Edwina Mountbatten's love affair with Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru will be featured in a new book on the lives and loves of the Mountbattens.
Nehru is one of the 18 lovers Edwina is believed to have had, but it was her most enduring one. When she died in 1960 at the age of 58, Edwina had a pile of Nehru’s love letters by her bed.
Her affair with Nehru was condoned by Lord Mountbatten, who in 1947 was appointed Viceroy of India.
In a letter to his daughter Patricia, Mountbatten wrote, “She and Jawaharlal (Nehru) are so sweet together, they really dote on each other.”
The Mountbattens left India in 1948, but Edwina would return to visit yearly and Nehru would make an annual trip to London. In between, they kept in touch by writing long love letters to each other.
As part of his research for the book, The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves, biographer Andrew Lownie delved into American intelligence service files, which described Mountbatten as “a homosexual with a perversion for young boys.”
Referring to an interview with Elizabeth de la Poer Beresford, Baroness Decies, who was a friend of the royal family, the report said: “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.”
It added: “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.”
The FBI documents from the 1940s also suggested that both Edwina and Lord Mountbatten were bisexual - a huge taboo at the time.
Quoting Ron Perks, Mountbatten's driver in Malta in 1948, Lownie's book states that the royal used to frequent a “gay brothel used by senior naval officers” in Rabat, Morocco.
Tom Driberg, a Labour party MP who was openly gay, was a friend of Mountbatten.
Lownie's book quotes a friend of Driberg as saying, “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.”
The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves is scheduled to hit the stands on August 22, the Sunday Times reported. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Lord Mountbatten's death. He was assassinated in an IRA bomb attack in 1979 in Ireland.
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