His final years as First Sea Lord were concerned with adapting the Navy to the age of nuclear weapons, managing demands for reduction in personnel, and defending the Navy against government cuts, especially its reduced role against the Army and Air Force and with the increased role of NATO. The latter he achieved with some success, cutting the civilian staff by 23,500 with the General List only pruned by 1,900 and pay increased. In May 1958, he was offered the post of Chief of the Defence Staff and was succeeded as First Sea Lord by Charles Lambe. After 40 years, his career in the Royal Navy was over.
* * *
On a snowy January day in 1960, Pamela married David Hicks, an interior decorator, at Romsey Abbey in what the press called ‘The Wedding of the Year’.611 The date had been picked to suit the Royal Family and most of them were in evidence. All except the Queen, who was expecting Prince Andrew. Princess Anne was a bridesmaid and Prince Philip proposed the toast. Amongst the guests were numerous crowned heads of Europe, Noël Coward, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Malcolm Sargent, Clement Attlee, Bernard Montgomery and Harold Macmillan, many of whom had to get out and push the coach between Romsey station and the house when it became trapped in snow.
The main reception was held at Broadlands and was marked by a power cut and the appearance of a smartly dressed old lady wrapped in furs, who introduced herself as Princess Victoria of Hildenbergh, but who didn’t appear on any list of invited guests. Bill Evans, who had just joined the staff as a valet, remembered, ‘In the hall Lady Louis immediately took charge, kissing the old lady on the cheek and saying: “My dear how lovely to see you . . . You must be very tired after your journey, Your Royal Highness. Let me take you to your room to tidy up.” The police were called and the old dear escorted off the premises.’612
Five days later, after a brief visit to Sandringham to see the Queen, Edwina left for a ten-week tour of Asia. ‘I am off at dawn filled with trepidation and hardly dare even to think about my Tour, as it would be far too exhausting a process,’ she wrote to her husband. ‘I shall miss you a lot and think of you a great deal.’613
Edwina’s punishing work schedule had already begun to take its toll. She constantly suffered from flu, tiredness, headaches and insomnia. In 1956, her doctor had diagnosed mild angina and warned she would be dead in three years if she did not slow down. Two years later, a growth in the parotid gland was surgically removed, giving her a lopsided cheek and drooping eye, and the impression she had suffered a stroke. In January 1959, she had caught chickenpox from a grandchild and the following year was told by her doctor that her angina had worsened and, without rest, she had only months to live. She had said nothing to her family and simply pressed on, as she was doing now.
After being reunited with Nehru in India, she flew on to Singapore and from there on 18 February to Borneo. After a day’s rest, she threw herself into her programme, touring an army training area, watching a gymkhana and attending an eight-course Chinese dinner given by St John Ambulance. Robert Turner, the acting Governor with whom she was staying, later recollected that, though she picked at her food, she still managed to speak:
with complete assurance for some ten minutes without notes . . . On reaching my house, she was preceding me up the incline leading to the steps up to the entrance when she suddenly caught the railing, and my wife took her arm. She confessed that she had a headache and was tired but declined offers of aspirin etc, thanked my wife and myself for a most enjoyable day and went into her room. About an hour later my wife noticed that the light in her room was on.614
Turner’s wife knocked and asked if she was alright. ‘She replied, “Yes fine,” and after exchanging good-nights she returned to her room. The next day Edwina complained of a chronic headache and a local doctor was summoned. ‘He did not think there was anything medically wrong, but that she might have the beginnings of flu or even malaria,’ Turner later wrote.615
After visiting a local hospital, she briefly attended a coffee morning for representatives from local voluntary organisations and then rested until the afternoon when, resplendent in white uniform with a full row of medals, she inspected a police band, presented some certificates and made a short speech, followed by a brief appearance at an evening reception. Turner, concerned about her health, suggested she should postpone her flight for the following day, Sunday, until Monday. She smiled and ‘said she would “see” in the morning.’616
At 7.30 a.m. the next morning, her assistant, Irene Checkley, went to her room to help her get ready for her departure for the airport. The curtains had been drawn back, letting in the early morning light. Edwina was still in bed. A touch of her cold cheek confirmed she was dead, at the age of 59. Around her lay some of Nehru’s letters.617
The doctor who had seen her the previous day was summoned and pronounced death from artery coronary thrombosis at 2.30 a.m. Dressed in her white St John uniform, after a short service conducted by an Assistant Bishop called from another Sunday service, she was driven to Government House where the air-conditioning was better, and placed under police guard. That evening her coffin, hastily constructed that day, was taken to the airport for the start of her sad journey home.
Dickie was at Broadlands and learnt of his wife’s death from a phone call at 3.00 a.m. from Turner. ‘It was a poleaxe blow. I simply couldn’t grasp it.’618 He had tried to ring her a few hours earlier and couldn’t get through. ‘He was waiting for her call when he received the news,’ his daughter Pamela later remembered.619 She, herself, was told of her mother’s death at the airport as she arrived back in Britain from honeymoon.
‘Miserable. I never realised how much I loved her and what she meant to me,’ Dickie wrote in his diary for 23 February.620 In spite of their marital difficulties, the two had become increasingly close in recent years. Edwina had remained restless and driven by her work, but the relationship was now marked by real affection, helped by the joys of being grandparents.
John Barratt was later to write:
Lady Mountbatten had become the faithful, devoted wife that he had craved – and missed – so much in the earlier years of their marriage. She had never lost her spirit, never been subservient, but they had spent more time together than they had previously, and the prospect of a comfortable and contented old age must have seemed both possible and enticing.621
Immediately Dickie’s friends rallied around. Charles Lambe spent the whole next day with his former colleague. Some 6,000 telegrams and letters began to arrive, ranging from presidents and public figures, such as Cecil Beaton, to ordinary people whose lives she had touched.622 Charles Smith’s abiding image of the time was his employer, ‘in the drawing room with one of these telegrams crumpled between his trembling hands . . . tears flowing from his eyes.’623
The condolence note from Ronald Brooke, who had served on Mountbatten’s staff in SEAC and in Malta, was typical. He remembered: ‘the remarkable way in which she so quickly knew everyone and remembered them as individuals’ and that ‘to her qualities of charm and gaiety she added a quite astonishing ability for organising and providing the driving force behind a vast range of activities, all of which were for the benefit of other people. The sum was an endearing and tremendous personality.’624
On 24 February Edwina’s body arrived at Broadlands and was taken to Romsey Abbey, only a month before the scene of much family happiness, where overnight, 52 male members of staff took turns in pairs to stand guard over it in half-hour watches. Edwina had stipulated in her will that she wanted to be buried at sea and so the next day, after a short service of prayers, the hearse left for the 30-mile journey to the naval yard at Portsmouth. As the funeral cortège left, her butler Charles Smith took her white Sealyham terrier, Snippet, ‘to catch a glimpse of the final departure of his mistress and the dog’s instincts seemed to tell him what was happening. He stayed woefully in my arms and whimpered sadly.’625
Eight chief petty officers, to the sound of Bosun’s Calls, carried the lead-lined coffin, covered by a Union Jack, onto the Fri
gate HMS Wakefield and laid it on a steel-grey bier on the Quarterdeck. Under pale, grey skies, the ship set out to sea. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, conducted a 15-minute service with no hymns or address. He ended with the traditional words ‘we therefore commit her body to the deep’ and the coffin was carefully tipped into the raging waters below as four Royal Marine buglers sounded The Last Post and Reveille.
Dickie, in full admiral’s uniform, tears streaming down his face, gently kissed his all-white wreath and tossed it into the sea. A cable away on the Indian frigate the Trishul, Krishna Menon, Indian Defence Minister, dropped a farewell garland of marigolds from Nehru. Terry Cattermole, the Officer of the Watch on HMS Wakeful, remembered how:
Lord Louis and the Prince [Philip], both in uniforms of Admiral of the Fleet, stood at the salute for a long moment as we slowly got underway. I noted in the Ship’s Log ‘Committed to the deep the body of Countess Mountbatten at 14.28 in position 50deg 36min North 0deg 57min West’ and we turned back towards Portsmouth.626
CHAPTER 24
After Edwina
Edwina’s death had made headlines around the world and scores of tributes poured in, of which Arthur Bryant’s in the Illustrated London News was typical:
She was a very great woman, one of those rare individuals, some famous and others not, who bear about them the unmistakeable hallmark of greatness . . . warmth of heart, the vitality and the splendid courage, selflessness and above all, humanity of this remarkable woman.627
On 5 March, a memorial service was held at Romsey Abbey attended by over 1,000 people, followed two days later by another at Westminster Abbey, the music arranged by Malcolm Sargent and attended by the Royal Family, Prime Minister and Cabinet. Hundreds of extra chairs had to be brought in for the overflow in the cloisters.
Edwina’s death had brought even closer together the two men whom she had loved the most. It had taken almost a month, but on 18 March, Nehru wrote by hand to Dickie:
I was working in my office on the 21st February morning when the message about Edwina came through our naval headquarters. I was stunned and could not believe it . . . It was exceedingly difficult to connect Edwina with death. She was the embodiment of life and vital energy and joy . . . Edwina died as she had lived, a radiant figure, laughing her way through life’s many troubles and bringing joy and healing to innumerable troubled hearts . . . It was our high privilege to have known her and had her love and friendship. In this rather dismal world, she came as a star brightening our lives and giving us generously and abundantly a bit of her rare and precious self. There is no way for me to express the depth of my gratitude for her.628
One of Dickie’s virtues was his generosity of spirit. He had accepted Edwina’s lovers during her life and he was not going to reject them now she was dead. Indeed, he felt a bond with anyone who had also loved Edwina. After her death he stayed in touch with them, called on their support for the Edwina Mountbatten Trust, which supported various nursing charities, and provided them with mementos of her life. Malcolm Sargent, for example, was touched to receive a ‘very beautiful souvenir. I shall always cherish it and am most grateful for the gift’.629
Edwina’s unexpected death changed Dickie’s life in practical terms, with 80 per cent death duties with the remaining 20 per cent divided 7.5 per cent to each daughter and 5 per cent to him. He thought of selling Classiebawn and there were newspaper reports that a butler, chef, under-chef and parlour maid had been laid off. Douglas Fairbanks Jr wrote hinting that he could involve him in a land development plan in the Bahamas.630
‘I shall not be able to do things on the scale which Edwina and I could do together in her lifetime, but I am not particularly keen on entertaining, or extravagant in my tastes,’ Mountbatten replied. ‘It is true that when I finish from this job, I might like to take on some business appointments to keep me occupied and to replace the very handsome salary and allowance which I receive in my present job. But that is still quite a way off, I hope.’631
In the end he decided to make Classiebawn pay its way, renting it out to rich Americans when not in use by family and friends. After Edwina’s death, he made a point of going every August and most Easters. Edwina’s death had drawn him closer to his daughters and their families, and Classiebawn became a place they could all come together, a place to recapture his own youth and where he could exert the authority and control that his character required.
Patricia by 1960 had four children – Norton (b. 1947), Michael John (b. 1950), Joanna (b. 1955), Amanda (b. 1957); Philip would be born in 1961 and Tim and Nicholas three years later. Overlapping them would be Pamela’s children, Edwina (b. 1961), Ashley (b. 1963) and India (b. 1967).
William Evans had joined the staff at Broadlands in 1959 and was to remain with Mountbatten for the next decade. He has fond memories of his employer, but no illusions about him. ‘Mountbatten was quite controlling. You had to know how to eat strawberries. They always had to have their husks. You would then make a hole in the sugar, fill with cream and swirl the strawberry. Ditto there were exact rules about how to eat a pear. Edwina just used to smile.’632
‘He was very demanding. Just pressure of work. Everything was coded – telephones, the tooting of cars at the gate. Remember he was a signalman. We knew if the phone rang once it was for him or Edwina, twice for Patricia and three times for Pamela.’633
‘He was always good fun especially with his grandchildren. One Christmas he insisted I obtain a box of Beatles wigs for grandchildren. The Managing Director of company had to drive down with a box. Mountbatten pranced around in the wig throughout Christmas Day.’634
Dickie found life as a widower difficult. ‘I know you think that I ought to be able to live alone and spend my weekends alone,’ he wrote to Patricia two years after Edwina’s death, ‘but I feel so terribly lonely without someone.’635 Not that he was without admirers. He complained to a friend, Grace Stevens, that ‘it is curious that at the very time I am living a fairly secluded, hardworking life, that so many people who knew Edwina, but who I hardly know, should be descending on me.’636
Amongst those who took an interest in him were two New York socialites, slightly older than him, Mary Hoyt Wiborg, a great-niece of the Civil War General William Sherman and Rhoda Tanner Doubleday, who had married into the publishing family. Another was Olga Stringfellow, a journalist at the Daily Express, whom he had first met in 1960.637 Stringfellow had come to Britain from New Zealand in 1949, after marrying a naval draughtsman whom she later divorced, and was beginning to forge a successful career as an historical journalist. The two were sufficiently close for friends of hers to think they might marry. One of her presents to him was the tiller from Captain Bligh’s boat.638 Stringfellow later became a well-known faith healer, specialising in sportsmen. She died in her early seventies, having drunk herself to death.
Attending the wedding of the future King Juan Carlos of Spain in May 1962, Mountbatten found himself ‘hotly pursued by a princess of considerable beauty and forty years his junior. She announced that she was madly in love and determined to marry him, and caused something of a scandal by rearranging the place-cards at the state banquet so that they were sitting side by side.’ He was delighted: ‘the whole experience was pretty good for the morale of a sixty-two-year-old widower.’639
But the person who had really captured his heart was a beautiful and vivacious Italian over 30 years younger. Blonde and with a stunning figure, which she showed off in very short minis, Sibilla Tomacelli was the daughter of the Duke and Duchess Della Torre and had recently married Columbus O’Donnell, nephew of the multimillionaire Huntington Hartford. Columbus’ mother was married to Ivar Bryce, a former colleague of Bunny Phillips in the Latin American section of the wartime British Security Coordination, and Dickie had met them whilst staying with the Bryces on a visit to the West Indies at the beginning of the 1960s.
Throughout the next two decades, Sibilla and Dickie met regularly – sometimes alone and sometimes with h
er husband – on Mountbatten’s annual trip to the Bahamas to stay with the Brabournes and Hicks at their holiday homes on Eleuthera, or on visits to London. ‘He was such a glamorous person. I was flattered by his attention,’ she later remembered:
He certainly had a crush on me. He made his feelings very clear. He was very special. We would go scuba diving and riding. Everyone loved him. He was good company and a very easy guest. He had kindness, he was always trying to help people. If you needed help, he would do anything he could. I too admired and liked him hugely. He was a good-looking man, nevertheless, he was 30 years older and even though we had a very close relationship, it was never physical, and I was happily married.
At a family wedding of the time, whilst Sibilla was talking to Patricia Brabourne, Roald Dahl (whom both Sibilla and Patricia had not previously met) came up to Sibilla and remarked, ‘I hear you are the girl that Mountbatten is in love with,’ upon which, clearly seeing Sibilla taken aback by this comment, Patricia immediately added, ‘Not only my father, but my husband and son too.’
After one such meeting, he wrote to her, ‘I enjoyed your visit enormously, and so did Pammy & David. In fact, Pammy, who is apt to be critical of my friends, told Patricia that she had rarely found a girl so beautiful as you to also be so nice! I more than agree with Pammy & count myself as very lucky to have found such a gay & charming friend – we all miss you & send love.’
Two months later, he admonished her for not joining him for a weekend at Luton Hoo whilst the Queen was staying. ‘The Queen wouldn’t have eaten you & Prince Philip would surely have joined the ranks of your admirers! . . . I can never thank you enough for your sweet companionship and friendship which has meant a great deal in the life of a lonely man. Much, much love my dear from Dickie.’640
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