The charmed life of a royal relation

The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves

Andrew Lownie

Harper Collins, 

490 pages, Rs 699

Lord Louis Mountbatten was a member of the British royal family. That got him many jobs which he didn’t perhaps deserve fully. In the end it also got him blown up when a bomb went off on his boat in 1979.  He didn’t deserve that either. 

But he lived a good life. The royal connection also got him many good jobs, including that of Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the East during World War II. He was just 43. 

Churchill wasn’t keen but eventually went along. He may have wanted to send him very far away. In any case, the Americans were calling the shots by then. Dickie couldn’t do much harm. 

Another job that he wasn’t quite suited for was that of the last Viceroy of India. He made a monumental mess. According to one historian, he hurried up the independence of India because he wanted to get back to London quickly so that he would be in the running for heading all British forces. That haste is what led to the partition mess. 

Mr Lownie  is very sympathetic to his subject. There is negligible detail. So the reader comes away thinking of old Dickie as what they call good man the lalten in Punjab. 

This book, whose major strength is its enormous bibliography, tells many stories. Many of them are well known but a few are not. Thus not many people know that Mountbatten was in charge of the disastrous Anglo-Canadian raid on the port of Dieppe in German occupied France. 

It wasn’t a great idea to start with, and Mountbatten knew that it wouldn’t work. It was more of a political statement rather than a military one. 

Given the various hurdles that Mr Lownie lists, it shouldn’t have happened. But “Mountbatten, naturally impatient and over-confident took the decision to proceed with the operation…”.

But Mountbatten, says Mr Lownie, had a crack PR team, with no less than Daryl F Zanuck on it,  and managed not to get associated with it in the public mind. This despite the fact that people always tend to associate failure with specific people. 

So the confusion over who screwed up still continues. But the fact remains: He was in charge and should have stopped it after realising that it wasn’t going to succeed. This was Dickie all over. 

It’s also, as we know, very similar to the way Indians think of him as not being responsible for partition. In the hierarchy of those who get blamed, he comes last. 

His own report on it is a masterpiece of the technique of how to distance yourself. Indeed had it not been for the official record available in the Transfer of Power volumes, it might well have become the only record. 

What Mountbatten’s contribution in Asia was is still unclear. Mr Lownie attributes many things to him like energy, coordination, teamwork etc, but specifically? Nothing or not much. 

Mercifully this book is not entirely about all that, at least not much. It’s also about his — and his wife’s — personal life. Both were very colourful. In his preface the author quotes Mountbatten as saying, “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.”  Right. 

Very early on in their marriage they agreed not to insist on marital fidelity. After that it was all smooth sailing. But even there the details are absent. Who had greater success, for example? The men usually draw the short straw so it would have been interesting to know who manages to get into more beds. 

Edwina’s affair, if it was fully that, seemed to hurt. Mr Lownie says at one point she may even have considered divorce but she didn’t really want it. Life was very nice with Mountbatten and anyway by the mid-1950s the ardour has cooled considerably. They weren’t writing as often and after 1955 or so the annual visits also tapered off. But while it lasted it was very intense, even if Nehru wasn’t very loyal. 

Mr Lownie says on page 268 that “Nehru was deeply attractive to women and had many lovers”. He lists four of them. 

But he is careful not to sound judgemental. But by every token it was inexcusable behaviour for a prime minister. No gloss is possible. 

One last nugget. Mr Lownie says when Jinnah was given some letters fr­om Edwina to Nehru, he returned them saying he “had no wish to capitalise on them”.