Daughter of Empire: My Life as a Mountbatten - Hardcover

Hicks, Pamela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1476733813 ISBN 13: 9781476733814

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2013

Synopsis

This magical memoir about a singular childhood in England and India by the daughter of Lord Louis and Edwina Mountbatten provides a privileged glimpse into the lives and loves of some of the twentieth century’s leading figures.

A magical memoir about a singular childhood in England and India by the daughter of Lord Louis and Edwina Mountbatten

Few families can boast of not one but two saints among their ancestors, a great-aunt who was the last tsarina of Russia, a father who was Grace Kelly’s pinup, and a grandmother who was not only a princess but could also argue the finer points of naval law. Pamela Mountbatten entered a remarkable family when she was born at the very end of the Roaring Twenties.

As the younger daughter of the glamorous heiress Edwina Ashley and Lord Louis Mountbatten, Pamela spent much of her early life with her sister, nannies, and servants—and a menagerie that included, at different times, a bear, two wallabies, a mongoose, and a lion. Her parents each had lovers who lived openly with the family. The house was always full of guests like Sir Winston Churchill, Noël Coward, Douglas Fairbanks, and the Duchess of Windsor (who brought a cold cooked chicken as a hostess gift).

When World War II broke out, Lord Mountbatten was in command of HMS Kelly before being appointed chief of Combined Operations, and Pamela and her sister were sent to live on Fifth Avenue in New York City with Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. In 1947, her parents were appointed to be the last viceroy and vicereine of India and oversee the transfer of power to an independent Indian government. Amid the turmoil of political change, Pamela worked with student leaders, developed warm friendships with Gandhi and Nehru, and witnessed both the joy of Independence Day and its terrible aftermath. Soon afterwards, she was a bridesmaid in Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to Prince Philip, and was a ladyin- waiting at the young princess’s side when she learned her father had died and she was queen.

Vivid and engaging, well-paced and superbly detailed, this witty, intimate memoir is an enchanting lens through which to view the early part of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author:

Pamela Hicks is the daughter of Lord Louis and Edwina Mountbatten. She was Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen both when she was a princess and following her coronation. In 1960 she married the internationally celebrated designer David Hicks. She is the author of India Remembered and lives in Oxfordshire.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Daughter of Empire 1

My father could trace his roots back to the ninth century. Through forty-one generations, he was able to recount the lives of our ancestors—royalists, rebels, and saints. He never tired of telling me that it was extremely rare for a family to be able to cite two canonized antecedents. “The first,” he would say proudly, “goes way back to the thirteenth century. St. Elisabeth of Hungary was a gracious princess who secretly gave alms to the poor. Her husband didn’t approve of this and, one morning, ordered her to remove the cover of her basket. And”—I loved the ending of this story—“her forbidden bread had miraculously turned into roses.

“The other was your great-aunt Ella, Grand Duchess Serge of Russia, who, following her husband’s assassination, became a nun and worked tirelessly among the poor and sick of Moscow. In 1918, when she, the chief nun, three young princes, a grand duke, and a lady-in-waiting were thrown down a mine shaft by the Bolsheviks—along with a few hand grenades for good measure—witnesses heard her clear sweet voice singing ‘Hail Gentle Light’ and other hymns of fortitude to her fellow victims. Before she died, she tore up her nun’s veil to provide bandages for the princes’ wounds.”

Now known as St. Elisabeth of Romanova, my great-aunt is one of twelve modern saints preserved in sculpture above the West Door of Westminster Abbey. It was hard to keep track of my father’s long line of relatives, but as he loved lists and charts and stories, he was always ready to bring them to life. For many generations his ancestors had been rulers of the Grand Duchy of Hesse in Germany, a landlocked territory far from the coast. It was his father, Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg, who changed all that and altered the course of the family’s path. In 1868, at the tender age of fourteen, beset by dreams of a seafaring life, he surprised everyone by announcing that he was leaving home to set sail. In fact he was so determined to become part of the “greatest navy in the world” that he took British citizenship, eventually rising to the top job of First Sea Lord and Admiral of the Fleet. He didn’t cut off his ties with Europe completely, though, falling in love with his cousin Princess Victoria of Hesse, a sparky, independent-minded granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who was related to most of the royal courts in Europe. In those days it wasn’t always an advantage to have family members scattered across Europe, and during the First World War his mother found herself on opposite sides to her brother and sister. Luckily, my father always said, while patriotism was intense, it never undermined strong family affections.

My grandparents married in 1884 and lived variously in England, Germany, and Malta. My father, also Prince Louis of Battenberg but known as “Dickie,” was born in 1900, the youngest of four children. The aging Queen Victoria held him at his christening and he wriggled so much that he got her full square in the face with a fist and a foot, knocking off her spectacles. He always told me that at only a few weeks old, he couldn’t possibly have known he was to be “seen and not heard” while in the queen’s arms.

My father was blessed with enlightened parents. His mother in particular thought that children should not only be seen and very much heard but that they should also be exposed to new ideas and the classics. She kept meticulous records of the books she read and was always keen to try new experiences. Passionate about cartography, she worked for many years on a detailed geological map of Malta, participated in archaeological digs, and rather daringly, scooping up my father to provide the required extra weight, flew in a zeppelin airship and a very early model of a biplane, even though, as she said, “it was not made to carry passengers and we perched securely on a little stool holding on to the flier’s back.” Coming from a line of progressive thinkers, she taught my father herself until he was ten years old, gifting him an education that was thorough and polymathic. She taught him to be open-minded, methodical, and thorough, and above all encouraged him to enjoy learning, to inquire. Later, when I got to know my grandmother, I could see how entirely free of prejudice she was, how interested she was in all that was around her, and just how much of an influence she had had on my father’s refreshing way of viewing the world. She was to be an inspiring force in my life.

A month before his tenth birthday my father was sent to Lockers Park prep school in Hertfordshire, and two years later he entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne. As war became inevitable, at the beginning of 1914, his German-born father was forced to retire from the Admiralty as first sea lord because of the anti-German hysteria at large in the country, scurrilous newspaper headlines whipping people up into a frenzy of hatred. My grandfather resigned, even though the navy was solidly behind him, and this episode had a profound effect on my father, who vowed to succeed to the position of his wronged father. Then, during the war, when King George V decreed that the royal family should anglicize their name, choosing Windsor, my grandfather changed his from Battenberg to Mountbatten. The king created him the Marquess of Milford Haven, having offered him the title of duke, but, practical to the last and looking around him at the grandeur of the English nobility, he calculated that as his savings had been decimated in the German economic downturn, he simply didn’t have the wealth that would be expected of him with that rank: an English duke had to maintain a grand style of life. My father also ceased to be the younger Prince Louis of Battenberg and received the courtesy title of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

During the First World War, my father joined Lord Beatty’s flagship HMS Lion as a midshipman, and later he was appointed first lieutenant of a small ship, HMS P31, and for a time, aged only eighteen, he found himself in command of a crew of sixty. Through Princess Mary my father contrived that King George V should come on board during the Peace Pageant on the Thames. He saluted smartly as the monarch came aboard. “Hello, Dickie,” said the king jovially, “how’s Chicken Bella?” The fact that his sovereign remembered the stupid doll he had had as a two-year-old mortified the nineteen-year-old second in command and exposed him to remorseless teasing.

The Admiralty now sent the “war babies” who had been unable to complete their education to Cambridge University, and my father went with both Prince Albert and Prince Henry. They all led a wildly social life, falling in and out of love between studying. Tall, with the good looks of a Hollywood film star, my father was very much in demand. He was also in demand from the royal household, accompanying the Prince of Wales—the future King Edward VIII—as his personal aide-de-camp, on tours including Australia and, later, India and Japan.

Grace Kelly once confided that she had always kept a photograph of my father before she met Prince Rainier. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, a fiercely rich American society hostess, nicknamed “the Kingfisher” for her relentless cultivation of European royalty, singled my father out as the perfect suitor for her only daughter. When she invited him to a tea party on her yacht off Cowes, my father was immediately smitten, falling helplessly in love at first sight. Only it wasn’t quite as Mrs. Vanderbilt had intended, for on board that afternoon was a gathering of young ladies, including Edwina Ashley, an effortlessly glamorous heiress, who had recently learned to stand with her hips pushed slightly forward, the very image of beau monde chic. With one hand on her slender hip, the charms of her gold bracelet glinting off the other in the sun, my father was at once dazzled and delighted. Although they had met a couple of times previously, they began to court in earnest, and when my father went to India with the prince, Edwina followed him, staying at the Viceregal Lodge. It became obvious to all that they were very much in love, so much so that the Prince of Wales lent them his sitting room so that my father could propose.

On 18 July 1922, they were married in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, tucked in the shadow of Westminster Abbey on Parliament Square. It was the most talked-about society wedding of the year, and when my mother walked out on the arm of her dashing husband, beneath a naval arch of swords, they were congratulated by a host of royals, including King George V, Queen Mary, and the Queen Mother, Alexandra. At the sumptuous reception, the Prince of Wales gave the best man’s speech, following which my parents enjoyed a rather protracted honeymoon, traveling to France, Spain, Germany, and the States, where they stayed with Hollywood’s royalty, the king and queen of silent movies, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. They even made a short silent home movie with Charlie Chaplin entitled Nice and Easy, in which Charlie played a rogue trying to steal the pearls of the heroine (my mother), who is rescued by her lover (my father). My mother’s performance showed suitable girlish alarm, my father’s acting was dreadful, and of course Charlie stole the show. Happily exhausted, they returned to Manhattan for the last days of their adventure, where they stayed as guests of the very game Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who bore no grudges.

Marriage, my father’s love, and a sense of her own destiny—this is just what my mother needed. Since her “coming out” she had been living with her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassell, in his London home, Brook House, stoically hosting his large parties of elderly grandees and financiers, but his death in the year before her marriage had left my mother feeling empty, memories of her lonely childhood flooding back to her. Raised by a series of nannies and housekeepers in Broadlands, a large Palladian mansion near Romsey in Hampshire, Edwina and her younger sister, Mary, were mostly kept apart from their parents. Her mother, Maudie, suffered from consumption and, as her condition deteriorated, she spent more and more time away, particularly in Egypt. Their father, Wilfred, a Conservative MP, was rarely at home either, busy attending to his political duties. My mother’s early letters show how anxious she was to see her “darling mother” again. Having been misled by a well-intentioned suggestion from their governess, my mother believed that the reason for their separation was that she was going to be a sister again, and she wrote to her mother at least twice expressing her and Mary’s desire to have a little brother. After a while the penny dropped and she tried to keep the desperation out of her letters, going out of her way to keep her tone upbeat. When Maudie finally returned to Broadlands, it was thought too upsetting for the children to witness their mother’s failing health, so they were sent away to a cousin. And even though my mother wrote several times with growing urgency and despair, pleading to see her mother again, she was never allowed to, and Maudie died in February 1911. My mother and Mary did not attend the funeral.

My mother was brave, hiding her emotions well, containing her sister, who became very difficult, throwing tantrums and creating scenes. It seemed that she was the only one who could calm Mary down, and forever after, she felt responsible for her younger sister’s safety and well-being. A subdued period of existence followed, during which time the girls learned to pour their bruised feelings into caring for a menagerie of domestic pets—puppies, ponies, rabbits, kittens, and a goat. For a brief while, their lives were cheered and enriched by the arrival of Laura Deveira, a loving young governess to whom the sisters became deeply attached, but just as they began to settle down and come out of their protective shells, their father presented them with a new stepmother and the world came crashing down again.

Molly Forbes-Sempill replaced their beloved Miss Deveira with a governess of her choice and sent the girls to bed every evening by half past six so they were “out of the way,” a phrase that deeply upset my mother. My mother and aunt were forbidden to pick a single flower from the garden from the moment she moved in, and Broadlands became a sterile and difficult place in which to live. Eventually my mother went to school near Eastbourne—another lonely place for her—where the pupils took it in turns “hooking up Miss Potts,” a humiliating task involving wrestling with endless hooks and buttons in order to help the headmistress secure her dress each morning. Things improved little more when, aged eighteen, my mother was sent to a domestic science training college. It was while here that she vowed never to go back and live at Broadlands while her stepmother was alive. On leaving she went to live in London with her grandfather, Sir Ernest.

Life changed for the better when she met my father. They had both been recently touched by death—my father distraught at the loss of his father, my mother by the unexpected death of her grandfather—and initially they sought solace in each other. As time passed, however, and finally freed from her past, rich from her inheritance (which included Brook House), and happily in love, my mother found life opening up for her. This was the beginning of the “roaring twenties,” a time of exuberance and great optimism: jazz, dance, and liberating new styles. My mother was fashionably slender—she referred to herself as a “straight actress” with vital statistics of twenty-six all the way down—and she took full advantage of the freedom afforded to women now that bustles and corsets were obstructions of the past. She soon cut her hair short à la mode and kept it immaculately coiffed. As hemlines rose and shoes became more prominent, my mother had hers handmade in Paris, a pair in every color. This was the extravagant time in my parents’ lives—they had a cinema screen installed in Brook House and hosted regular parties at which princes, even kings and queens, could rub shoulders with the likes of Noël Coward, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin. By playing it at her parties, my mother made “The Man I Love” an overnight hit in England after Gershwin told her how upset he was that it had flopped in the United States. She danced the Charleston with Fred Astaire, and the rumors that Queen Mary didn’t approve of this kind of behavior made the dancing all the more delicious.

If they weren’t entertaining at home, my parents went out to clubs, and it was only when they arrived that the party really got started. Once they had danced into the early hours, they would return to Brook House, music ringing in their ears, and collapse into bed. As was the fashion in those days, they kept separate bedrooms—my father’s decorated to look like a ship’s cabin, a porthole in the wall with an ingenious “view” of Malta built behind. He had designed the light switch himself so that when turned down it emitted a low hum, like that of a ship’s engine, and this helped him get to sleep. The walls were pale green and the carpet black, the bed was covered in a thick orange cotton quilt handwoven in Malta—this much I know because it would be the same wherever we lived thereafter. My mother slept next door between pink satin sheets with a swan’s-down quilt covered in pink ostrich feathers so that it appeared to float.

During the first mo...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1476733813
• ISBN 13: 9781476733814
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 5
• Number of pages: 256