Alifeof public service
Patricia, Countess Mountbatten of Burma: b London, February 14, 1924; m John Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne, 6s, 2d; d Mersham, Kent, June 13, 2017, aged 93.
Countess Mountbatten of Burma inherited the earldom created for her father Earl Mountbatten of Burma after narrowly escaping death in the IRA bomb attack in which he and her son Nicholas were killed.
Although stricken with grief and badly wounded, she soldiered on and in the course of an exemplary life became involved with more than 50 charities as well as serving as a magistrate and Lord Lieutenant of Kent.
On August bank holiday 1979, a bomb was planted by the IRA in Shadow V, Lord Mountbatten’s motor-cruiser moored in Mullaghmore Harbour, near Classiebawn, County Sligo, his Irish home. When the boat left the harbour, Lord Mountbatten was accompanied by his daughter Patricia (the future Countess) and her husband Lord Brabourne, their 14-year-old twins Nicholas and Timothy, the Dowager Lady Brabourne, and a 15-year-old boy from Enniskillen, Paul Maxwell.
The bomb was detonated by remote control and Lord Mountbatten, Nicholas Brabourne and Paul Maxwell were killed. The Brabournes and their surviving twin son, Timothy, were all badly wounded; the Dowager Lady Brabourne died the next day.
After spending five weeks in hospital, Patricia and her husband went home in wheelchairs and spent months on crutches. But the psychological injuries took longer to heal: ‘‘I cried every day for over six months and intermittently for the next year. I can still cry over it very easily,’’ she said in 1987.
The fact that her husband had similar injuries and had suffered a commensurate loss enabled them to give each other mutual support and by becoming involved in voluntary and charitable work, Lady Mountbatten slowly found the grief easier to bear.
She became president, deputy president and patron of a vast number of charities mainly concerned with healthcare, children and the armed forces. To all of these she demonstrated utter dedication and commitment, giving unstintingly of her time. In 1991 she was appointed CBE for her voluntary work with the Red Cross, of which she was vice-president.
Patricia Edwina Victoria Mountbatten was the eldest daughter of the then Lieutenant Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina. Patricia and younger sister Pamela were not close to their mother. To her daughters, wrote Mountbatten’s official biographer Philip Ziegler, Edwina was ‘‘the tinkle of a charm bracelet, the whiff of scent, a quick goodnight kiss’’.
Their father compensated for their mother’s lack of affection. It was he who sat on their beds, chatted about the day’s events, read to them and invented games for them to play. Lord Mountbatten advocated a morality based on common sense. When Patricia, aged 11 or 12, was caught smoking in the shrubbery, he reproached her for doing it in secret. If she had really wanted a cigarette so badly, he said, she should have asked him rather than practise a deception: ‘‘I don’t believe God will strike you dead if you lie, but people won’t rely on you and in the end you won’t be clever enough to remember what you said before and you’ll be caught out,’’ he told her.
It was while Patricia was serving as a Wren that she met her future husband, Lord Brabourne, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, then serving as ADC to Mountbatten in his role as Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia.
After the war, Lord Brabourne pursued a successful career as a film producer and later became chairman of Thames Television.
After Lord Mountbatten’s assassination the earldom passed to Patricia by a special remainder granted in 1946 by King George VI enabling the title to pass through the female line.
In 1991 Lady Mountbatten and her family had to endure another tragedy when her five-year-old grand-daughter, Leonora Knatchbull, died of cancer. None the less, she continued to find reasons for happiness: ‘‘I had wonderful parents, a marvellous grandmother, a supremely happy marriage and seven super children.’’
– Telegraph Group