The Mountbattens
Page 23
Elizabeth’s views of the Mountbattens had been shaped as much by her mother – who distrusted them, as her father – who accepted them. Dickie’s former chief of staff, Boy Browning, whom he had helped place as Comptroller of Philip and Elizabeth’s household, had warned a member of the royal party, ‘Remember you’ve got Dickie – he’d always rather do something under the table than above.’550
Dickie was anxious to know what she had thought of him, as Philip had told him she had not liked him, but in Malta the two warmed to each other. ‘She has done a lot of good functions & has gone down wonderfully with everybody here,’ Dickie wrote to his mother. ‘I’d never really known her before & have quite lost my heart to her; she is very sweet – and my word she is kind and thoughtful for Philip.’551
Mountbatten threw himself into his new job, making a point of entertaining extensively and going to sea every week, and he had quickly flown his flag in every ship in the Squadron. He also continued to demonstrate that he played by his own rules. During an exercise against the larger Home Fleet, he smuggled a Warrant Telegraphist ashore with a radio-transmitter, who proceeded to report the movements of the enemy fleet. When complaints were made, he replied that, ‘when he played war, he played with no holds barred.’552 His handling of ships also remained problematic. On one night-exercise, he ordered the torpedoes to position to fire to port and then directed the ships in a circle so they would have destroyed each other. One young officer could not help exclaiming, ‘The man’s mad!’553
His career, however, remained unaffected. In June 1949 he had been made a Vice-Admiral and the following spring his time with the First Cruiser Squadron ended and he was appointed to the Admiralty Board. ‘Vice-Admiral Mountbatten is most versatile and remarkable in ability and energy alike,’ began Power’s final report. ‘Ambitious and perhaps impetuous, but not rash. A tremendous asset to the service to which he is devoted.’554
There were Five Sea Lords on the Admiralty Board: the First headed the Navy, the Second was responsible for personnel, the Third handled the design and building of ships, the Fifth was in charge of the naval air service. Mountbatten, having hoped to be chosen to run personnel, was appointed the Fourth Sea Lord and was responsible for stores and pay.
He put a brave face on it. ‘Well, having blown off steam,’ he wrote to Patricia, ‘let me tell you that if I am sent as 4th Sea Lord I should go very humbly and loyally and do my best. I accepted to go back and take my chance at carving out a naval career and I have such ludicrous self-confidence that I still think I can get to First Sea Lord.’555
There was much that needed to be done. There were insufficient uniforms for the 150,000 reservists available for mobilisation, the mine-sweeping fleet was under-resourced, and pay needed to be reviewed. Within a month, he had visited the five major naval depots and each office in the Victualling and Stores Department. Crucially, the job gave him added experience of the workings of Whitehall, which was to prove useful in his career.
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In February 1952, George VI died just after the Mountbattens’ annual visit to Sandringham. ‘A real shock,’ wrote Edwina to Nehru. ‘How fit we had found him shooting and walking in spite of intense cold and arctic winds.’556 He and Dickie had been close since their time at Cambridge together 30 years earlier, and had corresponded on a regular basis. Dickie had always been scrupulous about keeping the Sovereign informed and making him feel important. He had also never been reluctant to use the King’s ‘wishes’ to secure his own objectives.
As at the start of George’s reign, Dickie pushed himself forward, or made himself indispensable according to one’s point of view. Together with Churchill and the Duke of Gloucester, it was the Mountbattens who met Elizabeth when she returned to Britain from a tour to Kenya as Queen on 7 February. At the funeral, he had asked if he could walk immediately behind the coffin, as his father had at the funeral of Edward VII, until rebuffed by the Earl Marshall, the Duke of Norfolk, who was in charge of the arrangements. The young Queen did so instead.
For Dickie, the new regime signified the triumph of the House of Mountbatten and at a dinner at Broadlands the day after the funeral, he gave such a toast. One of the guests, Prince Ernst of Hanover, reported it to Queen Mary who complained to Winston Churchill, pointing out that George V in 1917 had decreed the House of Windsor to be the Royal Family’s name forever. Churchill immediately called a Cabinet meeting to discuss, aware that public opinion, so soon after two wars against the Germans, would be against such a link. No one quite knew the position given the Queen’s married name was Mountbatten, and a new decree had to be made in April re-emphasising the position. Philip was furious that he could not pass on his own name to his children.557
Even so, there were continuing concerns about Mountbatten’s Svengali influence over the Royal Family and his left-wing views. Philip and Elizabeth were regular guests at Broadlands, and there were rumours that he was plotting to have Philip made King Consort.558 When the Duke of Windsor was over for his brother’s funeral, he noted of Mountbatten that ‘one can’t pin much on him but he’s very bossy & never stops talking. All are suspicious & watching his influence on Philip.’559
Dickie wrote to Edwina in February1952:
Four different people have come to me in the last two or three days to say that London is buzzing with rumours and talk in the clubs, etc. that I was to be offered an immediate post abroad so as to remove us from being able to influence Lilibet through Philip. My own influence was viewed with apprehension, and there was also the view that I would be passing on extreme left-wing views from you! Of course you always tell me that I am very right wing and reactionary compared with you . . .560
The reason for the gossip was an article in an American newsletter, ‘The Bulletin of the International Services of Information’, run by former intelligence officer Ulius Amoss, under the headline ‘A Red Aura Hangs Over the Mountbattens’ – which, amongst many claims, accused Peter Murphy, a strong influence on the couple, of being a member of the Communist Party. It was sufficient for MI5 to conduct an investigation into Murphy and raise their concerns with Mountbatten himself.561 The FBI also investigated and deemed Amoss a nutter, but this was just the sort of attention that a senior naval officer did not need.
The Mountbattens’ politics were complex. As a serving naval officer and member of the Royal Family, Dickie always claimed to try and stay above party politics – though he had to be rebuked at one stage by the First Lord of the Admiralty. ‘There is a feeling that in some of your conversations . . . you have approached rather too closely to the dividing line between legitimate naval interests and foreign policy.’562 He was a technocrat, keen to get things done, and a pragmatist, but he was also a progressive when it came to national aspirations and his record in India had aroused suspicion in right-wing quarters.
Edwina’s politics were certainly to the left of his. Dining with Edwina in September 1944, Chips Channon noted in his diary:
However, politically, she talked tripe, and pretended to be against all monarchy, she who is cousin to every monarch on earth. According to her, they must all be abolished. How easy it seems for a semi-royal millionaire, who has exhausted all the pleasures of money and position, to turn almost Communist.563
‘My mother was genuinely left wing and my father would try and persuade her only to argue with those she could influence and not die-hard Admirals but that was, of course, much more fun,’ remembered her daughter Pamela. ‘She worked with Jennie Lee and the Labour Government . . . several times people said they had been persuaded to vote Conservative after being charmed by her on the assumption she was a Conservative. She was very annoyed.’564
Her travels and humanitarian work had opened her eyes to the suffering in the world and the failure of governments to properly address it. Idealistic, perhaps politically naïve, she was deeply critical of American foreign policy and Britain’s post-war colonial policy, especially in Malaya and East Africa.
On the day b
efore the Coronation, tensions between her and government ministers came to a head at a lunch at Buckingham Palace when she, Nehru and Oliver Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary, got into an argument about British policing in Kenya. It was sufficiently heated for Lyttelton to complain to the Cabinet and for Mountbatten to receive a letter from the First Lord of the Admiralty that it would be prudent for her not to accompany him on a forthcoming official trip to Turkey. Edwina, who planned to visit hospitals and universities on the trip, was incandescent.
After letters to both the First Lord and Foreign Secretary, giving her own version of the conversation, the Admiralty relented – but Edwina was to provide a convenient whipping boy for Dickie’s enemies for years to come.565
CHAPTER 22
Separate Lives
In the spring of 1952, Dickie’s time as Fourth Sea Lord ended and he moved on to his next post, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, taking up residence in Admiralty House, a five-bedroomed house with a ballroom in a narrow street in the middle of Valetta. ‘In the entrance hall the soaring staircase rose between great marble plaques that listed all the naval commanders-in-chief since Nelson,’ remembered Pamela Mountbatten. ‘The garden overlooked the ramparts and could be reached only through a tunnel beneath the street and a climb up a steep staircase. When the fleet was berthed in Malta, my father worked in an office overlooking Grand Harbour.’566
Edwina continued her tours for St John Ambulance, Save the Children and the Red Cross and her involvement with Naval Wives Voluntary Service, the Allied Wives’ Club, the Service Families Nursery and Convalescent Home, Malta Memorial District Nursing Association, Sea Rangers and Girl Guides. She set up a scheme for a volunteer car service for hospital patients and a ‘housewives mutual help service’.
Brian Smith was a young secretarial officer in the Commander-in-Chief’s Office, responsible amongst other things for the printing office. When he was duty secretary, one of his tasks was to take Mountbatten’s correspondence from the Naval Headquarters to Admiralty House at about nine in the evening, and wait on Mountbatten whilst he went through the papers that Ronnie Brockman had weeded out as requiring his personal attention, which usually took about an hour:
He’d hardly acknowledge that I was there. In all the time I was doing this, I only remember one piece of conversation complaining that his biro was not working. His usual place of work was his office in the naval headquarters in Lascaris, overlooking Grand Harbour. He would work there in the mornings doing the routine work of the day and exchanging calls. Then in the afternoons he would usually play polo. He did not seem overly concerned with the day-to-day running of the Fleet. He left that to the Chief of Staff (Manley Power), his Secretary (Ronnie Brockman) and the Captain of the Fleet. He delegated well and made sure he was supported by able people, while he focused on the matters that interested him. At this time, he was very much concerned with the setting up of a NATO Command – Allied Forces Mediterranean – which would make him a senior NATO commander.
Whenever he visited any ship or naval establishment, he always insisted on being well briefed, in particular he wanted people to think that he remembered them, which was not the case, and he would get lists of people in the ship who had served with him so that he could surprise them by appearing to remember their names at a ‘contrived chance meeting’; sometimes when it went wrong, there were embarrassing mistakes. One of his hobbies was keeping up to date and publishing his family tree and he was extremely upset to find that the printing office did not have the same typeface to match the original for amendments. Every day his daily programme was printed and circulated to both Service and Civil Authorities in Malta. He wanted people to know what he was doing.567
But Edwina was very different:
He and Lady Louis seemed to lead separate lives, going about their various engagements on their own. They were not often seen with each other unless attending an official function where they had to be together. If she needed any printing done for the Naval Wives Organisation, she would ask me to go to Admiralty House to discuss it and if it was about lunchtime, I would be asked to have lunch, which was very informal and enjoyable. She would kick her shoes off under the table complaining of sore feet. She would always make you feel that you were important to her and would encourage you to talk. She was always very grateful for anything that was done for her.568
In September, the Mountbattens cruised for a month on HMS Surprise, the Commander-in-Chief’s frigate for official visits, bringing with them Yola Letellier. Malcolm Sargent joined the ship in Naples, ostensibly to discuss arrangements for the following year’s coronation concerts. Over the next two weeks he and Edwina, according to his private diaries, spent ‘hours of bliss, lolling in the sunshine’ on the Commander-in-Chief’s private deck, played with dolphins in the waters off Capri, climbed Mount Vesuvius, and toured the brothel district of Algiers.569
Dickie was himself enjoying his own affairs. According to Mountbatten’s private secretary, John Barratt:
He met another of his favourite women friends when he was in command of the Mediterranean fleet in the 1950s. She was very pretty [but] . . . She was not popular with the staff at Broadlands, to whom she was off-hand and patronising; I heard her described as a ‘snooty little bitch’ and worse. Lord Mountbatten kept an occasional relationship with her through the sixties, but by the seventies it had faded out.570
One particular issue as part of his new job was the division of responsibilities between Dickie, based in Malta, and his American counterpart, Admiral Carney, Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, based in Naples, which was only resolved that winter when the jobs were combined and given to Mountbatten. An integrated naval/air headquarters staffed by admirals from Italy, France, Greece, the United States and Turkey was set up, which had so many flags in front that it was nicknamed ‘Selfridges’ after the London department store. As he had at SEAC, and would do again in the future, Mountbatten soon succeeded in persuading different services and countries to become a reasonably coherent international force.
In February 1953, Mountbatten was promoted to Admiral. His nephew, who had recently been appointed Admiral of the Fleet on retirement from his naval career, telegraphed his congratulations: ‘Keep it up – you may catch up one day!’571
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The fifties were spent with Edwina caught between her husband and the man she had given her heart to. Each spring she would go to India, where she would stay at the Prime Minister’s house, and most years Nehru would come to Britain. At first, they had written to each other every day, but within a year it was weekly and by 1954, it was fortnightly.
But the bond remained strong. It was a bond that Dickie accepted, not least because it kept relations harmonious, but which unsettled Edwina. Throughout the early and mid-fifties she often discussed divorce. ‘I’ve never attempted to stop you or hold you and I never shall,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want you to stay against your will. I am not that selfish.’572 But she stayed. She stayed because of children and grandchildren, because she liked the life that Dickie gave her, because he loved and needed her and because, in her confused state of mind, she also continued to love him.
Shortly after George VI’s death, Edwina, hospitalised with a haemorrhage and worried she might die, passed Nehru’s letters to her husband for safekeeping.573 Dickie, nervous of what they might contain, asked Pamela if she would look at them first. Edwina’s confessional letter read:
You will realise that they are a mixture of typical Jawaharlal letters full of interest and facts and really historic documents. Some of them have no ‘personal’ remarks at all. Others are love letters in a sense, though you yourself well realise the strange relationship – most of it spiritual – which exists between us. J has obviously meant a great deal in my life, in these last years, and I think I in his too. Our meetings have been rare and always fleeting, but I think I understand him, and perhaps he me, as well as any human beings can ever unders
tand each other . . . It is rather wonderful that my affection and respect and gratitude and love for you are really so great that I feel I would rather you had these letters than anyone else, and I feel you would understand and not in any way be hurt – rather the contrary. We understand each other so well although so often we seem to differ and to be miles apart. You have been very sweet and good to me, and we have had a great partnership. My admiration and my devotion to you are very great. I think you know that. I have had a very full and a very happy life on the whole – all thanks to you! Bless you and with my lasting love.574
Dickie waited a year to answer:
I’m glad you realise that I know and have always understood the very special relationship between Jawaharlal and you, made the easier by my fondness and admiration for him, and by the remarkably lucky fact that among my many defects God did not add jealousy in any shape or form. I honestly don’t believe I’ve ever known what jealousy means – universal as it seems to be – and if it concerns the happiness of anyone I’m as fond of as you, then only my desire for your happiness exists. That is why I’ve always made your visits to each other easy and been faintly hurt when at times (such as in 1951) you didn’t take me into your confidence right away. Considering how deeply fond we are of each other and how proud and admiring I certainly am of all your wonderful achievements, I cannot but be sad and worried that we should have had so many differences . . . I know I’m selfish and difficult but that doesn’t change my deep and profound love for you . . . You have been my mainstay, my inspiration and my true companion for far more than half my life.575
What was the nature of the relationship with Nehru? Edwina’s authorised biographer, Janet Morgan, has claimed, having talked to ‘those who knew them well’, that it was purer than a physical relationship, that Nehru respected Dickie and would not have abused that trust. ‘To all her lovers she had given only the shell of herself. In exposing her doubts and hopes, she had exhausted herself to Nehru in a way that was more profound than a mere physical embrace. Nothing must be allowed to degrade the precious relationship.’576