V, asking his formal permission under the Royal Marriages Act to marry, and told his mother:
I’ve done it and she has said ‘Yes’ – are you angry? I do hope not. I really do know what I am about this time and it isn’t just a physical infatuation – indeed the supremely physical attraction has only grown since I have got to love all the rest of her. Mama – I am just quietly convinced that there is no other girl living who is half so wonderful, sweet or sympathetic. I feel absolutely totally unworthy of her – indeed I know I am and I shall spend the rest of my life striving to be even a little worthy of her.104
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