It’s people that change history…
Andrew Lownie: Uncovering those not so crowning moments
Andrew Lownie doesn’t mind setting the cat among the pigeons. For decades, if not centuries, English biographers have treated the Royal House of Windsor (and the Royal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha before that) as unimpeachable if not sacrosanct – always a dozen golden words if one slight blemish was allowed to mar their aureoles.
But Lownie simply won’t have it. The Englishman, all rosy in Galle’s searing heat, sits down in a pleasantly musty room within the old Dutch fort to talk to me about his career as a respected biographer, and more particularly his bestsellers on the Duke of Windsor (who was briefly Edward VIII) and the man who was to make the match for Queen Elizabeth II with Prince Philip – Lord Louis (‘Dickie’) Mountbatten.
Lownie is eloquent as we steer down those gilded pathways surrounding some of the British Empire’s highest representatives. He has written notably ‘The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves’, and ‘Traitor King’ about the once-glamorous but now mostly vilified Duke of Windsor, and also ‘Stalin’s Englishman: the Life of Guy Burgess’ and ‘John Buchan: the Presbyterian Cavalier’.
“Down with the deferential biography!” seems to be Lownie’s motto. And he’s not alone there. Didn’t the unsuspecting Mountbatten himself say “No biography has any value unless it’s written with warts and all”?
But before the warts, Lownie is happy tell me about a Sri Lankan connection he personally has. His grandfather, an architect, built a hotel here when he came to the island in 1911 (its identity not known today). Lownie was himself quite a cosmopolitan child – born in Kenya, raised in Bermuda and having schooled in Scotland before entering Cambridge.
As a well-known literary agent Lownie represented a lot of biographers. He was always quite keen to know ‘what makes people tick’. “I am a great believer that it’s people that change history not events.”
His first book was on Scottish writer John Buchan (best known as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps), and all his heroes and heroines belong to that period roughly from the 1870s to the 1970s – one of its main lures being that it is well documented but also a rather glamorous yet gracious period.
So what kind of secrets does he prise off those tiaras and the coronets? Well, when it comes to Mountbatten, that he was not only a bisexual but had a taste for boys (Sri Lankan as well as British public school boys!) for he was snidely monikered ‘Mountbottom’ (these proclivities not being known in his own lifetime when people like the writer Barbara Cartland lionised him).
But he also uncovers how he had ‘gone along with a possible coup against the government’. There’s also the much talked of relationship between his wife Edwina and India’s revered leader Jawaharlal Nehru to spice things up.
When it came to Edward VIII, homosexuality certainly lingered around the ducal suite as well but more unsettling was his association with the Nazis – in fact he “would have been prepared to be a Nazi puppet king”.
“One of the reasons there is restriction… to the access of royal records is to protect the dignity of the crown” Lownie concedes, “but the dignity of the crown is best protected by behaving in a dignified way!”
One of the stunners that emerge in the book is that “during the war, in Spain, in 1940, the Duke of Windsor was prepared to get money from the Nazis to come back to Britain and act as a Nazi representative to George VI”.
The spectres that haunted both the duke and Mountbatten’s adult lives are to be traced back to those upper class Victorian nurseries and schools where the former was cruelly treated by a nanny and the latter abused sexually as a boy.
Lownie uncovers how the Duke was so smitten (in a very unhealthy way) by strong women as a result of the childhood ordeals and that the “nastier Wallis Simpson (the American socialite for whom he abdicated the English throne) was to him, the more he liked it.”
Mountbatten was to have a brief if notable stay in our island when he was posted in Kandy as the Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Command during the Second World War. While in this position (he would afterwards leave to be the Viceroy of India) he was in love with a certain Janey Lindsay, the granddaughter of the Duke of Abercorn, and would often visit her bungalow in Dimbula.
In April 1944 they “played a record of the musical Oklahoma! Until Mountbatten accidentally dropped it.” That Christmas Eve was also spent there. “‘The cook had gone mad and started roasting the turkey a couple of hours too late’, Mountbatten recollected. ‘So we had an inverted dinner, with the sweet, savoury, fruit, coffee and cigars before the turkey!’.”
He also travelled to Galle and ‘swam in the Closenberg Bay’. During that time the late Prince Philip (then Philip of Greece) was in Colombo and would visit his uncle Dickie in Dimbula.
Lownie’s next subject for a book, curiously, was born in the decade of the Beatles – Andrew, Duke of York, about whom there will be many surprises in the offing – “about his time as trade envoy, his affair with Koo Stark, and his time in the Navy”.
Also in the pipeline is a biography of Andrew’s father Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. But these royal portraits don’t come easy. “A lot of the records are closed, a lot of people have signed official secret pacts, a lot of things in the press are not accurate… and a lot of (the informants) are dead.”
Some speculation he says is needed but one must not “spread false rumors or innuendo”.
Speaking about the vagaries of his craft Lownie says, “No biography is completely static – there’s always new information to add; I am still finding gaps in (my) stories that I can still fill in…”
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