Indian Summer
Page 6
The second feature was a great gift for storytelling, unspoilt by any preoccupation with the truth. The above tale of capturing 150 swooning, girlish hearts, for instance, was often told by Mountbatten himself in later life. And yet a search through the local Dartmouth newspapers from the winter of 1915–16 turns up no such advert, and the giving-away of the letters means that there is no evidence in the Mountbatten archive, either. The tale may be true, or it may be ‘rather inaccurate’, but it makes a nice story. As such it is similar to many of Mountbatten’s favourite anecdotes.
The third, and perhaps the strongest, of Mountbatten’s distinguishing features was a passion for formality. He adored ceremony, and developed an infatuation with orders and rank. He would amass an extraordinary collection of decorations: the octagonal collar of the Royal Victorian Order with its eight gold roses; the Maltese cross of the Order of St John, with two lions and two unicorns rampant between its points; the heron- and ostrich-plumed hat and the jewelled strap of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Most delightful of all was surely the star and sash of the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant. This distinguished Thai order was founded in 1861 by King Mongkut Rama IV, perhaps better known to Westerners in fictionalized form as the hero of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I. But the Order of the White Elephant is no fiction, and at his country house, Broadlands, Dickie’s still hangs proudly on its pink sash.18
Springing from a long line of royal sticklers, fussers and pedants, Mountbatten had been bred for pageantry. It was a good thing, for he seemed not to have been bred for the navy. A fellow officer later admitted that Mountbatten ‘knew nothing about the sea at all; he went into the Navy because it was in his family rather than in his blood.’19 One of his instructors reported that Mountbatten was slower than the average cadet, and that he would only ever keep up by hard work. Fortunately, Mountbatten had an insatiable appetite for hard work, and a burning ambition which would both literally and figuratively keep his head above water. At the age of eighteen, he had been made second-in-command of his first ship, a patrol vessel called HMS P31. His greatest achievement was to have it moored at Westminster and visited by King George V and Princess Mary – an event which set the tone for his career, in which the stage-managing of publicity coups would be paramount.20
In 1919, Dickie was released from the Navy to go to Cambridge, where he matriculated at Christ’s College. Entrance to the two most hallowed of English universities in those days had little to do with academic merit, and a lot to do with connections and money. The intensely anti-intellectual Prince of Wales, Prince Edward (‘David’), had already been through Magdalen College, Oxford, where he found it necessary to keep his private tutor with him at all times. His younger brother Prince Albert (‘Bertie’), who had been placed sixty-eighth out of sixty-eight in his final examinations at Osborne, was at Trinity College, Cambridge. Another brother, Prince Henry, was so profoundly dim of wit that even the royals themselves looked down on him (David was said to have remarked that the only reason ‘poor Harry’ recognized the National Anthem was because everybody stood up). He was about to start alongside his brother at Trinity. Unfortunately the royal family viewed education with the same suspicion with which a villageful of medieval peasants viewed witchcraft. The King refused to let Bertie and Harry live among their college peers. Instead he put them up at Southacre, a large house which was a good distance out of town, and consequently the shy Bertie made no friends at all, while Harry spent most of his university career setting up mousetraps in the conservatory. The young princes were fortunate in having one person who could provide a link to the distant social whirl of undergraduate life – their cousin, Dickie Mountbatten.
Being at Cambridge at the same time as the princes was a stroke of luck for Dickie. The Empire, though at its largest ever extent, had been troubled by the war. There was an opportunity at the heart of the royal family for someone with an instinctive feel for public relations, someone who could stand as a great British hero, steady the national identity, and move the throne forwards into a new democratic age. It was widely assumed that this would be the enormously popular golden boy, David, who would one day reign as Edward VIII. But, as royal families have long learned, it is no bad thing to have a spare besides an heir. By moving into the close cabal that surrounded the royal family, Dickie was moving closer towards fulfilling his own ambition: to restore his family to the very top of British public life.
Even before the war, the British Empire had been modifying its relationship with its colonies. Four of its great territories – Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada – now held ‘dominion status’, allowing them a measure of self-government. It was incongruous that India remained a mere colony. The incongruity was enhanced by the fact that India had provided wartime supplies of food and soldiers, the latter widely recruited by Mohandas Gandhi, who still professed that those who wished for rights must act like they deserved them. But the British government in India appeared to be moving towards greater control. In February 1919, it introduced the Rowlatt Bills, two pieces of anti-terrorist legislation which were intended to reinforce the totalitarian powers that had been granted to the judiciary in wartime. Gandhi saw these bills as an open challenge. On 18 March 1919, the Imperial Legislative Council forced the Rowlatt Act into law, despite the opposition of every Indian member. Three weeks later, on 6 April, Gandhi called a hartal – a day of prayer and fasting that effectively functioned as a general strike. It was the first major nationwide and interfaith protest against the British government since the Mutiny. Some protesters became so incensed that the non-violent character of the hartal was forgotten, and riots broke out. The British grew frantic, and far-fetched rumours spread among the troops. British soldiers heard that Gandhi himself had sponsored circulars inciting Indian patriots to murder European men and ravish European women.21 Gandhi had done nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he condemned his followers’ heated behaviour.22
But the most significant incident, which would change the whole course of British imperial history, was to take place in Amritsar, north of Delhi. On 10 April 1919, two Indian leaders who had been organizing the hartals were arrested. In consequence, there was a massive riot. Forty thousand people ran amok in the city, pillaging and burning buildings, and killing five white men as well as seriously injuring two women. The next morning, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer arrived from Jullundur to take command of the scorched city.
Dyer had served in the eastern Empire for over thirty years. He was known for his short fuse, but maintained an excellent rapport with the Indian soldiers under his command.23 On assuming command in Amritsar, he issued a proclamation warning that gatherings would be fired on. ‘Respectable persons,’ it warned, ‘should stay indoors.’24 By the morning of 13 April, the proclamation was being disobeyed, though not for nefarious purposes. That day happened to be a Sikh festival, Baisakhi Day, which was also celebrated by Hindus as the first day of harvest. Dyer sent his troops on to the streets to repeat the proclamation in Urdu and Punjabi, and added a curfew to the ordinances. Owing to the intense heat, and the small number of soldiers available, few citizens had any chance of hearing the proclamation. Many of them ran to hide at the first sight of British troops.25
At four o’clock that afternoon, Dyer received reports that a meeting was taking place in Jallianwala Bagh. The Bagh was an area of enclosed scrubland with only three narrow exits – one of which had been closed up. As usual on a Sunday afternoon, it was full of people. Hundreds used the Bagh as a social meeting place every day, and the crowd was swelled to thousands by out-of-town families who had come in for the festival. In one corner was the political meeting that had so outraged Dyer. A wooden platform had been set up near a well, and various poets and activists were speaking to the crowd.
Just before 5.15 p.m., Dyer arrived with 100 Gurkha, Sikh, Pathan and Baluchi riflemen, and 40 more Gurkhas armed with knives.26 He stopped outside one of the two open exits, and sent a man in
to estimate the size of the crowd – 5000, the report came back. Later estimates suggested it must have been between three and ten times that figure. The troops marched in and set up their rifles. Dyer’s instructions were specific: aim straight and low, fire at the fullest part of the crowd, and pick off any stragglers who try to escape. No warning was given before the troops opened fire.
The gathering, though technically illegal, had been peaceful until Dyer showed up. At his order, 1650 bullets were fired into the throng of men, women and children. Soldiers deliberately blocked the exits, trapping people in the killing ground. In desperation, they clawed their way up the walls, scrambled over their injured friends, and leapt down the open well, which filled with 120 bodies drowning and suffocating in water thick with blood. The slaughter went on until the ammunition was spent. Official estimates put the death toll at 379, with at least 1200 more injured. Popular estimates went much higher. Many of the victims were too scared to seek medical assistance from the British hospitals, and the curfew prevented families from searching for their dead.27
Dyer showed no remorse in the aftermath of his massacre. Instead, he had high-caste Indians whom he suspected of political agitation rounded up and publicly flogged. Any Indian who dared approach the street where a Christian missionary had been dragged off her bicycle was forced to crawl face-down in the dirt.
Dyer’s action had been vicious, decisive and unforgettable, and would polarize political opinion across the Empire. Strict military censorship slowed the spread of news, but so shocking a tale could not stay secret for long. By 30 May, it had reached Bengal. The national poet, Rabindranath Tagore, immediately resigned his knighthood. ‘The time has come when the badges of honour make our shame glaring in the incongruous context of humiliation,’ he explained to the Viceroy.28 Motilal Nehru wrote that, ‘My blood is boiling’, causing his daughter Betty to add that, ‘If his blood was in that condition, my brother [Jawahar]’s was like superheated steam.’29 Amritsar was the most influential single incident in the radicalization of Congress, and in the radicalization of the Nehrus.30
More surprising, perhaps, was the great upsurge in popular backing for Dyer. ‘I thought I would be doing a jolly lot of good,’ said the man himself, and there was no shortage of people who agreed with him.31 The House of Lords passed a motion in his support. The Morning Post newspaper started a drive to raise funds for his retirement; £26,000 was collected, from members of the public and celebrities, including Rudyard Kipling, and the Duke of Somerset. When Sir Edwin Montagu rose in Parliament to condemn Dyer for terrorism and racial humiliation of the Indians, he was shouted down by Conservative members crying, ‘It saved a mutiny,’ accusing him of Bolshevism, and screaming anti-Semitic insults. The session nearly turned into a physical fight.32 Even among Indians there was support for Dyer. The Sikh leaders in Amritsar made him an honorary Sikh, staging a special ceremony in their holiest site, the Golden Temple.33
But perhaps the most surprising response of all came from Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of the formerly peaceful campaign which had ended in such carnage. On 18 April, newspapers printed a letter from Gandhi expressing regret for the civil disobedience campaign. ‘I am sorry, when I embarked on a mass movement, I underrated the forces of evil’, he wrote, ‘and I must now pause and consider how best to meet the situation.’34 Discussing the victims of Dyer’s massacre, he declared that they ‘were definitely not heroic martyrs’, and criticized them for having ‘taken to their heels’ rather than face death calmly.35 He continued to profess that he believed the British would see justice done.36 Gandhi had fought for the British Empire for the entirety of his adult life. He believed in it; what he wanted for the Indian people was that they be recognized and treated as full subjects, and that they act in a way to deserve such an honour.
The plea against arbitrary justice in the Roman Empire, as famously invoked by St Paul at Philippi, was ‘Civis Romanus sum’ – I am a Roman citizen. Many years later, the Indian writer Nirad Chaudhuri converted this to ‘Civis Britannicus sum’ – I am a British citizen. Chaudhuri was widely seen in post-imperial India as being an apologist for British rule, but in fact he was making a point no different from Gandhi’s in 1919. It was an appeal for inclusion within the British imperial family; a sentiment young Dickie Battenberg, estranged by his German name, would have felt as he saluted the Union Jack at Osborne with tears of humiliation rolling down his cheeks.37
The Hunter Commission was set up on 14 October 1919 to inquire into the massacre and other disorders in Bombay, Delhi and the Punjab. It took five months to conclude that Dyer had been in the wrong. Congress ran its own inquiry into events, with young Jawaharlal Nehru sent to inspect the Bagh and take evidence. Later that year, Jawahar got on the night train to Delhi at Amritsar. It was full, and he crept into the only upper berth that was not occupied by a sleeping body. Only the next morning did he realize that he was travelling in a carriage full of loud, blustering officers of the Indian Army. The loudest and most blustering among them was Brigadier General Dyer himself, bragging of his exploits at Amritsar. ‘He pointed out how he had the whole town at his mercy and he had felt like reducing the rebellious city to a heap of ashes, but he took pity on it and refrained,’ Jawahar remembered. ‘I was greatly shocked to hear his conversation and to observe his callous manner. He descended at Delhi station in pyjamas with bright pink stripes, and a dressing-gown.’38
Dyer was asked to resign from the army. He escaped prosecution and lived out his remaining years quietly in Bristol. Gandhi was eventually moved from his patriotic position with great difficulty, having given the British administration every opportunity to prove itself responsive. Had the British at this point allowed moderate concessions, the following years might have been a great deal easier for them as well as for their king’s Indian subjects. Unfortunately, they did nothing. Fourteen months after Tagore had resigned his knighthood, Gandhi belatedly returned to the Viceroy his Kaiser-i-Hind medal. He declared his first national satyagraha campaign, and he and Congress declared themselves in favour of swaraj – meaning self-rule, defined as ‘political and spiritual’ independence.39
In London, it was felt that the reputation of the Empire had taken a serious knock. King George V had sensibly issued a pardon for all those involved in the Punjab rioting just before Congress opened its session of December 1919. The Congress president, Motilal Nehru, joined Gandhi in sending grateful thanks to the King ‘for his act of mercy’.40 In reality, the act had been pragmatic. The Empire’s image needed a boost, and the energies of its subjects needed to be refocused on patriotic pride. The government hit upon a simple solution. The King’s son David, Prince of Wales, was young, handsome and popular. Though he spent all of his free time in nightclubs dancing with other men’s wives and moaning about his royal burden, the press obediently presented him as a clean-cut young soldier hero and the most eligible bachelor in Europe. He was the ideal ‘face’ of the British Empire – and so he would be sent to tour his future domain. This would serve a triple purpose. First, David could act as an ambassador for British rule. Second, he could learn about the many lands and peoples that would one day be subject to him. And, third, it would get him away from his debauched Mayfair set – not least his unsuitable girlfriend Freda Dudley-Ward, who was married to someone else.
David’s cousin Dickie Mountbatten was not really a member of that set, being slightly too young and too gauche to join in. But his carefully nurtured friendships with David’s less glamorous brothers Bertie and Harry had brought him to the inner circle of royal life. One night, David was talking about his trips abroad at a Buckingham Palace dinner, and suggested to the rapt Dickie that he should come along as his aide-de-camp.
The process of inspecting his future Empire, and letting it inspect him, was to prove tiresome to the Prince of Wales. David was lonely on HMS Renown. The only people he considered to be friends were Dickie and an equerry called Piers Legh. ‘Dickie is keen & cheery about everything, though of cours
e he is such a baby!!’ the prince wrote to Mrs Dudley-Ward on the day after he sailed from Portsmouth, 17 March 1920. ‘But he’s a vewy clever boy & goes out of his way to be nice & kind & sympathetic & attentive to me as I think he guesses a little how I’m feeling. I’m so glad I’ve got him with me & I think we are going to be great friends.’41
The cousins did indeed become great friends, and quickly. Dickie was the only person the prince saw during his long cruises around the world to whom he could relate on equal terms and, conspicuously, the only person aboard ship who could call the prince ‘David’, rather than ‘Sir’. The two men shared the same sense of humour, so common among royalty, centred around practical jokes. And they were both lovesick: David for Mrs Dudley-Ward, and Dickie, apparently, for a new girl each week. ‘Dickie has been sitting in my cabin for 1/2 hr while I undressed & has told me all his “love affairs” as he calls them!!’ the prince wrote to Mrs Dudley-Ward. ‘He makes me laugh, sweetie, particularly when he mentions the word love!!’42 Dickie had been pining for an Englishwoman, Audrey James, to whom he was tentatively engaged following a dogged pursuit – but she would chuck him on his return, and absence did not appear to be making his heart grow fonder, either. On tour, he flirted with all the cheerful abandon of one let off the leash, and delighted in dancing and playing Ludo with ‘a lot of pretty girls’.43
The tour’s first destination was Barbados (‘I haven’t landed yet sweetheart but it looks a proper bum island this Barbados,’ David confided to Mrs Dudley-Ward)44, and it was there that the standard for the trip was set. David spent the days moping about in between ponderous ceremonials and formal parties, while Dickie plied him with horseplay and dancing partners in an attempt to lighten things up. The two men soon found themselves riding together, drinking together, going to parties together, learning to surf together, sleeping on deck with their beds pushed together, and even, one hot afternoon in Fiji, bathing together. ‘Plenty of room for two!!’ David exclaimed as he and Dickie threw themselves into a tiled pool at Government House and ordered reviving cocktails.45 (Back in Britain, the King was not impressed. ‘You and Dick in a swimming pool together is hardly dignified, though comfortable in a hot climate, you might as well be photographed naked, no doubt it would please the public,’ he wrote acidly.)46 Most of all, they joked together. They tied up officers and dunked them in a bath. They attempted to train David’s pet wallaby, Digger, to perform tricks. They flooded bathrooms. They raided gentlemen’s cloakrooms, and dressed up in silly outfits: ‘Dickie & I found some of our host’s clothes & opera hats & tennis boots in his room (he was away) & we dolled ourselves up & made everybody laugh too which was so amazing! But as you can guess my beloved my mild hilarity was merely due to some very good brown sherry His Ex gave us for dinner though I wasn’t in any way toxi-boo.’47