The Mountbattens

by Andrew Lownie

  His thinking on nuclear weapons also took shape, influenced by Zuckerman. He accepted that they could not be un-invented or abolished, and that they were a deterrent, but saw no point in accumulating ever more stockpiles and launching sites, which he saw as a needless expense and simply created a greater risk. They must be a weapon of last resort and only used in conjunction with America and NATO. Far better, he argued, to concentrate on conventional forces, which were more likely to be deployed. In particular, and against conventional military thinking, he saw little value in tactical nuclear weapons with all the attendant problems of radiation and escalation.

  From 1955, he had supported controlled disarmament and in that year produced a memorandum for the Foreign Secretary arguing that, given the Russians had superiority in conventional forces but not in nuclear weapons, ‘a method must be found to give them an adequate feeling of security to induce them to go ahead on their proposed reduction of conventional forces.’ He proposed each country make public the extent of its nuclear stockpile and additions be monitored in an attempt to preserve parity.682

  Given Britain had to have a nuclear deterrent, he was determined it should be controlled by the Royal Navy and launched from a Polaris submarine, rather than the Skybolt long range-air-to-surface missile, controlled by the Air Force, which had encountered testing problems. In late 1962, Solly was duly despatched to Nassau, where at an Anglo–American conference the decision was taken to commit to Polaris. The Navy had won over the Air Force yet again, but it had not made Mountbatten friends in Whitehall.

  Mountbatten’s dealings with his American counterparts, from President Eisenhower down, were helped by the fact he had known many of them during the war. Even Eisenhower’s successor, Kennedy, had once been to a party at Brook House. His dealings with his colleagues as CDS, however, were more difficult, with suspicions about his love of publicity and his economy with the truth.

  Edwin Bramall, later himself CDS, who worked with him in the early sixties, remembered him as an Italian Renaissance Prince:

  He was a larger than life character. He had glaring strengths and weaknesses. In a sense he was a genius. He could deal with things on two different levels. He could deal with the bigger picture, but he had an eye for detail and the big vision at the same time. He had an incredible capacity for work. Anything you gave him in the box one evening he would have back to you the next morning though he may have had a state banquet or dinner party. He had driving ambition, a determination to do all the things he wanted to do by fair means or foul. They don’t come like that more than very occasionally in a generation, but he was a very circuitous person. He almost preferred the indirect to the direct approach . . . He wished to achieve his own visions, to get his own way. He used to use every trick in the book.683

  Edward Ashmore, also a future CDS, worked with Mountbatten at the Admiralty during the sixties:

  He had a sense of humour and could laugh at himself, if necessary, but I thought him capricious and vain and felt that many of his manoeuvrings, usually unnecessary, arose from an inability to recognise early enough that he could, in fact, be wrong. He worked quickly, with a certain fitful brilliance, but his high opinion of his own abilities made him a difficult colleague for the Chiefs of Staff.684

  My feeling was that ‘Dickie’ with his wide experience, his connections, his butterfly approach, very often generated more heat than steam. He gave stimulus to an organisation which may well have been momentarily salutary, but . . . I felt that the restless brilliance did not emanate from any inner happiness or peace and so lacked stability, even conviction.685

  The writer Alistair Horne noted: ‘On several occasions Dickie reported decisions of the Chiefs of Staff to the Minister of Defence in terms quite contrary to what had actually been decided.’686 His military assistant, Pat MacLellan, recollected how: ‘He’d talk to the Minister before the meeting to ensure that he had his backing for the line he intended to take.’687 Sam Way, the Permanent Secretary of the Army, thought him ‘the most mistrusted of all senior officers in the three Services for his ambition and his motives.’688 Sam Elworthy, the Chief of the Air Staff, called him a liar and a cheat to his face.689

  Mountbatten had always been susceptible to hearing what he wanted and this tendency was to become even more exaggerated in later life. When in June 1963 it was mooted that Mountbatten’s term of office be extended, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence explained this would be unpopular, as Mountbatten was ‘widely disliked and distrusted’.690

  In July 1965, Mountbatten retired as CDS. He had served his country for over 50 years in 35 different appointments, including over 20 years as a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. It was the end of what in defence circles had come to be called ‘The Mountbatten Era’. Mountbatten was thrilled to be awarded the Order of Merit, claiming he was only the seventh sailor to receive it – in fact he was the twelfth.691 The Sunday Telegraph in a profile by its defence correspondent, based on interviews with Mountbatten’s colleagues, summed up his time as CDS:

  a top-grade organisation man; a practical, hustling executive (‘he’s a driver, not a leader’) quick to seize on new ideas and gadgets, agile in their promotion . . . He set about changing the Navy, forcing through the commando ship concept, carrier task forces, guided-missile ships, nuclear hunter-killer submarines. By 1959 the Navy had been hurled into the modern age. But as the new Chief of the Defence Staff, raised above the other Service Chiefs, Mountbatten’s difficulties were undoubtedly aggravated by his complicated and devious nature; his imperious assumption of precedence; his singular self-centredness (‘He does everything for an audience of one’) . . . His preoccupation with both the substance and the apparel of power, exasperated his fellow Chiefs. ‘We’d go on for hours, trying to work out just how many guns ought to salute the Chief of the Defence Staff.’ . . . But what caused even more concern among his colleagues was his infinite capacity for minor intrigue. He was clumsy at it; people compared notes. ‘You could hear him a mile off, crashing about like some great animal in the jungle.’ His fellow Chiefs suspected his advice to Ministers would vary from their own, and their suspicion was fuelled by the fact that he quite often did not deign to declare it to them . . . For 10 years he was the only constant presence on a scene disrupted by the passage of seven Defence Ministers. Of the closing stages of his career it can be said that more might have been done but for his extraordinary capacity to alienate people; that without him nothing might have been done at all.692

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  Mountbatten was not temperamentally suited for retirement. He was used to routine and hierarchy and still, in spite of some health scares, full of energy and determined to stay active rather than lead the quieter life of a more reflective man. He had little interest in the arts or music (except to dance to) and read little. Whilst he enjoyed shooting it was more for the social side, the opportunity to network and to test himself – a bag of over 1,000 birds a day at Broadlands was a long-held ambition. He generally rented out the shooting to rich neighbours, such as Donald Sopworth or Sir Donald Gosling, but would retain certain days for himself where he would invite Prince Philip, Prince Charles, King Constantine of Greece, the Duke of Kent or King Carl-Gustaf of Sweden. Each January, he would be invited to shoot at Sandringham, where he was regarded as ‘a poor shot but a greedy one’.693

  He continued to involve himself in a myriad of organisations – he was associated with 179 when he retired – from the Admiralty Dramatic Society to the Zoological Society. He continued to employ a staff of four to respond to a voluminous correspondence, all of it courteously and quickly answered, and to help draft the various speeches he was asked to make each week.

  He spoke occasionally in the House of Lords, especially on defence matters, but he still desired to be more active in public life. An opportunity presented itself in 1965 when Rhodesia, a British territory in South Africa that had governed itself since 1923, threatened to declare Independence – the first unilateral
break since the United States Declaration of Independence some two centuries earlier. After securing permission from the Queen, Harold Wilson approached Mountbatten to replace the existing Governor, Sir Humphrey Gibbs, who had lost his authority. It was hoped that Mountbatten’s proven skills of negotiation in India might resolve the situation.

  After considering the offer, and on the advice of Solly Zuckerman, he turned it down, writing to Wilson that he believed replacing Gibbs would make little difference and at 65 he felt too old. ‘But above all I had the world’s most remarkable woman as my wife who was an indescribable help to me in contacts with people and a support and comfort to me when exhausted and facing terrible problems. I do not believe any Governor can do the job properly without a wife.’694

  A month later, with the situation deteriorating, Wilson summoned Mountbatten to Downing Street, suggesting a special mission to invest Gibbs with a Knight Commander of Victorian Order. This time Mountbatten was prepared to go and proposed taking Sir Solly Zuckerman and John Brabourne, but courtiers, nervous of the constitutional implications, vetoed the trip. Rhodesia declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence on 11 November, which was only invoked in December 1979.695

  In August 1966, the Labour Foreign Secretary, George Brown, suggested he should join the Foreign Office as Defence Adviser, which he also declined. Then in October 1966 the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, asked if he would chair an inquiry into the prison escape of the spy George Blake. Mountbatten readily accepted, asking only that a scientist, retired prison governor and serving policeman should also be part of the inquiry. The policeman chosen was Sir Robert Mark, until recently Chief Constable of Leicester. The appointment was to bring Mark to the attention of Roy Jenkins, who appointed him Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1972. It was also the beginning of a close friendship with Mountbatten, to whom he would become a useful ally.696

  The ‘Report into Prison Escapes and Security’ was published in December and Mountbatten was so pleased with it that he sent a copy to members of the Royal Family for Christmas. It proposed improving morale amongst prison officers with better conditions and more rapid promotion, better electronic security and the appointment of an outsider as Inspector General. His most controversial suggestion was for the construction of a maximum-security prison entirely for Category A prisoners on the Isle of Wight, which he felt with its enhanced security would allow the most dangerous prisoners more liberty than being contained within a conventional prison, but it was not to be.

  He had always had strong associations with the Isle of Wight, having lived there as a child, been educated at Osborne and eventually having been elected (at the second attempt) to the Yacht Club. In 1965 he was invited to become Governor, a duty he took seriously, visiting at least every other month and in 1974, when it became a shire county with its own Lord Lieutenant – until then the Lord Lieutenant had also been responsible for Hampshire – Mountbatten was appointed as the first incumbent.

  One of the appointments that gave him greatest pleasure was as Colonel of the Life Guards in January 1965, not least for the opportunity it gave him to dress up. Writing to Bob Lacock, he remarked, ‘Only Angie (Lady Laycock) will fully appreciate my schoolboy delight at this unique honour, because she knows my weakness for uniforms.’697 Whilst to Sibilla he was even more forthcoming, ‘I am busy fitting my scarlet tunic, my white leather breeches, my very high jackboots, my helmet and my cuirass.’698 He took his role in the Trooping the Colour each year very seriously, practising with his charger at Broadlands dressed in helmet, thigh boots and hacking jacket. He also took a great deal of pleasure in interviewing every prospective officer.

  But his main focus was as chairman of the Council of World Atlantic Colleges, to which he had been introduced by John Brabourne. The first Atlantic College had been opened at St Donat’s Castle in Wales in 1962, a sixth form college drawing pupils from around the world based on Kurt Hahn’s teachings on the importance of outside activities and community service, and where 70 per cent of the places were financed from scholarships.

  Mountbatten’s imagination was captured by its mission statement and its internationalist outlook and, until handing over to Prince Charles in 1978, he worked tirelessly on behalf of the organisation, travelling the world, fundraising by using his famous contacts – Jeffrey Archer, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Noël Coward and Grace Kelly were all corralled into taking part in gala evenings – and setting up the second Atlantic College in Singapore in 1971.699

  With his retirement, Mountbatten also began to give thought to ordering his archives – he had kept almost every piece of paper related to his life with the most sensitive entrusted to the ‘black box’ – and preparing a biography, which he saw not just as a way of shaping his legacy, but providing money for his grandchildren. He had always been keen to provide his own version of events in which he had been involved. To that end, he persuaded friends to return letters – not all of which were eventually made public – and to contribute reminiscences, and he began with a researcher, Robin Bousfield, to create tape recordings covering his life.700 He would also specifically spend weekends discussing the past with close friends, such as Solly Zuckerman, in front of a tape recorder and then have the talks transcribed.

  His secretaries, David Brice and Charles Nelson, had produced catalogues up to 1952 and 1959 respectively, but now Mollie Travis was brought in as a full-time archivist and a proper muniment room created. Amongst the collection was extensive correspondence with the Royal Family, especially Prince Philip, and King George VI. ‘There is a treasure trove of letters from LL to King George V1 from 1920–1952,’ wrote Bousfield to Travis. ‘I had no idea they knew each other as well as they did long before the Abdication . . . I think it is vital that I should précis large chunks of them for our archives, as opposed to leaving them there “for future historians”.’701

  There were also some 55 letters that Peter Murphy had left to Mountbatten on his death in 1966. ‘They are on the whole very intimate letters to his best friend; much more informative to an ultimate 21st-century biographer than the letters to his mother,’ Bousfield told Travis. ‘They exhibit the normal exuberant instinct of a very young man.’702

  In March 1969, the trustees of the Broadlands Archives – John Brabourne, the writer and publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, and Charles Troughton, a director of WH Smith – signed an ‘Undertaking by the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives Settlement’, agreeing that the archives would be administered along the same lines as any material in the Public Record Office and that there would be no access to the papers without permission from the Cabinet Office.703

  C.S. Forester, author of the Hornblower series, had been the first candidate as an official biographer. ‘If ever there is to be a biography written about me (which God forbid),’ wrote Mountbatten, ‘there is no single writer I would be more willing to have as the author . . . since you undoubtedly succeed in capturing the spirit of the sea better than any other author I have read.’704 Forester died in 1966 and the idea of an authorised biography was shelved, though almost 20 writers continued to approach him asking for his cooperation over the next two decades, including F.D. Roosevelt’s son Elliott in 1976 and Denis Judd in 1977.705

  In 1948, Mountbatten had allowed Ray Murphy to talk to colleagues for The Last Viceroy, authorised by the British Information Services, and had given two interviews himself.706 The book was serialised in Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express where, to Mountbatten’s dismay, headlines and sub-editing emphasised the less attractive elements of his character.

  In 1951, less than three years after the events, Alan Campbell-Johnson’s Mission with Mountbatten about Mountbatten’s time as Viceroy and Governor-General was published. Campbell-Johnson had kept a daily diary in India and had long been Mountbatten’s preferred candidate as official biographer.707 It was a version of events Mountbatten clearly supported – over 100 copies were sent out to family, friends and influencers on publication, and in 1972 Mountbatten contributed
a foreword to a paperback reissue.708

  Campbell Johnson had first tried to write a biography in 1944 and had been told there was ‘a good chance of being accepted once the war is over’, but the approach came to nothing.709 There were discussions in 1958 about an official biography, but Mountbatten accepted that nothing could be published in his lifetime or that of his principal characters.710 In 1953 Brian Connell’s deferential study, Manifest Destiny: A Study in Five Profiles of the Rise and Influence of the Mountbatten Family, was published and six years later Mountbatten had contributed comments to Supremo by Christopher Maitland, the pseudonym of the writer George Baker.711

  Edwina’s reputation was also to be carefully curated. Initially, Nehru’s sister, Vijiya Pandit, had been earmarked to write an official life, but it came to nothing.712 In 1952 Dennis Holman’s Lady Louis: Life of the Countess Mountbatten of Burma, described as ‘the complete authorised biography of Edwina Mountbatten, written with her consent and cooperation after more than a year’s research into her personal diaries, letters, records and interviews with her family, servants, friends and associates’, had come out.

  Six years later, Madeleine Masson published Edwina: The Biography of the Countess Mountbatten of Burma. Though billed as unauthorised, Edwina had given several interviews for the book, provided extracts from her diaries, and many of her close friends and colleagues had spoken to the author. ‘She has omitted a lot of what I would have thought important things, and treated less important ones at length,’ wrote Edwina to her secretary Elizabeth Collins. ‘But it’s her book thank God – not ours! . . . it’s a pretty good attempt.’713