The Mountbattens

by Andrew Lownie

  Henry Pownall, who had seen Mountbatten at close hand, wrote a shrewd analysis of his strengths and weaknesses:

  One of his best points is his way with troops; that is quite admirable. He looks the part; he says the right things, and he’s the King’s cousin – at heart the troops are snobby to that extent. He has plenty of moral courage, yet not enough to allow him to face calmly an unpleasant interview . . . He is too fond of ‘quarrel by proxy’. For he hates a row and wishes to be popular and well thought of, and is indeed almost pathetically surprised when he learns that there are people who do not care for him and his ways. His strongest point is his resilience. With all his natural advantages and the experience he is now getting, he will surely play a big part in the post-war Empire and he is qualified to do so.361

  Mountbatten’s Command with the end of the war was now extended to include French Indochina, Java, Borneo and the Celebes Sea, adding another half a million miles to the million square miles for which he was already responsible. There were 125,000 Allied prisoners-of-war and civil internees to be rescued, as well as 750,000 Japanese to be sent back to their country. Apart from the devastation of war, civil administration had broken down and the resulting power vacuum was being filled with a variety of nationalist groups. His ‘Post-Surrender Tasks’ were to restore the rule of law, regenerate the economy and either restore old governments or open the way to fresh elections. A complication was reconciling the interests of the former colonial powers, the indigenous movements, and the United States – who was now an important regional player.

  His response was pragmatic. He did not have the resources to put down these nationalist uprisings, so he had to work with them. It might not be popular with some of the old guard, but he recognised that the popular aspirations released by the war could not be cast aside. Brian Kibbins, who served with Mountbatten in the new headquarters in Singapore, was aware that some thought him ‘too inclined to the left, too ready to listen to upstart leaders in the emergent liberation forces. It would be fairer, I think, to say that he recognised more quickly than many that the old status quo could never be restored.’362

  This was especially true in Burma, where he worked with Major-General Aung San, leader of the ‘Burma Independence Army’, which had been set up and controlled by the Japanese. Mountbatten’s aim was to postpone the reimposition of indefinite direct rule in favour of an independent Burma, within the British Commonwealth, but his plans were thwarted by the British Cabinet and when the prewar governor, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, was reinstated.

  In Malaya and Singapore, ethnic conflicts, together with Communist influence, created an even more difficult situation. Here, Mountbatten kept civil order whilst again promoting moves towards independence within the Commonwealth, until in the spring of 1946, Malcolm MacDonald took over as Governor-General of the two countries. Siam (Thailand) continued as an independent country, but the problems of Indo–China proved more intractable.

  Mountbatten controlled the country south of the 16th parallel with Chiang Kai-shek in charge above. Before the French could restore their colonial empire, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh movement declared the independent Republic of Vietnam. Attempts by Mountbatten to persuade the French to come to terms with the Viet Minh were rejected and he was relieved shortly afterwards to surrender responsibility for the area.

  The job of locating and rescuing these POWs and internees was called RAPWI (Recovery of Allied Prisoners of War and Internees) and was one where Dickie and Edwina worked together. The exact location of the POWs and internees had to be established, together with numbers and the extent of their needs, and arrangements had to be made for medical staff, supplies and transport. A key member of Edwina’s staff was to be Elizabeth Ward.363

  Siam, still regarded by the generals as too dangerous to visit (with 150,000 fully armed Japanese at large) was Edwina’s first stop. At the Nakhon Pathom hospital camp, where almost 20,000 prisoners had died in 1942 and 1943, she found thousands of men suffering from TB, malnutrition, gangrene and dysentery. Climbing onto a wooden platform, which served as a communal bed, to rousing cheers, she gave them words of comfort. Always direct – she told one set of prisoners they smelt – modest, good-humoured and sympathetic, she immediately tried to improve their quality of life in all sorts of practical ways, such as insisting that relief parcels include packets of condoms as well as calling for magazines, books, playing cards and toys for the children.

  In Singapore, she spent hours below deck in the hot and crowded hospital ships, ensuring she spoke to as many of the 600 patients as possible, and at a Leper Hospital she had no inhibitions about shaking hands, touching arms and stroking foreheads. Allied troops had not yet reached Sumatra but, guarded by ex-POWs with rifles but no ammunition, she flew there and toured the camps, as always bringing comfort and hope.

  One of those accompanying them was Tom Driberg, a Labour Member of Parliament who, on the recommendation of Frank Owen, had come out to write a few articles for Reynolds News and then been taken on as a temporary adviser. He remembered a formal dinner at Government House, with 40 senior officers in their white mess dress, when Mountbatten had also included four recently repatriated prisoners from Changi Jail (one of them the artist Ronald Searle, later best-known as the creator of the cartoon strip on St Trinian’s School), all still in their shabby prison garb. They were the guests of honour and Mountbatten ensured at the end of the evening they were driven back to their camp.

  This incident, I thought, showed the best side of Mountbatten’s character – his lack of pomposity, his curiosity about people, his keen sense of the effective gesture, perhaps of public relations. I found him and his wife an unusual and interesting couple: both were extremely good at their jobs – so much so that there was almost a kind of competition between them. At breakfast they would compare the total numbers of British prisoners in the camps whom each of them had spoken to and shaken hands with.364

  At the end of November, Edwina returned to London. She had made a huge difference and her husband was incredibly proud of her. ‘If you weren’t my wife, I’d offer you permanent employment in a very high rank on my staff,’ he wrote to her for her birthday, ‘and I know of no other woman I’d say that to.’365 In the New Year’s Honours list she was awarded a DCVO on the recommendation of the King and Queen. She could now look Dickie in the eye.

  Mountbatten was himself offered a barony in the New Year’s Honours list, which gave him a seat in the House of Lords. For most people this would have been an offer that could not be refused but Dickie, already of higher precedence as the son of a marquess, was playing for larger stakes. Both Alexander and Montgomery had been made viscounts and he saw no reason why he should not be awarded one as well. Indeed, he argued disingenuously, it was simply downgrading his particular theatre of war. He was also worried that accepting a barony would make the subsequent offer of a viscountcy more difficult. In any case, he pointed out, he would much prefer the Garter or Order of Merit.

  Edwina was despatched to bend George VI’s ear. ‘I have most decided views, which I would prefer her to discuss with you verbally if you can spare the time to see her,’ Dickie wrote to him. ‘Personally I don’t want a peerage & above all would hate to lose the “Louis” from my name.’366 Another argument was that he did not feel he could accept an honour ‘whilst my men are still losing their lives in French Indo China and the Netherlands East Indies. I fear my job is by no means completed.’ 367

  The King’s private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, was infuriated by Mountbatten’s ‘somewhat film-starrish attitude towards his proposed barony’:

  the really fatal blunder would be to omit the name of SACSEA (Supreme Allied Commander, South-East Asia) from a victory honours’ list, when the men of SEAC already feel themselves neglected, and that all the credit for victory is being given to 8th Army etc. But his protestations have revived the King’s wish that he should have a viscountcy, and I had to go and see Attlee again this afternoon. But Attlee was a
damant, basing his view, I am certain, on the advice of the Services, in the persons of Andrew Cunningham and Pug Ismay.368

  Edwina was again deployed to make Dickie’s case to the King, briefed by Peter Murphy. ‘Dickie has thought it over and thought it over, and has discussed it with me unendingly; and I think that the attached “A” and “B” really represent his final thoughts on this subject,’ Murphy wrote to Edwina from Singapore.369 In the end, Dickie was offered a viscountcy and took it ‘in the National Interest, subject to minor conditions, such as continuing to call myself Lord Louis Mountbatten’.370

  * * *

  In mid-March 1946, Jawaharlal Nehru, as a leading member of the Indian National Congress, was invited to Singapore to meet Indian troops and study the conditions of the large Indian community in Malaya. The British authorities, nervous that he was out to cause trouble, did not feel he should be officially received nor allowed to meet Indian troops. Mountbatten recognised that he might well be India’s first Prime Minister and if he was not treated well that British actions would only further ferment anti-British feelings. He insisted that he would meet him at the airport and accompany him into town in his open-topped limo to a St John Ambulance Indian welfare centre, where Edwina would be waiting. What could have been a public relations disaster was turned into a celebration of Anglo-Indian friendship.371

  All went well until Nehru’s arrival at the centre. The delighted crowd rushed him, knocking Edwina over in the process. Jayanto Chaudhuri, a brigadier on Mountbatten’s staff, tried to help:

  Trying to be chivalrous, I knelt down beside her and said: ‘Lady Mountbatten, can I help you up? Let me give you a hand getting up.’ She said: ‘Don’t be a mug. This is a friendly crowd. If you start giving me a hand, they will all give me a helping hand and they will pull all the clothes off my back, I might tell you that in this heat I have not got very much on.’372

  Mountbatten and Nehru linked arms and charged the crowd to rescue Edwina, who had ‘crawled between the people’s legs and had come out at the far end of the room, got on a table and shouted to us that she was all right’.373 A door was kicked in and eventually the party escaped the mob. It had been an unusual introduction to what would become a crucial relationship. That night, the Mountbattens and Nehru dined together. ‘We talked about everything under the sun,’ Mountbatten later remembered, ‘and that is where our friendship started.’374

  Mountbatten’s time at SEAC had now come to an end. From Singapore the couple flew to Australia, where Dickie had meetings with the Australian Chiefs of Staff to discuss the handover to Australian garrisons in SEAC. When Dickie had last visited 25 years earlier, it had been as an aide to the Prince of Wales. Now he and Edwina were the star attractions, with cheering crowds, civic receptions and countless speeches. Dickie had always enjoyed this sort of attention. Edwina now found she did, too.

  In May, they were back in Singapore for the winding up of SEAC, and swearing in of Malcom MacDonald as British Governor-General of the Malayan Union. At their farewell party, a baby elephant appeared carrying an illuminated sign that read ‘Goodbye Supremo’.375

  What were the Mountbattens to do now? The Duke of Gloucester had suggested his cousin succeed him as Governor-General of Australia; George VI thought he might become a Chief of Staff to the Minister of Defence; whilst an old friend, the Maharaja of Bikaner, was keen for him to succeed Archibald Wavell as Viceroy of India, but Dickie’s ambitions were still focused on his naval career. ‘I really want to go back to the Navy, as you know,’ he told Edwina, ‘and don’t like the idea of governing . . . but if it ever became unavoidable I know that you would make the world’s ideal Vicereine!’376

  CHAPTER 16

  Love and Marriage

  In the summer of 1946, the Mountbattens returned to London for leave. They were fêted in Paris, where Dickie was invested with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and Croix de Guerre and driven in an open car with outriders up the Champs-Élysées. In London there was another open carriage drive, when he received the Freedom of the City of London. Cambridge gave him an Honorary LLD and Christ’s College an Honorary Fellowship, Oxford awarded him a DCL, whilst St Andrew’s asked him to be Rector, which he declined.

  Further happy news was the engagement in July 1946 of Patricia to one of Dickie’s ADCs, John, the 7th Lord Brabourne. John Brabourne’s father had been Governor of Bombay and Bengal and briefly served as India’s youngest Viceroy in 1938. He had died the following year and the title inherited by John’s elder brother, Norton, but he had been executed in 1943, whilst trying to escape from a prison train in Italy.

  John Brabourne had been educated at Eton and Oxford and joined the Coldstream Guards aged 17. He had fought in France, been one of the extras in the film In Which We Serve, before becoming an ADC to first General William Slim and then Mountbatten. It was in Delhi, where Patricia had been posted with the Wrens in 1943, that she had met her future husband. He had proposed several times until she finally accepted. Even then she had her doubts.

  ‘Subconsciously I suppose I was worried by the fact that my parents had had a difficult marriage for many years and I did not want the same thing to happen to me,’ she later explained. ‘I desperately wanted a marriage that would last and certainly I did not want to get married thinking if it didn’t work out we could simply get divorced, which is what happens a lot of the time now.’377 She told her father about her reservations, that she cared for Brabourne, but was not ‘madly in love’ with him. Mountbatten advised her to see it through – they remained married until Brabourne’s death in 2005.

  There was another complicating factor. The relationship between daughter and father was intense and it would have been difficult for any man to seek to replace it. John Barratt, Mountbatten’s secretary, was later to describe how Mountbatten’s ‘feelings towards her verged on the unhealthy: he worshipped her’.378 Patricia had early on taken the place of Edwina in his affections. Edwina found it difficult, because of her own childhood, to bond or communicate with her children and would often walk straight past the nursery door at night. Dickie was always there chatting about the day’s events or their problems, or reading Emil and the Detectives or the Babar books in French, especially to his eldest daughter.

  His easy relationship with his children only further stimulated Edwina’s jealous nature. As a result, theirs often had to be a furtive relationship, hidden from his wife. A letter written on New Year’s Eve a few years later encapsulates the intensity of his emotions about Patricia:

  It is close on midnight. Most people are out at parties . . . but I have just finished work and my mind, as always, turns to you. You, yourself, know pretty well all that you have meant to me for the past thirty years, for I have never disguised my feeling from you, but in the years to come, after Mummy and I have both ‘passed on’ as the euphemistic term goes, I would have liked to feel that there was some record in the bottom of your ‘Black Box’ of the part you play in my life.

  I have sometimes regretted that you turned into such a very lovely and attractive woman because I would certainly have loved you just as much, and very possibly more, if you had remained the ungainly, lanky creature with odd teeth and slightly receding chin that you presented when you first went to school. Physical attraction (by no means unknown to Freud between parents and children) has hardly ever entered into our very remarkable friendship . . . the attraction which you have had for me from the day I first saw you in April 1924 was an almost mystical feeling that you were really a part of me living on in the world.

  I wanted a boy, not a girl, as you well know, but I am certain if you had a brother he could never have taken your place because from the day I saw you first as a two month old baby and was allowed to help with you, I have never really had eyes for anyone else.

  You know how basically fond I am and always have been of Mummy, you know pretty well about my girlfriends, but none of them have had that magic ‘something’ which you have . . . Of course, the miracle of our
relationship is that you make me feel truly unselfish and wanting only your happiness. Why else should I have done so much to induce you to marry John when you were wavering? . . .

  I have grown so fond of Pammy, few fathers could be fonder of a daughter or miss her more than I miss Pammy now, but the mainspring of my love is that she is your sister and you love her. Every achievement in life since 1924 has been achieved for you and because of you . . . If in years to come history takes the view that I did well in my jobs, the credit must all go to you. There is always one woman in a man’s life and darling – she is you. Bless you always. You’ll never really know how much I love you.379

  Patricia and John Brabourne finally married in Romsey Abbey in October with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret as bridesmaids, Philip as an usher, the Archbishop of Canterbury officiating and various members of the Royal Family in attendance. The only hiccup was when the bridegroom was temporarily refused entry as he had not been issued a ticket. As always, Mountbatten organised it like a military operation, with a special train from London that served lunch, committees to handle the traffic arrangements for the almost 400 close friends and relations invited to the wedding breakfast at Broadlands, part of it still being used as a hospital, plus the 600 at the reception in Romsey.

  It was at the wedding where Princess Elizabeth’s closeness to Philip became clear, when a newsreel shot caught a tender glance between the two.380 Mountbatten had long encouraged the relationship between his nephew and his cousin’s daughter. In July 1939, when the Royal Yacht cruised along the south coast and dropped anchor at Dartmouth, it was Mountbatten who had arranged for his nephew (then an 18-year-old cadet at the naval college) to escort the royal party and join them for tea the next day. When the yacht departed, escorted by a collection of sailing, rowing and motorboats, the last to obey the signal to turn back was a young, solitary rower – Philip.