An excerpt from The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves
During his life, and after his death, rumours circulated about Mountbatten’s sexuality, encouraged by his friendship with well-known homosexuals such as Noël Coward and Tom Driberg, his close working relationship with Peter Murphy and his tactile behaviour. It was a question that his official biographer addressed head-on:
If Mountbatten was a practising homosexual, he was risking everything he valued most to indulge a fleeting appetite. In that case, his character was wholly different from anything delineated in this biography . . . All his naval contemporaries who have expressed an opinion on the subject – and some worked very close to him – state emphatically that they do not believe the stories to be true . . . Sex itself was not a matter of great importance to him . . . To suggest that such a man was actively homosexual seems to be flying not merely in the face of the evidence but also of everything we understand about his character.
It was a view shared by his secretary, John Barratt. ‘He certainly was not homosexual. The allegations that he “consorted” with young naval officers at his house in Kinnerton Street are preposterous . . . There is no possibility that he could have kept any homosexual activities secret from me in the intimate relationship that we had over the last fourteen years of his life.’
It’s an issue that Brian Hoey in his authorised book also dismisses, quoting evidence from Sacha Abercorn, John Barratt and Bill Evans – with the latter claiming that stories of bisexuality are: ‘Absolute rubbish . . . Men and boys weren’t his thing at all.’ Hoey concluded that ‘the most convincing argument against Mountbatten being bisexual is that in the fifteen years since his death, no one has come forward claiming that he was his lover.’
And yet rumours continued to circulate. Just after Mountbatten’s death, Private Eye ran a story:
News that Lord Weidenfeld has signed up naval historian Richard Hough to write an intimate family portrait of Earl Mountbatten raises speculation as to just how ‘intimate’ a portrait this will be. Will it, for example, reveal that the old sailor, particularly in the last 19 years of his life following the death of his heiress wife Edwina Ashley, was also a raving queen? Residents living close to his London home at 2 Kinnerton Street, SW1 have hair-raising stories to tell of the rollicking all-male frolics held there by the ageing matelot. Lord Louis, it seems, had a preference for young servicemen. This worked to advantage both ways: doing a turn for Dickie could do wonders for a young officer’s career, and in turn the former Chief of the Defence Staff could count on the discipline of service life to ensure discretion, and not have to monkey around with the disreputable and mercenary ‘John Come Home’ rent boys of Piccadilly.
Writing of the Ziegler biography, the author Michael Thornton ‘utterly disbelieved his insistence that there was no evidence to suggest Mountbatten was bisexual. My own knowledge of Dickie over the years suggested the opposite conclusion and Noël Coward, whom I knew extremely well for the last thirteen years of his life, told me it was “beyond doubt” and to his certain knowledge that Dickie had had male as well as female lovers.’ The entrepreneur, Jeremy Norman, whose business interests ranged from Burke’s Peerage to the Embassy nightclub, and who met Mountbatten a couple of times, ‘always thought he was gay; a crashing snob, interested in genealogy, loved uniforms and decorations – all typical of a gay man of that generation.’
‘There were rumours he was homosexual. I was surprised but not that surprised though I never saw any evidence,’ remembered Derrick Meakins, who served on his staff in 1948. ‘He was very manly. I had heard about friendships with other women. They were quite happy to go their own way.’ Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, in his memoirs, wrote of Mountbatten’s home in Kinnerton Street that ‘The tiny mews house seemed awash with young, muscular and suspiciously good-looking Naval ratings bustling about the place to no apparent purpose.’
Jackie Crier, who together with the casting director Celestia Fox worked in a clothes shop called ‘Spice’, owned by the Kinks’ management, opposite the Kinnerton Street flat in 1964–65, often saw Mountbatten. He would flirt with them and joke about the strange clothes they were wearing, but then pretend not to recognise them if they saw him in Wilton Crescent, as if that was a different persona. ‘He was hugely charismatic, always looked amazing with cheeky smile and eyes,’ remembered Crier. ‘I always thought, here’s serious grown-up crumpet. He was very dashing, elegant, dignified with wonderful manners. But I couldn’t help noticing the succession of handsome young men frequenting his flat through the day, including some rather shady characters. Sometimes they stood outside smoking. A sixth sense told me they were gay.’
The journalist Nicholas Davies recalled that, ‘In 1975 I helped write a series of articles for the London Daily Mirror, which revealed details of a homosexual ring centred on the Life Guards barracks in London. A number of young guardsmen informed me that Mountbatten was involved and they gave detailed, signed statements of alleged visits to his Kinnerton Street home. As a result of an internal investigation by the army, five Life Guards officers and thirty-six guardsmen were found guilty of homosexual activities and dismissed from the regiment.’
Francis Wheen, the biographer of Tom Driberg and Private Eye journalist, had collected material on Mountbatten that was destroyed in a fire. ‘It’s so maddening that all my boxes of Driberg research went up in flames in the great shed fire,’ he wrote, ‘as I know the Mountbatten file included (for instance) a letter sent to me by a chap whom Mountbatten tried to seduce when he (my correspondent) was a 17-year-old rating.’ The ‘young naval rating was lined up to “go on a picnic” with Mountbatten when the great man was visiting (I think) Malta. On the day, the youth was startled to discover that it was à deux – and that Mountbatten assumed that the sailor was to be served as a human dessert.’
Charlotte Breese wrote in her acclaimed biography, Hutch, ‘As for Lord Mountbatten’s bisexuality, many of those I interviewed were convinced of it. When he was Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, several officers boasted of their liaisons with him. A naval friend came across him on an island, when he was serving in Malta, nude in flagrante with another officer . . . These and other stories that refer to Mountbatten’s sexual proclivities have been consistently denied by their [sic] family.’
‘Lord Louis’ homo leanings were not any secret in the XIVth Army messes, which I heard about on my return to Calcutta at the end of the war,’ according to Philip Hindin, who served with Mountbatten in India and Burma:
By then I had been commissioned in the field. One of my sergeants used to boast about it in his cups. The end of the war situation lessened the division between ranks especially in the East, and junior officers used to use the Sgt’s mess in Fort William in k.d. (khaki drill) without the ‘pips’, as the food was better than any officer’s mess. Jack Hawkins (then a full colonel in the entertainments section) squashed these comments whenever possible.
The writer Elisa Segrave remembered, ‘My father always claimed that Mountbatten, whom he had met in the navy, was “a most frightful shit and probably a bugger boy!”’ According to someone in royal circles, ‘They were divorcing just before he became Viceroy and he persuaded her to go. She enjoyed the starring role. They were living apart. He had men friends – often naval ratings – and she liked black men.’
A banker seconded to Bombay in the seventies heard various stories about Mountbatten’s homosexual affairs – a long-standing Indian staff member of the bank had reputedly been one of his lovers. A Garda Special Branch officer heard stories about Mountbatten’s assignations in India through the Indian High Commission in Dublin.
James Lees-Milne recounts in his wartime diaries hearing from John Gielgud a story about ‘MB who decoyed a young man into his Eaton Square house and made him strip MB and beat him. The young man laid on with such violence that MB screamed in agony and the butler appeared. When confronted with the scene, all the butler remarked was, “I thought you rang, sir.”’
In his memoir, To Kill and Kill Again: The Chilling True Confessions of a Serial Killer, published in 2002, the conman and murderer Archibald Hall, also known as Roy Fontaine, claimed to have been Mountbatten’s lover during the war. Hall wrote that through the bisexual Vic Oliver, who was married to Winston Churchill’s daughter, he was taken up by Ivor Novello and at wartime parties in Novello’s flat above the Strand Theatre, he met the playwright Terence Rattigan, Conservative peer Lord Boothby and Mountbatten.
Paul Pender, who wrote a biography of Fontaine with his cooperation, asked him: ‘You mean – you mounted Mountbatten?’ ‘No,’ Roy replied, ever a stickler for detail, ‘Mountbatten mounted me. He believed it is better to give than to receive.’
Pender then asked Fontaine what he called his royal lover, to which the butler responded: ‘Most of Mountbatten’s gay friends called him “Mountbottom”.’ ‘Did you call him Mountbottom?’ ‘Of course not. That would have been disrespectful . . . I called him the Queen.’
Whilst research in their papers shows Ivor Novello and Terence Rattigan were friends, there is no evidence that Mountbatten knew either them or Hall. Pender stands by Fontaine’s claims, but Allan Nichol, in his biography of Fontaine, exercises caution: ‘It is impossible to ascertain how many of Fontaine’s recollections of early sexual exploits are true. If anything can be judged from his proven exaggerations elsewhere, it is fair to say that few of his boasted sexual adventures with the rich and famous of wartime Glasgow and London can be believed.’
In September 1987, an article appeared in the New Zealand tabloid magazine Truth, drawing on the testimony of Norman Nield, Mountbatten’s driver between 1942–43, who now lived in New Zealand, and had decided to tell his story after reading Spycatcher and after the death of his wife. ‘When I saw what all the fuss was about, I realised I had a better story to tell,’ Nield said.
He claimed he ‘was ordered to take young boys who had been procured for the admiral to his official residence in Lord Mountbatten’s Humber car’ and was paid £5 a week for his silence at a time when ratings were paid three shillings a day. According to Nield, Mountbatten, known as L.L., used brandy and lemonade to help seduce the boys, who ranged in age from eight to 12, and that once ‘he saw Lord Mountbatten in bed with a prostitute and two teenage girls, who tried unsuccessfully to seduce him for more than an hour.’ The prostitute, Barbara Harris, declared him unfit for ‘the sandwich treatment’.
‘Barbara Harris always brought some clothing like that for a baby girl but outsize – large enough, in fact, for one of these boys to wear,’ Nield said. ‘Obviously it had been specially made and she would hand it to L.L. with the boy. In the beginning I didn’t see what went on in the room, but one didn’t have to be a genius to guess what was going on.’
Nield claims the link between Lord Mountbatten and Harris was London’s fashionable wartime Pink Petal Club:
L.L. was a close friend of Noel Coward, who was also a patron of the club. Barbara Harris, through her notoriety in the early sex scandal, became friendly with L.L. and was a well-known face at the club . . . Twig warned me to be most careful about what I heard and saw. He said I was picked for the job because they believed I would be discreet. He later told me that L.L. was under a lot of pressure and released his tensions with his fondness for young boys dressed as small girls. He also told me that L.L. engaged in sex with men or even girls if they were youthful enough. He told me that L.L. was confused sexually and that I was being paid very well to keep my mouth shut . . . It all ceased when the admiral was taken ill. On his recovery late in 1943, he went to south-east Asia as a supreme commander of Allied forces.
There was no reason for Nield to make up the story, especially in so much detail – though certain details do not fit the conventional story. He says that at the time Mountbatten was living in a large house at Fareham near Portsmouth, but in 1942–43 Mountbatten was head of Combined Operations and based in London. However, Southwick House at Fareham was, from 1943, the location of the advance command post of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, which Mountbatten would have had cause to visit and he may have used a house nearby. Broadlands is about an hour’s drive from Fareham.
Peter Thompson, a former Mirror editor, writing in Diana’s Nightmare, told of how ‘an informant came to Fleet Street to sell a story alleging deviant behaviour by Mountbatten . . . Maxwell bought the story and suppressed it . . . It was a small but important favour.’
The cookery writer, Clarissa Dickson Wright, told Thompson that her uncle, Douglas Wright, as a Surgeon Commander, had served with Mountbatten during the Second World War.
Wright was summoned to Mountbatten’s cabin and found him taking a bath. Dickie ‘proceeded to make a pass at the doctor but was turned down’:
‘What about your career?’ asked Lord Louis. ‘You don’t understand,’ replied Dr Wright. ‘I’m planning to make a career outside the Navy.’
When Mountbatten persisted, he was told: ‘Just remember, I’m the doctor – the man with the needle.’ ‘Sure enough,’ said his relative, ‘Mountbatten got a dose of the clap in the Far East and Dr Wright had to treat him.’
Anthony Daly, whose memoir The Abuse of Power recounts his experiences as a rent boy to the rich and famous during the 1970s, was particularly close to Tom Driberg, who told him that:
He flew to Ceylon in a cargo plane. On arrival at Colombo, Mountbatten sent his private Dakota to pick him up and he was flown to HQ at a place improbably called Kandy. Tom said that after cocktails, one of Mountbatten’s aides offered him a Burmese boy, whom everyone at HQ called Candy. Tom had sex with Candy in the Dakota – how could I forget that!
Tom really did give me the impression that Mountbatten actually preferred men to women (wishful thinking on his part perhaps), and said they both had frank, not to say graphic discussions about homosexuality. They discussed the pornography they liked (Tom offered to show me his collection, but I declined). Tom said Mountbatten had something of a fetish for uniforms – handsome young men in military uniforms (with high boots) and beautiful boys in school uniform.
Daly picked up gossip from the circles he moved in and was told, ‘Mountbatten had a sexual preference for well-bred and well-educated young men of good standing (that would have ruled me out), from good families; or public school boys.’ He chose not to mention Mountbatten in The Abuse of Power, but described how Mountbatten had been courted by members of the National Association for Freedom, later the Freedom Association, who were plotting against Harold Wilson:
The Mountbatten connection here, as told to me by Noel Annan (Lord), was that this group were very actively trying to enlist Mountbatten to their cause, and that their enticements included a position of power and prestige and to offer him various young men for sex.
You may recall from the book that I endured a full night with Annan. It was he who led me to believe there was what I would now describe as an Anglo-Irish vice ring, with the landed gentry on both sides of the Irish border, abusing boys and young men. He told me that the venues for parties were the grand houses they owned. The young Grenadier Guard I was teamed up with for a pornographic photographic session told me he had been transported by helicopter to an elite gathering in a castle in either Belfast, or possibly just minutes over the border. Mountbatten’s castle Classiebawn was just twelve miles from the NI border.
Annan appeared to be very knowledgeable about all things Establishment and spy related, and their indiscretions. He told me Mountbatten was bisexual and had affairs with numerous young men, including an Indian prince!
The former Conservative minister Keith Joseph had ‘said that Mountbatten had affairs with many young sailors whilst at sea – he said such liaisons were perfectly normal for men at sea; but he said that Mountbatten also bedded countless women . . . Mountbatten’s sexuality seemed to be an open secret in the circles I moved in.’
In 1980, an article appeared in International Times claiming that Cecil King was so annoyed at Mountbatten’s failure to take part in his coup that he ‘forever after spewed out low-minded and scandalous observations about his former idol to anyone who’d listen. Even when he was rung up from Dublin by a television journalist to discover his reaction to Mountbatten’s execution by the IRA, he maintained that Mountbatten was a “sexual pervert” and that his wife Edwina had been a nymphomaniac.’
That same year Now Magazine published an article under the headline, ‘Mountbatten was part of a gay ring which was linked with Kincora’, in which the Northern Irish writer Robin Bryans ‘claimed that leading British establishment figures were in a vice ring which abused boys from the notorious Kincora Home in East Belfast . . . that the late Lord Louis Mountbatten, Captain Peter Montgomery, a former intelligence officer from Northern Ireland, Sir Anthony Blunt, the infamous homosexual MI5 traitor, and Peter England, a senior member of the British Secret Service (MI6), who served undercover at Stormont in the 1970s, were members of an old boy network which held gay orgies in country houses and castles on both sides of the Irish Border.’ It added that ‘Mountbatten was a great one for boys in the first year of public school, like at Portora Royal, which was thirteen and fourteen.’
In April 1990, Now Magazine returned to the subject with an article which claimed that, according to some Belfast journalists, Mountbatten lived a secret life both in Eire and, more particularly, Northern Ireland. ‘Lord Mountbatten was interested in what homosexuals call “the rough trade” and liked to have contacts with working-class youths. He was particularly attracted to boys in their early teens.’
Robin Bryans, also known as Robert Harbinson, a few months later made the same accusation in a private letter, claiming: ‘Kincora and Portora Boys’ Schools were used as homosexual brothels by many prominent figures, including Lord Mountbatten, James Molyneaux . . .’ He went on to say of Mountbatten that, ‘In the 1930s he had shared Anthony Blunt’s butch lover, Alan Price.’
The Now Magazine articles and Robin Bryans’ claims were dismissed, but now a new person has come forward, who is using a pseudonym. ‘Sean’ was 16 years old when he says he was driven from the Kincora Boys Home in Belfast to Classiebawn in the summer of 1977. As the men who had brought them waited outside, ‘Sean’ remembers being taken into a darkened room where he was joined by:
a man who undressed me and then gave me oral sex. I was there about an hour. He spoke quietly and tried to make me feel comfortable. He was one of those men who wanted attention, wanted you to chase him . . . I think he felt some shame. He said very sadly, ‘I hate these feelings.’ He seemed a sad and lonely person. I think the darkened room was all about denial . . . He grabbed my hand and put it on his chest . . . I only recognised who he was when I saw on the news that Lord Mountbatten had been killed.
Another 16-year-old boy, who is using a pseudonym, remembers being brought to Mullaghmore during the summer of 1977. ‘Amal’ says he met Mountbatten four times that summer on a day trip from Belfast. Each time the encounter, lasting an hour, took place in a suite at a hotel by the harbour about 15 minutes from Classiebawn. ‘Amal’ remembered:
He was very polite, very nice. I knew he was someone important. He asked if I wanted a drink or candy. He told me he liked dark-skinned people especially Sri Lankan people as they were very friendly and very good-looking. I remember he admired my smooth skin. We gave each other oral sex in a 69 position. He was very tender and I felt comfortable about it. It seemed very natural. I know that several other boys from Kincora were brought to him on other occasions.
Hints at Mountbatten’s bisexuality are provided by Ron Perks, who has spoken for the first time about an episode over 70 years ago. Perks, who served in the Royal Marines from 1944–57, was appointed Mountbatten’s driver on his arrival in Malta in 1948. Mountbatten’s predecessor commanding the First Cruiser Squadron, Rear Admiral R.V. Symons-Taylor, had told him, ‘You are going to be the driver of my successor. I want you to find out all these places’:
The Red House near Rabat was amongst them. It was an isolated, baronial-style building with a flat roof. One day as we were driving along, Mountbatten asked if I knew the Red House. I said I did and he asked if I would take him there, which I did. I never dropped him there, but he had his own car which he used often. He wouldn’t have asked me for nothing. I didn’t know what it was and only learnt after I came out of the service that it was an upmarket gay brothel used by senior naval officers. You’re taught to keep out of trouble in the Navy and I’ve never said a word about the incident until now.
The son of one of the ADCs on Mountbatten’s staff said that whilst his:
father was posted at SHAPE in the mid-1950s (which was then located at Rocquencort next to Versailles), he remembered a succession of young men being taken up to Lord Mountbatten’s suite in a hotel in Paris, which raised a few eyebrows at the time. I was particularly struck by my father’s disapproval as he was not a particularly censorious person, and I think that it was the indiscretion of Mountbatten’s behaviour which surprised him most.
My father left no doubt that the young men were there for sexual favours and not part of the Army/Civil Service. I have always imagined that it was in the evening and would have been single men, but on a regular basis. The way my father told the story implied that a significant number of people knew about it, hence his disapproval.
One of Mountbatten’s most fruitful sources of young men was the Life Guards. Nick Best, who served in the Grenadier Guards, remembers that: ‘It was said when Mountbatten was the Colonel of the Life Guards, he always took every new officer out to dinner to explore the homosexual potential.’
The writer Nigel West is convinced Mountbatten was bisexual, giving three reasons:
My father worked for Mountbatten on the Joint Planning Staff at Kandy, and heard about the outrage when Mountbatten arranged for the transfer of the alleged boyfriend, Peter Murphy.
A good friend of mine [name deleted] was very shocked when he applied to join the Life Guards (or some similar smart cavalry regiment) and was offered an interview with Mountbatten (I think through a godfather), who then promptly propositioned him! [Name deleted] was appalled. Allegedly, at around the same time (late 1960s) Mountbatten was caught with a Guardsman in St James’s Park and the Palace declined to intervene when the Yard reported the incident.
When I worked at the BBC’s General Features Department at Kensington House in 1978 (then headed by Desmond Wilcox), a neighbouring programme filmed an interview with Mountbatten, at his request, in which he acknowledged his homosexuality. The rumour was that the film, intended to be broadcast after his death, was suppressed by the Palace.
When interviewed, the friend of Nigel West said that he had met Mountbatten for a very good lunch at White’s Club:
He was very charismatic and attractive and wit and humour will get you everywhere. It was certainly true of Mountbatten. He was bloody funny. Age meant nothing to him. If you had a bit of gumption, he liked you. About two-thirds of the way through the lunch, his hand appeared on my knee and stayed there. West had warned me he was a switch-hitter and would bonk anything, so I wasn’t worried. We just made a joke of it. ‘Why do you think I’m Colonel in Chief of the Life Guards,’ he said. ‘We have such beautiful boys.’
Mountbatten’s male lover for the last eight years of his life is now in his seventies, but looks considerably younger. Handsome, smartly dressed and well-spoken, meeting for lunch he remembers his times with Mountbatten, a near neighbour, with great affection:
He was lovely and great fun. I saw him at least once a month, sometimes for a chat, sometimes for more. He was a great mentor to me, introducing me to all sorts of useful people, and we had lovely times together. He was perfectly relaxed about our relationship, in spite of the forty-year age gap, and certainly felt no shame. I was always up for sex, so happy to see him. He would ring to warn me when he wanted to pop round. John Barratt knew all about it and did not mind. His death was a great shock.
Further evidence of Mountbatten’s bisexuality comes from FBI files. In February 1944, the American writer and society figure, Elizabeth de la Poer Beresford, Baroness Decies, was interviewed by the FBI about another matter. But the FBI report reads:
She has been an intimate of the British Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary and her ladies-in-waiting. She states that in these circles Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife are considered persons of extremely low morals. She stated that Lord Louis Mountbatten was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys. In Lady Decies’ opinion he is an unfit man to direct any sort of military operations because of this condition. She stated further that his wife Lady Mountbatten was considered equally erratic and that it was known that Paul Robeson, coloured singer and actor, was her paramour . . . At the present time Lady Decies is residing at the Plaza Hotel in New York and appears to have no special motive in making the above statements. With the exception of the fact that Lady Decies is greatly worried about the safety of her Paris home, she appears to be otherwise normal.
Ulius Amoss’ accusations in 1952 against the Mountbattens had been dismissed by the FBI, but in November 1955 an FBI file was opened on Edwina, most probably because of her close association with Krishna Menon and her various political pronouncements on India and Africa and during the Suez Crisis. The FBI at the same time sent a report to the Department of Justice on Mountbatten’s homosexuality. In April 1957, the FBI produced a memo on allegations of an affair between Paul Robeson and Edwina and in September 1959 her file was again reviewed.
In May 1968, further accusations against Mountbatten were supplied to the FBI by John Grombach, who has been described as ‘one of the most remarkable and yet least known intelligence leaders in American history.’ Grombach, a brigadier in the New York National Guard, under cover of a company called Industrial Reports, ran his own independent spy operation for J. Edgar Hoover ‘known informally as the “Pond” that conducted espionage operations for the US government from 1942 to 1955.’
An international fencer, who also claimed to have been a stunt double in Hollywood movies, Grombach had been educated at West Point and worked in the State Department during the war dealing with British Intelligence. He told the FBI: ‘the person who furnished a report in 1953 regarding the alleged homosexuality of Anthony Eden, Earl Mountbatten and Anthony Nutting, was believed to be Lady Judith Listowel, née Márffy-Mantuano.’
Born Judit Márffy-Mantuano de Versegh et Leno on the family estate in Hungary, the daughter of a Hungarian diplomat, Listowell had studied at Budapest University and the London School of Economics, where she met ‘Billy’ Hare, the future 5th Earl of Listowel and Secretary of State for India, which gave her access to British social and political circles – her soirées in Belgrave Place during the war were famous. They had married in 1933, but divorced 12 years later, and she later served in the Hungarian diplomatic service and worked as a journalist and writer.
Much of Mountbatten’s FBI file, only part of which was released after Freedom of Information requests, remains closed. Some of the Kincora files at the British National Archives from the late 1970s and early 1980s are ‘Temporarily Retained by Department’, whilst others, which were due for release in 2018, were in August that year extended for a further period. One has to ask why.
Was Mountbatten perhaps abused as a young boy? The thirteen-year-old Dickie, recovering from whooping cough and bronchitis, spent several weeks alone at Bridport in Dorset in the summer of 1914 with a private tutor called Frederic Lawrence Long. Long, then in his early thirties, had left the Royal Navy to train for the ministry a few years earlier and was doing some private tutoring. The friendship between Mountbatten and Long, which continued after their sojourn in Bridport, was close – Long was to officiate at Mountbatten’s wedding – and is marked by some intense correspondence. ‘Dear Kid, I have one special pupil now – Prince John de Mahe. He is about your age & a decent enough kid but you need not be jealous as you know there is only one Dick in the world for me & there never will be anyone before or anywhere near him in my affections,’ wrote Long to Dickie in February 1916. ‘It is hardly necessary for me to add that I would give anything to wipe the floor with you. Goodbye my best beloved & dearest kid. With all my love, ever yours affectionately, F. Lawrence Long.’
Shortly afterwards, Long, who never married, wrote to his former pupil:
I don’t expect you know how much I would have given for a line from you dear for several reasons, but don’t worry yourself, and anyway, God bless you for the times of happiness we have had together and keep you always safe in body and soul . . . All my love to my best friend.
Then, after Mountbatten had been the first to congratulate Long on his ordination later that month:
You won’t find that ordination makes me any the less yours or you any the less mine; although I think I understand just what you felt. However many things there may be to do & think about there will always be time to think about you – and in the way that will be of most use. The use of those envelopes is a sound idea – very as I always have had an idea you wished to say more, in some ways, than you cared to do . . . you are constantly in my thoughts. Best of love, your devoted, Lawrence.
Quite apart from the familiarity of Long’s letters, one has to question, given Mountbatten kept almost every letter sent to him and this was clearly a close friendship, why there is so little correspondence between the two men in the Mountbatten archives and why should a tutor and his pupil communicate through double envelopes. Even though Long officiated at his wedding, Mountbatten makes no reference to him in his letters to his family, nor does he appear in any book on Mountbatten. It is a relationship worthy of closer study.
