Masson later claimed that was not entirely the case and that ‘when she had finished the book Mountbatten asked to see the manuscript – and altered it in his own hand, using blue pencil, the traditional tool of the military censor. In Madeleine’s words, “He rewrote history by taking out anything, however petty, that did not show the Mountbattens in a good light, and inserted new information.” Horrified, she summed up his uniquely annotated version as “lies, pure lies”.’714
Then the year after Edwina’s death, her childhood friend Marjorie Brecknock brought out Edwina Mountbatten: Her Life in Pictures, a short illustrated book based on private albums to raise money for the Edwina Mountbatten Trust, which had been set up to raise funds for Save the Children and the St John Ambulance Brigade.
Mountbatten also contributed to scores of forewords to various books touching on his career. A good example was Michael Harrison’s Mulberry: The Return in Triumph (1965), in which the first chapter is devoted to Mountbatten, who gave the author access to all the key figures in COHQ, taking the opportunity to settle some old scores with critics such as Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke and Bernard Fergusson’s history of Combined Operations, The Watery Maze.
After Leonard Mosley’s The Last Days of the Raj, critical of Mountbatten’s role in India, had been published in 1961, supposedly under Beaverbrook’s instruction, Pug Ismay had written:
I have come reluctantly to the conclusion that there is a serious risk that history will do you a grave injustice unless very early steps are taken to establish the fact that there is no substance in the charge that your decision to transfer power in India as early as the 15th August 1947 was responsible for the carnage that took place . . . I was at great pains to explain that you had not been impetuous, but extremely wise, and that if you had not taken the initiative in a way that no one else could have done and driven the scheme through with all the drive at your command, there would have been no power to hand over: only bloody chaos.715
Ismay had suggested first an article then a book be written for the fifteenth anniversary in August 1962, with access to the key individuals involved on Mountbatten’s staff, explaining the reasons for partition ‘by someone with a gift of attractive presentation, such as Peter Fleming or Alan Morehead’.716 Dickie was keen, ‘I should be more than happy to give the fullest possible cooperation to you if you would be prepared to take the initiative.’717 Both Fleming and Morehead refused, as did Cecil Woodham-Smith, who worried about libel and that it was not her subject area. Eventually, H.V. Hodson, a former editor of the Sunday Times, accepted in September 1963, and his book came out six years later.
Mountbatten was also able to control, to a certain extent, what was written about him by holding out the promise of an authorised version. Many publishers, such as Robert Lusty at Hutchinson, rejected any book that did not have the support of Mountbatten in the hope of being offered the official book. A good example was Alden Hatch’s The Mountbattens, a study of Prince Louis, Dickie and Prince Philip, published in 1966, which did not find favour with the family, largely because of its inaccuracies.
At the beginning of the seventies, Mountbatten supplied material, contacts and commented on a book originally called While the World Slept, which became a 1985 international bestseller and TV documentary Freedom at Midnight, after the Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend cleared his participation. He and his secretary John Barratt made extensive comments on the script, notably on criticisms of the Punjab Boundary Force and that Mountbatten had been unfair to the Princes, to the extent of producing completely redrafted sections.718 As Philip Ziegler wryly noted, it was ‘remarkable chiefly for the faithfulness with which it portrays the history of the period as Lord Mountbatten would have wished it to be seen.’719
* * *
Though Mountbatten had been adamant that no biography of him should appear in his own lifetime, he was persuaded by John Brabourne to tell his story in a series of very personal television films about his life and times. In return for his participation and the use of his archives, which included extensive photographs and cine film, he would own the subsidiary rights with monies going to the Broadlands Trust, which had been set up to benefit his children and grandchildren.
This alarmed the Government, concerned with what he might say, especially concerning India and Pakistan, as he might be seen to be personally profiting from the use of official documents, and secret material might have found its way into his private archive. Mountbatten was summoned to a series of meetings with the Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, who was insistent the Government should see the television scripts. He also suggested Mountbatten deposit his papers as Viceroy in the India Office Library on permanent loan, as 11 previous Viceroys had done, where they might be more strictly regulated.720 His ‘hot’ papers were given to the Royal Archives, where they remain unavailable to researchers.721 It was also agreed that his papers could not be sold or loaned without permission of the government and that proper arrangements needed to be made for safe custody.722 For years afterwards, his papers were subject to repeated weeding by various government departments.723
In October 1966, the 12-part series was announced, to be produced and directed by Peter Morley, a former BBC current affairs producer, whilst the job of researching and scripting the series went to John Terraine, who had just written and produced a BBC documentary The Great War and its sequel, The Lost Peace.724 Originally commissioned and then dropped by the BBC, it was eventually bought by the independent Thames Television. Filming took up much of the next two years and included contributions from Prince Philip, the Duke of Windsor, Dwight Eisenhower and Anthony Eden – some more enthusiastically than others.725 The series was launched in December 1968 with a Royal Preview at the Imperial War Museum, attended by the Queen, Prince Philip and most of the Cabinet.726
The series ran every Wednesday from the beginning of January and was a critical and commercial success, being shown to over 300 million viewers in over 70 countries and sold to PBS in the United States, and shown twice more in the following decade. The programme was seen by 38 million people in Britain – 68 per cent of the population – and the tie-in book by John Terraine, which quickly passed over or omitted any embarrassing subjects, sold over 30,000 copies in hardback.
Mountbatten had long recognised the importance of television and film in promoting image – he had always had large publicity staffs at Combined Operations, SEAC, and as Viceroy focused on recording his every activity on film – and he collaborated with several sympathetic television programmes throughout the 1960s, including a documentary for CBS in 1963 (Twentieth Century: Mountbatten Man of Action) and a six-hour series in 1969 for PBS’s Twentieth-Century Leaders series: Lord Mountbatten: A Man for the Century. It seemed his legacy was safe.
CHAPTER 26
Fixer
In August 1967, Cecil King, Chairman of International Publishing Corporation, confided in his diary:
Cudlipp had some talk a few weeks ago with Mountbatten at some dinner. Hugh asked him if it had been suggested to him that our present style of government might be in for a change. He said it had. Hugh then asked if it had been suggested that he might have some part to play in such a new regime? Mountbatten said it had been suggested, but that he was far too old (sixty-seven, I think).727
Here were the first references to one of the most mysterious and controversial episodes in Mountbatten’s life. Harold Wilson’s government, which had been in power since 1964, had been beset with economic problems and industrial unrest. There were concerns about cuts in the armed forces, a belief that public spending needed to be reduced to help interest rates and tougher laws needed against the trade unions.
Added to this, in 1964 Jim Angleton, the head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Division, had told MI5, Britain’s domestic security service, that, according to a secret source which he would not divulge, Wilson was a Soviet agent. The case would henceforth become known under the code name ‘Oatsheaf’. Whatever the merits of the accusation, it wa
s certainly true that there was extensive Soviet penetration of the Labour Party. Various defectors had named a series of Labour MPs and trade unionists, including Joseph Kagan, a close friend of Wilson’s.
For months, Cecil King had publicly been saying that Wilson should be replaced by a coalition government, and on 23 April he had dined with Oswald Mosley in Paris to sound him out as a possible leader of a national government. His other possible candidate was Mountbatten, and an opportunity soon presented itself for further discussion.
On Saturday, 27 April, Edward Pickering, Chairman of the Daily Mirror, was Mountbatten’s guest at the annual reunion of the Burma Star Association at the Albert Hall – the Mirror helped with advertising for the event – and Mountbatten took the opportunity of discussing with him his concerns about the ‘developing national crisis’ of strikes and economic problems. He asked if he could meet Hugh Cudlipp, the paper’s editorial director.
On the following Monday morning, Cudlipp, who had been sailing in the Solent at the weekend, saw Mountbatten at Broadlands, en route to London, noting in a memo to himself afterwards Mountbatten’s concerns:
Important people, leaders of industry and others, approach me increasingly saying something must be done (Mountbatten said). Of course, I agree that we can’t go on like this. But I am 67, and I’m a relative of the Queen; my usefulness is limited: this is a job for younger men, and obviously talent and administrative ability which does not exist in Parliament must be harnessed. Perhaps there should be something like the Emergency Committee I ran in India.728
Cudlipp told his host that Cecil King shared his views. ‘The crux of the problem was that the nation had lost faith in Mr Wilson and the Socialists and still had no faith in Mr Heath and the Tories,’ said Cudlipp. ‘The head of a Coalition Government, whatever it may be called, would have to be a Labour Minister.’729 He suggested Roy Jenkins or Denis Healey and Mountbatten expressed his preference for the former, adding, ‘I certainly don’t want to appear to be advocating or supporting any notion of a Right Wing dictatorship – or any nonsense of that sort. Nor do I want to be involved at my age. But like some other people I am deeply concerned about the future of the country.’730 They agreed to meet the following week at Mountbatten’s London house with King and, at the suggestion of Dickie, Solly Zuckerman, ‘whom he described as now utterly disenchanted with Harold’.731
The four duly met at Kinnerton Street at 4.30 p.m. on the afternoon of 8 May. According to Cudlipp, King, after outlining his concerns about Wilson’s government and the need for action, asked Mountbatten if he would:
agree to be the titular head of a new administration in such circumstances? Mountbatten turned to his friend: ‘Solly, you haven’t said a word so far. What do you think of all this?’ Sir Solly rose, walked to the door, opened it, and then made this statement: ‘This is rank treachery. All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling. I am a public servant and will have nothing to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.’ Mountbatten expressed his agreement and Sir Solly departed. Only a minute or two elapsed between Zuckerman’s departure and King’s. Lord Mountbatten was, as always in my experience, courteous but firm: he explained explicitly but briefly that he entirely agreed with Solly and that that sort of role, so far as he was concerned was ‘simply not on’.732
That night Mountbatten wrote in his diary, ‘Drove back with Solly in Graham’s car from Lincoln’s Inn where we had dinner to 39 Montpelier Walk to discuss with John and Patricia meeting which Solly and I had with Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp. Dangerous Nonsense.’733
Thirty-six hours after the Kinnerton Street debacle, and with Labour routed in the local elections, King published ‘Enough is Enough’, a front-page article in the Daily Mirror calling on Harold Wilson to step down as Prime Minister over his mishandling of the British economy. King blamed both Tory and Labour governments for Britain’s failure to make the same post-war recovery as other nations, notably the defeated Japanese, Germans and Italians, and called on Wilson to resign.734 But the fall-out from his provocative headline had unintended consequences. It was King, not Wilson, who was forced to resign. The man who took his place as chairman of IPC was Hugh Cudlipp.
Two years later, King returned to the issue. In July 1970 he wrote to Dickie, ‘You may recall that about three years ago you asked me to come and see you. Since then events have moved, though slowly. I wonder if it would be helpful if I were to call on you at your convenience and continue our conversation.’735 Dickie replied, ‘I well recall our meeting but you will remember that at the end I definitely came to the conclusion that there was nothing I could do to help in this matter. I am afraid my views are unaltered.’736 To Solly, Dickie wrote the same day enclosing his reply, adding ‘As you can imagine, the last thing I want to do is to continue any conversation with him.’737
That might well have been the end of the matter, but for the fact that Cudlipp decided to refer to the episode in his memoirs. In November 1975, he therefore sent a draft of his recollection to Dickie:
I have told the story of the meeting with you in a way in which it can do no possible harm to you and Solly . . . If you would like me to add anything, please be kind enough to tell me, and I will not approach Solly until you and I have agreed on what I say about you, but I will not, of course, mention Solly without his agreement.738
Mountbatten replied two days later: ‘Your description of the interview is incomplete and inaccurate. I have discussed this with Solly and my Private Secretary, John Barratt, who was coming down from his office and had reached the landing next to my sitting room when he heard Solly make this statement. All three of us agree that Solly said words to this effect: “This is rank treachery. All this talk of machine guns at street corners is appalling. I am a public servant and will have nothing to do with it, nor should you, Dickie.” I expressed my agreement with him. He then left . . . Not more than a minute or two elapsed between Solly’s departure and yours. I was merely courteous and explained explicitly and briefly that I entirely agreed with Solly and that sort of role, so far as I was concerned, was “simply not on”.’739
Cudlipp’s book was published in October 1976 and serialised in the Observer. It created a media storm. ‘There are various inaccuracies with which I will not bore you,’ wrote King to Cudlipp on reading the book, ‘but the interview with Mountbatten, at which I was present, had no resemblance to the one described in your book. The plans and ambitions attributed to me at the end of my time at the Mirror are primarily fanciful.’740
Suspicions of a planned coup refused to go away. On 29 March 1981, a story about the coup appeared in the Sunday Times. The following day, Zuckerman was interviewed on the Today programme. King responded a few days later by releasing his diary entry for the May 1968 meeting, which gave a rather different account of the meeting:
Hugh and I called on Dickie Mountbatten at his request at his flat at 4.30. He insisted that Solly Zuckerman should be there. Dickie spoke of him as a man of invincible integrity and as one of the greatest brains in the world . . . Solly seemed embarrassed by this and hurried away as soon as he decently could. Dickie does not really have his ear to the ground or understand politics. After Solly had gone, Mountbatten said he had been lunching at the Horse Guards and that morale in the armed forces had never been so low. He said that the Queen was receiving an unprecedented number of petitions, all of which have to be passed on to the Home Office. According to Dickie, she is desperately worried over the whole situation.
He is obviously close to her and she is spending this weekend at Broadlands. He asked if I thought there was anything he should do. My theme was that there might be a stage in the future when the Crown would have to intervene: there might be a stage when the armed forces were important. Dickie should keep himself out of public view so as to have clean hands if either emergency should arise in the future. He has no wish to intervene anyway.741
Cecil King said he had withheld this note from his published diary on the grounds th
at it was confidential, ‘especially the part about the Queen’.742 It was beginning to emerge that Mountbatten had shown far more interest than he, or the others, had earlier admitted.
In November 1975, whilst those involved had been straightening out their version of events, Zuckerman had added a diary note to his file on the episode: ‘All I hope is that Dickie did not go beyond what we had agreed. The fact of the matter is – as Hugh Cudlipp knows only too well – that Dickie was really intrigued by Cecil King’s suggestion that he should become the boss man of a ‘government’ . . . When I saw Dickie at Prince Philip’s dinner party on 17th November, three nights after I started to dictate this note, he seemed very pleased with himself and thought the whole matter was settled – once again implying that his record of what had happened in an event would be the statement which history would accept.’743
In fact, Dickie in 1968 had put forward various names who might be ‘useful’ for such a national government, including: Zuckerman himself, the government’s advisor on nuclear matters; Air Vice-Marshal Deryck Stapleton, a former Director of Defence Plans at the Ministry of Defence, who had retired that month as Commandant of the RAF Staff College at Bracknell; Duncan Lewin, a former Director of Plans at the Admiralty; Lord Beeching, famous for his report on the railways, a deputy chairman of ICI and director of Lloyds Bank; and the businessman Sir Charles ‘Dick’ Troughton, who would become chairman of WH Smith the following year.744
He also suggested Sir William Armstrong, the Head of the Home Civil Service; Sir Michael Cary, the Second Permanent Under Secretary at Defence dealing with the Royal Navy; and Jimmy Carreras, head of Hammer Film Productions – a ‘great go-getter’, whom Mountbatten had met through the Variety Club.745 Political suggestions ranged from a former Labour Chief Whip,
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