The Mountbattens Read online

  On 28 June, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo and the countdown to war began. Prince Louis had become First Sea Lord in 1912 and Dickie was invited to watch a full test mobilisation of the Fleet on 18 July. Dickie was thrilled to watch the Royal Review at Spithead in front of King George V, with the full might of the Royal Navy laid out in front – some 59 battleships, 55 cruisers, 78 destroyers, 16 submarines and a host of lesser craft – and to meet Admiral Jellicoe and Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty.

  Dickie had met Churchill several times before, not least when he had paid an official visit to Osborne. When Churchill had asked the cadets if they had any requests, Dickie had been the first to respond. ‘Please, sir, may we please have three sardines for Saturday supper instead of only two?’ ‘I’ll see to that,’ Churchill assured him. The sardines were never forthcoming. It was a lesson that Dickie was to remember.25

  It was Prince Louis, alone on duty, on the fateful weekend before the outbreak of war, who had to make the decision not to stand down the Fleet, but keep them mobilised. It proved to be a wise decision. The following day, Germany and Russia declared war on each other and on 4 August, the United Kingdom declared war on Germany.

  There was an almost instant wave of anti-German feeling, with assaults on suspected Germans – even dachshunds were targeted – and the looting of stores owned by people with German-sounding names. Mountbatten initially joked to his mother on 14 August, ‘that Papa has turned out to be a genuine spy and has been discreetly marched off to the Tower, where he is guarded by beef eaters [sic] . . . I got rather a rotten time of it for about 3 days as little fools (like Stopsford) insisted on calling me German spy and kept on heckling me and trying to make things unpleasant for me.’26

  In October, the German-accented Prince Louis, feeling that the criticisms of him as head of the Navy were a distraction from the war effort, resigned as First Sea Lord. He had faithfully served his adopted country for 46 years and yet Winston Churchill made no attempt to dissuade him. His son was devastated. Another cadet saw a contemporary standing in front of the Osborne mast with tears running down his cheeks. It was Dickie. From that day he was to have one consuming ambition, to avenge his father’s dismissal and become First Sea Lord himself.27

  * * *

  A descendant of the Native American princess Pocahontas, the Prime Minister Lord Palmerston and the reformer and philanthropist the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury, Edwina was born on 28 November 1901. Her father, Wilfrid Ashley, was a former colonel in the Grenadier Guards, who would later become a Conservative Member of Parliament. Her maternal grandfather was the banker Sir Ernest Cassell, financial adviser to Edward VII – the King was Edwina’s godfather and she was named after him – and one of the richest men in the world.

  Cassell, whose wife had died within three years of marriage, was very close to his only child and her first-born daughter and provided one of the few anchors in Edwina’s rather rootless youth. Edwina’s father was a remote figure, busy pursuing his parliamentary business or sporting interests, and her mother, Maud, frequently ill, had no idea how to be a parent to Edwina.

  Maud died of tuberculosis in February 1911, when Edwina was nine and her sister Mary was five. Neither child was allowed to attend the funeral at Romsey Abbey. Edwina wrote to her father, ‘I am so very sorry darling Mama left us all so suddenly and for ever, I wanted to kiss her once and now I didn’t, but it is very nice to think her spirit will always be with me.’28 She never spoke of her mother again in public.

  Both daughters found it hard to come to terms with their mother’s death, but displayed it in different ways. Edwina was forced to grow up quickly, became ever neater and more dutiful, while Mary responded by becoming more wilful and uncooperative. Motherless and starved of affection at home, Edwina poured her love into caring for her animals – puppies, ponies, rabbits, kittens, a goat and, a present from her grandfather, an Arab horse. Educated at home, she was a conscientious and organised student, who by the age of ten could read German, write in French and play the piano. She had a particular love for geography, noted one biographer. ‘Maps fascinated her, talk of distant lands gripped her attention, and she would read travel books voraciously.’29

  The situation improved with the arrival of a new governess, Laura Deveria, in September 1912. Young, warm-hearted and fun, she made lessons interesting and the two girls adored her, but their happiness did not last for long. In August 1914, Wilfrid, lonely and feeling he needed a wife for his political career, remarried. He had met Molly Forbes-Sempill on the political circuit and they married weeks after she had secured a divorce from her naval officer husband.

  Molly quickly made herself unpopular with everyone through her bossiness, insensitivity and attempts to make changes, from replacing the brocade wall coverings at the family home in Hampshire, Broadlands, to strict new rules that the children should be sent to bed at half past six. A guest who came back early from fishing, because of the rain, was made to eat his lunch in the hall, rather than bring his wet boots into the dining-room.

  She insisted the girls call her ‘Madre’ and when travelling by train she would go first class, but put them in third. Laura Deveria, regarded as a threat, was dismissed, which only increased the girls’ unhappiness and sense of rejection. Wilfrid, fearful of confrontation and busy raising and training a battalion to take to France, turned a blind eye rather than stand up for his daughters.

  The anti-German hysteria that had affected the Battenbergs was now directed at the German-born Ernest Cassell. In spite of being one of the largest subscribers to the War Loan and entrusted with an official mission to the United States to secure a loan of half a million dollars, he was accused of being friendly with the German Emperor and having a specially designed wireless set on the roof of Brook House to maintain contact with the country of his birth. Sir George Makgill, Secretary to the Anti-German Union, brought a lawsuit to strip Cassell of his membership of the Privy Council. It failed, but for Edwina – like her future husband remembering his father’s experiences – it was something she would never forget.

  CHAPTER 2

  Students

  Dickie had ended his Osborne career on a high note, graduating first in physics, second in engineering and third in seamanship. In January 1915, he moved on to Britannia Royal Naval College, more commonly known as Dartmouth, for the next stage of his naval training. He again threw himself into student life, editing a magazine with close friend Kit Bradford, beagling, running, fencing, playing cricket, rugger, tennis, fives and squash – generally with more enthusiasm than success – and attending the Saturday night dances with wives and daughters of officers on the station.

  It is inevitable that boys going through puberty, thrown together and with very few girls, should indulge in adolescent homosexual experimentations, though Dickie’s reaction to his colleagues’ antics, to a later generation, may appear priggish and naïve. He wrote to his mother – her reaction is unknown – in June, ‘Dr Moon is going to have the talk with me soon. People here are becoming too swinish for words. It is awfully difficult not to get contaminated by them, when you have them talking filth, or almost worse still, hinting at nasty things during meals and when we are in bed & in the gun room . . . some people in the other dormitory have even begun to do filthy things, I have heard.’30

  His first holidays from Dartmouth were spent with George on HMS New Zealand, steaming off Heligoland, guarding the edge of a large minefield and covering some 2,000 sea miles. He wrote in his diary, ‘I am having the time of my life.’31 George had been given a portable projector for 35mm films and he would borrow films from a local cinema and show them to the ship’s company. It was to kindle a passion that his younger brother was to enjoy for the rest of his life.

  Dickie had been in an isolation hospital with German measles for most of May. Then in July, he was ill again. Often prone to injury from his fearlessness, in February 1916 he sprained his ankle in a tobogganing accident and t
hen broke his leg, requiring him to sit his final exams in hospital. Bored, he placed an advertisement in the personal column of The Times: A Young Naval Officer, injured and in hospital desires correspondence’. The reaction was immediate, as he told his mother: ‘On the Saturday I got 100 letters and today I got 75 letters with a possible prospect of more to come . . . They vary from a society girl in Curzon Street & a merry widow in Stanhope Gardens to a typist in Whitechapel & a chauffeur, who looks after a Ford car.’32 In the end, over 200 women, most of them in their twenties, wrote to him until he placed another ad regretting he could not respond individually.

  Leaving Dartmouth in April 1916, he was disappointed not to go to sea, thereby missing the Battle of Jutland the following month, unlike his brother George. Instead, his cohort spent three months at Keyham, the engineering college, but it was to be a turning point in his career. Two days after his sixteenth birthday, he wrote to his mother, ‘I was surprised myself to find that I had passed out first from Keyham.’33

  His first posting in July 1916 was as a junior midshipman to Admiral Beatty’s flagship HMS Lion, employed as a general dogsbody to the captain, John Chatfield. ‘My action station is on the Fore Bridge, which I believe is about the best station going, only one suffers rather from the blast of one’s own guns,’ he wrote excitedly to his mother:

  I am awfully pleased to be up there, as one can see something of what’s going on. My chief job is tending voice pipes & that is where the admiral & his staff are, as a rule. At sea I am in the white watch and keep watch at the 4 gns by night, with 2 other fellows. At day I keep submarine watch . . . I have been having a ripping time.34

  The sub-lieutenant in charge of the gunroom was a bully and took every opportunity to curb the natural exuberance of the young midshipman, but Dickie thrived on the discipline and hard work and the demands of war.35

  In August, Lion escaped a mine and a torpedo attack in the North Sea defending Sunderland from a German bombardment. Dickie was thrilled. He had achieved his ambition and been bloodied in war.

  * * *

  In order to divide and rule, Molly had sent Mary to boarding school to keep the sisters apart. Edwina continued her lonely childhood at Broadlands, her main enjoyment baiting her stepmother – a favourite ploy was to write in French or German, languages Molly could not speak. Most of the day was spent in lessons with her governess, Miss Atwood, but there was time to ride and hunt with the Hursley Hounds and she read voraciously – A Study in Scarlet, Dombey and Son being particular favourites. It was then her shortsightedness was discovered and she was prescribed spectacles, but discarded them whenever she could. From this point her eyesight worsened, as did the headaches that were to plague her throughout her life.

  From an early age, Edwina was organised and tidy. The schoolroom books were catalogued, and her diary scrupulously listed everyone’s birthday, as well as the names of all the visitors to Broadlands with the times of their arrival and, more importantly, departure. It was a means of her exerting control on a world in which she had little say. Evidence of that came in the summer of 1916, when she learnt that she, too, was being sent away to school. The excuse was that it was felt she had too few companions but, as she noted in her diary, it was clear the reason was ‘that Madre wanted to get rid of me and Miss A. – the pig!’36

  In September 1916, aged 14, she joined Mary at The Links in Eastbourne, which was run by Miss Jane Potts, a former governess to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Alice, and known to the girls as Potty. Edwina quickly shone, coming top in French and German, excelling in music, drawing and English literature, and playing in the cricket and tennis teams. Now with schoolgirl companions, her strong competitive streak came out, but she champed at the petty rules and restrictions. She was used to being a free spirit, found the routine and discipline of school life irksome and, by the autumn of 1919, she had outgrown the school.

  In autumn 1918, she followed several of her friends to Alde House, a mixture of finishing school and Domestic Science Training College, on the Suffolk coast at Aldeburgh.37 Its aim, over the year’s course, was to teach 20 girls at a time how to run a household. The training ranged from cleaning, cooking, dressmaking and doing their own laundry to comportment, etiquette, ordering stores and paying wages. As always, Edwina flourished and she was one of two students to represent the school at a Domestic Science display in London in July 1919. It should have been invaluable training, but from the day she left, Edwina never again picked up a broom or a kitchen utensil. Now free from the constraints of formal education, her adventurous nature determined she would see the world.

  * * *

  Naval policy was not to let two brothers serve together, so when George joined Lion in February 1917, Dickie was transferred to Queen Elizabeth. Again he threw himself into the ship’s activities, appearing as a flower girl and in the chorus in Three Peeps: A Musical Muddle in Three Acts and editing a quarterly magazine, Chronicles of Queen Elizabeth, with a print run of 1,100 copies.38

  Dickie had written short stories at school – one was about ‘a midshipman called Richard Norman and a new type of motor-propelled destroyer called the “Okapi” which can act as a submarine.’39 Now with time on his hands, under the nom de plume, N.O., he had been invited to write another for the naval magazine Sea Pie. ‘Soapy – The Tale of a Dog’, about a cocker spaniel on board a battleship, was based on his own experience with a spaniel called Bubbles.40

  Both HMS Lion and HMS Queen Elizabeth were based at Rosyth, just outside Edinburgh, and the two brothers saw much of each other. In November 1916, George had married the vivacious and exotic Nada de Torby, a daughter of the Grand Duke Michael of Russia and great granddaughter of the poet Alexander Pushkin, and Dickie often visited them at their home on the Firth of Forth, riding there on his Douglas motorbike.

  George was regarded as the more brilliant of the two brothers. The second master at Osborne thought him the cleverest and laziest cadet he had ever known. He had always been mechanically minded, reputedly aged five putting a family clock back together after dismantling it. By the age of ten, he had his own workshop, and by 15 was designing and constructing working models of steam engines.

  He was constantly inventing gadgets to make life more comfortable, including an early form of air-conditioning, which worked by having a thermometer with electric contacts that switched on a fan if the cabin was too hot and a radiator if too cold. He produced hot and cold running water in his cabin, using small electric lathe-motors to pump the water, and created a device controlled by an alarm clock to produce an early morning cup of tea.

  Shortly after leaving Dartmouth, he had ridden in the procession for George V’s 1911 Durbar in Delhi, before specialising as a gunnery officer and taking part in the naval actions at Heligoland, Dogger Bank and Jutland. His younger brother revered him and vowed that if he could not compete on the same intellectual level, he would achieve success by hard work. Dickie, in contrast, according to his first biographer was ‘found to be rather young for his age, full of enthusiasm, ready to try anything, but not very good at games. His youthfulness showed itself in lightning changes of mood, and this made some of those who served with him at that time question his stability of temperament.’41

  The brothers’ nomenclature was about to change. In June 1917, King George V was persuaded to change his German name of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor and relinquish all German titles and styles on behalf of his relatives who were British subjects. Mountbatten’s father, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was forced to change his name to Mountbatten – an earlier option had been Battenhill – and became the Marquess of Milford Haven, with George becoming the Earl of Medina and the younger brother Lord Louis Mountbatten. He would henceforth be known by many as simply Lord Louis.

  In November, Dickie signed up for the steam submarine K6 for the first of two fortnight stints, as part of a scheme to broaden a midshipman’s training and help them choose their specialism.42 The wardroom, he wrote to his mother, wa
s:

  A grand and sumptuous compartment, in the centre of which you really can stand up without bumping your head. It looks for all the world like a tuppenny tube, except that in place of umpteen advertisements . . . they are bedecked with gaily coloured pictures of semi-nude females out of La Vie (Parisienne) . . . That department has been turned over to me, as has also our ‘garden’. This is a wonderful piece of ‘terra’ of sorts, dug and sown in March with all manner of vegetables . . . cabins have no bulkheads but curtains. Bath is a LONG one at least 3 ft long!!! The WC is the most wonderful contraption of valves you have ever seen.43

  After his second fortnight in January, he was able to tell his mother, ‘I have spent the happiest month I’ve ever spent in the Service (6 years this May) in this ship and am more sorry than words could ever say my time in her is up . . .’44 Part of the reason might also be that he had ‘made the acquaintance of a very nice girl, who went to one of the “gun room dances” in Edinburgh where I met her, and her name is Hilda Blackburne. She is the daughter of Lady Constance Blackburne.’45

  The submarine service was now to be his career, its attractions including better pay, longer periods of leave and more rapid promotion, though the new Marquess of Milford Haven counselled his son to keep his options open for the moment.

  Whether through his father’s contacts or as part of a scheme for naval officers – it’s not clear – Dickie achieved his ambition to visit the Western Front, though of the ten days he spent in France in July 1918, because of a high fever, only two were actually spent with front-line troops.

  In the autumn he left the Queen Elizabeth to broaden his experience, joining P31 (an escort and anti-submarine vessel) on the Dover Patrol. Now a sub-lieutenant, he was the second in command of 50 officers and men with a particular responsibility for organisation, paying the sailors and acting, in effect, as the ship’s doctor, which during the flu epidemic claimed the lives of a quarter of the crew; and for several weeks in early 1919, he was the acting captain. It was his first real position of responsibility and he relished it.