Postscript
• • • Now, though, it is not particular newspapers merely, but real books in hard covers that are giving Lord Mountbatten a going-over. True, Leonard Mosley, whose book on the withdrawal from India is reviewed on another page this week, is a Beaverbrook employee, but I am sure that it is not what Philip Mason, the re- viewer, refers to as 'powerful interests implac- ably hostile to Lord Mountbatten' that have prompted him to imply, among much else that is severely critical, that the withdrawal itself was accelerated for the sake of the Mountbatten career. Others have said as much, though I should like to know how much less muddle and bloodshed there would have been if all had gone at the sedater Wavell pace.
More surprising to me than Mr. Mosley's criticisms is the tone of A Very Quiet War (Hart- Davis, 21s.), by Ralph Arnold, who was Mount- batten's Deputy Director of Public Relations in the South-East Asia Command, for what seems to be the burden of Colonel Arnold's com- plaints is that his chief was so good at public relations. It seems a little unreasonable to have complained first, as Colonel Arnold did, and in writing, that a Corps Commander 'did not seem to me to be very PR-minded,' and then to devote a sizeable part of his book to being sniffy about 'Supremo's intense interest in everything to do with PR,' and to supposing, in a rather superior way, that when Mountbatten 'would drive him- self at a spanking pace in a jeep and when he reached any large bunch of soldiery that was doing nothing in particular . . . would vault nimbly out of his machine, jump agilely on to a packing-case, and deliver an absolutely first-class and apparently impromptu speech—simple, direct and genuinely inspiring,' the bunches of unoccupied soldiery, and the packing-cases, had been carefully set down at the appropriate places beforehand. What it boils down to is that Mountbatten was better at public relations than the public- relations people around him—to say nothing of being well known to the men who listened to his speeches as being somewhat better qualified to talk to them about fighting.
1 first fell in with Mountbatten in 1940, when he was a mere four-ringed captain in command of a destroyer flotilla beating up and down the Channel in case the Germans decided on a cross- ing, and occasionally bombarding an enemy-held port or trying to bring an enemy flotilla to battle. He was a good deal more highly re- garded then, by his destroyer captains and crews, who had already seen him in action and bringing in a crippled ship across the North Sea, fighting all the way, than he seems to have been four years later by the rather more cerebral types in Kandy.
We correspondents were given a ringside seat on the bridge whenever we wanted it, and before any considerable operation were taken as fully into the flotilla-commander's confidence as any of his officers. So we knew the whole story, and why this or that detail, for reasons of security, would have to be kept secret: it was never kept from us. I learned then, and have never for- gotten, that the best sort of 'relations' between a public man and the press is direct contact, not through an intermediary, or an adviser, or a consultant, and that the public man who gets his confidences respected is the one who tells all.
And if anyone argues that the relations be- tween the Beaverbrook press and Mountbatten, for whom I am claiming so much, could hardly be worse, and that perhaps a firm of public- relations experts would improve them, I can only answer that although this may not be over- estimating the power of public relations, it is certainly underestimating the Beaver.
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It has nothing to do with the story, but I like to recall that my colleagues and 1, at that time, were the first to be accredited to the Navy as correspondents, many months after the Army and the Air Force had accredited theirs. In the preliminary discussion between editors and the Admiralty my own chief, the then London editor of the then Manchester Guardian, re- calling that he had already sent off one man to the phoney war in khaki, with a gilt 'C,' for 'correspondent,' in his cap ('WC' having been argued about and decided against), asked what sort of uniform the new naval correspondent ought to provide themselves with. The AS, miralty thought this one over for some time, and then said, 'Yachting-caps: saluting the quarter- deck, you know.' And I duly sailed into action with Mountbatten, wearing grey flannel trousers. blazer and a yachting-cap. Not to mention thre different buoyant or inflatable life-saving device4.
You can't keep Erwin Wasey, Ruthrauff or Ryan down. They still keep on sending us hand- outs about potatoes, and we are now offered, on request, 'Photographs of Roast Breast of Lamb with turnips and Breast of Lamb Roly-Poly with Baked Onions.'
The enterprising firm of Peter Dominic seeni to make their wine tastings as seasonable as pos- sible. They are showing FrenCh and German white wines in May and June respectively, which somehow seems 'right' for white wines, even to those who drink them all the year round, and the current tastings are of Rhone wines, includ- ing Chateauneuf du Pape, a suitably robust wine for grey February days. (The tastings are in London, every Thursday at 12.30 and every Wed- nesday and Thursday at 6.30, up to and including March 8. Particulars from Peter Dominic, Horsham, Sussex; not from me.) Chateauneuf du Pape is very popular these days, but I can't believe that any RhOne wine is worth 23s. 6d. a bottle, which is the price of the one that is top of the bill at the tastings. 1 see that there is a red Hermitage, too, at only a shilling less, and that's a wine that I used to think underrated here—which it is obviously ceasing to be. My own tip would be to look very seriously indeed at the 1957 Grand Hermitage Rouge at 13s. 9d., for I suspect that it might show a good deal better than the sort of district burgundy that would sell at the same price; fine burgundies (and clarets) are going up every year, and the more modest of the Rhone wines might well take the place of some of them in our shop- ping lists.
CYRIL RAY
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