The Mountbattens, by Andrew Lownie
JANE RIDLEY
The Mountbattens By Andrew Lownie Blink £20
They seemed the perfect couple. Dickie Mountbatten, the younger son of Prince Louis of Battenberg, was a greatgrandson of Queen Victoria, an ambitious 22-year-old naval officer blessed with matinée-idol good looks. His wife, Edwina Ashley, had huge blue eyes and a fortune of £300 million (in today’s money) which she inherited from her grandfather Sir Ernest Cassel, the fixer who bankrolled the Edwardian court.
As Andrew Lownie recounts in this well-researched, enjoyable book, the marriage very soon turned sour. Dickie was often away at sea, and, when he was at home, his passion for micromanagement infuriated Edwina. She was outrageously and openly unfaithful with strings of men with names like Laddie. Paul Robeson and the black musician ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson were alleged to be her lovers.
Amidst the emotional carnage, Dickie emerges as long-suffering and surprisingly tolerant – though no doubt Edwina’s money constituted a compelling argument against divorce. In spite of constant rows, they professed undying love for each other. They reached a sort of truce, Edwina agreeing to support Dickie’s career in exchange for Dickie’s allowing her to pursue discreet affairs.
Edwina’s most serious boyfriend was ‘Bunny’ Phillips, with whom she travelled the world. A fearless adventurer and tough as old boots, she thought nothing of driving 700 miles from Burma to China. She was an appalling mother, spending years away from home. Once she parked her two small daughters in a hotel in Hungary for months and forgot where she had left them.
The Second World War changed everything and it was the making of them both. Edwina threw herself into war work. She looked like a film star with her smartly tailored uniforms. As Lownie suggests, her affairs had been less about sex than about self-assertion, and the war gave an outlet for her innate qualities of leadership. Working 18-hour days was a way of atoning for her years of frivolity.
Dickie was a disappointment as a naval commander. He was adored by his men and he always prepared immaculately, but he was a showman, lacking the rat-like instincts of the true warrior. He blundered several times, once allowing his ship, HMS Kelly, to be torpedoed, by broadcasting its position, and then towing it back at needless risk to be refitted.
Other officers would have faced a court-martial, but not Dicky. PR genius that he was, he passed it off as a triumph. After the Kelly was sunk at the Battle of Crete, he collaborated with Noël Coward to make the story of the ship into the successful and self-glorifying film In Which We Serve.
As head of Combined Operations, preparing for an invasion of France, Mountbatten was a success, proving both decisive and forward-thinking. His claim to be considered a great man rests, however, on his stint as last Viceroy of India in 1947, tasked with delivering the transfer of power and partition in India. Mountbatten has been accused of rushing partition but, Lownie argues, he brought it forward because of the danger of civil war. Nevertheless, he could have done more to stop the bloodbath that followed, he ignored warnings from more experienced advisers and he erred in failing to make clear the boundaries in advance.
Edwina played a starring role in India, on account of her affair with Nehru. Mountbatten tolerated the relationship – indeed his wife’s friendship with the Hindu leader was useful politically, though some thought it made the Mountbattens pro-hindu. Nehru was the love of Edwina’s life. She always insisted that it was a spiritual and platonic affair, but there exists convincing evidence of a physical relationship.
At the end of the book, in a chapter called Rumours, Lownie surveys the
evidence on Mountbatten’s sexuality. His official biographers denied that he was gay, but plenty of people claimed that ‘Mountbottom’ was bisexual, and this now seems well-established. The really damning evidence comes from interviews Lownie had with two men who claimed that, in 1977, they were brought, aged 16, from a boys’ home in Belfast for oral sex with Mountbatten at or near his home in Ireland (where he was assassinated by the IRA 40 years ago).
Edwina was perhaps the greater figure. She was more intelligent, and her legacy as a humanitarian is secure. As this fair-minded and revealing book makes clear, Mountbatten remains a Marmite figure – loved and loathed in equal measure.