The Mountbattens

by Andrew Lownie

  John Courtney, who led the Garda investigations, found several others connected with the assassination – McMahon and McGirl had been taken into custody before the bomb was detonated – but did not have enough evidence to bring charges.820 They included an IRA leader from Monaghan believed to have orchestrated the attack – who was questioned and then released – the bomb detonator, and three women living in a caravan opposite Mullaghmore Harbour, who it was suspected had been watchers. Of those that came under suspicion, one still lives and works in Dublin as a journalist, another was released under the Good Friday Agreement, whilst a third became a member of the Forum for Victims and Survivors.821

  ‘The Garda never closed the Mountbatten file, because they believed it was a wider conspiracy and they were hoping someone would rat out the people up the chain of command who ordered it,’ says veteran Northern Ireland journalist, Martin Dillon. ‘Like the Shergar episode, senior IRA figures did not want their fingerprints on it. This source says the Garda have been sitting for decades on a list of guys they would like to attach to the assassination, but no one is prepared to offer them up.’822

  If the IRA had thought their ‘spectacular’, for which they were reputedly later paid £2 million by Syria, would help their cause, they were to be disappointed. Public opinion was horrified by the senseless killing of teenagers and the elderly on holiday. There were calls for the reintroduction of capital punishment and the withdrawal of troops. It was something the British immediately exploited, in particular with regard to cooperation over security issues with the Republic and IRA financing from America, though, as a briefing paper for Mrs Thatcher noted, ‘the Dublin Government is short on resources and long on political inhibitions.’823

  Amongst the options considered were the reintroduction of executive detention, the closure of 35 border crossings, increased use of the UDR and SAS, and improved cooperation between the RUC and the Army with more joint operations rooms.824 One of the ironies is that Mountbatten had been sympathetic to Republican aims and even offered himself as a middleman negotiator, but had been refused by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, president of Sinn Fein.825

  The Provisional IRA had killed the wrong man.

  CHAPTER 28

  Rumours

  During his life, and after his death, rumours circulated about Mountbatten’s sexuality, encouraged by his friendship with well-known homosexuals such as Noël Coward and Tom Driberg, his close working relationship with Peter Murphy and his tactile behaviour.826 It was a question that his official biographer addressed head-on:

  If Mountbatten was a practising homosexual, he was risking everything he valued most to indulge a fleeting appetite. In that case, his character was wholly different from anything delineated in this biography . . . All his naval contemporaries who have expressed an opinion on the subject – and some worked very close to him – state emphatically that they do not believe the stories to be true . . . Sex itself was not a matter of great importance to him . . . To suggest that such a man was actively homosexual seems to be flying not merely in the face of the evidence but also of everything we understand about his character.827

  It was a view shared by his secretary, John Barratt. ‘He certainly was not homosexual. The allegations that he “consorted” with young naval officers at his house in Kinnerton Street are preposterous . . . There is no possibility that he could have kept any homosexual activities secret from me in the intimate relationship that we had over the last fourteen years of his life.’828

  It’s an issue that Brian Hoey in his authorised book also dismisses, quoting evidence from Sacha Abercorn, John Barratt and Bill Evans – with the latter claiming that stories of bisexuality are: ‘Absolute rubbish . . . Men and boys weren’t his thing at all.’829 Hoey concluded that ‘the most convincing argument against Mountbatten being bisexual is that in the fifteen years since his death, no one has come forward claiming that he was his lover.’830

  And yet rumours continued to circulate. Just after Mountbatten’s death, Private Eye ran a story:

  News that Lord Weidenfeld has signed up naval historian Richard Hough to write an intimate family portrait of Earl Mountbatten raises speculation as to just how ‘intimate’ a portrait this will be. Will it, for example, reveal that the old sailor, particularly in the last 19 years of his life following the death of his heiress wife Edwina Ashley, was also a raving queen? Residents living close to his London home at 2 Kinnerton Street, SW1 have hair-raising stories to tell of the rollicking all-male frolics held there by the ageing matelot. Lord Louis, it seems, had a preference for young servicemen. This worked to advantage both ways: doing a turn for Dickie could do wonders for a young officer’s career, and in turn the former Chief of the Defence Staff could count on the discipline of service life to ensure discretion, and not have to monkey around with the disreputable and mercenary ‘John Come Home’ rent boys of Piccadilly.831

  Writing of the Ziegler biography, the author Michael Thornton ‘utterly disbelieved his insistence that there was no evidence to suggest Mountbatten was bisexual. My own knowledge of Dickie over the years suggested the opposite conclusion and Noël Coward, whom I knew extremely well for the last thirteen years of his life, told me it was “beyond doubt” and to his certain knowledge that Dickie had had male as well as female lovers.’832 The entrepreneur, Jeremy Norman, whose business interests ranged from Burke’s Peerage to the Embassy nightclub, and who met Mountbatten a couple of times, ‘always thought he was gay; a crashing snob, interested in genealogy, loved uniforms and decorations – all typical of a gay man of that generation.’833

  ‘There were rumours he was homosexual. I was surprised but not that surprised though I never saw any evidence,’ remembered Derrick Meakins, who served on his staff in 1948. ‘He was very manly. I had heard about friendships with other women. They were quite happy to go their own way.’834 Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, in his memoirs, wrote of Mountbatten’s home in Kinnerton Street that ‘The tiny mews house seemed awash with young, muscular and suspiciously good-looking Naval ratings bustling about the place to no apparent purpose.’835

  Jackie Crier, who together with the casting director Celestia Fox worked in a clothes shop called ‘Spice’, owned by the Kinks’ management, opposite the Kinnerton Street flat in 1964–65, often saw Mountbatten. He would flirt with them and joke about the strange clothes they were wearing, but then pretend not to recognise them if they saw him in Wilton Crescent, as if that was a different persona. ‘He was hugely charismatic, always looked amazing with cheeky smile and eyes,’ remembered Crier. ‘I always thought, here’s serious grown-up crumpet. He was very dashing, elegant, dignified with wonderful manners. But I couldn’t help noticing the succession of handsome young men frequenting his flat through the day, including some rather shady characters. Sometimes they stood outside smoking. A sixth sense told me they were gay.’836

  The journalist Nicholas Davies recalled that, ‘In 1975 I helped write a series of articles for the London Daily Mirror, which revealed details of a homosexual ring centred on the Life Guards barracks in London. A number of young guardsmen informed me that Mountbatten was involved and they gave detailed, signed statements of alleged visits to his Kinnerton Street home. As a result of an internal investigation by the army, five Life Guards officers and thirty-six guardsmen were found guilty of homosexual activities and dismissed from the regiment.’837

  Francis Wheen, the biographer of Tom Driberg and Private Eye journalist, had collected material on Mountbatten that was destroyed in a fire. ‘It’s so maddening that all my boxes of Driberg research went up in flames in the great shed fire,’ he wrote, ‘as I know the Mountbatten file included (for instance) a letter sent to me by a chap whom Mountbatten tried to seduce when he (my correspondent) was a 17-year-old rating.’838 The ‘young naval rating was lined up to “go on a picnic” with Mountbatten when the great man was visiting (I think) Malta. On the day, the youth was startled to discover that it was à deux – and that Mountbatten assumed that t
he sailor was to be served as a human dessert.’839

  Charlotte Breese wrote in her acclaimed biography, Hutch, ‘As for Lord Mountbatten’s bisexuality, many of those I interviewed were convinced of it. When he was Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, several officers boasted of their liaisons with him. A naval friend came across him on an island, when he was serving in Malta, nude in flagrante with another officer . . . These and other stories that refer to Mountbatten’s sexual proclivities have been consistently denied by their [sic] family.’840

  ‘Lord Louis’ homo leanings were not any secret in the XIVth Army messes, which I heard about on my return to Calcutta at the end of the war,’ according to Philip Hindin, who served with Mountbatten in India and Burma:

  By then I had been commissioned in the field. One of my sergeants used to boast about it in his cups. The end of the war situation lessened the division between ranks especially in the East, and junior officers used to use the Sgt’s mess in Fort William in k.d. (khaki drill) without the ‘pips’, as the food was better than any officer’s mess. Jack Hawkins (then a full colonel in the entertainments section) squashed these comments whenever possible. 841

  The writer Elisa Seagrave remembered, ‘My father always claimed that Mountbatten, whom he had met in the navy, was “a most frightful shit and probably a bugger boy!”’842 According to someone in royal circles, ‘They were divorcing just before he became Viceroy and he persuaded her to go. She enjoyed the starring role. They were living apart. He had men friends – often naval ratings – and she liked black men.’843

  A banker seconded to Bombay in the seventies heard various stories about Mountbatten’s homosexual affairs – a long-standing Indian staff member of the bank had reputedly been one of his lovers.844 A Garda Special Branch officer heard stories about Mountbatten’s assignations in India through the Indian High Commission in Dublin.845

  James Lees-Milne recounts in his wartime diaries hearing from John Gielgud a story about ‘MB who decoyed a young man into his Eaton Square house and made him strip MB and beat him. The young man laid on with such violence that MB screamed in agony and the butler appeared. When confronted with the scene, all the butler remarked was, “I thought you rang, sir.”’846

  In his memoir, To Kill and Kill Again: The Chilling True Confessions of a Serial Killer, published in 2002, the conman and murderer Archibald Hall, also known as Roy Fontaine, claimed to have been Mountbatten’s lover during the war. Hall wrote that through the bisexual Vic Oliver, who was married to Winston Churchill’s daughter, he was taken up by Ivor Novello and at wartime parties in Novello’s flat above the Strand Theatre, he met the playwright Terence Rattigan, Conservative peer Lord Boothby and Mountbatten.847

  Paul Pender, who wrote a biography of Fontaine with his cooperation, asked him: ‘You mean – you mounted Mountbatten?’

  ‘No,’ Roy replied, ever a stickler for detail, ‘Mountbatten mounted me. He believed it is better to give than to receive.’

  Pender then asked Fontaine what he called his royal lover, to which the butler responded: ‘Most of Mountbatten’s gay friends called him “Mountbottom”.’

  ‘Did you call him Mountbottom?’

  ‘Of course not. That would have been disrespectful . . . I called him the Queen.’848

  Whilst research in their papers shows Ivor Novello and Terence Rattigan were friends, there is no evidence that Mountbatten knew either them or Hall. Pender stands by Fontaine’s claims, but Allan Nichol, in his biography of Fontaine, exercises caution: ‘It is impossible to ascertain how many of Fontaine’s recollections of early sexual exploits are true. If anything can be judged from his proven exaggerations elsewhere, it is fair to say that few of his boasted sexual adventures with the rich and famous of wartime Glasgow and London can be believed.’849

  In September 1987, an article appeared in the New Zealand tabloid magazine Truth, drawing on the testimony of Norman Nield, Mountbatten’s driver between 1942–43, who now lived in New Zealand, and had decided to tell his story after reading Spycatcher and after the death of his wife. ‘When I saw what all the fuss was about, I realised I had a better story to tell,’ Nield said.

  He claimed he ‘was ordered to take young boys who had been procured for the admiral to his official residence in Lord Mountbatten’s Humber car’ and was paid £5 a week for his silence at a time when ratings were paid three shillings a day. According to Nield, Mountbatten, known as L.L., used brandy and lemonade to help seduce the boys, who ranged in age from eight to 12, and that once ‘he saw Lord Mountbatten in bed with a prostitute and two teenage girls, who tried unsuccessfully to seduce him for more than an hour.’ The prostitute, Barbara Harris, declared him unfit for ‘the sandwich treatment’.850

  ‘Barbara Harris always brought some clothing like that for a baby girl but outsize – large enough, in fact, for one of these boys to wear,’ Nield said. ‘Obviously it had been specially made and she would hand it to L.L. with the boy. In the beginning I didn’t see what went on in the room, but one didn’t have to be a genius to guess what was going on.’

  Nield claims the link between Lord Mountbatten and Harris was London’s fashionable wartime Pink Petal Club.

  L.L. was a close friend of Noel Coward, who was also a patron of the club. Barbara Harris, through her notoriety in the early sex scandal, became friendly with L.L. and was a well-known face at the club . . . Twig warned me to be most careful about what I heard and saw. He said I was picked for the job because they believed I would be discreet. He later told me that L.L. was under a lot of pressure and released his tensions with his fondness for young boys dressed as small girls. He also told me that L.L. engaged in sex with men or even girls if they were youthful enough. He told me that L.L. was confused sexually and that I was being paid very well to keep my mouth shut . . . It all ceased when the admiral was taken ill.851 On his recovery late in 1943, he went to south-east Asia as a supreme commander of Allied forces.852

  There was no reason for Nield to make up the story, especially in so much detail – though certain details do not fit the conventional story. He says that at the time Mountbatten was living in a large house at Fareham near Portsmouth, but in 1942–43 Mountbatten was head of Combined Operations and based in London. However, Southwick House at Fareham was, from 1943, the location of the advance command post of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which Mountbatten would have had cause to visit and he may have used a house nearby. Broadlands is about an hour’s drive from Fareham.

  Peter Thompson, a former Mirror editor, writing in Diana’s Nightmare, told of how ‘an informant came to Fleet Street to sell a story alleging deviant behaviour by Mountbatten . . . Maxwell bought the story and supressed it . . . It was a small but important favour.’853 The cookery writer, Clarissa Dickson Wright, told Thompson that her uncle, Douglas Wright, as a Surgeon Commander, had served with Mountbatten during the Second World War.

  Wright was summoned to Mountbatten’s cabin and found him taking a bath. Dickie ‘proceeded to make a pass at the doctor but was turned down’:

  ‘What about your career?’ asked Lord Louis.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ replied Dr Wright. ‘I’m planning to make a career outside the Navy.’

  When Mountbatten persisted, he was told: ‘Just remember, I’m the doctor – the man with the needle.’

  ‘Sure enough,’ said his relative, ‘Mountbatten got a dose of the clap in the Far East and Dr Wright had to treat him.’854

  Anthony Daly, whose memoir The Abuse of Power recounts his experiences as a rent boy to the rich and famous during the 1970s, was particularly close to Tom Driberg, who told him that:

  He flew to Ceylon in a cargo plane. On arrival at Colombo, Mountbatten sent his private Dakota to pick him up and he was flown to HQ at a place improbably called Kandy. Tom said that after cocktails, one of Mountbatten’s aides offered him a Burmese boy, whom everyone at HQ called Candy. Tom had sex with Candy in the Dakota – how could I forget that!


  Tom really did give me the impression that Mountbatten actually preferred men to women (wishful thinking on his part perhaps), and said they both had frank, not to say graphic discussions about homosexuality. They discussed the pornography they liked (Tom offered to show me his collection, but I declined). Tom said Mountbatten had something of a fetish for uniforms – handsome young men in military uniforms (with high boots) and beautiful boys in school uniform.855

  Daly picked up gossip from the circles he moved in and was told, ‘Mountbatten had a sexual preference for well-bred and well-educated young men of good standing (that would have ruled me out), from good families; or public school boys.’856 He chose not to mention Mountbatten in The Abuse of Power, but described how Mountbatten had been courted by members of the National Association for Freedom, later the Freedom Association, who were plotting against Harold Wilson:

  The Mountbatten connection here, as told to me by Noel Annan (Lord), was that this group were very actively trying to enlist Mountbatten to their cause, and that their enticements included a position of power and prestige and to offer him various young men for sex.

  You may recall from the book that I endured a full night with Annan. It was he who led me to believe there was what I would now describe as an Anglo-Irish vice ring, with the landed gentry on both sides of the Irish border, abusing boys and young men. He told me that the venues for parties were the grand houses they owned. The young Grenadier Guard I was teamed up with for a pornographic photographic session told me he had been transported by helicopter to an elite gathering in a castle in either Belfast, or possibly just minutes over the border. Mountbatten’s castle Classiebawn was just twelve miles from the NI border.