A kind, giving woman with a positive outlook
The Countess Mountbatten of Burma, who has died aged 93, 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, the Brabournes’ 14-year-old twins Nicholas and Timothy, the Dowager Lady Brabourne, and a 15-year-old boy from Enniskillen, Paul Maxwell.
Patricia Mountbatten recalled that as Shadow V left the harbour, she was sitting on one side in the boat’s stern; the last thing she remembered hearing before the bomb exploded was her mother-inlaw saying: ‘‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’’
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.
The survivors were rushed to Sligo hospital, where Patricia had to have more than 120 stitches in her face (including her eyeballs) and a steel plate inserted in her leg, which had been badly broken.
After spending five weeks in hospital, she 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.
Outwardly she put on a brave face, attending the wedding of her eldest son two months after the tragedy, in a wheelchair. 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 vicepresident.
Patricia Edwina Victoria Mountbatten was born in London in 1924, the eldest daughter of the then Lieutenant Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina.
Patricia and her 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’’. Uninterested in children and unable to express her emotions, she left the girls to the care of their nannies.
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.
Patricia was very close to her father. Dark and serious-looking, she had inherited her mother’s good looks, but not her volatile temperament. Edwina was jealous of the affection between her husband and eldest daughter; even when Patricia was grown up, his meetings with her had to be contrived with discretion so that Edwina should not suspect that a relationship existed from which she was excluded.
Patricia was educated at various schools in Malta (where her father was stationed before the war), in England and in New York, where she lived with her mother and sister in the early years of the war. Returning to England, she joined the Wrens after her 18th birthday and served for a time on the signals staff in Portsmouth, where her colleagues described her as being rather shy, but natural and unaffected.
It was while she 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.
At their wedding in October 1946, Patricia was attended by the Princesses Elizabeth, Margaret and Alexandra. ‘‘Sad without Patricia’’, Mountbatten wrote in his diary the next day.
After the war, Lord Brabourne pursued a successful career as a film producer and later became chairman of Thames Television.
Patricia remained close to her father and was with him in India in 1948 on the day Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. ‘‘My father and I had been riding together,’’ she recalled. ‘‘We came back at dusk to be met by a whitefaced ADC with the news. My father was asked what would happen. He said it was very, very dangerous ... it was an electric, terrifying atmosphere.’’
The Brabournes remained friends with Nehru and with his daughter Indira Gandhi. In 1983 they accepted Mrs Gandhi’s invitation to India’s Republic Day celebrations and dined with her en famille.
Edwina Mountbatten died in 1960 and after Lord Mountbatten’s assassination the earldom passed to Patricia Brabourne by a special remainder granted in 1946 by King George VI enabling the title to pass through the female line.
Lady Mountbatten and her sister Lady Pamela Hicks decided that any biographies of their parents should be candid. When intimate details of her mother’s infidelities were revealed by Janet Morgan in her book Edwina Mountbatten, A Life of Her Own, Lady Mountbatten said: ‘‘I knew in theory that her life was like that, but I hadn’t known all the details.’’
In 1991, Lady Mountbatten and her family had to endure another tragedy when her 5-year-old granddaughter, 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. I now say I have six children here, and one in Heaven, where I am sure Nicky is, God bless him.’’
– Telegraph Group