The relationship between Nada, who had lesbian tendencies, and Georgie was under strain and Edwina saw much of her sister-in-law, especially as Dickie was taken ill with tonsillitis and spent much of the trip in bed. Edwina wasn’t going to have her fun spoilt and continued to aquaplane behind fast boats, dance at parties, and stay until dawn at nightclubs in New York accompanied by other guests.
Once he recovered, Dickie gamely accompanied her, but he did not warm to Edwina’s new social set, nor their nightclubbing antics. He much preferred a solitary round of golf or playing with a movie projector. Tensions built until Edwina, liberated by her newfound freedom and friends, announced she would not be returning with Dickie, but wanted to stay on. It was clear there were problems in the marriage. Edwina needed constant reassurance and Dickie, emotionally immature himself, did not always know how to give it. Confused by her own burgeoning emotions and newly assertive, she respected him all the less when he accepted her criticism of his various faults. Dickie returned home alone on the Homeric full of self-reproach.
Edwina remained a few more weeks, enjoying her new independence, but unsure what to do with it. Attractive, rich and vulnerable, she was surrounded by admirers who competed for her attentions, which she deflected by playing them off against each other. Annoyed, they gradually withdrew and, Edwina, knowing her little adventure was over, returned to the husband who had increasingly come to bore her.
CHAPTER 6
A Marriage Under Threat
Dickie had started at the signal school at Portsmouth at the end of September 1924. It was a tough few months with an examination every fortnight. After a day of polo, he would study all night in his barracks. Often the only entry in his diary was ‘Work as usual’. His hard work paid off. When the final placing was announced the following summer, he had come top.123
Shortly before their American trip, the Mountbattens had taken a long lease on Adsdean, a large neo-Tudor house built of flint and stone, as a base near to Dickie’s course in Portsmouth. It was to be their country home until Edwina inherited Broadlands shortly before the Second World War. The mansion, built in the previous century and covered in Virginia creeper, was situated in a wooded park of 50 acres on the Sussex Downs. With over 30 bedrooms, three tennis courts, 800 acres of shooting and 18 servants, it was ideal for their ambitious entertaining plans of a party most weekends.
Three days after Edwina returned from America, she had moved in and within a few days she had entertained her first guests – the Casa Maurys, Poppy Baring and Prince George, youngest son of George V. Henceforth, every weekend for the next 15 years, and whenever else Edwina was in residence, the house would be filled with friends and Dickie’s naval colleagues.
Edwina decorated the house in her favourite colours of pink and cream and they added a nine-hole golf course, hard tennis court, a special pit for polo practice, a paddock and riding school, as well as a staff recreation room with radio, billiard table, darts board and table tennis; and plans were also made to build a private aerodrome – both Edwina and Dickie were learning to fly. The house was run with efficiency, not least by Dickie himself, who issued each evening a form in triplicate where guests needed to state what they wished to do the next morning and afternoon, which meals they required, the times they wanted to use the tennis court, and so on. Spontaneity was frowned upon.
He had first discovered polo whilst in India with the Prince of Wales and now he was to create his own team at Adsdean. Without ever being a good horseman, Dickie, as in everything he did, trained himself single-mindedly and systemically to be the best, substituting talent by focusing upon technique. He scrutinised slow-motion film of top players in order to analyse and improve tactics, developed a more ergonomically efficient mallet and regarded each chukka as just another naval engagement.
He created a polo pit of four sloping walls of chicken wire with a roof where, seated on a wooden horse, named Winston, he would practise hitting the ball again and again. He would strengthen his fingers by carrying a squash ball in his pocket and strengthen the muscles in his wrist by having a polo stick shortened and weighted with lead, which he would swing at every opportunity.
One young naval officer later complained that Mountbatten took all the enjoyment out of the game after he was invited to join the exclusive team. ‘Life suddenly became rather real and earnest and no longer such fun. A weekly memo was sent to all the team members giving days to practise, days to play, ponies to play, diet sheets, dates for the weekly session on polo tactics using matchsticks on a card table at his flat in Guardamangia, and a reminder to be in bed by ten p.m. Of course, we won everything.’124
In September 1925, he was posted to the Naval College at Greenwich for the demanding Higher Wireless Course with its mix of algorithmic calculation and rote-learning, applied physics, advanced mechanics and pure mathematics. This was to be an important turning point, confirming to colleagues his ability in a rapidly expanding and important area of technical expertise, and his potential to rise to the very top of the Navy.
* * *
She called them her ‘ginks’, a dozen or so admirers, many of them Americans or from Dickie’s polo circle, with whom Edwina went to parties and revues. They included Danish banker Aksel Wichfield; a Swiss friend of the Vanderbilts, Pierre Merillon; and the designer and former aviator, Deering Davis.125 They might flirt and dance closely, but they seemingly posed no threat to the marriage.
At the beginning of 1925, however, Edwina stepped over that boundary. Her first lover was long-term friend, Hugh Molyneux, three years older than her, the heir to the Earl of Sefton and described as ‘the best-looking man in society’. A former army officer, he had served as ADC to the Governor General of Canada immediately after the First World War and was a keen sportsman and racing enthusiast. The affair lasted for ten months before Molyneux was posted to India as ADC to the Viceroy.126
Almost immediately she took up with Stephen ‘Laddie’ Sandford, the heir to a $40 million fortune and champion polo player, whom she had first met on Long Island the previous autumn and had met again in July 1925, when he came to play for the Adsdean polo team. A few years older than Edwina, he had been educated at Yale and Cambridge, where he played number 1 in the polo team. Laddie was a glamorous figure – a big game hunter in Africa, who hunted regularly with the Quorn, Belvoir and Coltsmore packs. His most recent lover had been the socialite Doris Delevingne, whom he had set up in an apartment by The Dorchester Hotel and for whom he had bought a Rolls-Royce.127
In August, Laddie joined the Mountbattens for their annual holiday at Deauville and from then on, he and Edwina were inseparable. Dickie suspected nothing for many months until in December, the Prince of Wales told him. Even then he refused to believe it. ‘Went to see David . . . He had a queer story about Edwina.’128 Sandford was to remain one of Edwina’s principal lovers throughout the interwar period, and the Mountbatten guest books at Brook House and Adsdean and the diary of her friend, Jean Norton, are filled with references to him.
Jean Norton was Edwina’s best friend. Slender ,with large blue eyes and wavy golden-brown hair, she closely resembled Edwina. Married to the film producer Richard Grantley, she, too, was having an affair – with the newspaper proprietor Max Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express. Rare amongst Edwina’s friends, she had a job, working at the New Gallery Picture House in Regent Street, where it was hoped her social contacts would help box-office takings.
The two women had worked together on the switchboard, as street vendors and in the canteen at the Express during the General Strike, as well as serving at the YMCA canteen in Hyde Park, making tea and cooking sausages for volunteer lorry drivers. It was Edwina’s first proper employment and, though exhausting, she loved it. For once she had some worthwhile purpose in life.
But Laddie was not Edwina’s only lover. By September 1926, she had a new one. Mike Wardell was a tall, dashing ex-cavalry officer with a passion for hunting. He had lost an eye in a riding accident and wore a bla
ck patch, which only made him more attractive to women. A close friend of Oswald Mosley, he owned Craven Lodge, a 24-bedroomed mansion at Melton Mowbray and the centre of the hunting set around the Prince of Wales. He had just joined the Daily Express as circulation manager and Edwina had met him through Jean Norton. During the autumn of 1926, he and Edwina were constantly out at the theatre and supper parties and he was invited to Adsdean. It only added to Dickie’s humiliation.
Hints were dropped heavily in gossip columns, especially that of Lady Decies, of Edwina out on the town escorted by a variety of men – Hugh Molyneux, Laddie Sanford or Mike Wardell. Edwina’s social life now became of concern to the Royal Family, much to Dickie’s dismay. ‘A royal spanking for gay lady Mountbatten’ ran a full-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle in October, referring to her dancing with Fred Astaire, and that Queen Mary disapproved of her socialising. ‘For Lady Mountbatten wears her skirts just about as short as you see them anywhere on Broadway, and to the staid people present the sight of Lady Mountbatten’s garters and lingerie was, no doubt, a shocking spectacle.’129
Dickie did his best to demonstrate, for all his faults, his love for his wife:
I want you to know that no action, however small, of yours, passes unnoticed by your spouse and that he is more grateful than he probably shows for the hundred and one little thoughtful acts by which you make life so very pleasant for him. The interest you take in my humble efforts at polo and the encouragement you have given me to play as often as possible . . . have made a wonderful difference in my life. If I could in any way alter my character and nature to be less selfish and more thoughtful I should be a very happy chap. Should like to be able to wait until you have gone to sleep at night, sleep without snoring, steal out of bed without waking you up, sit up late and dance late with you, knock off making plans, writing chits and discussing servants. I should love to feel I really wasn’t a snob, and that I wasn’t pompous . . . I wish I could drive a car like Bobby Casa Maury, play the piano and talk culture like Peter . . . shoot like Daddy . . . play polo like Jack. I wish I knew how to flirt with other women, and especially with my wife. I wish I had sown many more wild oats in my youth, and could excite you more than I fear I do. I wish I wasn’t in the Navy and had to drag you out to Malta. I wish I had an equal share of the money so that I could give you far handsomer presents than I can really at present honestly manage. In other words – I would like to feel that I was really worthy of your love.130
Edwina kept the letter but never replied.
* * *
Dickie’s course at Greenwich had ended in the spring of 1926 and he had marked time in the Reserve Fleet battleship Centurion. Now, at the end of 1926, he was posted to Malta and it was hoped this might provide a new start. He and Thorogood went out ahead with the polo ponies, just after Christmas, with Edwina following in the New Year, accompanied by her sister Mary and Peter Murphy, though two-year-old Patricia was left in London.
Their new home, Casa Medina, was a row of four small houses at the top of a narrow lane below the Valetta city walls. Friends came to stay, such as Jean Norton and her children, Nada and even the Duke and Duchess of York. Soon the Mountbattens had created a new circle of friends, many of them centred around polo, though Edwina found it difficult being the wife of a junior naval officer. Within a month, she had returned to London via Paris.
Dickie’s new job was assistant to the Fleet Wireless Officer. He was working hard, often late into the night, preparing lectures for midshipmen and junior officers, but his playboy image followed him. With his servants, Rolls-Royce with silver signaller on the bonnet, speedboat, polo ponies, celebrity friends and huge parties, it was easy to see how such accusations could be made. ‘No one will ever believe I work,’ he wrote to his friend Andrew Yates. ‘If I work like a beaver, people won’t believe it, and if I am seen on the polo ground, they will say “I told you so”.’131
‘We always thought of him as having married millions of pounds and being mad on polo and pretty girls, and we thought he was a write-off as far as the Navy went,’ recalled one of his colleagues, Peter Kemp. ‘We didn’t see why he should bother to work. If any of us had had such luck, we shouldn’t have bothered. No, he was becoming the great playboy, and he acted like one. He wasn’t going to go far, that’s what we said.’132
At the end of the spring cruise, his new ship Warspite was anchored at Villefranche in the South of France. Dickie had arranged to meet up with Edwina, but she wired to say she had been delayed. In fact, she was already there with Laddie, who was pressing her to leave Dickie. She played for time, returned to Malta, but three weeks later she was back in London for her sister Mary’s wedding.
Mary’s mental health had always been fragile and Edwina had been very protective of her sister. In 1925 she had announced that she had fallen in love with Alec Cunningham-Reid, her father’s parliamentary private secretary. On paper, Cunningham-Reid looked a catch. Tall, with a pencil moustache and matinee-idol looks, a godson of Sir Robert (later Lord) Baden-Powell, he had been a Royal Flying Corps flying ace, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross during the First World War, and been appointed flying instructor to the Prince of Wales and Duke of York. After the war, he had become a Conservative MP.
Given Mary was aged only 20, recently launched into society and only able to come into her share of her grandfather’s inheritance on marriage, there were the same family concerns about fortune hunters that had bedevilled Dickie. It was decided she should be made a ward of court and the couple should agree not to see each other for the time being. Mary reacted by smashing up Dickie’s bedroom and accusing one of his guests of being a brain specialist in disguise. Paranoid and violent, she had to be nursed for several months at Adsdean and then sent to a sanatorium in Italy.
Eventually, in October 1926, the family relented and after a man-to-man discussion between the suitor and Dickie, conducted in the Burlington Arcade, it was agreed permission would be granted if Alec could show he was worth £10,000. He did so immediately by simply borrowing it. In May 1927 the two of them, described as ‘England’s wealthiest girl and handsomest man’, married with Patricia as a bridesmaid and a reception for 1,000 guests at Brook House. Dickie was not amongst them.133
It was not only Mary’s wedding that had brought Edwina to London. Laddie was back with his polo team, The Hurricanes. Each weekend at Adsdean, the lovers would argue about their future. Hugh Molyneux was also around, having returned from India after a broken love affair with a Maharani. A further complication was Mike Wardell, who had been included in a party, which also included Jean and Winston and Clementine Churchill, on a yacht that Beaverbrook had chartered to tour First World War battlefields and cemeteries.
Panicking, Edwina fled to Paris and then back to London before being persuaded to return. ‘Lunch with Hugh at the Berkeley Grill . . . Had dinner on a tray and Mike came to see me,’ read one diary entry. One night it would be ‘long talk with Hugh’, the next ‘long talk with Mike’.134 In mid-October 1927, Laddie returned to London to add to her troubles.
She suffered headaches and dizzy spells and had trouble with her eyes and teeth. X-rays suggested further investigations were required. Instead of staying in London, where she had had a small gynaecological operation the previous year, she chose to go to a nursing home in Paris, where she was joined by Jean. She had had an abortion.
Early in 1928, a divorce action was threatened in the United States, in which Edwina was to be cited as a co-respondent by Adelaide Chaqueneau. Edwina had been conducting an affair with Adelaide’s husband Julien, known as ‘Jack’ Chaqueneau, grandson of the founder of the American Locomotive Works in Paris. The solicitor Sir Charles Russell was retained in Britain and Beaverbrook was brought in to help on the American end.
‘It is imperative that we should know in the first instance if this threat is serious. If not we don’t propose to do anything,’ he cabled the American lawyer Paul Cravath. ‘If threat is serious, it is a matter of utmost
importance that suit should be stopped. Our immense social influence in support of plaintiff. Please throw all your personal interest into this case.’135 It seems to have worked. The Chaqueneaus, who had separated in January, divorced quietly in May 1928. He later remarried and became a well-known theatrical agent and president of a New York perfume company.
The affair with Laddie continued to rumble on. After a visit to Paris in the spring of 1927, Laddie had pressed her to leave Dickie. At the end of June 1927, he returned to America, their future together unresolved, but was back in mid-October and they were at the Ritz in Madrid in April 1928, when she also briefly saw Dickie. In June 1928, instead of spending the day with Dickie on his birthday, she pleaded toothache and drove to London with Laddie.
The next week, Laddie was one of the guests at a dinner Edwina held at Brook House for King Alfonso of Spain, which was followed by a showing of The Gaucho lent by Douglas Fairbanks. A hundred and sixty were invited to the reception and 68 for dinner, including Diana and Duff Cooper, Prince Serge Obolensky – a new admirer, the Admiral of the Fleet, David Beatty, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, and the Duke and Duchess of York. (The evening was enlivened when guests in evening dress chased two burglars disturbed by a night watchman in an adjacent house.)
In August 1928, Laddie and his sister were with the Mountbattens in the South of France, and Edwina and Laddie were photographed together in the Star. Edwina could see how she hurt Dickie and felt guilty. ‘I feel I’ve been such a beast,’ she confessed to her husband. ‘You were so wonderful about everything, and I do realise how hard it all was for you, altho’ I know you think I don’t. I feel terribly about it all.’136 New attempts were made to patch up the marriage and try for another child. ‘I am in Paris for a couple of nights so that Edwina can see her doctor, as it seems such a good opportunity,’ Dickie wrote to his mother in mid-August from the Ritz.137
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