Ryan Tubridy
Here’s a quote, ‘We all have a car crash in our lives and to date I have had one; it happened to be a bomb. I was a boy at the time on a small boat in Ireland. Three of my family and a friend died in the explosion. One of the dead was my identical twin brother, Nicholas Knatchbull. My parents and I were the only survivors.’ These are the opening words of Timothy Knatchbull’s book, em
You’re relationship with your brother was extraordinarily typical of twin boys. As young fellas running around you had this bond that only twins will ever understand.
Timothy Knatchbull
I think that’s right. We were identical twins. Within identical twins we were a fairly good example of a very close pair by both nature and nurture. We were very identical. We were brought up from our earliest hours and days in symmetrical circumstances. My mother dressed us identically, we shared a bedroom we even shared names. He was christened Nicholas Timothy Knatchbull and I was christened Timothy Nicholas. We were 20 minutes separated and we really became, from our earliest days, just an integral part of each other’s lives.
Ryan Tubridy
So literally from the get-co, nominally and physically there was very little between you and I presume that led to all sorts of confusions whether at home or at school.
Timothy Knatchbull
It was great fun that was the predominant memory that I have of childhood, the fun and the companionship of being an identical twin. It felt like being in a two-person club. It was great. The only way that people could reliably tell us apart was if they lifted my chin and looked under the left side of my neck where there was a small mole. This acted as a sort of indelible proof of identity but even that could be abused at times.
I remember one of my cousins one day started telling me in confidence something that he wanted Nick to hear, my twin brother to hear, but not me. He looked at me at one moment and had this terrible look on his face, a moment of doubt. Was he talking to the right twin? So to prove who I was, I lifted my chin but I showed him the right side of my neck so that he didn’t see the mole. He was reassured he was talking to Nick. Of course he was talking to me and ended up very embarrassed later when he found out.
Ryan Tubridy
Were you into the same things? Did you like watching the same programmes, listening to the same comedy, finishing each other’s sentences? Was it like that?
Timothy Knatchbull
We did. People often asked, ‘were you telepathic?’ and the answer to that is, I’m not sure telepathy works between any two humans but it is true that the way that we had grown up together had created in us such clones of each other. In many respects, although we were strongly different personalities, we were able, as you say, to finish each other’s sentences. There was that great excitement, the thrill of identical twin hood, having another human being and finding that you were entirely on that human being’s frequency that you could almost think for each other. That was an incredible privilege and it was a gift. Like most gifts you only realise it once you lose it.
Ryan Tubridy
Were you opportunists? Were you cheeky?
Timothy Knatchbull
I think we were cheeky. I remember playing up to our identical appearances in all manner of ways. I didn’t feel like playing football one day, I wouldn’t show up, Nick would. No one would notice the substitution.
Ryan Tubridy
Tell me about Lord Louis Mountbatten and his relationship to you and towards you, as an influence and a presence in your life?
Timothy Knatchbull
Just as we were born he was coming to that part of his career where it was winding down. He was 66 years old when we were born and so two things acted in our favour to gain from him – this tremendously involved, loving, funny grandfather. The first was that he had given up his responsibilities at the Ministry of Defence. He had been the Chief of the Defence Staff, effectively the head of the three defence services in the UK. Secondly his wife of almost 40 years, Edwina Ashley, had died in 1960, so he was bereft. She had been an incredible companion and although their relationship had at times been a complex one, they were each other’s greatest supporters and fans and mutual admirers. With her gone he turned to his two daughters, that’s my mother, Patricia and my aunt, Pamela. He turned to them for extra company and he filled his home with them and their children – between the two of them they produced ten grandchildren for him.
He was so much on our wavelength. He was such terrific fun. If we got out our toys and started to play he would be the first to be down on his hands and knees partaking of them. And not just in some sort of adult way but really involved. He had this fantastic facility to be not childish but to be childlike, to understand the enthusiasm of childhood. He had, as somebody had once famously said of Churchill, Churchill had this world reputation but also this boy scout enthusiasm. I think that’s a very good description that worked for my grandfather too that made him such fun as a grandfather.
I think the thing that people don’t understand about him is what a funny man he was: entertaining, full of stories and tricks, always looking for the fun in life. As a grandfather figure you couldn’t want for somebody more, than who had the ability to find the fun and simple things in life. But who also had the facilities – if you like – this wonderful home in England but also this wonderful home on the west coast of Ireland at Sligo, at this small, picturesque, wonderful little community called Mullaghmore.
Ryan Tubridy
Why there do you know? It’s a beautiful part of the country. I can understand why anyone would want to take a boat out and go fishing but why him and why there? .
Timothy Knatchbull
Well it’s a piece of family history for hundreds of years. My grandmother’s family – Edwina, his wife – came from a family called the Ashleys and through a long line of descent they had had a home in the west coast of Ireland called Classiebawn Castle with some land. It was a place in which the family had felt incredibly bonded too for many generations. My four-great grandfather, Harry Palmerston, who became Prime Minister, went out there as a young man. He was appalled to find the conditions in which the people in the local area were living. He set about really as a spare time occupation bringing it up to something that he felt was an equitable set of circumstances. He invested heavily; he built a harbour as well as a substantial house. This was handed down and my grandmother when out as a little child and when she died my grandfather continued the tradition.
He was passionate about the place. When he first clapped eyes on it when he was a naval destroyer captain in 1941, he grabbed a few hours leave and tore down from Londonderry where his ship was docked for repairs. And when he clapped eyes on the place it was a turning point in his life. He wrote to his wife, Edwina, who was working in England, ‘but you never told me how stupendously beautiful this place is and I can’t wait to move in’. That was 1941 or thereabouts. It was obviously after the war before they could return. It was some years before they could actually get running water and electricity and do the house up after many years of neglect.
And then it became this happy home which we went to when my grandmother died. My grandfather, if anything, became even more wedded to the place. It was the month of August every year that was simply inviolable. He had to be there and he took with him his daughters and his grandchildren. This was the place where his biographer said, quite rightly, ‘he was happier there than anywhere else’ and we felt the same.
Ryan Tubridy
You obviously felt the same: on the beach with the rods and the feathers looking for mackerel. Those halcyon days that always seemed so much brighter and better than you have had since.
Timothy Knatchbull
That’s true enough. You put it very well and the epicentre of our holiday was this lovely little, rather smelly, but charming fishing boat which he had built in 1960. It was something that he and my grandmother, Edwina had really looked forward to very much. They had got the place done up and the fishing boat was going to be the next thing. No sooner had it started to be built than my grandmother, Edwina died. So my grandfather came up. She never saw it but he made that the epicentre of the holiday and of course as kids we loved it. We went out and he loved fishing for mackerel but also pollock and all sorts of other things. He had lobster pots, occasionally he’d go out and try and catch a shark. This was the thing more than anything else we loved. Day after day we would spend our hours on the boat, just mucking around as a family in a small boat.
Ryan Tubridy
The boat had a name on it didn’t it?
Timothy Knatchbull
It did. In the early part of my grandfather’s life he’d had some rather swish boats which he kept on the French Rivera and they were called Shadow, there was Shadow II, III and so on. When this boat was built by a wonderful pair of local craftsmen, the McCann brothers in Moneygold near Sligo, he named it Shadow V. She was very distinctive. You would have thought she was an extra member of my grandfather’s family. He adored her and was never happier than when just tinkering around and often at her helm or the other place he liked to sit was in her fishing seat, a large seat in the middle of the boat. This was where he customarily sat.
Ryan Tubridy
I’m looking at a picture of him on the cover of your book doing just that. The rods are up and it’s a sunny day and it looks like a happy picture. But let’s head towards 1979 and think about the political environment and the infrastructure in the area that you are visiting. You were in Sligo so it wouldn’t have been touched by as much trouble as across the border, obviously. But having said that, here he was, Lord Louis Mountbatten, a former Viceroy of India, holidaying at a time that some might have said was probably not so wise. Were you as a young fella – you were 14 at this stage with your brother, holidaying there – were you aware that there was a whiff of sulphur in the air?
Timothy Knatchbull
One was aware, of course, because we had since 1971, when I was six years old just about to turn seven, we had noticed for the first time that some Garda appeared. There was just a pair of Garda and they would keep an eye on him. So from an early age I was aware there was something a little bit different about what was going on. I didn’t really understand the circumstances there and as the years went by my grandfather kept a very particular eye, not just on his safety but his real fear was that if something was going to happen it would affect others in the family. A great fear he was aware of, I am now aware, is the possibility of kidnap. He wouldn’t have been able to live with himself had there been a kidnap attempt, not so much on himself he was worried about, but maybe another member of his family, one of his daughters or grandchildren. So he took a very focused interest on this.
Through his life he had been after all at the centre stage of world affairs. He had been a Viceroy of India and he had been used to security issues through his life and so he knew how to gauge things. He knew the best way to do it was to take the best advice he could from the British but also from the Irish authorities and he was punctilious in doing this each year. On occasions, for example in 1974, the advice was: ‘look the temperature is a bit too hot and you should stay away’. He did, he stayed away. He cut his holiday in half and did two weeks in Ireland that year much to his sadness.
We had year after year a clear picture, which is that the risk was felt to be extremely modest and indeed with every passing year, the temperature seemed to be falling. The number of deaths north of the border was falling. Of course this is all with the benefit of years of hindsight and looking now as a mature man, looking into the archives and seeing what was going on. I see that he was very, very careful to weigh up the risk and it seemed in 1979 that the risk was less than ever before but of course how tragically wrong that decision was.
Ryan Tubridy
It was the 27th of August, the day we’re going to talk about now. That day no doubt etched in your mind. I suppose if we can go to the pre- rather than the post-. Was it a morning like any other? Or is it still there vividly in your brain, as can often be the case these days, become more important in hindsight? August the 27th you wake up, do you recall that morning, the picnic being put together? Do you recall that detail?
Timothy Knatchbull
I do. It’s one of those funny things that parts of the day remain in sharp focus and I can remember all the little details. And there are other parts which have just been blanked out – for a physiological reason because of the injuries I had or maybe psychological reasons. Or maybe the brain only wants to take in so much.
The predominant thing was that it was a beautiful morning. It was a clear blue sky and the ocean was flat calm. You looked out from Classiebawn and you could see Inishmurray, this beautiful little island lying out to sea. The sea was looking really like a mill pond. It was exciting because we were looking forward to spending a long lazy tranquil day on Shadow V. We all piled into breakfast and had a big breakfast. I remember my grandfather had dressed himself that morning, amongst other things, with a blue sweatshirt and written on it was the words ‘Fighting Fifth’. Now the ‘Fighting Fifth’ alluded to a flotilla of navy destroyers of which he had been the principal captain in the Second World War and it was a nickname given, the ‘Fighting Fifth’.
And as I passed him, he was coming away from the breakfast table as I was pushing a bit late towards the breakfast table and we crossed. He caught me as he came by and he said, ‘Morning Timmy’. He bent down and gave me a kiss. His hand came up lifted my chin and looked underneath to make sure he had greeted me with the right name. He saw the mole and knew that it was me. I said to him rather cheekily for a fourteen year old to a former First Sea Lord, ‘Morning Fighting Fifth’. And with that I pushed past him. It was a very irreverent relationship I had with him. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Ryan Tubridy
That was the preparations in the house and then you were making your way towards the little pier.
Timothy Knatchbull
Correct. It’s about a mile and a half away. We piled into a family car and we ended up in the harbour. The first down the steps into this rickety little boat was my father’s mother. This is on the other side of the family, this is my grandmother on the Brabourne side – my father was John Brabourne – and his mother was Doreen Brabourne. A wonderful lady herself, 83 years old.
Ryan Tubridy
Was your father Lord Brabourne? People may know him for producing A Passage to India and Murder on the Orient Express. Is that the same?
Timothy Knatchbull
Exactly right. He chose an unlikely career. He had a lot of fun and took a lot of satisfaction from bringing happiness to other people’s lives.
Ryan Tubridy
I’m thinking that your descriptions are so vivid; there is obviously an eye for the detail. You make documentaries now, is that right? It’s a genetic disposition from memory.
Timothy Knatchbull
Maybe it is the detail. One can speak in generalities and miss the point. But it is the detail that can puncture the memories and my memory of that day is the care with which we took Granny down the steps into this little fishing boat, followed by my grandfather. It was a vertical ladder covered in grease and salt as it would in a working, busy harbour. We were worried because the tide was low, the boat was low, that they were going to miss their footing and do themselves a grievous injury. So we were very careful, Nicholas and I, to go down and help them down, as other members of the party did and settle them in.
Then we pushed off. My grandfather was particularly keen – there was only four days left of our holiday that year – that my father stay on the pier and take a good photograph of the boat as it went out. He stood very proudly at the helm and posed for the photograph. Then my father scampered down the ladder and threw his camera down onto the seat of the cabin and his jumper on top of it – [the camera] would later be recovered by police divers from the seabed. My father went into the back of the boat, my mother was in the back of the boat and my grandmother was in the stern of the boat, feet up.
As we chugged out of the harbour, lovely Paul Maxwell was darting around the deck with Nicholas and me. Paul was a most splendid character. Fifteen years old and so very close in age to Nicholas and me. We had a lot of fun with him. He was from Enniskillen and his family had a holiday cottage in Mullaghmore and they had been coming from when he was a very small boy. And he was someone earning pocket money doing what he loved with his summer, looking after a boat. He had done a wonderful job that summer in helping us.
Ryan Tubridy
His father featured heavily in the documentary. Paul Maxwell sounded a lovely kid doing what he did in the summer, slopping out the boat, helping out, getting it ready for you guys and hanging out with you and earning a few bob. He was just a young fella doing what young guys do at that time.
Timothy Knatchbull
It felt like we were all on holiday together. It was the way that it had always been in the village and Paul was very much in that mode. We darted around. His job that morning was going to be to lift the pots and so my grandfather took the helm and as we left the harbour we chugged along about half a mile, three quarters of a mile to the first of our lobster pots. As we did so it seemed like everybody who was in the village was out on the water that day. I suppose it was the good weather that had drawn people into Mullaghmore from north of the border, from across the county and elsewhere.
Ryan Tubridy
So it was busy on the sea?
Timothy Knatchbull
Very busy, there were boats dotted around everywhere. I clambered up onto the little white cabin of this fishing boat. I pulled up a fender. In fact it was an old tyre we used to dangle down the side of the boat to act as a fender in harbour. I put it on the roof and then I plopped myself down in that and that was my makeshift seat.
It was flat calm and I was aware that with so many people out and so many lobster pots that had been set the previous day, and a flat calm day as well – a big high pressure system had moved into the west of Ireland. There were a lot of lobster pot lines and buoys and I was worried that just possibly my grandfather who seemed wonderfully tranquil, really in a world of his own, may not be either paying attention or possibly his 79 year old eyes weren’t picking up the lines in the water that betrayed the presence of the lobster pots. I called out to him ‘over there on our right 20 yards a lobster pot. And over there, on our left, 40 yards’ and so on. Not a word from my grandfather, not a response. He didn’t acknowledge me. He just seemed sublimely peaceful doing what he loved. And as we chugged along other boats we passed and other boats passed us and waved occasionally.
Then we slowed up as we came to the first lobster pot. My mother recalls – pretty well the last thing she does recall – is looking across to the other side of the stern of the boat and saying to my grandmother – she knew her as ‘Dodo’ – she remembers my grandmother saying, ‘Isn’t this a beautiful day’.
And then I don’t have any clear memory. I have a snatched impression of a physical blow. I can’t really describe the sensation but it’s there latent in my memory, this sickening blow. And the next thing that I remember is lying on a very hard floor, a wooden floor of a very small boat. I could tell it was small for two good reasons: I could feel the vibration of a little engine and I could hear very close to me, the sound of two voices; emotionally charged, Irish accents, kindly voices. But they were disturbed and they were trying to reassure me as if to say, ‘It’s alright, it’s alright’. But I knew it was far from being alright, that there was something dreadfully wrong both with the scene I was in and with myself. Yet I couldn’t work out what was wrong with me.
Now at the time I had been temporarily blinded by the bomb. I wasn’t even able to assess myself and I didn’t realise that I was blind. I simply couldn’t work out what it was. Somewhere within me I had this terrible sense that if everything was going to be alright I had to concentrate very hard, I had to do everything right and the people around me had to do everything right. I thought to myself – it’s almost bizarre – my mind at that moment went to some training that I had had in first aid and emergency services at the school that I was at the in the UK. I thought of this and I thought, you’ve had training, you know you have to stay calm, think now what you can do to help them help you. And the only thing I could work out what was wrong with me is that I am cold. When I say cold, I don’t mean just chilly, I mean I felt a cold the likes of which I have never really known before or since. And I said to them, ‘I’m cold’, just like that. But I was shocked, I couldn’t hear myself, maybe it was because both my eardrums had been blown in or maybe it was the amount of blood, salt water and diesel oil which I inhaled after the explosion.
The boat had utterly disintegrated and disappeared in that instant and all that was left on the top was matchwood and a floating oil slick and cushions and life vests and small bits of rubbish. And that was it. And it seems I must have inhaled a lot of this, I was face down in the water when this couple had found me and perhaps I’d inhaled it. And when I said I’m cold, all I could detect was a click at the back of my throat. I couldn’t hear any words at all so I thought ‘My God, I’m worse than I realised’. And I tried a second time to say ‘I’m cold’. Again I could hardly hear myself so I redoubled my efforts yet again to say, ‘I’m cold’. At this point I heard the man say to me, ‘Yes, we know, we are doing everything we can’. And suddenly I felt awful, I realised they had heard once or twice before and I felt I had been too much, I had been asking for too much attention and I felt awful. He told me years later when I met him that I had started to apologise. He also told me that I had tried to get up and climb out of the boat. I don’t know why I did that.
My next memory is being in the harbour, perhaps fifteen minutes later, in Mullaghmore.
Ryan Tubridy
You know exactly at what time that bomb exploded on your boat, don’t you?
Timothy Knatchbull
I do. The last time that I looked at a watch was six minutes before the explosion. Paul was terribly conscientious and he knew that this lovely old Parsons engine that we had in Shadow V – 19 years old – was thirsty, she was leaky, she needed topping up with water. My grandfather had made his instructions and we all tried to stick to it, which was every 15 minutes we needed to add fresh water. So Paul came to me. He didn’t bring his watch out with him he always left it at the cottage in Mullaghmore – and his father found his watch later that morning safely where he always left it. Paul came to me and said, ‘Tim, what time is it?’ It seemed so sublimely out of place to ask that question on this wonderful, timeless holiday. Who cared what the time was. I looked at my little Casio watch and I said, ‘Paul, it’s 11:39 and 40 seconds’ And he laughed. It was just a few minutes later at 11:46 that the explosion happened which changed all of our lives.
Ryan Tubridy
Who survived?
Timothy Knatchbull
There were seven people on the boat, that’s my grandfather and my grandmother, my parents, John and Patricia Brabourne and then there were the three children, Paul, Nicholas and myself. Of the seven on the boat, my grandfather was killed instantly by the explosion, so was Paul, so was Nicholas. Then of the four survivors at that stage, my mother, father, grandmother and myself we were taken to Sligo Hospital. And really there was something of a miracle there. The quality of the care and the love we received not just by the people who picked us up out of the water but the people when we were taken into the village and pulled up onto the narrow strip of sand in Mullaghmore, they looked after us fantastically. The ambulances came very quickly….
Ryan Tubridy
…Who told you that Nicholas had died out there? That must have been quite a stretch for you emotionally.
Timothy Knatchbull
It was indeed. And what happened is when we got to hospital I was in intensive care and to finish the previous question, my grandmother Doreen died in the bed beside me in intensive care the next morning. I spent three days in intensive care and when I came out and my father knew that I was going to come and see him, he turned to one of my sisters and said, ‘I can’t see Tim if he doesn’t know that Nick is dead’. Now the Doctors had made the decision, and rightly so I believe, that I was too physically weak, after an emergency operation, they had kept me heavily sedated and anaesthetised part of the time and they took the decision which was that I was simply not strong enough. So when I started to ask about the family in intensive care, ‘Where’s Mum, where’s Dad? I was told they were OK, in hospital. When I asked about my grandparents and my twin brother I was told I suppose a white lie, which is yes he was in the hospital. And it was on the fourth day after three nights of intensive care, I was taken out, and I was told the news that really was the worst day of my life. One of my sisters told me that ‘when you were brought to hospital you were unconscious and you woke up, Nicky never did’. And that was a moment I will never forget. I was utterly shocked and utterly distraught. It was unimaginable to me that I would spend a day of my life without access to him in the nearly fifteen years we had lived together. We had only spent four or five days apart and during those days we had either spoken by phone or written letters to one another. And suddenly I had to accept he was gone forever and that my twin hood was over. I was alone in that respect but I was incredibly lucky. I knew that I wasn’t alone in the sense that I had this fantastic, loving, large family. If you come from a family of seven kids it meant that I had an immediate support structure to reach out and tap into and that made all the difference.
Ryan Tubridy
You wrote in the book that ‘I wasn’t good at crying’, which makes you a typical man in some respects, but you were fourteen years old and essentially you had lost your other half. That would make anyone cry.
Timothy Knatchbull
Well it did and in the first seconds after I was told the news I simply stared at my sister and it was as she dissolved into tears and who could blame her, and my Aunt sitting a few feet away in another chair, that was my cue, I dissolved into tears. When they were gone I had the peace and the quiet to bury my head beneath the sheets, and really cry like I needed to. I didn’t want to cry around other members of the family, I didn’t want them to feel that I was in terrible distress. I wanted to send a signal to them, which is: they were strong and they were going to get through this and so was I. I suppose it was as you said, a male reaction, particularly my own culture, class and background, there was an element there of a stiff upper lip and don’t show your feelings.
But the truth is I didn’t want to show my feelings to the poor nurses and I also didn’t want to upset them. I was aware how distressing it must be for them. They were terribly thoughtful and caring.
Ryan Tubridy
The Queen of England does not have the greatest reputation for being the warmest soul, in public at least, and that came to a head when Diana passed away. To go back to 1979, she issued an invitation to you, ‘come to Balmoral, we’ll look after you as your parents are in hospital’. You describe a woman who doesn’t have a reputation of being particularly emotionally engaged or engaging but you describe what we would call here, essentially a mammy.
Timothy Knatchbull
We were pieced together in a couple of weeks and headed back to England. When we got there my parents were still hospitalised, they would be hospitalised for some time beyond. My mother’s injuries were the worst. She had some 117 stitches in her face alone, 20 in each eyeball and had been kept alive by a ventilator. My parents slowly got back and in this time they needed to have the support of their extended family and their friends. We were really blessed that great family friends, the Crathornes and the Dugdales, had come out to Ireland when they heard of the explosion and had been with us in hospital partly to be with us [Timothy and his parents] when my brothers and sisters had been flown back to England for the funerals of those that had died. They really acted in a way that is difficult to describe, shoring us up.
When we got to England my parents had an invitation, from again great family friends, the Troughtons, who lived in the north west of Scotland and I was invited up there. In a way these two wonderful people, Dick and Gosh, invited me and my sister Amanda into their home and acted in place of parents. They took us in and looked after us lovingly. Dick took me out fishing and really I was in no state to fish. He got me fishing and got me to catch the biggest salmon I ever caught with the worst fishing I ever did. It was one of the best experiences I had ever had and started to get me looking out again and thinking to the future. I came back to London and my parents realised that I had healed incredibly well: I gained 7lbs in body weight in seven days. I came back with the beginnings of a sparkle in my eye, which had been totally absent since the attack.
Another invitation came from the Royal Family at Balmoral where they were finishing their summer holidays. They said the same thing, could they help. One of my sisters and I returned and spent a few days there. Certainly the loving care I saw there, just like with the Crathornes and Dugdales and Troughtons, it was an extension of the strongest bond we know on this planet, between a mother and her child. And my mother lying in a hospital bed stitched up, fractured legs, damaged lungs, scared body tissue, unable to stand up, what could she do for me in my hour of need or indeed for her other five surviving children – although they were elder, most of them adult. She was in some sort of emotional and spiritual agony. The friendship, which the Queen and other members showed her, by saying ‘we’ll help where we can’. What I saw at Balmoral in those days was a very loving family. At the centre a wonderfully gifted, caring mother figure, namely the Queen. I’ve always read this idea that there is a lack of love or care or warmth. All I would say is that anybody who says that, they must be fooling themselves because the truth of the matter is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Ryan Tubridy
What sort of things did she do that made her so warm and maternal?
Timothy Knatchbull
I’ve written a little bit about it in my book. It was the simple little things. Including me in family life. They are a very private family as far as they can be and they just included me in that lovely family atmosphere and I left with that combination of warmth and love and respect for them, which I carry to this day.
Ryan Tubridy
I have a couple of more questions I want to put to you Timothy but before I do let’s go to a commercial break. Stay with us for the moment.
Ryan Tubridy
Timothy, did you follow the trial of Thomas McMahon? You would have been about 14 or 15 or did you try and ignore it?
Timothy Knatchbull
Well largely I was getting on with my life at school, so I don’t think there was a conscious effort to ignore it but it was very much on the periphery of my vision. I just decided to follow the example of my parents and family, which was total absence of any bitterness and resentment. They had picked themselves up, they had accepted what happened and had got on with their lives, as I had, as best we could while acknowledging the grievous wounds, both emotional and physical and mental. But just picking ourselves up and getting on. So my memories from being back in England were again plugging myself into my group of friends and going back to school and getting on with life.
Ryan Tubridy
And literally getting on with life. A few decades later you meet Isabella and you have five children, don’t you? You’ve got your hands full there.
Timothy Knatchbull
Great fun, you couldn’t want for more good luck.
Ryan Tubridy
You’re like your granddad. The way you described Louis Mountbatten. It’s like some people have this ability not to quench the flame of childhood despite being an adult in reality. You are a bit like that are you?
Timothy Knatchbull
Well, I’m like any parent. I’m learning from my kids every day. They are reminding me about the joy of being alive and making the most of everyday. We are having a terrific time.
Ryan Tubridy
What did you do in October 2003 when you returned to Classiebawn alone? You had a CD in your hand and a plan of some description? What were you doing then?
Timothy Knatchbull
Well my decision to coming back to Ireland and the way I did it in 2003 was an acknowledgment that some of the overhang from the events of being a 14 year old boy and loosing Nicholas in the way that I did, in having him killed, I haven’t properly been able to resolve that. I had spent some time in the 1990s when frankly I caved in one day. I accepted that some things were going on in my head and my mind that weren’t healthy. I would sit at home and would feel very sad or lonely when all was quiet. I would keep myself desperately busy but would realise that behind that mask of business would lie something I needed to address.
I did a bit of therapy recommended by my GP and that started to unloosen some things in my mind. In my first session I remember my therapist saying, ‘do you have any symptoms?’ ‘No, no symptoms.’ He said, ‘none at all?’ ‘No, none at all. I’m perfectly ordinary. Happy getting on with things. It’s just I have this sense that something is wrong.’ He said, ‘no symptoms at all?’ I said, ‘well occasionally I do hear the sound of the bomb.’ He said, ‘how often?’ I said, ‘well sometimes half a dozen times a day.’ He fixed me in the eye and said, ‘so you think that’s normal?
So I admitted to myself then, maybe that there wasn’t quite a screw loose but something I needed to address. I did a bit of therapy and what it taught me was that I could go so far in a therapist’s chair. It could get me into a habit of looking after my mental and emotional health, in the way that I got used to going to the gym and staying in shape physically. I could do the same and needed to work at it. Things loosened up in my life. This was the mid 90s and I decided I would take a new turn in my career away from documentary making. I would make a move and gain further qualifications and take a job in management in broadcasting.
All sorts of things opened up. Isabella came into my life. It was a terrific love affair, the woman I’m married to and still desperately in love with. I think that came out of all that good therapy. One of the things about fatherhood was that I found myself questioning. I looked into the eyes of my newly born child and suddenly I was reconnected to that desire that all parents have, to protect and realise that there was only so much I could do to protect. But also to reach out to the people who had saved my life in 1979. In 2001 I wrote them a letter saying how indebted I was to them and what it meant to me to be alive day by day and looking into the new born child’s eyes that I have.
In 2003 I came to Ireland because I decided that emotionally, for the first time since 1979, I was emotionally stable and strong enough to ask the really difficult questions that I’d never asked myself. I had this sense, this sense of unfinished business with Nicholas, with Ireland. I needed to go back and address some deep questions. At that stage I was only viscerally aware what those questions were. Suddenly I had no answers to them. I knew that if I was to find them, I needed to spend some time, probably on my own. I’m not just talking about a quick weekend, but rather I set aside a week in August 2003 to go out to the west, to Mullaghmore and spend the best part of a week just absorbing the place and starting to reconnect to the people, the events, the place that had reshaped my life in 1979. And I continued to do that, for one visit a few days each month through those months of 2003 until August 2004 when I concluded on the 25th anniversary of the attack. I made the visits very quietly, very privately. It was an opportunity to be one-on-one with the people in the village, with the doctors and nurses, with the Garda, with our neighbours, friends and relatives in the west of Ireland. To ask them to help me to piece together the answers to questions which had lain dormant within me. I was desirous of getting into a forgiving state in a way that I’d never quite got into.
Ryan Tubridy
Did you say goodbye to Nicholas?
Timothy Knatchbull
I did and I had this underlying sense of needing to do that more than any other single thing. I found that by bringing together all the circumstances in the west, eventually by rummaging around in the cellar of Classiebawn – which had remained remarkably unchanged – I found our old vinyl collection and pulled out a disc recorded in the early 70s, Hot Hits 6 it was called. And when I found that I knew it was going to be another piece I could use in the jigsaw. I made a copy on CD and one day I was alone in the castle. It was an extraordinary day, a storm and deep depression out in the Atlantic brought in low clouds and strong winds and I was inside this 19th century granite, double glazed castle, totally alone. Alone with my thoughts, alone with my memories and I started to feel what I had needed to feel which was that connection again to my past, that connection to Nicholas and I quite simply surprised myself by saying his name, calling out his name and speaking to him for the first time.
Ryan Tubridy
What were you saying?
Timothy Knatchbull
I called out ‘Nick’ and I shocked myself by doing that, finding that I was talking to him directly. I was hugely – by this stage I was in a trance like state. It is something very difficult to describe. I had tears. One of the things that I’ve learnt in life is to pull out a piece of paper and jot notes. I jotted down notes of an imagined conversation that I was having with my dead twin. It proved to be the turning point in those visits I made to Ireland. Indeed it was the turning point in my life, a form of monologue with him where I was just pouring out the things at some deep psychological level I needed to say to him: to say goodbye, to tell him about my love for him, to have an opportunity at last to feel I had said a final goodbye. That’s what I did and I came away from that visit with a whole new set of ‘hello’s’ in my life: to my present, to my wife, to my children, my friends and my neighbours, my work. I came back from Ireland with a whole new wave of energy and threw myself into life. And it’s really just been a wonderful process that I look back on with terrific gratitude to the people who were big enough and kind enough to take me back in and talk and share with me ever so privately in the west of Ireland in 2003 and 2004. That’s really what I’ve documented in my book.
Ryan Tubridy
Timothy, a text – an email – has come in from Ann Chambers, esteemed historian and biographer of Grace O’Malley. It says it may be of interest to know that Timothy and Nicholas are 14th great grandsons in descent of our pirate queen, Grainne or Grace O’Malley. So a little bit of history for your pocket as you head off today.
