John Terraine - The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten

John Terraine

with a foreword by

LORD MOUNTBATTEN

How did this book come about? I suppose I ought to explain, because my friends know that I have refused to authorise any biography during my lifetime, and I certainly never intended to write any memoirs myself. So why did I agree to this book about my Life and Times?

It all started because my daughters wanted my grandchildrenten of them at presentto have some idea of what their grandfather had done. I have been involved in many historical events, but history, as taught in schools, very rarely deals with recent times, so the younger generation often knows least about the period closest to it. My son-in-law, Lord Brabourne, being a film and television producer, then came up with the suggestion that we should try to put the story of my life on film.

Ever since the end of the First World War, I had made a hobby of collecting film of personal interest. We knew that the archives of the Imperial War Museum and news-reel companies would contain much that could be useful. But obviously it would be a massive task, requiring a great deal of time, skill and money, to edit all this into a comprehensible story. John Brabourne, however, said that it should be possible to find a television company which would undertake the job and then screen the result.

This went far further than I had bargained for, and a long time passed before I was finally persuaded to agree. When I did, he found that Rediffusion Television would be prepared to do just that. So on my retirement from active duty in July 1965 the making of a television series was launched under the title of The Life and Times of Earl Mountbatten of Burma. None of us then realised quite what we were taking on!

That television series has taken over three years to make. We were fortunate to enlist a brilliant producer, Peter Morley, with a fine record of documentaries for I.T.V. behind him. We then got hold of John Terraine, who has a high reputation as a military historian, and who also played a considerable part in the making of the B.B.C.s excellent television series, The Great War. These two formed the nucleus of a very hard-working and efficient teamand a very happy one, too.

The first thing they had to do was to find out just what the story was. All that took up a lot of time. Then they had to give it a shape, which eventually turned out to be twelve one-hour television programmes. And then, with the help of their indefatigable researchers, they had the monumental task of clothing the bones of the story with the flesh of actual filmarchive material, and commentary by me, often filmed on location where the events concerned took place. All this turned out to be one of the hardest jobs I have ever done, but out of it there slowly emerged a television history of a type which has never been done before, because never before has a living participant taken part in this way.

It was encouraging for all of us to have our faith in the project warmly supported by Dr. Noble Frankland, the Director of the Imperial War Museum. He made all his facilitiesthousands of feet of film, stills, the expertise of his staff, even his premisesavailable to us, and a print of the series will be permanently available in the Museum.

Other experts in their special fields also helped to ensure the authenticity of what we were doing. The team have had the privilege of consulting (and filming) Prime Ministers, Presidents, senior officers of the Services, as well as other ranks and ratings who had important contributions to make. We are very grateful to them all.

Out of this painstaking effort our television history finally took shape. The team then felt that it was a perfectly logical next step to ensure that it should not be committed to the one, somewhat ephemeral, medium of television. They thought it deserved a more permanent record, and I finally agreed: hence this book.

To Queen Victoria and Albert, Prince Consorte were born nine children: four boys and five girls. The second girl, Alice Maud Mary, was born on April 25th 1843; in 1862 she married Prince Louis of Hesse, who subsequently became the Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse and the Rhine. They, in turn, had five children, the eldest of whom they named Victoria.

This was my motherQueen Victorias grand-daughter; they were very fond of each other. She was born in 1863, in the Lancaster Tower at Windsor Castle. And I was born thirty-seven years later in Frogmore House, in Windsor Great Park, just a few hundred yards away.

I was born on June 25th 1900, the sixty-third year of Queen Victorias reign. I was the youngest of four children: my sister Alice was already fifteen years old; my sister Louise was eleven; and my brother Georgie was nearly eight.

My great-grandmother was always very particular about the names of her descendants. When I was born she wrote to my mother, in the rather shaky handwriting of an octogenarian: There is one thing that would give me great pleasure if you and Louis approve of it, viz. if you would add the name Albert to the four others. So I was christened Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholasbut all my life people have called me Dickie.

My great-grandmother drove over from the Castle in her carriage for my christening, which took place in Frogmore House three weeks after I was born. I gather that I gave an early indication of obstreperousness by knocking her spectacles off her nose while she was holding mebut to everyones relief she took that in good part.

It is a tremendous thing to be one of Queen Victorias descendants. Roger Fulford, in his book Hanover to Windsor, wrote: They filled or were about to fill the thrones of Europe They did indeed. Queen Victorias eldest daughter, Princess Victoria, married Prince Frederick of Prussia, and became Empress of Germany when he ascended the throne as Kaiser Frederick III. My mothers sister Alix married the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Another grand-daughtermy cousin Enamarried King Alfonso XIII of Spain. Another married King Ferdinand I of Rumania; another married King Gustav VI of Sweden, who later married my sister Louise; yet another married King Constantine I of Greece; and yet another one married King Haakon VII of Norway; one of Queen Victorias great-grand-daughters married King Alexander I of Yugoslavia.

To me, this meant that from my earliest childhood I had close links with many countries. Later I visited a number of them, and began to take an interest in them. World affairs for us have always been very largely family affairs.

Six months after my christening my great-grandmother died, and the Victorian Age departed with her. It was the Age of Empire, and we British were proud to boast that our was an Empire on which the sun never set.

This Empire was founded on sea-power, and in the year 1900, when I was born, British sea-power was supreme.

At Queen Victorias Diamond Jubilee Review, in June 1897, the Royal Navy assembled 165 fighting ships. This was a deeply impressive spectacle of naval might. But its significance did not merely lie in the numbers displayed; it lay in the fact that not a single post abroad had been Nobody, it seemed, could compete with this.

Indeed, the Royal Navy had not been challenged in battle since Trafalgar; it had found no occasion to fight a major fleet action single-handed since 1805. Now it was taken for granted as the countrys protection, the guardian of trade, and the sanction of the Empire. Behind the shield of the Navy, British democracy seemed secure to advance in whatever direction it pleased: towards further imperialism