Indian Summer

by Alex Von Tunzelmann

  ‘Now that Nehru is gone we shall no longer have the enormously valuable access to the India Government’s inner councils which Lord Mountbatten’s personal friendship with him gave us at crucial moments,’ complained the British High Commission in Delhi.28 Mountbatten himself had other things to worry about. Douglas-Home’s Conservative government lost an election, and a Labour administration under Harold Wilson came in. Mountbatten soon clashed with Denis Healey, his new boss at the Ministry of Defence. Mountbatten wanted to abandon the separate Chiefs of Staff and integrate the three services into one department; Healey suspected that Mountbatten really wanted more control for himself. ‘I doubt if anyone else in my time could have met the requirements of a Chief of Defence Staff as Mountbatten conceived the post’, wrote Healey; ‘few other officers shared his confidence in his own qualifications for such a job.’29

  Mountbatten attracted the disapproval of his colleagues by attempting to have himself made a Field Marshal and an Air Marshal, in addition to an Admiral, prompting an official to write icily to the Prime Minister that ‘only members of the Royal Family have held five-star rank in all three Services’.30 During this period Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the General Staff, allegedly remarked to Mountbatten’s face that, ‘Dickie, you’re so bloody crooked that if you swallowed a nail, you’d shit a corkscrew!’31

  Sidelined, Mountbatten occupied his time with reorganizational fantasies and technological flights of fancy. His great ally was his Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Solly Zuckerman, a scientist distinguished originally in the field of monkey and ape behavioural science. Zuckerman had been involved in government work since before the Second World War, when someone at the Ministry of War, concerned with the effects of bomb blasts on the human body, apparently said: ‘What about calling in that monkey fellow?’32 Many exploded chimps later, it was conclusively established that the effect was detrimental.33 But Zuckerman had caught the eye of Dickie Mountbatten, who had appointed him to his staff at Combined Operations. By the 1960s, the two men formed what was known in Whitehall as the ‘Zuckbatten Axis’, bent on spreading technological innovation throughout the services.34

  Mountbatten’s interest in science occasionally crossed the line into science fiction, and he was keen for the Ministry of Defence to spend its time investigating the paranormal. He was excited when a giant carcass was found on the west coast of Tasmania, with no recognizable head, eyes or appendages. He sent news clippings to Zuckerman, wondering whether it might be a sea-monster, and badgered him to take the matter up with the Zoological Society. Zuckerman replied that, ‘It has been determined that it is “a lump of whale meat”.’ Having been defeated over his sea-monster, Mountbatten looked to the skies. ‘I have long been fascinated by Flying Saucers’, he wrote to Zuckerman a few months later, enclosing an imaginative magazine article on the subject. ‘Should Flying Saucers not be investigated further?’ Zuckerman wrote a kindly reply, explaining that it was not possible to establish conditions under which flying saucers might be impartially observed. ‘It is the same problem as with ghosts,’ he noted, perhaps hoping to forestall his friend’s next initiative.35

  When the time came for Dickie’s reappointment to be considered, Healey interviewed the top forty people in the Ministry of Defence. Only one supported Mountbatten’s reappointment, and that was an old friend of his – Sir Kenneth Strong, the Director General of Intelligence. ‘When I told Dickie of my decision not to reappoint him, he slapped his thigh and roared with delight,’ Healey remembered; ‘but his eyes told a different story.’36

  In retirement, there would be little for Dickie to do – though this never stopped him from doing it. He ran the Nehru Memorial Trust, raising £100,000 by 1966 to fund Indian scholars at British universities.37 He organized the Nehru Memorial Lecture, and ensured a decent attendance: Prince Charles was induced to leave a day’s shooting on his twentieth birthday to show up.38 Harold Wilson considered sending him to Rhodesia to sort out Ian Smith after that country’s white minority declaration of independence in 1965; Mountbatten leapt at the chance, and the Queen was in favour, but her courtiers quashed the idea.39 He was made responsible for a government report on prison reform. He made documentaries, taking a hand in the BBC’s notorious Royal Family, held by many commentators to have been the beginning of widespread public disrespect for the monarchy; in the programme the Queen bought an ice lolly, and Prince Philip was seen to barbecue a sausage.40 There was also a twelve-part series on himself to be fussed over, presenting his reputation as a great British hero. He was unwilling to share his script with the government, which worried about the political effect in Pakistan of his self-aggrandizing attitude.41 It was easy to see what they meant. At the end of the series, Dickie’s summing up was characteristic: ‘All I want to know is: was I right, were they wrong?’ he asked. ‘Will they eventually come round and see it? Or are they so dumb that it will have to be their children or grandchildren who will perhaps see this series of films in fifty years’ time and see that I was fairly reasonable and the people who thought I was wrong were the ones who were unreasonable.’42

  Most of all, though, Mountbatten wrote letters. The phrase ‘letters in green ink’ has long been used in the media to denote an eccentric strain of correspondence from members of the public. Mountbatten’s letters were typed in emerald green, on pale mint-green paper, embossed with a forest-green crest, and signed dandyishly with his decisive, upslanting script, ‘Mountbatten of Burma’, in sea green ink. Dozens of these letters are to be found in the British and Indian national archives. ‘What in God’s name has happened in the Ministry of Defence?’ he wrote to Solly Zuckerman, before launching into a diatribe against nuclear weapons.43 ‘I have been so worried about the situation in the sub-continent’, he wrote to General Cariappa of the Indian Army, and confessed that he had been ‘doing everything I can behind the scenes to try and explain India’s case’.44 The letters include multiple invitations, such as that extended to Harold Wilson in May 1966 for a private dinner with Mountbatten. Wilson’s secretary noted at the top that ‘The Prime Minister does not wish to take this up.’45

  After Nehru’s death, there had been no more great figures of independence to step into his shoes. The man who succeeded him, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had been chosen as the least objectionable candidate. The possibility of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, becoming Prime Minister had been dismissed as fanciful. But Shastri made her his Secretary of State for Information and Broadcasting and, when he died suddenly in January 1966, her name came up again. In a restrained and clever campaign which would be echoed forty years later by her daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, Indira played a subtle game of flirtation with the media and the party. This only served to endear her to an electorate which preferred its politicians to play hard to get. Finally, after a great deal of prevaricating, Indira shyly conceded that she would accept the prime ministership if the Congress President wished her to do so. ‘I am wholeheartedly overjoyed at this wonderful turn of events’, wrote Dickie Mountbatten. ‘How delighted your dear father would have been and Edwina also.’46

  President Lyndon B. Johnson was similarly smitten when she visited the United States in March. ‘What a nice girl, and how beautiful,’ he said to the Indian Ambassador, describing the forty-eight-year-old woman who had just become Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy. He declared an interest in bolstering her support. ‘You tell me what to do. Send her food? Attack her? I’ll do whatever you say.’ Indira herself, fielding a diplomatic enquiry about how Johnson should address her, showed her true character. ‘He can call me Madam Prime Minister, he can call me Prime Minister, he can call me Mr Prime Minister if he wants,’ she snapped. ‘You can tell him that my colleagues call me “Sir”.’47

  Unlike Jawahar, Indira found the processes of democratic government irritating and cumbersome. Soon she started to act without recourse to it. ‘My position among the people is uncontested,’ she declared.48 When she attacked the princes for their privy purses, M
ountbatten was shocked and upset. ‘I do hope Indu will do nothing that could in any way dishonour her father’s word’, he wrote to Nan Pandit, ‘and I have written to her to this effect in as friendly a way as possible.’49

  But Mountbatten’s main worries were closer to home. In London, the spirit of revolution was also in the air. When the Labour Party had been elected to power, the first person that Harold Wilson invited to lunch at 10 Downing Street had been Cecil King, a large, terse, ambitious newspaper magnate who controlled 40 per cent of the national circulation.50 King had supported Labour throughout the election, but by the summer of 1965 he had lost all faith in Wilson.51 King and Hugh Cudlipp, an old friend and chairman of the Mirror, decided that if Wilson would not change or go, he should be ousted by force. But who could lead the coup and replace Wilson at the head of a new, post-democratic administration? The answer had come to them by 12 August 1967, when King reported: ‘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.’52

  The idea floated around for some months before Cudlipp finally set up a meeting between Mountbatten and King, on 8 May 1968, in Mountbatten’s flat on Kinnerton Street. Solly Zuckerman also attended.53 King launched into a list of Wilson’s failings. If the government continued as it was, he said, the towns would be awash with blood, and there would be machine guns on street corners. Instead, he proposed a velvet revolution, but raised the question of who could head the replacement government of ‘national unity’: someone competent and non-partisan, who could command the confidence of the public.54 Was Mountbatten interested?

  Mountbatten was, according to Zuckerman ‘for a moment beguiled’.55 He turned to Zuckerman and asked him what he thought. Zuckerman got up and went to the door. ‘This is rank treachery,’ he said. ‘I am a public servant and will have nothing to do with it. Nor should you, Dickie.’56 Mountbatten tried to restrain him for a few moments, but he walked out. Afterwards, according to King’s diary, Mountbatten told him that morale in the services was low, and the Queen was ‘desperately worried’ over the situation.57 Cudlipp later admitted that Mountbatten told him he had raised the question of a coup with the Queen that month.58

  Private Eye magazine would later allege that Mountbatten had gone much further with this plan than this tale allowed, and even that he had begun to compile a list of military friends who might support him. The magazine claimed that it was Zuckerman who talked him out of it.59 Rumours in the highest circles at Buckingham Palace suggest the Eye had the right idea, but the wrong saviour. It was not Solly Zuckerman who talked Mountbatten out of staging a coup and making himself President of Britain. It was the Queen herself.60

  On 25 June 1970, Earl Mountbatten of Burma celebrated his seventieth birthday. He threw a weekend party at Broadlands, stocked with British and European royalty and other dignitaries. When the last of the guests left on the Monday morning, Mountbatten patted his valet on the shoulder. ‘Charles, that was the best birthday party of my life,’ he said. ‘Only one person was missing. I wish she had been alive to see it.’61 A decade after Edwina’s death, he was still mourning.

  By the 1970s, Mountbatten had outlived most of those whom he felt were his equals or superiors in class, style and outlook. Edwina had died in 1960; Alanbrooke in 1963; Nehru in 1964; Churchill and Ismay in 1965; Peter Murphy in 1966; the Duke of Windsor would go in 1972. He ate his meals alone in front of the television, watching Panorama, World in Action, and Horizon. He still enjoyed the company of women, but would not remarry: a man of his genealogical consciousness would not wish to jeopardize the position of his existing family, especially when – most unusually – he had secured a special remainder so that his title might pass to his daughter, Patricia. He was also obliged to spend some time fending off rumours about guardsmen when, in 1975, his name was whispered in connection with an exposé in the Daily Mirror about gay orgies at the Life Guards’ barracks in London. ‘I might have been accused of many things in my life but hardly of the act of homosexuality’, he wrote indignantly in his diary.62 He was accused of it again after a maid walked in while a photographer was attempting to remove the Admiral’s trousers, for reasons apparently connected with portraiture.63 He had continued his relationship with Yola Letellier.64 But any thoughts Mountbatten had about marrying other women were crowded out by the memory of Edwina. ‘If I lived for another hundred years,’ he told his valet, ‘I would not meet another woman to compare with Her Ladyship.’65

  With all his fancies of leading the nation returning to the dust whence they had come, Dickie was left functionless again. He took up any number of charitable presidencies and patronages. No Boy Scout troupe went unaddressed, no dinner-dance unattended, no regional administrative office unopened. The Queen took pity on him and made him Governor of the Isle of Wight, his childhood home. The former Viceroy of mighty India, who had wielded the power of life or, often, death over 400 million people, was entitled in this new role to attend council luncheons. With his great friend, Barbara Cartland, he collaborated on a romance novel, Love at the Helm. The hero is a dashing naval officer, Captain Conrad ‘Tiger’ Horn, with a penchant for neatly kept uniforms.66

  Indira Gandhi won a massive victory in the 1971 elections. That year, East Pakistan rebelled against West Pakistan. Indira sent troops to aid the rebels, and following an horrific civil war, East Pakistan seceded from Jinnah’s dream to become Bangladesh.

  In June 1975, Nan Pandit was in London for a wedding. She was queuing for breakfast at the Indian Students’ Hostel when she heard that, following accusations of electoral malpractice, an ‘emergency’ had been declared in India. Indira had suspended all human rights: property could not be owned, professions could not be pursued, and there was no freedom of movement, association, or speech. Total censorship had been imposed, especially on quotations about freedom from the writings of Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore. ‘It was reminiscent of the midnight knock of forty years ago in Hitler’s Germany,’ Nan remembered.67

  The emergency was a time of terror. Bulldozers cleared deprived areas, whose inhabitants were given as little as forty-five minutes’ notice to vacate them, in order to make way for property developers under the slogan ‘Make Delhi Beautiful’.68 Indira’s son, Sanjay, ran a programme to tackle overpopulation. His sterilization campaign put so much pressure on provincial officials to show results that stories became common of men being kidnapped and forcibly castrated, and the same men being operated upon two or even three times to make up the figures. Indira had her favourite slogan – ‘Indira is India, and India is Indira’ – displayed in colossal letters around the arcades of Connaught Circus.69

  Mountbatten was horrified. ‘I cannot tell you how infinitely saddened I am at what is being done to the memory of your great brother, Jawaharlal’, he wrote to Nan. ‘It is a tragedy, of course, that his own daughter, Indu, and that unfortunate young son of hers, Sanjay, should have behaved in such a way during the Emergency, to make it possible for the name of Nehru to be besmirched.’70 Indira cancelled the emergency on 18 January 1977 and called an election, in the belief that she would win it. She did not, and a rickety coalition of Hindu nationalists, Sikhs, farmers and the extreme right took over. Indira was shocked and hurt, more so yet when the new government imprisoned her. For all her ‘Indira is India’ rhetoric, she had badly misjudged the popular temperature.71

  Dickie had agreed with Nan that he would not see Indira publicly on her visit to London after her release in 1978, but would invite her to see him privately.72 Had he not wished to draw attention to the meeting, he could have picked a less conspicuous middleman. On 13 November, Barbara Cartland – in trademark searing pink and feathers, and with a white Pekingese dog under her arm – arrived at Claridge’s to whisk off Mrs Gand
hi in her Rolls Royce Silver Cloud. They drove to Dickie’s flat and stayed for half an hour, for what can only have been an uncomfortable chat. ‘We managed to keep off the Emergency’, Dickie reported to Nan, ‘and to talk in a friendly way about the old days with her father and you and the family generally.’73 Reporters congregated to observe the surreal scene. Did Indira read Miss Cartland’s books, they wondered – with an eye to the Indian setting of her 249th novel, Flowers for the God of Love, published that week? ‘Of course she does,’ snapped Miss Cartland.74 And what on earth did the three of them talk about, the crumbling semi-royal playboy, the disgraced Indian dictator, and the romance novelist? ‘We discussed inflation,’ replied Miss Cartland, then slammed shut the door of her car, and drove Indira back to the hotel.75

  Dickie’s main focus became that of his own dynastic succession, through the proxy of the Prince of Wales. Mountbatten had been behind the decisions to send Prince Charles to Gordonstoun, Cambridge and the Navy; he had encouraged him to play polo; he had provided the younger man with a weekend place away from his parents at Broadlands, to which girlfriends could be invited; he had even tried, and failed, to persuade Philip and Elizabeth to have their son’s ears pinned back before he went to school, which might have spared him a great deal of bullying from classmates and, later, the media.76 In the summer of 1979, he was orchestrating a putative relationship between Charles and a pretty young aristocrat called the Hon. Amanda Knatchbull. Miss Knatchbull happened to be Mountbatten’s granddaughter, and the opportunity to strengthen the concentration of his own blood in the royal veins was too delicious for the ageing schemer to pass up. He attempted to organize a trip to India, taking Charles and Amanda with him, but the potential for press intrusion put an end to that. Instead, he wrote to Nan that he might come alone, for he wanted to visit ‘the Ajunta [sic] Caves which I have never actually seen myself’.77 The opposition of Amanda’s parents to Mountbatten’s matchmaking, and the apparent lack of attraction between the couple, doomed the relationship.