He nicknamed the programme ‘Firm Friends’, because Mountbatten would always go above someone’s head or threaten resignation, but having won, he would claim ‘we became firm friends’.888 This was Mountbatten at his most boastful and ingenuous. Reviewing it, Miles Kington observed: ‘He reminded me, in fact, of the well-known singer who, when informed of Elvis Presley’s death, said, “Poor Elvis. He was always my greatest fan.”‘889
The most controversial episode was the one devoted to Suez, because of its criticisms of the then Minister of Defence, Lord Hailsham, and the former prime minister, Harold Macmillan, who were both still alive. Robert Armstrong, the Cabinet Secretary, later known during the Spycatcher trial for himself being economical with the truth, noted in an internal memo, ‘There are good reasons for thinking that Lord Mountbatten’s account of the matter was in many respects some way from the truth – though I do not suggest that his own view of the matter at the time was other than as he describes it.’890
Armstrong had long sought for the programme to be deferred, arguing that it was in breach of confidential relationships laid down in the Report of the Privy Council on Ministerial Memoirs. However, no one was persuaded, as the restrictions were limited to 15 years and Suez had taken place some 24 years earlier. There were also suggestions there could be ‘untoward consequences while the situation in the Arab world is as critical as it is at present.’891 But the situation in the Arab world in 1980 was not then critical and in fact Mountbatten had tried at Suez to dissuade Anthony Eden from attacking the Arabs.
Kennedy, exasperated, leaked the transcript to the journalist Bernard Levin, who then wrote up a major feature in The Times, which occasioned a letter from Hailsham refuting Mountbatten’s version of Suez.892 Further complaints followed about his version of other events, notably the sacking of Oliver Leese and the relations with James Somerville during his time as Supreme Allied Commander. Writing to George Howard, chairman of the BBC Governors, Somerville’s son noted ‘there was more than a touch of Baron Munchhausen about Lord Mountbatten.’893
Stephen Roskill summed it up, writing to Somerville’s son:
I have done so much to contradict MB that there is I think a danger of me being regarded as a professional de-bunker of him. For instance, I don’t know if you belong to the Naval Review, but in that journal I have recently disproved his claim to have been responsible for the adoption of the Swiss Oerlikon gun – and almost all who know the true story have supported me . . . I could give a dozen examples of his utter unreliability on historical issues. In fact, I tell everyone who comes to me on such matters NEVER to rely on his testimony unless it is supported by independent evidence. Perhaps the worst case is the story that at Second Quebec he was given authority by the COSS to dismiss any C-in-C in the SEAC on demand.894
Mountbatten’s carefully nurtured reputation was beginning to be dismantled.
In 1985, after five years’ research, Philip Ziegler’s 800-page official life of Mountbatten, drawing on unrestricted access to all of the Mountbatten papers, was published. The book published by Collins, where Ziegler was editor-in-chief and one of the Broadlands Archives trustees, Charles Troughton, was a director, had been worth £300,000 to him and £300,000 to the Broadlands Archives Trust, with the Sunday Times paying £350,000 for eight instalments to serialise the book.895 It is a generous and elegant biography, not afraid to pull its punches where criticism is due – Mountbatten’s command of the Kelly, his vanity and mendaciousness – which comprehensively covers Mountbatten’s public life, if perhaps hinting more about the private life than he is prepared to reveal.896
Capitalising on the publication of the official life and success of his own biography of Dickie, Richard Hough in 1985 published a life of Edwina, drawing on interviews with her sister Mary.897 Six years later came the authorised biography of Edwina by Janet Morgan, commissioned by Philip Ziegler and published by Collins again. Though suffering from no footnotes, it is a shrewd and nuanced account of a complex woman.
Anthony Lambton’s, The Mountbattens: The Battenbergs and Young Mountbatten, the first of a projected two-volume life, appeared in 1989, concentrating on Mountbatten’s genealogy and arguing that shame at the illegitimacy in his family tree had shaped his character, most notably his vanity and insecurity. Further memoirs by members of staff followed in 1989 and 1991. William Evans had been Mountbatten’s valet from 1959 to 1969. His book, My Mountbatten Years: In the Service of Lord Louis, provided a discreet but revealing insight into Mountbatten’s life after the death of Edwina. Even more revelatory was John Barratt’s With the Greatest Respect, a memoir by his secretary subtitled, ‘The Private Lives of Earl Mountbatten’, which recounted details of Mountbatten’s lovers and voyeuristic tendencies.898
Further damage to Mountbatten’s reputation came with Andrew Roberts’ collection, Eminent Churchillians, which included a scathing essay, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Perils of Adrenalin’, describing him as ‘a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler . . . promoted wildly above his abilities, with consistently disastrous consequences’, which argued for Mountbatten’s impeachment over the partition of India.899
Within days, Mountbatten: The Private Story by royal writer Brian Hoey was published. The book had been commissioned by the Mountbatten family, who felt the Ziegler book had been rather too official. It benefited from interviews with Mountbatten’s two daughters, his sons-in-law, eight grandchildren, Sacha Abercorn, King Constantine of Greece, Prince Michael of Kent and Prince Philip. Its main revelation was Mountbatten’s love affair with his goddaughter, Sacha Abercorn.
The family have continued to provide their own version of events, downplaying the couple’s infidelities, and drawing on their own related stories. These include Tim Knatchbull’s moving memoir of the events of 1979, From a Clear Blue Sky, published for the thirtieth anniversary of Mountbatten’s murder, and two charming memoirs by Lady Pamela Hicks, India Remembered (2007) and Daughter of Empire (2012).
Probably the most important of the specialist recent books on the Mountbattens has been Alex von Tunzelmann’s critically acclaimed debut in 2007, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, an examination of the transfer of power, arguing that Mountbatten’s poor relationship with Jinnah and closeness to Nehru did affect the details of independence; and Adrian Smith’s Mountbatten: Apprentice War Lord, focused on Mountbatten’s naval career up to 1943, which appeared in 2010.900
Many of these books have benefited from the extensive Mountbatten archives at Southampton University, donated on permanent loan in 1989 and purchased in 2010 for £2.85 million, with £1,993,760 alone from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The archive comprises some 200,000 documents and 50,000 photographs, comprising letters to hundreds of figures, family correspondence, photograph albums and news cuttings (the Mountbattens at some stages of their lives were in the papers every day and all was dutifully recorded by press cutting agencies), household accounts, shooting game cards, files on each of the myriad organisations with which the couple were involved, letters of condolence, transcripts of the Life and Times television series and visitors books.901
Yet the couple’s private diaries and letters to each other, plus the letters between Nehru and Edwina, available to the authorised biographers, remain closed to researchers. It appears there are still Mountbatten secrets to be revealed.
Like Churchill, Mountbatten wanted to be remembered and that reputation to be one which he had curated. Fame was to be important to him, not only during his own lifetime, but also afterwards. He was keen to do so because, as Pat MacLellan noted:
his public image – far-sighted, imaginative, bold, dynamic, charismatic, and vigorous – was not shared by many of those who competed with him and who regarded him as devious, vain, imperious, unscrupulous and unprincipled. In fact, privately he was kind, charming, sentimental, witty and magnetic.902
Friends were deployed to support his version of events, later a role taken on by his family. ‘The Mount
batten daughters seek to obscure three aspects of their parents: their mother’s physical relationships with “men of colour”, her perjury; and both their parents’ bisexuality,’ wrote Charlotte Breese in her biography Hutch. ‘While I did not seek definitive proof of any of these, all three are evident from existing research in other books and from people I have interviewed.’903
The family, first daughters and now grandchildren, constantly denied Dickie’s bisexuality and the extent and range of both their love affairs, though the story kept changing. Edwina’s relationship with Nehru was impossible, first because it was platonic and then because he was impotent. Lady Pamela Hicks and the authorised Edwina biographer, Janet Morgan, suggest that most of Edwina’s affairs were simply unconsummated romantic flirtations.
According to Pamela Hicks, her ‘mother had at least eighteen lovers but my father, to my knowledge, only had one other.’904 Yet Dickie’s authorised biographer, Philip Ziegler, almost 30 years earlier had concluded:
He conducted at least two protracted love-affairs outside his marriage, to the apparent satisfaction of both parties, but he was never promiscuous. Though he liked to imagine himself a sexual athlete, he seems to have had in fact only slight enthusiasm for the sport. He loved the company of women, sought their affection and had an almost irresistible urge to use them as confidantes, but his energies were channelled into his working life.905
He then devotes a single paragraph to his subject’s mistress of 40 years with no reference to anyone else. According to John Barratt, his employer although ‘he had quite a number of sexual liaisons, he seemed to be quite happy, even during the years he was married, with long periods of celibacy.’906 Amongst the 4,000 files at Southampton University, there are few hints of the couple’s extramarital relationships.
Part of the control of the Mountbatten legacy has been exercised by withholding permission and material, much of which still remains in the archives at Broadlands or closed under a Ministerial Directive at the Hartley Library. Lambton, one of many writers to suffer from these controls, reflected:
It made me draw the conclusion that every author who was not prepared to accept the Mountbatten myth would be starved of information. In the past the favoured few were fed with carefully selected passages.907
Dickie’s wartime and post-war career remains controversial. Debate continues about his effectiveness at Combined Operations, South East Asia Command, as Viceroy, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff. Was he over-promoted by his mentor Churchill and given jobs because of his connections and public relations skills, or was he an inspiring leader who could be trusted to get things done?
For David Cannadine, ‘there was about almost everything Mountbatten did an element of the makeshift, the insubstantial, the incomplete, and the disingenuous, a disquieting gap between the promise and the performance that no amount of bravura on his part could ever quite conceal.’908 To a naval colleague, however, he was: ‘A single-minded enthusiast in anything he took up and endowed with boundless energy and ability, I am sure that no one in the Fleet, even in those early days, doubted that he would go right to the top and deservedly so on his own merits.’909
His record is not clear-cut. Dieppe may have been poorly planned, but it is unfair to blame Mountbatten entirely. Many of the fateful decisions were not his own. And though the Dieppe disaster overshadows his time at Combined Operations, it is generally acknowledged that he did build a totally inter-service organisation, which not only kept pressure on German forces but prepared the way, not least with his encouragement of technical developments, for the successful D-Day landings.
In spite of being deprived of the necessary resources to wage the sort of campaign he would have liked in Burma, he did restore the fighting spirit. Bill Slim and his generals were the military brains, but it was Mountbatten’s leadership that allowed them to flourish. His appointment, with its confused command structure and diplomatic sensitivities, was a political rather than a military one, and on that score, he acquitted himself well. He may have fallen out with various of his generals, and relations with the Americans were strained at times but, in a difficult situation, he kept the show on the road.
The ends of wars are messy affairs. There are huge logistical problems of demobbing troops, rescuing prisoners of war, repatriating captured soldiers and rebuilding devastated areas. Both Mountbattens rose to the challenges and this was perhaps their finest hour, with Dickie’s decision to work with nationalists, such as Aung San, proving to be pragmatic and far-sighted.
The rapid transfer of power, Indian Partition, the subsequent communal violence and problems in Kashmir continue to be debated. Faced with the instability of the Interim Government, the breakdown in British administration, the Indian impatience for independence, rising communal violence and a brief to hand over power with as much dignity as possible from a British government with other priorities, Mountbatten had little choice.
Rushing partition was tactical – to concentrate minds, demonstrate good faith and narrow options – but also if he had not rushed it, there would have been no power to hand over. It is certainly not the case that Mountbatten brought it forward so he could return to the Navy sooner. If that was true, he would not have stayed on as Governor-General. Indeed, his reputation might be higher now than if he had left in August 1947.
Yes, the Mountbattens probably did show favouritism towards Nehru and the Hindus, but Jinnah had not been an easy person with whom to deal. Mountbatten was charmed by the old Harrovian and fellow Cambridge alumnus, Nehru, whereas, in spite of a genuine effort, he was never able to establish the same close relationship with Jinnah. On such personal matters, history can be shaped.
According to the BBC journalist, John Osman, sitting next to Mountbatten in the officers’ mess of the Life Guards at Windsor, and chatting about his time in India:
Speaking with a frankness that surprised me, Mountbatten blamed himself, saying how he had ‘got things wrong’ . . . To this day his own judgment on how he had performed in India rings in my ears and in my memory . . . As one who dislikes the tasteless use in writing of the dictionary’s ‘vulgar slang’ word, I shall permit myself an exception this time, because it is the only honest way of reporting accurately what the last Viceroy of India thought about the way he had done his job: ‘fucked it up’.910
Is this fair? On the five criteria set for him on going out as Viceroy – unitary Government by June 1948, ‘fair and just arrangements’ for Princes, ‘the closest cooperation with the Indians’ and no ‘break in the continuity of the Indian Army’ – Mountbatten had failed. Over a million people had died in the Punjab, in spite of repeated warnings from various government officials, and many might have been saved if the boundaries had been clear before independence. But he had delivered his brief.
Mountbatten’s score card at the Ministry of Defence is mixed. He did integrate the three armed services and make tough choices about Britain’s nuclear deterrent, but he was simply a public servant reporting to politicians who created policy. And he incurred unnecessary unpopularity along the way for his ruthless ambition and rather unsophisticated plotting. As Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing told Field Marshall Lord Carver, ‘If the front door was wide open, Dickie would still prefer to come down the chimney.’911
Mountbatten was a man full of contradictions. Self-confident in public life, he was insecure when it came to his private life and relations with his wife. Able to think outside the box and see the big picture, he was obsessed with trivial detail – often to do with his own personal appearance or prestige. Always immaculately dressed and handsome in the correct uniform, he had no taste when it came to casual dress. With his lack of empathy and concern with detail – ‘his eggs had to be cooked for exactly one and a half minutes after being plunged into boiling water’ – there appear to be hints of autism and narcissism in his make-up.912
No one disputes the vanity born of his insecurity. Ludovic Kennedy, a fellow speaker at a naval dinner in Newc
astle in 1975, having arranged to meet him at a local hotel:
put my head gingerly round the semi-open door. There I saw an unusual sight: the admiral in shirtsleeves and braces sitting aside a very low dressing-room stool and gazing keenly at his reflection in the mirror, the ADC on his knees behind him brushing the curls at the back of his head.913
His obsession with uniforms and decorations was legendary. Harold Macmillan is supposed to have muttered to a courtier after a Silver Jubilee celebration lunch at the Guildhall, ‘I hope you’ll give us all a medal. Dickie will be so disappointed if you don’t.’
John Festing, son of Field Marshal Frankie Festing, tells similar stories of Mountbatten persuading the Powers That Be to give him certain key jobs to his father’s detriment, and inviting himself to memorial events when he had conspicuously not been invited. ‘I suspect that he was a very unusual man and a bit more Germanic than he would like people to know.’914
Pat MacLellan, the former military assistant to Mountbatten, agrees:
He was different because he was Hanoverian. He had a Teutonic determination. He never actually fitted in. He didn’t play by the same rules as other naval officers. Above all he wanted to be accepted. How to prove you’re better than everyone else is by getting to the top.915
As Mountbatten confessed to one of his wartime generals, Philip Christison, whilst trying to get him to take responsibility for one of his mistakes:
Christie, you know how my father was treated when World War I came. Ever since that disgraceful episode, I have lived determined to get to the top and vindicate his memory. Nothing, and no one; I repeat, nothing and no one, will ever be allowed to stand in my way.916
What had driven him was partly the desire to avenge family honour, partly a deep insecurity that required constant adulation. ‘Where his career was concerned, nothing else mattered,’ thought his son-in-law David Hicks. ‘He could be a complete bastard.’917 It was something Mountbatten recognised himself. ‘I know what I want and I go for it and I am ruthless. If anybody stands in my way, I circumvent them if I can’t finish them off.’918 Having achieved his lifetime’s ambition, even when he retired, he was driven partly by a strong sense of public duty and noblesse oblige, partly by loneliness and a need to keep himself busy and wanted.
The Mountbattens Page 33
