Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House

In August 1979, he prepared, as he did every summer, to spend a family holiday at his castle, Classiebawn, in Ireland. The day before he left he spoke on the phone to one of the authors of this book.

‘Be careful up there, Lord Louis,’ the author warned, ‘you’re an awfully tempting target for those whackos of the IRA.’

‘My dear Larry,’ came the reply, ‘once again you’re revealing how little you know of these matters. The Irish are well aware of my feelings on the Irish question. I am in no danger over there whatsoever.’

A fortnight later, together with the mother of his son-in-law Lord John Brabourne and a young child, he was murdered by an IRA assassin’s bomb hidden in his motor launch as he was setting out to sea for a morning sail.

He would have had nothing but utter contempt for people who would murder an elderly woman and a child. But himself? He died swiftly, afloat upon those endless seas which had played such an important role in his own and his father’s life. Had his death brought some small measure of wisdom to the Republicans and Loyalists killing and murdering in Northern Ireland, might he not have considered it a worthwhile final act, one not incomparable with the death of the man he so admired, Mahatma Gandhi?

Often during our work on Freedom at Midnight he had declared, ‘How can we here in the West possibly blame Hindus and Moslems for killing each other in India when in Northern Ireland we see people of the same basic stock, people who worship the same Resurrected Saviour, slaughtering each other?’

Alas, almost two decades after his death, his sacrifice and that of all the others which have followed it have not succeeded in implanting among the peoples of Northern Ireland a semblance of the wisdom Gandhi’s death bequeathed to his countrymen and women.

LARRY COLLINS

DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE

December 1996

PROLOGUE

The rude arch of yellow basalt thrusts its haughty form into the city’s skyline just above a little promontory lapped by the waters of the Bay of Bombay. The Bay’s gentle waves barely stir the sullen green sludge of debris and garbage that encircles the concrete apron sloping down from the arch to the water’s edge. A strange world mingles there in the shadows cast by its soaring span: snake charmers and fortune tellers, beggars and tourists, dishevelled hippies lost in a torpor of sloth and drug, the destitute and dying of a cluttered metropolis. Barely a head is raised to contemplate the inscription, still clearly legible, stretched along the summit: ‘Erected to commemorate the landing in India of their imperial majesties, George V and Queen Mary on the second of December MCMXI’.

Yet, once, that vaulting Gateway of India was the Arch of Triumph of the greatest empire the world has ever known. To generations of Britons, its massive form was the first glimpse, caught from a steamer’s deck, of the storied shores for which they had abandoned their Midlands villages and Scottish hills. Soldiers and adventurers, businessmen and administrators, they had passed through its portals, come to keep the Pax Britannica in the empire’s proudest possession, to exploit a conquered continent, to take up the White Man’s burden with the unshakable conviction that theirs was a race born to rule, and their empire an entity destined to endure.

All that seems so distant now. Today, the Gateway of India is just another pile of stone, at one with Nineveh and Tyre, a forgotten monument to an era that ended in its shadows half a century ago.

ONE

‘A Race Destined to Govern and Subdue’

London, New Year’s Day, 1947

It was the winter of a great nation’s discontent. An air of melancholia hung like a chill fog over London. Rarely, if ever, had Britain’s capital ushered in a New Year in a mood so bleak, so morose. Hardly a home in the city that festive morning could furnish enough hot water to allow a man to shave or a woman to cover the bottom of her wash-basin. Londoners had greeted the New Year in bedrooms so cold their breath had drifted on the air like puffs of smoke. Precious few of them had greeted it with a hangover. Whisky, in the places where it had been available the night before for New Year’s Eve celebrations, had cost £8 a bottle.

The streets were almost deserted. The passers-by hurrying down their pavements were grim, joyless creatures, threadbare in old uniforms or clothes barely holding together after eight years of make-do and mend. What few cars there were darted about like fugitive phantoms guiltily consuming Britain’s rare and rationed petrol. A special stench, the odour of post-war London, permeated the streets. It was the rancid smell of charred ruins drifting up like an autumn mist from thousands of bombed-out buildings.

And yet, that sad, joyless city was the capital of a conquering nation. Only seventeen months before, the British had emerged victorious from mankind’s most terrible conflict. Their achievements, their courage in adversity then, had inspired an admiration such as the world had never before accorded them.

The cost of their victory, however, had almost vanquished the British. Britain’s industry was crippled, her exchequer bankrupt, her once haughty pound sterling surviving only on injections of American and Canadian dollars, her Treasury unable to pay the staggering debt she’d run up to finance the war. Foundries and factories were closing everywhere. Over two million Britons were unemployed. Coal production was lower than it had been a decade earlier and, as a result, every day, some part of Britain was without electric power for hours.

For Londoners, the New Year beginning would be the eighth consecutive year they’d lived under severe rationing of almost every product they consumed: food, fuel, drinks, energy, shoes, clothing. ‘Starve and shiver’ had become the byword of a people who’d defeated Hitler proclaiming ‘V for Victory’ and ‘Thumbs Up’.

Only one family in fifteen had been able to find and afford a Christmas turkey for the holiday season just past. Many a child’s stocking had been empty that Christmas eve. The treasury had slapped a 100% purchase tax on toys. The word most frequently scrawled on the windows of London’s shops was ‘No’: ‘No potatoes’, ‘No logs’, ‘No coal’, ‘No cigarettes’, ‘No meat’. Indeed, the reality confronting Britain that New Year’s morning had been captured in one cruel sentence by her greatest economist. ‘We are a poor nation,’ John Maynard Keynes had told his countrymen the year before, ‘and we must learn to live accordingly.’

Yet, if Londoners did not have enough hot water that morning to make a cup of tea with which to welcome the New Year, they had something else. They could, because they were English, lay claim to a blue and gold document which would guarantee their entry to almost a quarter of the earth’s surface, a British passport. No other people in the world enjoyed such a privilege. That most extraordinary assemblage of dominions, territories, protectorates, associated states and colonies which was the British Empire, remained, on this New Year’s Day 1947, largely intact. The lives of 560 million people, Tamils and Chinese, Bushmen and Hottentots, pre-Dravidian aborigines and Melanesians, Australians and Canadians, were still influenced by the actions of those Englishmen shivering in their unheated London homes. They could, that morning, claim domain over almost three hundred pieces of the earth’s surface from entities as small and as unknown as Bird Island, Bramble Cay and Wreck Reef to great, populous stretches of Africa and Asia. Britain’s proudest boast was still true: every time Big Ben’s chimes tolled out over the ruins of Central London that New Year’s Day, at sunrise, somewhere in the British Empire, a Union Jack was riding up a flagstaff.

No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a comparable realm. For three centuries its scarlet stains spreading over the maps of the world had prompted the dreams of schoolboys, the avarice of her merchants, the ambitions of her adventurers. Its raw materials had fuelled the factories of the Industrial Revolution, and its territories furnished a protected market for their goods. ‘Heavy with gold, black with industrial soot, red with the blood of conquest’, the Empire had made in its time a little island kingdom of less than 50 million people the most powerful nation on earth, and London the capital of the world.

Now, almost furtively, a black Austin Princess slipped down the deserted streets of that capital towards the heart of the city. As it passed Buckingham Palace and turned on to the Mall, its sole passenger stared moodily out at the imperial boulevard passing before his eyes. How often, he reflected, had Britain celebrated the triumphs of empire along its course. Half a century earlier, on 22 June 1897, Queen Victoria’s carriage had come clattering down its length for the festival that had marked its zenith, her Diamond Jubilee. Gurkhas, Sikhs, Pathans, Hausas from Africa’s Gold Coast, the Fuzzy Wuzzies of the Sudan, Cypriots, Jamaicans, Malaysians, Hong Kong Chinese, Borneo headhunters, Australians and New Zealanders, South Africans and Canadians had all in their turn marched down the Mall to the plaudits of that energetic race to whose empire they’d belonged. All that had represented an extraordinary dream for those Englishmen and the generations that had succeeded them along the Mall. Now even that was to be snatched away from them. The age of imperialism was dead and it was in recognition of that historic inevitability that the black Austin Princess was running its lonely course down the avenue which had witnessed so many of its grandiose ceremonies.

Its passenger sank back in his seat. His eyes, this holiday morning, should have been gazing on a different sight, a sundrenched Swiss ski slope. An urgent summons, however, had interrupted his Christmas vacation and sent him to Zurich where he’d boarded the RAF aircraft which had just deposited him at Northolt Airport.

His car passed Parliament Street and drove down a narrow lane up to what was probably the most photographed doorway in the world, Number 10 Downing Street. For six years, the world had associated its simple wooden frame with the image of a man in a black homburg, a cigar in his mouth, a cane in his hands, fingers upthrust in a ‘V’ for Victory. Winston Churchill had fought two great battles while he’d lived in that house, one to defeat the Axis, the other to defend the British Empire.

Now, however, a new Prime Minister waited inside 10 Downing Street, a Socialist don whom Churchill had disparaged as ‘a modest man with much to be modest about’.

Clement Attlee and his Labour Party had come to office publicly committed to begin the dismemberment of the Empire. For Attlee, for England, that historic process had inevitably to begin by extending freedom to the vast, densely populated land Britain still ruled from the Khyber Pass to Cape Comorin – India. That superb and shameful institution, the British Raj, was the cornerstone and justification of the Empire, its most remarkable accomplishment and its most constant care. India with its Bengal Lancers and its silk-robed Maharajas, its tiger hunts and its polo maidans, its pugree helmets and its chota pegs of whisky, its royal elephants caparisoned in gold and its starving sadhus, its mulligatawny soups and haughty memsahibs, had incarnated the imperial dream. The handsome rear-admiral stepping from his car had been called to 10 Downing Street to end that dream.

Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, Viscount Mountbatten of Burma was, at 46, one of the most noted figures in England. He was a big man, over six feet tall, but not a trace of flab hung from his zealously exercised waist line. Despite the terrible burdens he’d carried in the past six years, the face, familiar to millions of the readers of his country’s penny press, was remarkably free of the scars of strain and tension. His features, so astonishingly regular that they seemed, almost, to have been conceived as a prototype of facial design, his undiminished shock of dark hair setting off his hazel eyes, conspired to make him seem a good five years younger than he was this January morning.

Mountbatten knew well why he’d been summoned to London. Since his return from his post as Supreme Allied Commander South-east Asia, he’d been a frequent visitor to Downing Street as a consultant on the affairs of the nations which had fallen under SEAC’s command. On his last visit, however, the Prime Minister’s questions had quickly focused on a nation that had not been part of his theatre of operations, India. The young admiral had suddenly had a ‘very nasty, very uneasy feeling’. His premonition had been justified. Attlee intended to name him Viceroy of India. The Viceroy’s was the most important post in the empire, the office from which a long succession of Englishmen had held domain over the destinies of a fifth of mankind. Mountbatten’s task, however, would not be to rule India from that office. His assignment would be one of the most painful an Englishman could be asked to undertake, to give it up.

Mountbatten wanted no part of the job. He entirely endorsed the idea that the time had come for Britain to leave India. His heart however, rebelled at the thought that it would be he who would be called on to sever the ancient links binding Britain and the bulwark of her empire. To discourage Attlee he had thrown up a whole series of demands, major and minor, from the number of secretaries he’d be allowed to take with him to the aircraft, the York MW 102 he’d employed in Southeast Asia, which would be placed at his disposal. Attlee, to his dismay, had agreed them all. Now, entering the Cabinet Room, the admiral still hoped somehow to resist Attlee’s efforts to force the Indian assignment on him.

With his sallow complexion, his indifferently trimmed moustache, his shapeless tweed suits which seemed blissfully ignorant of a pressing iron’s caress, the man waiting for Mountbatten exuded in his demeanour something of that grey and dreary city through which the admiral’s car had just passed. That he, a Labour Prime Minister, should want a glamorous, polo-playing member of the royal family to fill the most critical position in the empire that Labour was pledged to dismantle, seemed, at first sight, an incongruous idea.

There was much more to Mountbatten, however, than his public image indicated. The decorations on his naval uniform were proof of that. The public might consider him a pillar of the establishment; the establishment themselves tended to regard Mountbatten and his wife as dangerous radicals. His command in South-east Asia had given him a knowledge of Asian nationalist movements few in England could match. He had dealt with the supporters of Ho Chi Minh in Indo-China, Sukarno in Indonesia, Aung San in Burma, Chinese Communists in Malaya, unruly trade unionists in Singapore. Realizing they represented Asia’s future, he had sought accommodations with them rather than, as his staff and Allies had urged, trying to suppress them. The nationalist movement with which he would have to deal if he went to India was the oldest and most unusual of them all. In a quarter of a century of inspired agitation and protest, its leadership had forced history’s greatest empire to the decision Attlee’s Party had taken: let Britain leave India in good time rather than be driven out by the forces of history and armed rebellion.

The Prime Minister began by reviewing the Indian scene. The Indian situation, he said, was deteriorating with every passing day and the time for urgent decision was at hand. It was one of the paradoxes of history that at this critical juncture, when Britain was at last ready to give India her freedom, she could not find a way to do so. What should have been Britain’s finest hour in India seemed destined to become a nightmare of unsurpassable horror. She had conquered and ruled India with what was, by colonial standards, relatively little bloodshed. Her leaving it threatened to produce an explosion of violence that would dwarf in scale and magnitude anything India had experienced in three and a half centuries.

The root of the problem was the age-old antagonism between India’s 300 million Hindus and 100 million Moslems. Sustained by tradition, by antipathetic religions, by economic differences, subtly exacerbated through the years by Britain’s own policy of Divide and Rule, their conflict had reached boiling point. The Moslem leaders now demanded that Britain rip apart the unity she had so painstakingly erected to give them an Islamic state of their own. The cost of denying them their state, they warned, would be the bloodiest civil war in Asian history.

Just as determined to resist their demands were the leaders of the Congress Party representing most of India’s 300 million Hindus. To them, the division of the sub-continent would be a mutilation of their historic homeland almost sacrilegious in its nature.

Britain was trapped between those two apparently irreconcilable positions, sinking slowly into a quagmire from which she seemed unable to extricate herself. Time and again British efforts to resolve the problem had failed. So desperate had the situation become, that the present Viceroy, an honest, forthright soldier, Field-Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, had just submitted to the Attlee government his last-ditch recommendations. Should all else fail, he suggested the British announce ‘we propose to withdraw from India in our own method and in our own time and with due regard to our own interests; and that we will regard any attempt to interfere with our programme as an act of war which we will meet with all the resources at our command.’

Britain and India, Attlee told Mountbatten, were heading towards a major disaster. The situation could not be allowed to go on. Wavell was a man of painfully few words, and, Attlee said, he’d been unable to establish any real contact with his loquacious Indian interlocutors.

A fresh face, a fresh approach was desperately needed if a crisis were to be averted. Each morning, Attlee revealed, brought its batch of cables to the India Office announcing an outburst of wanton savagery in some new corner of India. It was, he indicated, Mountbatten’s solemn duty to take the post he’d been offered.*

A sense of foreboding had been filling Mountbatten as he listened to the Prime Minister’s words. He still thought India was ‘an absolutely hopeless proposition’. He liked and admired Wavell, with whom he’d often discussed India’s problems during his regular visits to Delhi as Supreme Allied Commander in South-east Asia.

Wavell had all the right ideas, Mountbatten thought. If he couldn’t do it, what’s the point of my trying to take it on? Yet he was beginning to understand there was no escape. He was going to be forced to accept a job in which the risk of failure was enormous and in which he could easily shatter the brilliant reputation he’d brought out of the war.

If Attlee was going to force it on him, however, Mountbatten was determined to impose on the Prime Minister the political conditions that would give him at least some hopes of success. His talks with Wavell had given him an idea what they were.

He would not accept, he told the Prime Minister, unless the government agreed to make an unequivocal public announcement of the precise date on which British rule in India would terminate. Only that, Mountbatten felt, would convince India’s sceptical intelligentsia that Britain was really leaving and infuse her leaders with the sense of urgency needed to get them into realistic negotiations.*

Second, he demanded something no other Viceroy had ever dreamed of asking, full powers to carry out his assignment without reference to London and, above all, without constant interference from London. The Attlee government could give the young admiral his final destination but he, and he alone, was going to set his course and run the ship along the way.

‘Surely,’ Attlee asked, ‘you’re not asking for plenipotentiary powers above His Majesty’s Government, are you?’

‘I am afraid, Sir,’ answered Mountbatten, ‘that that is exactly what I am asking. How can I possibly negotiate with the Cabinet constantly breathing down my neck?’

A stunned silence followed his words. Mountbatten watched with satisfaction as the nature of his breathtaking demand registered on the Prime Minister’s face, hoping, as he did, that it would prompt Attlee to withdraw his offer.

Instead, the Prime Minister indicated with a sigh his willingness to accept even that. An hour later, shoulders sagging, Mountbatten emerged from the portal of Downing Street. He knew he was condemned to become India’s last Viceroy, the executioner, in a sense, of his countrymen’s fondest imperial dream.

Getting back into his car, a strange thought struck him. It was exactly seventy years, almost to the hour, from the moment his own great-grandmother had been proclaimed Empress of India on a plain outside Delhi. India’s princes, assembled for the occasion, had begged the heavens that day that Queen Victoria’s ‘power and sovereignty’ might ‘remain steadfast forever’.

Now, on this New Year’s morning one of her great-grandsons had initiated the process which would fix the date on which ‘forever’ would come to an end.

History’s most grandiose accomplishments can sometimes have the most banal of origins. Great Britain was set on the road to the great colonial adventure for five miserable shillings. They represented the increase in the price of a pound of pepper proclaimed by the Dutch privateers who controlled the spice trade.

Incensed at what they considered a wholly unwarranted gesture, twenty-four merchants of the City of London gathered on the afternoon of 24 September 1599 in a decrepit building on Leadenhall Street. Their purpose was to found a modest trading firm with an initial capital of £72,000 subscribed by 125 shareholders. Only the simplest of concerns, profit, inspired their enterprise which, expanded and transformed, would ultimately become the most noteworthy creation of the age of imperialism, the British Raj.

The Company received its official sanction on 31 December 1599, when Queen Elizabeth I signed a royal charter assigning it exclusive trading rights with all countries beyond the Cape of Good Hope for an initial period of fifteen years. Eight months later, a 500-ton galleon named the Hector dropped anchor in the little port of Surat, north of Bombay. It was 24 August 1600. The British had arrived in India. Their initial landing was a modest one. It came in the solitary figure of William Hawkins, Captain of the Hector, a dour old seaman who was more pirate than explorer. Hawkins marched off into the interior, prepared to find rubies as big as pigeons’ eggs; endless stands of pepper, ginger, indigo, cinnamon; trees whose leaves were so enormous that the shade they cast could cover an entire family, potions derived from elephants’ testicles to give him eternal youth.

There was little of that India along the Captain’s march to Agra. There, however, his encounter with the great Moghul compensated for the hardships of his journey. He found himself face to face with a sovereign beside whom Queen Elizabeth appeared the ruler of a provincial hamlet. Reigning over 70 million subjects, the Emperor Jehangir was the world’s richest and most powerful monarch, the fourth and last of India’s great Moghul rulers.

The first Englishman to reach his court was greeted with a gesture which might have disconcerted the 125 worthy shareholders of the East India Trading Company. The Moghul made him a member of the Royal Household and offered him as a welcoming gift the most beautiful girl in his harem, an Armenian Christian.

Fortunately, benefits of a nature more likely to inspire his employer’s esteem than the enrichment of his sex life also grew out of Captain Hawkins’ arrival in Agra. Jehangir signed an imperial firman authorizing the East India Company to open trading depots north of Bombay. Its success was rapid and impressive. Soon, two ships a month were unloading mountains of spices, gum, sugar, raw silk and Muslin cotton on the docks along the Thames and sailing off with holds full of English manufactures. A deluge of dividends, some of them as high as 200%, came pouring down on the firm’s fortunate shareholders.