The Mountbattens

by Andrew Lownie

  In retaliation, Jinnah ordered Pakistan troops to respond. It looked like within months of independence, the two countries, each army led by British officers, would be at war with each other. The situation was only saved when Auchinleck threatened to withdraw all British officers from the Pakistan Army and Jinnah cancelled his military order. Mountbatten, after the failure of talks, now placed faith in the United Nations and a plebiscite, which was never held, to rule on whether Kashmir should go to India or Pakistan, but both countries remained suspicious of the other’s motives – a situation that remains to this day.

  The Mountbattens were now being drawn into a political maelstrom, which for many Muslims – and others – suggested they were under the influence of Nehru, who was Kashmiri by descent and emotionally drawn to the region. Ian Stephens, editor of the British-owned The Statesman, who had been under pressure from Mountbatten to give a stronger pro-Hindu line in the paper, dining with the Mountbattens at the end of October was startled by their one-sided verdicts on affairs. They seemed to have:

  become wholly pro-Hindu. The atmosphere at Government House that night was almost one of war. Pakistan, the Muslim League, and Mr Jinnah were the enemy. This tribal movement into Kashmir was criminal folly. And it must have been well-organised . . . It was a thoroughly evil affair. By contrast, India’s policy towards Kashmir, and the Princely States generally, had throughout been ‘impeccable’.481

  The situation in Hyderabad had also not been resolved by independence. The Nizam, one of the richest men in the world, continued to prevaricate about which country to join, partly in the hope he might be able to become an independent state. He himself recognised the country’s best interests were served by joining India, but he was in hock to Muslim fanatics. The challenge was to convince him of joining India, but still make him believe he was independent. He was given until August 1948 to make up his mind, but he still refused to make a decision. Two divisions of the Indian army, in what was described as a ‘police action’, invaded shortly afterwards. Four days later, Hyderabad became part of India.

  CHAPTER 20

  A Deeper Attachment

  ‘Edwina has been dreadfully tiresome lately,’ Ismay told his wife. ‘There have been daily scenes about Dickie’s decision to go home for the wedding. Personally, I think it’s advisable on every count. It’s good for the Govt of India because it will show them that they can do without him: it’s good for Pakistan because it will show them that he is not as they charge – the Supreme Commander of the Kashmir offensive: and it’s good for Dickie himself as he badly needs a change.’482

  The wedding on 20 November was that of Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth, one which Mountbatten had long encouraged and at which Pamela was due to be a bridesmaid. In August 1946, Philip had secretly proposed to Elizabeth at Balmoral, informing his uncle the next day, and in October the King wrote in his diary, ‘Dickie came to lunch when we discussed everything.’483 The following month, Dickie saw the Home Secretary and Prime Minister to finalise the naturalisation papers and agree that henceforth, Philip would be known as HRH Prince Philip, and arranged for the young naval officer to meet three Beaverbrook newspaper executives at the Mountbatten home so as to brief behind the scenes.484

  In January 1947, it was Mountbatten who confirmed to the Home Secretary that his nephew would be taking his family name on naturalisation – Oldcastle had been considered but rejected as sounding too much like a brewery.485 Mountbatten’s interfering was beginning to irritate Philip, who felt he was perfectly capable of running his own life:

  I am not being rude, but it is apparent that you like the idea of being General Manager of this little show, and I am rather afraid that she might not take to the idea quite as docilely as I do. It is true that I know what is good for me, but don’t forget that she has not had you as Uncle loco parentis, counsellor and friend as long as I have.486

  In March, the naturalisation of Philip, who gave the Mountbattens’ home at 16 Chester Street as his address, was announced in the London Gazette and in July 1947 the engagement was officially announced.487

  One of those who had helped prepare the ground was the journalist and Labour MP Tom Driberg, whom Mountbatten had first met at SEAC and had used as a useful sounding board and contact in both Parliament and the media. It was Driberg, who having talked to other Labour MPs, had advised that the wedding be kept low-key and that Philip’s financial allowances be kept modest. It was a view that Mountbatten challenged:

  You have either got to give up the Monarchy or give the wretched people who have got to carry out the functions of the Crown enough money to be able to do it with the same dignity at least as the Prime Minister or Lord Mayor of London is afforded.488

  On 11 November, the Mountbattens arrived back in London and, as the Brabournes were using Chester Street, took a suite at the Dorchester Hotel. Edwina was keen to see her first grandchild Norton, who had been born a month earlier, attend the christening and prepare Broadlands, which was hosting the first part of the royal honeymoon. She also wanted to see her old lover Malcolm Sargent and he stayed for one of their two nights at Broadlands, whilst Dickie made himself scarce. ‘Thanks for being so sweet and understanding during these days in England,’ Edwina wrote to her husband after their return.489

  At the end of November, the Emergency Committee was closed down and its responsibilities handed to the Indian Government. Dickie had resolved in his last few months in India to visit every Province and principal state and so now, free of day-to-day responsibilities, the Mountbattens were able to travel. They were joined by friends such as Kay Norton, Yola Letellier, Bunny and Gina Phillips, Marjorie Brecknock and Peter Murphy and, for Christmas 1947, John and Patricia. Apart from continuing humanitarian work, there were also the celebrations for the Maharaja of Jaipur’s Silver Jubilee, visits to Benares, Calcutta, Cuttack, Puri, Assam, Travancore, Cochin, Udaipur, Mysore and Ootacamund.

  Behind the public appearances of affability, however, the tensions in the marriage continued with frequent quarrels, including one so bad between Edwina and Yola that the latter had offered to leave early. Edwina was resentful of the demands of her husband’s job, his female friends and his relationship with his daughters. As always, Peter Murphy was the peacemaker, writing to Edwina:

  Poor old Dickie’s become so rattled: he is now in the state of feeling that he must try not to do silly little things which are habits and second nature to him. It distresses me so that you ever imagine that you are not a very great deep love in his life. I have been his confidant off and on for 25 years: you know that. What it seems you don’t know is the unfailing affection and loyalty that he feels for you and that he has spoken of so freely to me. There has never been a moment in the past, Edwina – however difficult things may have appeared and in circumstances when 99 men out of a 100 would have felt they no longer had any responsibility – that Dickie didn’t put your happiness first. I think if you look into your heart and honestly remember how good a friend he had been to you, you will realise that what I say is true.490

  Whilst Dickie was able to relax with morning rides with Pamela and evenings on his genealogical ‘Relationship Tables’, with its various codes for the interlocking branches of his family tree, Edwina remained tense. She suffered from insomnia, partly influenced by the menopause, which was only resolved by pills or playing Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ on the gramophone.

  There was some relief in the New Year when Malcolm Sargent came to stay en route to a music festival in Turkey, but he quickly developed dysentery and Edwina saw little of him. ‘But darling do please take care of yourself. We do mind a lot what happens to you – all of us,’ she wrote to him. ‘I have missed you so much. I hate not seeing you and not being able to consult you about things . . . You are very sweet and wise and human and I value your opinion very much as you know.’491

  One of those who had kept the communal peace was Gandhi, who had fasted until he felt communal violence had abated. At the end of January,
as he made his way to a prayer meeting at his Delhi home, supported by his two young great-nieces, a lone gunman fired at him, killing him instantly. Mountbatten rushed to the scene. As he got out of his car, someone in the crowd shouted out to him, ‘It was a Moslem who did it,’ to which Mountbatten instinctively replied, ‘You fool, don’t you know it was a Hindu?’492 The fact was that no one knew. If it was a Muslim, then civil war was inevitable.493

  Inside the Birla House, Mountbatten found most of the Cabinet almost incoherent with grief. Ever the opportunist, he seized the opportunity for good to come from evil. Beckoning Nehru and Patel, who had recently become estranged, he told them of Gandhi’s wish that they should remain friends. The two men looked at each other and embraced in silence. Later that evening, they jointly broadcast to the new nation.

  The next day a huge crowd, larger even than the one on Independence Day, followed Gandhi’s body, placed on an army weapons-carrier, in a procession of over 5,000 troops on the nine-mile route from Birla House to the Raj Ghat, by the banks of the Jumna, where he was to be cremated. So large was the throng around the funeral pyre that it threatened to push the Mountbattens into the flames, until Dickie ordered everyone to sit down, and then quietly slipped away.

  Gandhi’s death had not just brought the politicians together, but deepened the existing affection with the Mountbattens. Nehru had refused their invitation to live at Government House to ensure his personal safety, but he now saw even more of the couple and, in particular, Edwina, who had written a comforting letter after Gandhi’s death.

  Dickie had always had a picture of Nehru on his desk. Now Edwina had asked for one as well: ‘My dear J-Lal . . . I would love to have one, in fact two! I’d like a formal one and if possible an informal snap shot . . . Love ever, Edwina.’494 Thanking him a few days later for ‘the delightful snapshots and photograph’, she offered to return the favour. ‘My admiration for you increases each day. I’d love you to have a photograph and will send for one, as soon as I’ve found one you might like . . . Love ever, Edwina.’495

  For Nehru, amidst the loneliness of high public office, here was someone he could trust and to whom he could confide. ‘I want someone to talk to me sanely and confidently, as you can do so well,’ he wrote to Edwina in April, ‘for I am in danger of losing faith in myself and the work I do . . . What has happened, is happening, to the values we cherished? Where are our brave ideals?’496

  In mid-May, Nehru joined the Mountbattens, at Edwina’s invitation, for a few days at the Retreat at Mashoba, driving there from Ambala in an open-top sports car. ‘Although we have come to know him pretty well during the last fourteen months, it was during these three days that we really succeeded in establishing strong personal bonds,’ Mountbatten wrote to George VI.497 Dickie worked on his family tree, Edwina and Nehru walked, talked or read companionably with each other. There were picnics and afterdinner games of cards. After the pressures of the last few months, everyone could finally relax. ‘A perfect evening,’ Edwina wrote in her diary and then after the others had gone to bed, ‘. . . a fascinating heart to heart with J.N.’498

  Seeing the strong emotional bond between the two, Dickie and Pamela discreetly withdrew to give them time together. Six weeks before her departure, Edwina had finally, according to her younger daughter, found ‘the companionship and equality of spirit and intellect that she craved.’499 On the morning Nehru had to leave, she rose at half past six to see him off and, almost immediately afterwards, sent him a letter. ‘I hated seeing you drive away this morning . . . you have left me with a strange sense of peace and happiness. Perhaps I have brought you the same?’500 He had felt the same, writing in a letter that crossed with hers, ‘Life is a dreary business . . . and when a bright patch comes it rather takes one’s breath away.’501 A few years later, he was more open about the moment:

  Suddenly I realised (and perhaps you did also) that there was a deeper attachment between us, that some uncontrollable force, of which I was only dimly aware, drew us to one another. I was overwhelmed and at the same time exhilarated by this new discovery. We talked more intimately, as if some veil had been removed, and we could look into each other’s eyes without fear or embarrassment.502

  Restless and difficult when apart, Edwina would become exhilarated at the thought of being together with the Indian leader. For Dickie, however, life was easier, as his wife’s ‘new-found happiness released him from the relentless late-night recriminations.’ Pamela remembered how:

  In recent months, whenever he had left his huge pile of paperwork to go up to say goodnight to her, my father would find himself subject to a long string of accusations that he didn’t understand: he was ignoring her, his behaviour had been rude and he didn’t care about her. He was sympathetic and apologised, even though he did not understand what he had done wrong. These were the exhausted outpourings of a woman who always drove herself too hard and felt intellectually isolated. To my father’s great relief, after our short stay in the mountains, these sessions ceased. Now when my father went up, he would find her studying her pocket atlas, and she would simply smile and wish him a cheery ‘Goodnight, Dickie, darling.’ He would then return to work through most of the night without a heavy heart.503

  On the 11 June, Edwina and Nehru flew to the United Provinces to say goodbye to Sarojini, now Governor of Bareilly and an old friend of Edwina’s mother. They walked in the gardens, drifted on a boat in the lake and next morning rode together in the mountains. ‘This was the only promise we ever made,’ Edwina wrote to Nehru later, ‘on the road to Naini Tal – that nothing we did or felt would ever be allowed to come between you and your work or me and mine – because that would spoil everything.’504

  As the date for departure loomed, Nehru tried to convince her to stay and continue her work with refugees but, torn as she was, she knew her place was with her husband. ‘And so it will be and it has to be,’ he reflected. ‘How wise and right you are, but wisdom brings little satisfaction. A feeling of acute malaise is creeping over me, and horror seizes me when I look at a picture in my mind of your shaking thousands of hands on the night of the 20th and saying your final goodbyes . . . Dickie and you cannot bypass your fate, just as I cannot bypass mine.’505

  ‘We dined with Jawaha and his family,’ she noted in her diary, ‘sat in the garden with full moon. Sadder and sadder.’506 Finally, the last night came. After a farewell party for all 2,000 staff, the Cabinet hosted a State Banquet in Government House, where the Mountbattens were presented with a huge silver tray inscribed with the names of the Indian Cabinet, the Governors of the Provinces and President of Constituent Assembly. In return, they donated the Viceroy’s gold plate service.

  Nehru began by paying tribute to Dickie:

  It is difficult for me or anyone to judge of what we have done during the last year or so. We are too near to it and too intimately connected with events. Maybe we have made many mistakes, you and we. Historians a generation or two hence will perhaps be able to judge what we have done right and what we have done wrong . . .507

  He continued that he believed, ‘we did try to do right, and I am convinced that you tried to do the right thing by India, and therefore many of our sins will be forgiven us and many of our errors also.’508

  He then turned to Edwina, who had been in tears:

  To you, Madam . . . the gods or some good fairy gave . . . beauty and high intelligence, and grace and charm and vitality, great gifts, and she who possesses them is a great lady wherever she goes. But unto those that have, even more shall be given, and they gave you something which was even rarer than those gifts, the human touch, the love of humanity, the urge to serve those who suffer and who are in distress. And this amazing mixture of qualities results in a radiant personality and in the healer’s touch. Wherever you have gone, you have brought solace, you have brought hope and encouragement.509

  Early the next morning, Nehru appeared at Government House where he and Edwina exchanged presents. For him, one of her most
valued possessions, an 18th-century French box of enamel and gold, and for her an ancient coin, a box of ripe mangoes and a copy of his autobiography. Then the Mountbattens left Government House for the last time, a bodyguard lining the steps and escorting the carriage. As they were about to move off, one of the horses jibbed. ‘Even the horses won’t let you go,’ someone called out.510

  Away from the crowds on board the plane, Edwina finally broke down in tears. Taking off something round her neck, she passed it to her personal assistant, motioning to her to leave the plane. It was her precious St Christopher that she wanted Nehru to have. ‘The long flight home passed in sombre silence.’511

  CHAPTER 21

  Malta Again

  The Mountbattens arrived at Northolt to be met by Patricia, Prince Philip, Clement Attlee and the Indian High Commissioner, Krishna Menon. Edwina, still emotional after her parting, made a short speech about what India meant to her. Her younger daughter remembered how:

  she began to falter, and she had difficulty in getting the words out, ‘. . . every . . . possible . . . feeling.’ She stopped, blinked, then licked her lower lip until for a horrifying moment I thought she might break down. Then, as she turned to my father for support, he gave her a warm, confident smile and she regained her composure and found the strength to continue.512

  For Edwina, life in drab post-war London after the vibrancy and energy of India seemed trivial and low-key. She fell into a deep depression, exacerbated by exhaustion and the loss of her beloved Sealyham terrier, Mizzen, who had had to be put down en route to Malta.