From Lord Curzon’s farewell speech at the Byculla Club in Bombay, 16 November 1905, quoted in Sir Thomas Raleigh’s collection of Curzon’s viceregal speeches, Lord Curzon in India (Adamant Media Corporation, 2005), pp. 589–90
At home, and despite enjoying the king’s favor, Curzon’s political career went on the skids, without a parliamentary seat and denied a peerage. In 1906 his wife Mary, who had given him three daughters, died. She was only thirty-six, but the last two years of her life had been blighted by sickness. Despairing after his wife’s death, Curzon wrote, “Every man’s hand has long been against me, and now God’s hand has turned against me too.”6
Curzon’s Age of Lead
Curzon had lost an empire and had yet to find a role. He busied himself in the meantime with a myriad of architectural projects and with micromanaging every responsibility to which he could turn his hand, believing that he (assisted by his daughters) was better at weeding than any gardener, better at dusting books than any housekeeper, and better at devising the curriculum for his girls’ schooling than any governess. He became a chancellor at Oxford and was elevated to the House of Lords, where he became a defender of its prerogatives, while also being a champion of reform. He showed himself ahead of his time in his opposition to female suffrage.
But really, until the First World War, it seemed that Curzon’s star had fallen. He certainly felt so; at the outset of the war he felt sadly unemployed, lamenting that “a man who at 39 was thought good enough to rule 300 millions of people—and did rule them—is apparently useless at 55 when the existence of his country is at stake.”7 He took a special interest in supporting India’s military units (ensuring, for instance, that they were all supplied with massive water boilers—paid for out of his own pocket—for tea), harbored the Belgian royal family on his estates, and was an active opponent, again, of Lord Kitchener, who argued for an all-volunteer force while Curzon believed in the necessity of conscription.
In December 1916, the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, leading a Liberal-Tory Coalition government, brought Curzon into the War Cabinet. Curzon was easily the best-informed cabinet member on questions involving India and the Middle East, but his advice was routinely ignored. He opposed occupying any more of Mesopotamia beyond the port of Basra; he opposed promising the Arabs their own state or carving states out of the defeated Ottoman Empire, and he was opposed to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which put the British government on record supporting a Jewish state in Palestine. His arguments were, in each of these cases, dismissed, which resulted in an enormously costly campaign in Mesopotamia, competing promises to the Arabs and the French, and the sowing of greater enmity between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. His great fear was that the Allies would negotiate a peace in the West in exchange for giving Germany a free hand in Eastern Europe—though this hardly seems the nightmare Curzon imagined it to be.
Curzon accepted that Allied war rhetoric inevitably meant concessions on self-government for India, but he was quick to insist that self-government could only be successfully achieved under British tutelage and supervision, which could last for centuries. Many of his parliamentary colleagues, however, were impatient to speed things along. Curzon accepted that nationalism seemed an unstoppable consequence of the war, and that some people preferred to be badly governed by their own rather than well governed by another. But independence, to which he thought hasty reforms inevitably led, would in his view be a tragedy for the Indians and the British—putting the interests of politicized Bengali lawyers over the interests of the Indian people as a whole and relegating Britain to a second-rank power.
In 1919, he became foreign secretary, a position that had once seemed inevitable but that he finally achieved only by lobbying Lloyd George. Curzon drew the border between Poland and the Soviet Union (the Curzon Line) and rebuffed the secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill, who wanted to crush the Russian Bolsheviks, because Curzon feared the White Russians would more seriously threaten British interests in central Asia. He also defeated Churchill on the matter of Egypt, over which Lloyd George and Churchill wanted to maintain the British protectorate that had existed under the Ottoman Empire, while Curzon insisted on recognizing Egyptian independence (albeit under British supervision and military defense).
That victory, if such it was, had to compensate for the unraveling agreement he thought he had reached with Persia. Curzon had agreed to guarantee Persia’s independence, while flooding it with British assistance—political, military, technical, and commercial—in exchange for securing British rights to Persia’s oil fields. As Curzon conceived the agreement, it neatly welded Persian self-interest to the interests of the British Empire. To his dismay the agreement was never formally ratified in Tehran and was then repudiated by the new Persian government (taking power in a military coup) in 1921, though the Persians still wanted British aid and assistance. His amour-propre badly wounded by Persian ingratitude—and the indifference of his Cabinet colleagues who were far more interested in retrenching British commitments than extending them—he vowed never to negotiate with the Persians again.
He was also determined, despite his Persian setback, not to resign again. His resignation as viceroy had cast him into the political wilderness, and though he felt forever at odds with Churchill and Lloyd George (who opposed him on Greek and Turkish policy; they being philhellenes, he being pragmatically pro-Turk), he was determined to stick it out. Indeed he stuck it out even after the Conservatives came to power and he was passed over, to his immense disappointment and even shame, as prime minister—that prize going to Stanley Baldwin. But in January 1924, Labour took power and Curzon was out at the Foreign Office. When the Conservatives were returned to power later in the year, Baldwin kept him as leader of the House of Lords but denied him the Foreign Office, offering him in recompense the chairmanship of the Committee of Imperial Defence.8 He died a few months later, prematurely aged from overwork.
Curzon’s Definition of British Imperialism
“A discipline, an inspiration, and a faith.” Without the empire, Britain would no longer be a world power, but would become “a sort of glorified Belgium” with “no aspiration but a narrow and selfish materialism.”
Quoted in David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 363
Curzon had spilled out his life for the cause of the Empire—and most particularly for India. But by the time he died, his ideals had faded from a Britain that was more democratic, less imperialistic, and even capable of electing a socialist government. He was not a man easy to like, but he was a dedicated patriot all the same. Churchill’s epitaph for him has never been bettered: “The morning had been golden; the noontide was bronze; and the evening lead. But all were solid and each was polished till it shone after its fashion.”9
Chapter 14
LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN, 1ST EARL MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA (1900–1979)
“The only man I have ever been impressed with all my life is Lord Mountbatten.”
—Muhammad Ali Jinnah, first governor-general of Pakistan, 19481
If nothing else, Mountbatten looked the part—handsome, patrician, tall and striking in uniform, perfect casting for a modern viceroy of India, even if his inevitable role was to preside over an epic tragedy. He was born a German prince—Prince Louis of Battenberg—though his place of birth was Windsor Castle and his eventual moniker of choice was Dickie. His father, also styled Prince Louis of Battenberg, had become a British subject when he joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen—an idea recommended to him by two of his English cousins, who happened to be the son and daughter of Queen Victoria.
* * *
Did you know?
Mountbatten’s cousins were the Romanovs, executed by the Bolsheviks
Noël Coward’s famous film In Which We Serve is based on the wartime service of Lord Mountbatten
Mountbatten advocated the creation of iceberg-based aircraft carriers
* * *
Dickie’s father had grown up speaking German, French, and English; and Dickie—the youngest, by eight years, of four children—was expected to do the same, which was easy enough because as a young boy he holidayed in Germany and spent time with his cosmopolitan Russian cousins, the Romanovs. His father rose to become an admiral and eventually (1912) First Sea Lord, a position he resigned in October 1914 as his health declined under the stress of the First World War and the mob’s demand for the scalp of the “German” Battenberg. In July 1917 he renounced his German titles and changed the family name to the more English-sounding Mountbatten.
Young Mountbatten
Dickie, unlike his father, had no foreign accent, and thus was freer to live the serene life of an English aristocrat (he was in fact, properly, “His Serene Highness Prince Louis”); he was cheerful in demeanor, diligent in his studies (he had to be, as he was not naturally clever), and eager, even if not gifted, on the playing field. There was no question as to his career—he was bound for the Navy, supposing he could scrape by on his mathematics. He was twelve, nearly thirteen, when he entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne; the First World War began while he was a cadet, and he was there when his father was forced to resign as First Sea Lord. His ambition crystallized: he would take his father’s place. The next step was to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in January 1915, and then on to the Naval College at Keyham where he surprised by graduating top of his class. By July 1916 he was a midshipman aboard the battle cruiser HMS Lion, the flagship of the Admiral of the Fleet, Sir David Beatty, the hero of Jutland. Beatty became commander in chief of the Grand Fleet and Dickie transferred to the flagship of the fleet, HMS Queen Elizabeth. It was aboard the Queen Elizabeth that he learned that his surname had been changed and he was now Lord Louis Mountbatten. He ended the war a sub-lieutenant and executive officer of a patrol boat. In 1919, the Navy sent him to attend Cambridge.
This proved to be a bad idea. Mountbatten had been raised with a simple creed: do the right thing. It had been reinforced by the Navy. It provided what moral ballast there was to his agnostic Anglicanism. As he had no greater philosophical resources—and also had a tremendous fondness for gadgets, inventions,2 and new technology; in short, for “progress”; he was vulnerable to the conceit—fed to him by a cultured, leftist subversive named Peter Murphy—that the Left was on the side of justice and progress. The Bolsheviks who murdered the Russian royal family, his cousins the Romanovs, might have gotten carried away, but on the whole, the Left’s goals were enlightened. Mountbatten might glory in his bloodlines (his best friends at Cambridge were the Prince of Wales and the future King George VI), his cultural tastes might be conservative and traditional, he might be a career Navy man pledged to the defense of the realm, but in his politics he always assumed that the Left spoke for the future and for what was morally right. Nevertheless, when he accompanied the Prince of Wales on his trip to India in 1921, Mountbatten had no sympathy for Indian nationalists—his mind was focused more on mastering the great game of polo (to which he became devoted) than on the rumbling independence movement.
If Mountbatten made a mistake in befriending Peter Murphy at Cambridge, he perhaps compounded it by marrying Edwina Ashley (the Prince of Wales approved of her, but then again, he was a famously disastrous judge of women). Edwina had loads of cash from her maternal grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, a German Jew who had come to England as a young man and become an extraordinarily successful financier, friend of King Edward VII, and Catholic convert. Her father was Lieutenant-Colonel Wilfrid Ashley, a Conservative M.P. Edwina, however, was no conservative. An opinionated flapper, she shared Mountbatten’s left-wing politics but was impatient with Mountbatten’s desire for a traditional marriage, had a taste for extramarital affairs, and left an ever-understanding Mountbatten to do most of the raising of their children—while resenting and trying to prevent his closeness to them. Like many a high-living socialite she proved her merit when danger threatened, working with the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade during the war, and easing the suffering of Indians amidst the carnage and misery of India’s partition. She died in 1960 while inspecting hospital facilities in Borneo; Mountbatten never remarried.
Mountbatten survived the swingeing cuts to the armed services after World War I—and while some attributed this to royal intervention on his behalf, there was no doubt that he was a dedicated, energetic, industrious officer who knew how to handle men (he made a point of memorizing a biographical profile of every man under his command). As at school, he possessed no extraordinary talent, but he did have the gift of charm, a determination to succeed, a natural capacity for detail and hard work, and an ability to teach and inspire young officers.
He excelled as a signals officer, qualified as a French translator, and commanded a destroyer before being appointed to the Fleet Air Arm at the Admiralty. He was no mere pencil pusher but an active proponent of myriad improvements from acquiring better guns to adopting the Typex enciphering machine. In London, and with his social connections, he became the close friend of two Tory politicians, Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper—all three of them sharing strong anti-fascist sentiments and opposition to a policy of appeasing Hitler and Mussolini. Captain Cosmo Graham wrote this assessment of Mountbatten on his departure from the Admiralty in 1938: “He possesses a naïve simplicity combined with a compelling manner and dynamic energy. His interests incline mainly towards the material world and he is, therefore, inclined to be surprised by the unexpected; he has been so successful in that sphere that he does not contemplate failure. His social assets are invaluable in any rank to any Service. His natural thoroughness is extended to sport. Desirable as it is to avoid superlatives, he has nearly all the qualities and qualifications for the highest commands.”3 With a second World War imminent, he was about to test his mettle.
Mountbatten as Commander of HMS Kelly
“I want to make it clear to all of you that I shall never give the order to ‘abandon ship,’ the only way you can leave the ship is if she sinks beneath your feet.”
Quoted in Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten: The Official Biography (Collins, 1985), p.128
A Broadminded Fellow
“Isn’t it grand news that the Russians are fighting on our side? The original Bolsheviks murdered most of our relations and I never thought the day would come when I would welcome them as allies, but we must on no account let the Nazis win, must we?”
Letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten to his daughter Pamela, 14 July 1941
In 1939, he became commander of the destroyer HMS Kelly, and quickly earned a reputation for dash, daring, and fearless and inspiring leadership. The Kelly evacuated troops from Norway, fought German U-boats and bombers, battled in the Mediterranean, and survived (at least for a while, thanks to gallant seamanship) wounds that should have sunk her. Churchill, ever appreciative of a well-born swashbuckler, became one of Mountbatten’s wartime champions. When German bombers finally sank the Kelly during the battle for Crete in 1941, Mountbatten was last to leave the ship—indeed almost went down with her—and then swam to help others as German machine guns strafed the water. They were rescued by HMS Kipling. The Kelly’s story became the (officially unacknowledged) basis of Noël Coward’s film In Which We Serve, with Coward playing the captain based on Mountbatten (they were friends).
With the Kelly at the bottom of the ocean, in August 1941 Mountbatten was assigned to command HMS Illustrious, then being repaired in Norfolk, Virginia, giving him an excuse to make a triumphal tour of the United States (where his two daughters had been evacuated). He not only met with the president but toured Pearl Harbor—and was appalled at how vulnerable it was to a possible Japanese attack. While in America he received an urgent message that his appointment to HMS Illustrious had been canceled. Churchill wanted him to organize combined operations. Promoted to commodore, Mountbatten was ordered to prepare everything necessary—from landing craft to men—for raiding the coast of France, though in fact Mountbatten’s first raid was in Norway. (Mountba
tten also backed an extraordinary project to make unsinkable iceberg aircraft carriers—an idea, developed by some of his boffins, which collapsed because of the enormous expense involved.)
No False Humility
“My task is probably the biggest and most difficult which any Englishman has been given in the war. To reconquer Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and all the places in which the British Empire’s present forces received an unparalleled series of defeats on land, at sea, and in the air. Particularly as no one seems to have done anything about it until now!”
Mountbatten writing to his daughter Patricia about his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander of the Southeast Asian Theatre, 26 August 1943
Just as Drake had singed the beard of the king of Spain, Mountbatten’s task was to singe the toothbrush moustache of the führer of the Reich. In March 1942, his men destroyed the dry dock at St. Nazaire. Though these and other raids pleased Churchill and raised Allied morale, they often came at a high cost in casualties for the gains made. Churchill made Mountbatten an acting vice admiral and chief of combined operations.
As combined operations chief, Mountbatten organized the ill-fated raid on Dieppe where Canadian commandos took nearly seventy percent casualties—though Eisenhower said the hard lessons learned at Dieppe made success at Normandy possible, and Churchill’s confidence in Mountbatten was unabated. In October 1943, Churchill appointed Mountbatten Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, leading the campaign to reclaim Burma. In that role Mountbatten had to manage such difficult customers as the Anglophobic, misanthropic American General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell—one of whose nicest names for Mountbatten was “glamour boy” and who was officially his deputy—and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese nationalist government. The end result was victory over formidable obstacles of geography and disease and a fanatical enemy.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire Page 17