Jeremy Vine
30 years ago one of the highest profile terrorist attacks of the IRA’s campaign shocked the nation. The victim was Lord Mountbatten. He was a Supreme Allied Commander in south east Asia in World War Two, the last Viceroy of India and great uncle and mentor to Price Charles. He was killed at the helm of his fishing boat soon after setting out on a family trip. A bomb had been hidden on board, exploding just minutes after they left the harbour.
Three people actually died; 79 year old Lord Mountbatten, his 14 year old grandson, Nick, and 15 year old Paul Maxwell who helped on the boat. The other passengers who were all caught up in the blast and seriously injured were Nick’s twin brother, Timothy, their parents and their paternal grandmother who died the next day. It was a terrible, terrible atrocity.
For many years Tim was unable to come to terms with the tragedy and the loss of his twin. He has now written a book about it called From a Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten bomb. And he joins us this afternoon. Tim Knatchbull, good afternoon to you.
Timothy Knatchbull
Hello.
Jeremy Vine
So you and Nick. Let’s just talk about your family first of all. You and Nick were the youngest of seven children and identical to the point that few could tell you apart.
Timothy Knatchbull
That’s true. There was one tiny but tell tale sign which is under my left chin there is a mole and so if there was doubt about which twin was being spoken to a relative would lift our chin, have a look and if there was a mole then it was me.
Jeremy Vine
Looking in the book there are pictures of you from before your brother died and yes, it’s impossible to tell.
Timothy Knatchbull
It was great fun being an identical twin. My parents brought us up really symmetrically, very identically. We were dressed the same and we were christened. Nicholas was Nicholas Timothy and I’m Timothy Nicholas. And it was really that sense of fun. It felt like being in a two-boy club all of our own. My parents thought – they had five children – they thought, well we’d just go for one more and then about three weeks before we were born my mother was told, I think there’s two in there. So they ended up with seven. My elder brothers and sisters were a fantastic influence on us growing up and those are my predominant memories of childhood really: a fun, happy, very close-knit family.
Jeremy Vine
And I read that you only spent a couple days apart from each other.
Timothy Knatchbull
Yes, I think it was a handful in a lifetime of 14 years nearly 15. I remember one time going back to boarding school and it was my second term. Shortly before we went Nicky got German measles so he stayed back. He wrote to me that day, he wrote to me the next day. So each day I was separated from him I had a letter and those two letters are the only two letters I ever received from him. I kept them at the time for no apparent reason. I treasure them now they are fond reminders. But really in nearly 15 years I would say just a handful, four or five days, were ever spent apart. We were intensely close.
Jeremy Vine
So that is your immediate family, how does Lord Mountbatten fit into the family tree?
Timothy Knatchbull
He was the senior figure in the family. He’s my mother’s father. He had two daughters, my aunt, Pamela Hicks, and my mother, Patricia Brabourne. And we grew up with him really at the centre of our family. I was born shortly – a few years – four years after his wife, Edwina Mountbatten, died in 1960. He was coming up to his retirement, 1965, he really made sure that his home in Hampshire and his holiday home on the west coast of Ireland were always full of children and grandchildren and the family. He was a terrifically fun, helpful and involved grandfather. He had this wonderful streak about him. Someone said famously of Churchill that he was a world figure but with boy scout enthusiasm and the same went for my grandfather. For us kids it was just terrific fun for him to be interested in what we were doing, interested in our toys. He wasn’t childish but he was childlike and therefore we really bonded with him.
Jeremy Vine
Anyone I guess over 40 will remember – or even 35 – will remember your grandfather as a quite a big figure in our national life. He was sort of Uncle Charles’ mentor; he had a war record; he was amazingly respected; he would be at all the moments where the state showed itself, wouldn’t he? Famous isn’t the right word but he was the establishment personified.
Timothy Knatchbull
I think he had this incredible drive all through his life. In the second world war he started the war as a destroyer captain and in fact he was docked in Londonderry for repairs when he first went down and saw this house that his wife had inherited in the west coast of Ireland. He was overcome by the beauty of it.
But rapidly he was promoted and he ended the war as Supreme Allied Commander so that gave him an international visibility in the world. And shortly afterwards, 1947, he went out to India for the transfer of power and that was a momentous moment, I think, for the British psyche. It was a risky appointment for him but he and my grandmother were deemed to have a done a fantastic job and I think that did give him a visibility in this country and internationally, which as he went on – became First Sea Lord and Chief for the Defence Staff – he stayed I think in the seams, in the public consciousness which in a way was very warm. I remember him taking us to the Royal Tournament and to take the salute. We were amazed as young kids – sort of five or six years old – that grandpapa would stand up, a spot light would be trained on him, thousands and thousands of people around would rise to their feet and cheer and clap as if he was a family member or something. It was a lesson to us just what he meant to other people.
Jeremy Vine
The day that that changed your life was the August Bank Holiday in 1979. Do you remember much about getting ready to go on the boat and leaving the harbour?
Timothy Knatchbull
I do. It was a beautiful day, a clear blue sky, we’d had a happy family breakfast. My grandfather had come down wearing his favourite T-Shirt given to him by the survivors of HMS Kelly of which he’d been the captain, part of a destroyer flotilla, the Fifth Flotilla or the Fighting Fifth. He came down wearing this T-Shirt saying the Fighting Fifth and as I pushed past him to get some breakfast, he was coming out and lifted my chin. There’s the mole. ‘Morning Timmy’. ‘Morning Fighting Fifth’, I said. It wasn’t much later that morning that we left, went down into the harbour and carefully helped him down the steps, he was 79 years old. It was a vertical ladder that he had to go down because the tide was low. My 83-year-old grandmother who I adored as well, a wonderful lady called Doreen Brabourne, and we got them on board. My twin brother and I went on.
My grandfather wanted a photograph taken of the boat that day so my father stayed on the quay took a photograph then joined us. My mother sat in the stern with my grandmother. As we moved along it was a flat calm sea, a really wonderful, beautiful day. Everybody who had a boat in the village was out on the water that day. There were many boats, probably dozens of boats and we nodded and waved at people.
We were on way to pick up lobster pots. We’d gone maybe three quarters of a mile of so and my grandmother sitting with her feet up in the back of the boat, catching the sun, turned to my mother who was reading a back dated copy, I think, of the New Statesman and said, ‘Isn’t this a beautiful day’.
And I don’t have a clear memory of what happened next. There was this incredible explosion and I have just a snatched recollection of this forceful, violent sensation and then of being – lying in the bottom of the boat, lying on some hard wooden boards of what I knew was a very small boat. I could hear the sound of an outboard engine very close by and I could feel its vibration and I could hear two voices very close to me. Two people, Irish accents, very kindly but very worried, emotionally charged, trying to reassure me and that was my first recollection.
I’m told I had no sight. I had lost – well I was peppered from the explosion and quite badly injured and I knew that I just had to concentrate very, very hard in trying to work out what was wrong with me and it wasn’t long before they got me to the harbour. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with me. The only thing I could really work out was that I was cold, desperately, desperately cold. The sort of cold I’ve never really felt before or after and when I told them that, they tried to cover me up. They had just one towel on their little boat.
They got me to the harbour. By that time other boats had picked up other members of my family and the body of Paul Maxwell, this lovely Irish boy who was spending his holiday earning pocket money looking after this boat. It felt like he was on holiday with us. And they got us to the harbour where the local people were tremendously kind and helpful and ran around and grabbed a broom, broke it to act as a splint here and carried there. Ambulances came and we got to the hospital in Sligo and were met by again a wall of loving support and brilliant care. And Jeremy, that really was critical. It meant for me, my experience of Ireland, 14 years of going there had all been about friendliness and hospitality. Wonderful people, wonderful place and that really continued the moment after the explosion. I received nothing but the most wonderful care and attention.
I was in Intensive Care for three days. Opposite me in Intensive Care was a bed, a curtain drawn round it. I didn’t know who was in it but I could hear the doctors talking to somebody. I imagined it was a very young girl and from they were talking she was obviously utterly helpless. And they were talking to her, ‘we’re just going to move your hand now, we’re just going to move your arm, you are OK Patricia’. It never occurred to me that this Patricia was my mother and she was hovering on the edge of death for days, connected to a machine that breathed for her. 117 stitches in her face, 20 in each eyeball. She lived and became a mainstay of my life in future. To my right, my 83 year old grandmother. At 9.00 the next morning, Tuesday morning, she died in the bed next door to mine. My father, there was no other bed available in intensive care so he was in the next ward.
We were reunited and we went on and when we got back to England a few weeks later, a huge mailbag came from Ireland and indeed other countries as well as from around England and the rest of the UK. There was wonderful letters of love and support from old and young and from all sorts of people and one really shook me, really went right to my core. I remember the moment I opened it and unfolded it and read it. I withdrew – I was in my parent’s home in London – I withdrew into a back room and read it again. It came from the Coroner in Sligo – this was a few months later, January 1980. It said, ‘I recognise the loss of your twin brother, Nicholas, you’ve had something awful’. He went for a little bit on a few other points and he finished his letter, ‘I hope the day will come when we have peace again in this country and this beautiful place which was put here for everybody to enjoy is a place where you will be able to come back again and enjoy’. And I wanted that so much and eventually I was able to do that and that’s what’s caused me to make this journey and write this book.
Jeremy Vine
Just to go to back to your brother’s death because of course you didn’t know and your father, as you say in your book, didn’t want to be the first to tell you so it fell to your sister. Now, what happened?
Timothy Knatchbull
I can imagine it was a heavy burden for her. I had been in the hospital for three days. My father was terribly caring and thoughtful and he thought this through and said, ‘why don’t you go into see Tim and take your Aunt – my Aunt, Pamela Hicks – and take Aunt Pammy with you’. This is what my sister did. She sat down. I loved it when I had family visiting in the hospital, so I was delighted to see my sister and am very close to both my sisters. She sat down and she looked at me and I could tell from the expression in my face that she had something serious to say. Now, I’d asked about my family members, those I couldn’t see beforehand. Where’s grandpapa, where’s granny and where’s Nicky. Now on good medical advice – I was so sedated, I was so injured and so weak – the advice the doctors, who, when I had arrived in the hospital and were not sure I’d live, was ‘do not tell him too much too quickly. And so I hadn’t been told he was dead. Well my sister told me. I just looked into her eyes. There was a moment then as she dissolved into tears, I followed her and it was the moment that I realised that my life had changed forever.
Jeremy Vine
And you’d never loose the pain of that.
Timothy Knatchbull
Well, I think I recognised that everybody in the family was hurting and everybody was carrying on and I needed to do the same. I buried my face later when my family left. I hid under the sheets. I think I didn’t want to appear weak. I didn’t want to upset as well these wonderful kindly nurses who were moving around. I buried my face and just cried quietly but later I fell asleep and when I woke up I knew I just had to carry on and I knew – I wanted to give a signal to other people that I was OK. I could imagine what it felt like for my parents, not really Jeremy like you now as the father of young children. It wasn’t until I was a father of young children myself, I could quite apprehend what that meant to my parents, to lose one of their youngest children but I wanted to reassure them I was alright in order to lessen their pain, their worry and allow them hopefully to move on. That was what my family were so good at and I followed the example of my brothers and sisters and parents and that got me through those first painful difficult weeks and months.
Jeremy Vine
There’s so much more to talk about and honestly, we could go on for another hour on this. The state funeral for Lord Mountbatten was part of our lives because we were all watching it. Then of course the perpetrators and then you find out how they did it and how precise they were. And your feelings for them particularly in the light of the peace process that’s followed.
Timothy Knatchbull
Well of course the peace processes are just so important, so wonderful. Personally, I went back to Ireland, 2003, I was a father, very happily married in 1998 and in this wonderful warm loving relationship I was in I felt secure enough emotionally to go back to Ireland to address those issues you’ve mentioned: how the attack had been carried out, by whom, why and how. I needed answers and there was precious little information for me to tap into when I started going, asking these questions, which was 2003. I decided that I would just go to the west of Ireland, very quietly and peacefully and privately and spend time there, a week at a time, each month for a period of a year and in talking with the people in our local community, Mullaghmore on the west coast of Ireland, County Sligo, I came to a whole new level of understanding and with that came really – a sense of peace, of saying goodbye to my darling twin, Nicky, but also gaining a new sense of forgiveness and a new understanding and indeed a whole new appetite for life and energy level. A happiness has come into my life. I have 5 children now and having a really happy time and hopefully I’m a better father, a better husband, a better friend and colleague as a result of having laid a lot of these memories to rest.
Jeremy Vine
Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us about that terrible day and the years since. Tim Knatchbull who’s written From a Clear Blue Sky, the story about the bomb that killed not just Lord Mountbatten but also his twin brother Nicholas Knatchbull.
