One of the lordly ones
John Hackett
The people whom Mountbatten knew must number millions — quite apart from the many millions more who knew Mountbatten. He will be very easily remembered. He moved through his acquaintance with the brilliance of a king-fisher. darting along the. stream in a blinding, breath-taking flash of electric blue. Some of those who worked with him found him rather irritating: others even went so far as to describe him as a little obtuse. What few would deny is that he shed a light on whatever company he was in that was not easily equalled. The life that was so brutally snuffed out by the work of squalid trolls was one of a radiance beyond their ken. It was not, it must be admitted, entirely beyond his own. To be wholly unaware of the shape and texture of his own aura a man must be either very stupid or a saint. This man was neither.
I first met him when I was eleven years old. He was then Flag-Lieutenant to the Prince of Wales on his Australian tour and stayed, with the other three closest members of the Prince's staff, in my mother's house in Adelaide. Not long ago I came across the bread-and-butter letter he wrote. It was as charming as it was discursive, Many years after that, when he was Chief of the Defence Staff and I was Deputy Chief of the General Staff and we had over the years come to know each other quite well, I brought one day to the office a picture of all these beautiful young men with their signatures on it, the most beautiful of all being the god-like figure in naval uniform under which was written 'Louis Mountbatten', Dickie looked at it with something approaching awe. 'You must be very careful with that,' he said. 'That's a historic document'.
It was impossible not to love this man, even if— and perhaps in part because — you also had to laugh at him a little. Once there was a great party in the house of Admiral Sir Frank Hopkins, C-in-C Portsmouth, to dine in Nelson's cabin on HMS Victory, newly done up the way it had been in the great days. We all met in the C-in-C's house to change, Pickle arriving in a rig that was clearly maritime but equally clearly not RN. As an ignorant but not wholly unobservant soldier, I had a careful look at this. Several possibilities went through my mind, of which one, as at least a decent outside bet, was Trinity House, He came over to me. 'Now you're one of our more intelligent soldiers,' he said. 'Tell me what I'm wear ing'. Wild horses could not have dragged Trinity House from me. 'I don't know,' I said, 'Peruvian navy?' Good heavens,' said he. 'Peruvian navy, indeed! Trinity House!' He said it in a way that positively invited genuflection. Later, on the Victory after dinner, I could hear him saying to one duchess after another (it was always useful to have a duchess or two for occasions like this): 'You see that chap over there? He's one of our more intelligent soldiers, but when I was wearing Trinity House rig before dinner he thought I was in the Peruvian navy.'
Everyone who knew him has his own store of Dickie stories. I have several of my own. Some of those you hear are very funny but I have never heard one that was malicious. He may have attracted an explosive blast from those already damned beyond redemption, who in the words of the song I used to know in County Donegal about poteen, 'be they Christian, pagan or Jew', will carry a bitter load of guilt to the grave and far beyond. He has never attracted malice.
Everyone who knew anything about him was aware that he wanted to be First Sea Lord, to set an entry in the book against the earlier intolerable and ignoble slight to his father. Contemporaries who knew his active, energetic ways would gloomily reflect over the Plymouth gin that he would get there all right, and it would take the Navy years to recover. But he was a very high-class professional, a 'comm unicator' — as they call those who know about 'making signals' and all that sort of thing in the senior service — who played in the top division of the league. He was brave. Of course he was brave: bravery — whatever 'bravery' means, and not even Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics could clear that up entirely is in fighting men no more than another professional skill. He was brave, but he was also very capable. He could take a long cool view and if in the political arena he sometimes went a bit wrong on the detail, he knew where he was going and never lost sight of the objective, even if it was one that not everybody could see — and not all of those who could found it welcome. Above all he had style, a richness and a splendour which the pathetic little men who blew him and his boat apart can never hope to match this side of doomsday. There can never be another for the world into which fate poured the rare metal, of which Mountbatten was made, is broken now. The Immortal Hour, known so well to so many of my generation, is virtually unknown in this. 'How beautiful they are, the lordly ones. .1 Rutland Boughton 's phrases come back to me over the half century since I heard them first. Mountbatten was one of the lordly ones. However you look at Dickie Mountbatten that is the company in which he belongs, not least because of the true humility without which there is no entry to it. We shall not see his like again, and there will be very many who will find the world he has left a poorer, and a sadder place without him.
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