They arrived in July, but it was only in November that their mother and their father’s lover arrived together to pick them up. When naval personnel were ordered to leave Malta in 1935, the sisters were dispatched to a small hotel in Hungary, two hours' drive east of the capital, Budapest. As a commander in the Royal Navy, their father was often at sea while the family was formally based on the Mediterranean island of Malta, an important naval base. The sisters' lives were seemingly peripatetic. “Yola did not live with us but would visit frequently, bringing us charming gifts,” Hicks wrote.
“He would stay with us for long periods of time, and, to us children, he was just part of everyday life,” she added.Īt the same time, the girls' father had met a "young, extremely attractive, boyish-looking girl with cropped hair and a little snub nose – a French 'gamine'." This was Yola Letellier, who served as the model for the character Gigi in the novel of the same name by the French writer Colette. He was six-foot-five and "thrillingly handsome, with perfect posture", Pamela Hicks wrote.
British socialite dead teen mother series#
They belonged to a social circle that inhabited vast mansions and included Queen Mary, King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, the American socialite for whom Edward abdicated the British throne.īy the time Knatchbull was nine, her sister wrote, her mother had met the latest in a series of lovers, Lt Col Harold Phillips of the Coldstream Guards – nicknamed Bunny – "who changed her life". In a memoir, Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten (2013), her sister described a life of parental absences in the care of nannies and governesses as their mother and father devoted their time to separate lives and separate loves. The name Battenberg was changed to Mountbatten during the first World War, when anti-German sentiment ran strong.īy later standards, her upbringing seems to have been unconventional. On her father’s side, the family was descended from German aristocracy. She and her sister were great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria. In the family tree, she ranked as third cousin to Queen Elizabeth II and first cousin to Prince Philip, who married Elizabeth in 1947. Patricia Edwina Victoria Mountbatten was born in London on February 14th, 1924. “I was so overwhelmed by grief for Nicky, who was just on the threshold of his life, that I began to feel guilty that I was not able to grieve for my father, whom I really adored, in the same way,” she said. "I think Nicky dead," she wrote on a piece of paper, which she handed to her sister, Pamela Hicks, five years her junior. While in the hospital, she realised that her son Nicholas was absent. Her medical treatment included 120 facial stitches, which she later described as “my IRA facelift”. I have very vague memories, now and again, of floating among the wood and debris, being pulled into a small rubber dinghy before totally losing consciousness for days." "My own memory," Patricia Knatchbull told the Daily Telegraph in 2008, "is of a vision of a ball exploding upwards and then of 'coming to' in the sea and wondering if I would be able to reach the surface before I passed out. She inherited the title Countess Mountbatten of Burma after the mayhem on August 27th, 1979, when the family fishing boat, the Shadow V, was bombed by the Irish Republican Army off the coast of Sligo. Through her marriage in 1946 to the moviemaker John Knatchbull, the seventh Baron Brabourne, she became Lady Brabourne. She was born without a formal title, the elder daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten, Britain's onetime First Sea Lord and its last imperial viceroy in India, and a prominent heiress of the day, Edwina Ashley. With close ties to Britain's royal family, Knatchbull – also known as Lady Patricia – belonged to what an official biography called "a dynasty of royal, political and wealthy relations". Her death was confirmed by Paul Beresford-Hill, the director-general of the Mountbatten Institute. Lady Mountbatten, as she was known, was 93. Patricia Knatchbull, a grande dame of Britain's titled elite, whose life embraced a fabled childhood between two world wars and deep personal tragedy after her father and teenage son were killed in a bomb attack at sea, died on Tuesday at her home in England, in Mersham, Kent.
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