Steamy secret lives of the Mountbattens

A new book about Prince Philip’s uncle and his wife matches his own prescription that a biography should be ‘warts and all’.

Lord and Lady Mountbatten in Melbourne in 1946.

He was the war hero who led Allied efforts in southeast Asia, the statesman who was so admired as last viceroy of India that he was invited to be its first governor-general, and the family man who was Prince Philip’s uncle and a valued mentor to Prince Charles.

But recently uncovered FBI files and new interviews paint the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma as a sexually voracious man whose bisexuality became a theme of US intelligence files. The documents came to light during research for a biography of Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina by Andrew Lownie, a fellow of the Royal ­Historical Society and president of the Biographers’ Club.

Since the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in an IRA bomb attack­ 40 years ago, rumours have swirled about his sexuality, fuelled by his comment: “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.”

While Lady Mountbatten’s extramarital affairs are documented and acknowledged by their children, her husband’s private life has rarely been discussed. His official biographer wrote: “To suggest 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.”

The FBI files cover more than three decades. The first is dated February 1944, soon after Mountbatten became supreme allied commander of southeast Asia. Elizabeth­ de la Poer Beresford, Baroness Decies, when interviewed about another matter, had mentioned being an intimate of Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary and their 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.”

Much of Mountbatten’s FBI file remains closed. Further US intelligence files were added after the war as Mountbatten became NATO commander of allied ­forces in the Mediterranean, then admiral of the fleet, and later chief of the defence staff.

In Lownie’s book, The Mountbattens: their Lives & Loves, Ron Perks, who was Mountbatten’s driver in Malta in 1948, breaks a silence of more than 70 years to say that one favoured destination, the Red House near Rabat, “was an upmarket gay brothel used by senior naval officers”, which he had not realised at the time. In Britain, homosexual acts were illega­l until 1967.

Interest in the Mountbattens peaked around the Suez crisis, with FBI files opened in November 1955 and November 1956. Many memos pertaining to his homosexuality have since been redacted or destroyed. One file dated April-July 1956 was destroyed in May 2017, shortly after Lownie requested the records.

It was during the mid-1950s that Edwina came under scrutiny because of her close friendship with Krishna Menon, the Indian defence minister, and numerous men involved with the civil rights movement. At the same time, the FBI sent a report on Lord Mountbatten’s homosexuality to the Department of Justice.

In April 1957 the FBI produced a memo on allegations of an affair between Paul Robeson, the singer­, and Edwina, who had several­ liaisons with black men.

Edwina later adopted a new lover, Lieutenant Colonel Harold “Bunny” Phillips, a 190cm officer of the Coldstream Guards, while her husband enjoyed a decades-long relationship with Yola Letellie­r, the Frenchwoman upon whom Colette based her 1944 novell­a, Gigi.

His discomfort with his sexuality drove Mountbatten’s ambition, according to Lownie: “His sense of inadequacy in his private life found an outlet in his deter­mination for public ­office.”

The most intriguing of the documents is from May 1968, when a renowned FBI agent by the name of John Grombach discusses­ “a number of reports pertaining to the alleged homosexuality of Anthony Eden, Earl Mountbatten and (the diplomat) Anthony Nutting”.

Not surprisingly for a man of royal birth with film-star looks, Mountbatten cultivated a large group of gay friends, including Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan, Ivor Novello and Tom Driberg, who gave him the moniker “Mountbottom”.

The book contains an interview with a man who was Mountbatten’s lover throughout the 1970s, an unnamed neighbour then in his 20s.

In the new book, to be publishe­d on Thursday, Anthony Daly, a rent boy to the rich and famou­s during the 1970s, who had a close relationship with Driberg, claims: “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.”

In 1980, Pat MacLellan, Mountbatten’s former military assistant, wrote in a letter: “The interesting biography will be the one that is published in 30 or 40 years’ time when the dust has settled­.”

Mountbatten once said: “No biography has any value unless it is written with warts and all.”

Lownie said on Saturday: “I am a serious historian rather than a tabloid journalist but in a full biograp­hy I had to deal with many of the allegations which have repeatedly been raised.”

The Sunday Times