CHAPTER 5
ON 18 JULY 1922, LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN MARRIED THE Hon. Edwina Ashley at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. It was the wedding of the year.1 Policemen linked arms to hold back the crowd of 8000 people, which had not been deterred by the drizzly London weather.2
The guests included most of the royal family, led by Queen Mary, imposing in plumes, feathers, and fat strands of pearls; and her seventy-seven-year-old mother-in-law, Queen Alexandra, stylish in a jewelled turban and a long coat edged with black fur. The groom arrived, looking impossibly tall, slim and handsome next to his diminutive best man, David, the Prince of Wales. The bride debuted in a gown of silver tissue. Among her bridesmaids were the four sisters of Prince Philip of Greece, wearing gigantic lace bonnets.3 (Just weeks afterwards, a coup in Greece would nearly be the end of them. They would be saved by the timely intervention of the British Foreign Office, with the future husband of the British Queen cradled in an old orange crate. Mountbatten, in later years, would do little to discourage the story that it was he who had organized the rescue – but this was pure fantasy.)4 The newlyweds emerged to great cheers from the crowd, and went on to host a reception for 1400 guests at Brook House, before driving off towards Edwina’s country house in the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost that the bride had bought the groom for a wedding present.
Despite her position as the heiress to an immense fortune, Edwina had been brought up with austerity. She had always travelled third class (apart from when an Indian railway clerk had prevented her from doing so) and existed on a modest allowance. The first time she was allowed to have lunch with a man unchaperoned was when Dickie took her to Claridge’s after they became engaged; the first time she used make-up was when she wore a pale pink lipstick on her wedding day.5 After she married, the economies ended. During the five indulgent months of their honeymoon, Dickie and Edwina went to stay with Dickie’s uncle, the Grand Duke of Hesse, and toured Europe in the Silver Ghost. The jewellery Edwina received as wedding gifts attracted so much attention that Dickie took to sleeping with a gun under his pillow. When a thief broke into their bedroom, in Angoulême, he made enough of a kerfuffle while scrabbling around in the bedsheets for it to scare off the would-be felon.6 From Europe, the newlyweds sailed to New York, and crossed the United States, ending up in Hollywood. They stayed at Pickfair, the Beverly Hills mansion owned by movie stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. The Fairbankses were away, so Charlie Chaplin graciously stepped in to act as their host. Chaplin offered them a unique wedding present: the chance to star in one of his short films. The plot was inspired by the couple’s true life adventures, for Edwina plays the victim of a gang of jewel thieves. She is saved by Chaplin in trademark guise as the little tramp, and by a prettily made up Dickie.
Edwina’s vast wealth and Dickie’s social connections allowed the Mountbattens to live the most fashionable of lives. Edwina indulged Dickie’s fantasies of naval glory by giving him a special suite at their London home, Brook House in Mayfair, modelled on a ship’s cabin. The walls and ceilings were enamelled in white, and fake pipes and cables artfully arranged. Portholes were carved out of a wall, and electric fans blew through them to lull Dickie with a gentle sea breeze. He slept in a bunk, complete with brass rail to prevent him from falling out, should a typhoon strike Park Lane. There was a life-size mannequin of an admiral, dressed in a selection of relics of Prince Louis of Battenberg, including his hat, uniform and decorations; an imposing sight indeed in a newlywed’s bedroom. Edwina’s suite, meanwhile, was filled with lace, silk and swansdown.7Dickie was allowed in only sporadically. ‘Slept with Edwina!!’ he would write triumphantly in his diary after one of these rare intimacies.8
From the outside, the Mountbattens looked like the most golden couple in London. But it took only two years of marriage for Edwina to tire of having plighted her troth exclusively to Dickie. Dickie was deeply attached to the Navy, and spent more of his time fussing over it than over her.9When he did fuss over her, he fussed too much. Dickie had come from a happy, intimate home, and wanted to recreate a family in which everything was a team effort. Edwina had grown up in a household in which privacy and independence had been the norm, sometimes to the point of dysfunction. Dickie’s marital behaviour was exactly the opposite of what Edwina wanted: starving her of attention for months at a time, then smothering her with domesticity.
The couple had two daughters together, Patricia in 1924 and Pamela in 1929. Often they had the young Prince Philip of Greece to stay after he began his education at Cheam prep school in 1930.10 Behind this illusion of wedded bliss, Edwina embarked on a long and ostentatious series of affairs. These started very early on, even if one discounts the claim Charlie Chaplin once dropped into conversation about Edwina having made a pass at him during her honeymoon.11 Dickie’s posting to the Dardanelles aboard HMS Revenge in 1923 left his young wife alone to the gaudy pleasures of London’s night life, and she – still quite recently emancipated from her maiden existence – made the most of them. ‘Went to see David at St James’s Palace,’ Dickie wrote warily in his diary on 3 December 1925. ‘He had a queer story about Edwina.’12
There would be many more queer stories to come. In October 1926, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a lurid story entitled ‘A Royal “Spanking” for Gay Lady Mountbatten’. Though not quite as scandalous as it sounds to modern ears, the article was damaging enough. It contained a list of her misdeeds, which were said to have included an inappropriate Charleston with Fred Astaire, and a florid description of the rebuke she had allegedly received from Queen Mary.13 By then, Dickie knew all too well that his wife was doing more than the Charleston with some of her ‘ginks’, as her admirers became known. He was devastated. His younger daughter, Pamela, later said that he had nurtured a romantic dream about ‘a wife that was purer than pure’, whom he could put on a pedestal and would support his career indefatigably: ‘And then, of course, he finds that she’s not like that at all.’14 He wrote Edwina a piteous letter:
I wish I knew how to flirt with other women, and especially with my wife. I wish I’d sown more wild oats in my youth, and could excite more than I fear I do. I wish I wasn’t in the Navy and had to drag you out to Malta. I wish I had an equal share of the money so that I could give you far handsomer presents than I can really at present honestly manage. In other words, I’d like to feel that I was really worthy of your love.15
‘I feel I’ve been such a beast,’ was Edwina’s typical reply. ‘You were so wonderful about everything and I do realise how hard it all was for you, altho’ I know you think I don’t. I feel terribly about it all.’16 But the terrible feeling never prevented her from doing it again. Edwina did not bother to be secretive about her affairs, and hints of her liaisons were scattered through newspaper headlines, gossip columns and the memoirs of nightclub hostesses.17 In 1928, the Mountbattens called in the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook to help quash an American divorce case in which Edwina would have been cited as co-respondent.18
Despite the Mountbattens’ marital dramas, the marriage did not break up. There had been a decisive row, with Edwina sitting in her bath, sobbing, and telling Dickie that she wanted to be free. Dickie agreed to leave the next morning, and retired to bed. His cool reaction worked: it was Edwina who came to his room to make up. They agreed to stay together, though with, effectively, an open relationship.19 Dickie had realized, with a commendable grasp of reality that would elude him in his working life, that he could not have his wife to himself. Edwina would be allowed her boyfriends: and Dickie, somewhat perfunctorily, would take a girlfriend. He met Yola Letellier, the wife of a French newspaper owner, at a polo game. According to Dickie’s younger daughter, Pamela, ‘He didn’t fall head over heels, but he found her very attractive, to flirt with, to dance with, and to enjoy life with.’20 Though it may have been adultery in a technical sense, Dickie’s relationship with Yola would demonstrate his instinctive urge for fidelity. They would stay together, in one form or another, for decades.
Edwina was furious about Dickie’s consolation affair. ‘It was all right for her to have her own boyfriend, but she wasn’t so keen on my father having his girlfriend,’ remembered Patricia. ‘She suffered from this dreadful jealousy all her life and even when she didn’t want him herself she still hated the thought of him with anyone else.’21 Edwina swiftly and unhelpfully befriended her husband’s girlfriend, going to great lengths to create trouble. On one occasion, Dickie arrived in Paris for a weekend with Yola to find a note saying that Edwina had taken her to Austria.22 When he complained, Edwina let rip in the most unreasonable tones. ‘I have never in any way tried to pinch her from you’, she wrote angrily. ‘I don’t want our friendship spoiled … by this ridiculous attitude you have been taking up: jealousy, hurt feelings, and all over nothing.’23 But the person in the marriage who suffered most frequently from jealousy was Edwina. She was jealous of Yola, extracting a promise from Dickie not to marry her if he were widowed; she was jealous of the Navy; she was even jealous of her own daughters. Even when Patricia was a grown woman, she had to conspire to meet her father in secret to avoid incurring her mother’s wrath.24
In contrast to her intense jealousy towards women, Edwina never showed any sign of the least resentment towards the men in her husband’s life. There was quite a number of them; and there have been persistent rumours that he was homosexual. Several of his closest friends were gay, including Noël Coward, Tom Driberg, and a left-wing ex-Guards officer called Peter Murphy who virtually cohabited with the Mountbattens for many years. Coward had met the Mountbattens after their trip to America with the Prince of Wales in 1924. He had always had a ‘hero-worship for the Royal Navy’, and the friendship blossomed despite the fact that the two men were quite different.25 ‘Temperamentally we were diametrically opposed,’ Coward admitted; ‘practically all our interests and pleasures and ambitions were so divergent that it was difficult to imagine how, over such a long period of time, we could have found one another such good company.’26 And yet they did. By the 1930s, they were close enough that Coward went on holiday with the Mountbattens in Gozo: ‘I spent one of the gayest months I have ever spent with him and Edwina in Malta’, he later wrote; it should probably be assumed he meant ‘jolliest’.27 Coward passed his time lounging around at the Mountbattens’ house, the Casa Medina, stripped to the waist, and tanning himself to a dark teak finish.28 On his return to England, he wrote a thank-you letter to Dickie, addressing him as ‘Dear dainty Darling’, and went on:
I could not have enjoyed my holiday more … Please be careful of your Zippers Dickie dear and don’t let me hear of any ugly happenings at Flotilla dances.
Love and kisses
Signal Bosun Coward
(I know Bosun ought to be spelt ‘Boatswain’ but I don’t care!)29
The fact that Mountbatten was not threatened by gay men does not automatically imply that he himself was gay; it could be taken to signify the opposite. His reaction on being told that one of his servants was gay was characteristically unflustered. ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘All the best valets are.’30 The conclusion drawn by most of those who knew him was that, while he enjoyed flirtation with everyone, Dickie was not terribly interested in actually having sex with anyone.
As their marriage floundered, the Mountbattens’ separate pursuits grew ever more important. While Edwina partied, Dickie invented things. He became obsessed with time-saving devices. He equipped himself with elasticated shoes, had his braces stitched permanently to his trousers, and wore a buttonless waistcoat that could be pulled on over his head like a jumper. His valet even reported that Dickie invented a ‘Simplex’ shirt with built-in Y-fronts, ‘that he could slide into like a stretch suit’. Edwina had started to find her husband tiresome and unattractive.31 But her extramarital social life was not making her happy, either. She was by no means the only person to notice that London in the 1920s was a whirl of overcrowded parties that felt empty. It was a theme of the time, most memorably captured in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, but also occupying any number of less celebrated literary works such as Jig-Saw, the first novel by Edwina’s friend Barbara Cartland. Noël Coward’s party farce Hands Across the Sea was a straight parody of the Mountbattens; apologetically, he sent them six tickets for the premiere in recognition of the fact.32Edwina’s life was a constant rotation of luncheon-parties, garden-parties, cocktail-parties, dinner-parties and weekend house-parties. When she was not at parties, she was planning parties, or buying new dresses for parties, or carrying on illicitly with the men she had met at parties, or recovering from the hangovers she had incurred by going to too many parties. The Mountbattens often received three or four invitations for the same evening. ‘To those who knew her best it seemed she was just burning up energy because she did not know what else to do with it,’ commented one semi-authorized biographer.33 As she approached thirty, she began to plot an escape. She planned to travel the world, and her first choice of destination – Moscow – betrayed the stirring of a new political interest in her mind.
Mohandas Gandhi had suffered greatly from his retreat after Chauri Chaura. In his absence, control of Congress had passed to Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das. At the end of 1922, they had formed a group called the Swarajya Party within Congress, aiming at a swift transition to dominion status. This was well supported in India, but the British Home Member of the Indian government, Sir Malcolm Hailey, put a stop to it. The ‘responsible government’ stated as the aim of British policy since 1919, he said, did not imply a fully responsible government, nor one that had dominion status. ‘It may be,’ he said during the debate, ‘that full dominion self-government is the logical outcome of responsible government, nay, it may be the inevitable and historical development of responsible government, but it is a further and final step.’34 Indian hopes were dashed again.
Motilal Nehru followed Jawahar’s lead, and gave up everything for Gandhi: his legal career, his fine clothes, his Western dining room, his stable of horses and his wine cellar. Only one trapping of his former life remained. ‘I have done all these things for you, Bapu,’ his daughter Betty remembered him saying to Gandhi, ‘but I am an old man and accustomed to my ways. Whether you like it or not, I am going to have my two pegs [whiskies] before dinner.’35
Meanwhile, the relationship between Gandhi and the younger Nehru was intense, fraught and semi-paternal. The two men had wildly different political and philosophical ideas, but a peculiarly potent sympathy with each other, both emotional and practical. Gandhi needed a link to the temporal world; Nehru needed a guru. It suited Gandhi well to groom this young radical, for he had found no serious political heir among his four sons. In fact, by the middle 1920s, his relationships with them had become extremely difficult. When eighteen-year-old Manilal was caught in an embrace with a young, married Indian woman, Mohandas coerced her into shaving her head, and extracted from Manilal a vow of lifelong chastity.36 In 1926, still languishing under his vow, Manilal fell in love with a Muslim woman called Fatima. Mohandas was outraged. ‘Your desire is against your religion’, he wrote to Manilal. ‘It would be like putting two swords in one scabbard … Your marriage will be a great jolt to Hindu–Muslim relations.’37
Manilal did not marry Fatima, though he was finally released from his vow at the age of thirty-five, and married a Hindu woman. It was then the turn of Mohandas’s third son, Devadas, who fell in love with Lakshmi, the daughter of Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, one of the leading lights of Congress and a member of the Brahmin caste. The fathers would only agree to the inter-caste marriage if Devadas and Lakshmi waited for five years to see if their feelings changed. Happily, they did not. The couple married in 1933.38
Despite the many failures of his brahmacharya policy, Gandhi persisted in enforcing it at his ashrams, and broke up several marriages by persuading the women to renounce sex.39 It was a field in which he and Nehru could never be reconciled. Nehru wrote that Gandhi’s sex ban ‘can only lead to frustration, inhibition, neurosis, and all manner of physical and nervous ills’.40 As for Gandhi’s decree that birth control was a particular sin, for it allowed a person ‘to indulge his animal passions and escape the consequences of his acts’, Nehru considered it to be outrageous. ‘Personally I find this attitude unnatural and shocking, and if he is right, then I am a criminal on the verge of imbecility and nervous prostration.’41
Nehru was aware that the gulf between Gandhi and himself was deep. Much of his autobiography chronicled their differences. And yet the two continued to be the closest of friends. ‘People who do not know Gandhiji personally and have only read his writings are apt to think that he is a priestly type, extremely puritanical, long-faced, Calvinistic, and a kill-joy,’ Nehru wrote. ‘He is the very opposite … His smile is delightful, his laughter infectious, and he radiates light-heartedness. There is something childlike about him which is full of charm.’42
Whatever his moral eccentricities and political failures, Gandhi’s charm and charisma ensured that he remained popular both within Congress and in the nation at large. The millions of admirers he attracted from among the general public greeted him not as a politician, but as a spiritual guru. They cannot be accused of misconstruction. Nehru went around the United Provinces with Gandhi during 1929, and was struck by the masses of ordinary people who turned up – amounting to tens of thousands every few miles. Gandhi’s tour was a basic affair. He brought no means of amplification and, consequently, these heaving throngs had little chance of making out what he was saying. ‘Probably they did not expect to hear anything,’ Nehru observed; ‘they were satisfied if they saw the Mahatma.’43 He was right, and it went further than that. An American correspondent watched in awe as people surged forward towards Gandhi at the end of one of these meetings, desperate to touch the hem of his garment.44 Sanskrit has a useful word which Nehru used to describe Gandhi’s appearances: darshan, meaning the act of seeing or being seen by a divinity.
Among those who found Gandhi inspirational was Kamala Nehru. ‘Close contact with Gandhiji opened up a new world to her,’ remembered her daughter, Indira.45 Kamala, like many Hindu girls, had been taught that the highest accomplishment at which a woman could aim was the emulation of Sita – the legendary wife of Rama, whose obedience and chastity were rewarded with rejection and slander, and whose achievement was to bring up twin sons alone, deliver them unto the husband who had rejected her, and then roll over and be swallowed up by the earth.46 But Kamala had married Jawaharlal Nehru, who thought little of meek obedience and still less of pretty ignorance. She had been only seventeen when they married, and barely educated – but she became a brave, spirited and politically active woman. Visits to Europe with her husband strengthened both her notions of racial identity and her feminist tendencies. She wrote from London: ‘When I think of the plight of my sisters my heart bleeds for they are indifferent to the question of their own rights. Day by day I am getting more and more determined that on my return home I shall take my sisters along with me, I shall urge them to place their trust in God and fight for their own freedom, educate their daughters so that they are not in trouble like us and join the struggle for independence so that we do not have to spend our lives in shame.’47 Yet, despite her increasing interest in politics, she and her husband were barely happier together than they had been on their disjointed honeymoon. Jawahar was struck to see paintings for sale at bazaars, depicting Kamala and him with the caption ‘Adarsha jori’ – ‘The ideal couple’.48
Kamala was never in good health after the birth of the couple’s daughter, Indira, in 1917. In 1924, she and Jawahar had a premature baby boy, who soon perished. The experience further ruined her constitution, and she developed tuberculosis. Jawahar was obliged to take her to Europe for long periods so that she might recuperate in Alpine sanatoria. Even outside India, Jawahar took no rest from Congress activities, travelling tirelessly around the European capitals, followed, somewhat to his pride, by the British secret service, which he described as ‘the best in the world’.49
Lonely and bored, Kamala struck up a correspondence with Syed Mahmud, a Muslim friend of Nehru’s from his Cambridge days. She encouraged him to correct her Urdu, and debated with him her new-found interest in women’s rights.50 She urged him to educate his daughters and to remove the women of his family from the strictures of purdah. ‘I want you men to be put in purdah for some years, and then I should ask you what it is like.’51
She was able to confide to Mahmud her innermost feelings, which at that time could be dark and unhappy. ‘I am of no use to the world and am making it heavier every day by doing nothing: only eating and sleeping,’ she confessed. ‘I cannot earn my living and am a burden to everybody. I wish that my end will come soon. Your brother [Jawahar] cannot do his work owing to me. There is no other way to free him of his burden.’52 Mahmud later described her as ‘an angel of the house’, ‘goodness personified’, and confessed that she was ‘like a sister to me’.53 But, for all that her friends could see Kamala’s virtues, her own husband remained distant, and only intermittently affectionate.
In the summer of 1927, Motilal arrived at Kamala’s Swiss sanatorium, and with his entrance the austerity of Jawahar’s household vanished. Kamala, Betty, Indira and Jawahar went all around Europe with him first-class, staying in luxury hotels and driving in limousines. In Berlin, Jawahar and Motilal received an invitation from the Soviet government to go to Moscow for the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Russian Revolution. Jawahar was thrilled by Moscow, and by his perceptions of comradely idealism, though he was horrified by the brutality of the Stalinist regime. Motilal felt the horror, but not the thrill. The suite in the Grand Hotel was filled with gold and velvet furniture covered up with coarse cloth: its tsarist opulence did not fit with communist tastes. It was freezing, and Betty was alarmed to discover that there was no hot water to bathe in – ‘though Father succeeded by making a tremendous fuss’.54
When Jawahar finally returned to India, he was driven by a new confidence. His fellow Congressmen began to joke that ‘vodka has gone to his head’.55 ‘In a hundred fiery speeches all over India he preached the doctrine of complete independence’, wrote Betty. ‘So radical was he that even Gandhiji protested that he was moving too fast, and Father was terribly worried.’56 Motilal’s concern was that his son on the left, and Subhas Chandra Bose on the right, would split Congress. Towards the late 1920s, the independence movement had lost much of its vitality. Nehru had been in Europe; Gandhi’s focus had been on his two personal campaigns, swadeshi – self-sufficiency, or the campaign to buy Indian-made goods – and khadi, or hand-spinning of cloth. It came as something of a surprise to all sides when, in March 1927, the British government announced that it was appointing a commission to look into India’s future.57
The Simon Commission, led by Sir John Simon and including a junior Labour MP called Clement Attlee, arrived in India in February 1928, to investigate possible changes to the Indian constitution. Indian politicians were outraged: every single man on the Commission was British, and they had had enough of Britons imposing constitutions upon them. Immediately, Congress and the Muslim League came together to organize protests. ‘Once again, by lack of elementary tact, the British did for us what we could not seem to do ourselves,’ wrote Betty, wryly, ‘they unified India.’58 The protests would give Jawaharlal Nehru his first experience of violence at the hands of the state.
Sixteen people with a flag had been defined as constituting an illegal procession, and so Nehru led a group of exactly that description through the back streets of Lucknow. They had not gone more than a couple of hundred yards when mounted policemen rode them down and let fly with their lathis, bamboo sticks with metal tips. As he saw his fellow demonstrators being thrashed, Jawahar’s instinct was to hide – but he forced himself instead to face the aggression. A policeman approached him on horseback, and Jawahar simply asked him to go ahead, before turning his head away. From high atop his horse the policeman struck two blows on Jawahar’s body. Jawahar did not fall, and was saved from further injury by the intervention of local officials.59
The next day, when the Simon Commission actually arrived, a few thousand assembled for a protest on the maidan. They were charged by mounted policemen, who galloped their horses right up to the crowd, trampling innocent bystanders as they went. Once again, the policemen hit out with batons and lathis. Nehru had to fight down the urge to strike back.60
Nehru and his compatriots emerged from their beating with their flesh thoroughly mortified. He himself had received a serious injury to his arm, which would trouble him for the rest of his life, though he was too proud to admit it in his autobiography. ‘Injuries severe but not serious’, he telegraphed to friends in London. ‘Hope survive the British Empire.’61
It looked like he might, for the British general election of May 1929 returned a minority Labour government: weak, but determined to move on Indian policy. Lord Irwin was summoned back to London in June; he returned to Delhi in October, and made a proclamation:
In view of the doubts which have been expressed both in Great Britain and India regarding the interpretation to be placed on the intentions of the British Government in enacting the Statute of 1919, I am authorised on behalf of His Majesty’s Government to state clearly that in their judgment it is implicit in the declaration of 1917 that the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress as there contemplated is the attainment of Dominion Status.62
It had taken twelve years to clear up that misunderstanding; an incredible amount of time during which many opportunities had been lost. It would take a further eighteen years before India actually achieved dominion status. A great many more opportunities, a very large amount of money, and hundreds of thousands of human lives would be sacrificed along the way.