RIP: Lord Brabourne

[favorov]

"The marriage was to endure under unimaginable pressures, and
the couple remained devoted to the end"

The 7th Lord Brabourne, who has died aged 80, was, under the name
John Brabourne, a film producer whose credits included Sink the Bismarck!
(1960), Death on the Nile (1978) and A Passage to India (1984); married for
almost 60 years to Countess Mountbatten of Burma, the daughter of Earl
Mountbatten, Brabourne was on board the fishing boat that was blown up off the
west coast of Ireland by an IRA bomb in 1979, killing his father-in-law, his
mother and his son, Nicholas Knatchbull.

The tragedy, which also killed a local boy and left Brabourne,
his wife and Nicholas's twin brother, Timothy, seriously injured, had a
devastating impact on his family. But Brabourne and his wife were determined
that the Mountbatten name would not forever be associated with tragedy, and they
devoted the years after the bombing to restoring peace, hope and certainty to
their family.

John Ulick Knatchbull was born on November 9 1924 in Bombay, a
year after his father, the 5th Baron Brabourne, was appointed Governor of the
city. In 1938 the 5th Lord Brabourne spent four months as India's youngest
Viceroy, and young John would later become the son-in-law of the last Viceroy.
Descended from Richard Knatchbull, "a roving nobleman" who had settled in Kent
in 1485, John Knatchbull's father died in 1940, two years after being appointed
Governor of Bengal, and was succeeded by John's elder brother, Norton.

Until he was 10, John spoke Hindi as fluently as English. He was
then sent to England to be educated at Eton, followed by Oxford. During the
latter part of the war he was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards and
returned to India as ADC, first to General Slim, then to Admiral Viscount
Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander, SE Asia.

It was during this period that he first encountered Patricia, the
elder of Mountbatten's two daughters, who was serving as a Wren; he would later
recall that he "fell totally under her spell". But in 1943, John Knatchbull's
brother, the 6th Lord Brabourne, was shot by the Germans after escaping from a
prison train in northern Italy, and Knatchbull succeeded to the peerage. Three
years later, at a ceremony at Romsey Abbey, attended by King George VI and Queen
Elizabeth, it was as Captain Lord Brabourne that he married Patricia
Mountbatten.

The Daily Telegraph described how the bride, attended by Princess
Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, wore a golden gown; the King proposed the
health of the couple with his glass charged with sherry, and "laughed
uproariously at the jokes of the bridegroom". There was also a breathless
description of the 600 employees of the Mountbatten estate, all of whom attended
the reception at Crossfield Hall, Romsey: "Farmers, ghillies, woodsmen,
dairymaids, gamekeepers, gardeners, polo pony stable boys, labourers were all
assembled there." The marriage was to endure under unimaginable pressures, and
the couple remained devoted to the end.

In 1958 Brabourne produced Harry Black and the Tiger, an action
melodrama starring Stewart Granger as a hunter called upon to track down a
Bengal tiger that has been menacing an Indian village. This was followed by Sink
the Bismarck!, the true story of the Royal Navy's search for a German warship.
At that time, Lord Mountbatten was Chief of the Defence Staff, a position which
was said to have helped Brabourne achieve both authenticity and the full
co-operation of the Admiralty.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Brabourne produced several films
based on Agatha Christie's detective novels. Star-studded ensemble pictures,
they are now regarded as classics of the genre, particularly Death on the Nile,
which starred Peter Ustinov, Jane Birkin, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Angela
Lansbury, David Niven and Maggie Smith, to name but a few.

In 1957, during the production of Harry Black, Brabourne had
bought a copy of EM Forster's novel A Passage to India to while away the long
journey to Mysore, where filming was taking place. After reading it, he
realised, he later recalled, that this was "the film I really wanted to make",
and upon his return to London he wrote several letters to Forster. In 1961 the
two men met, although no formal agreement was ever made.

Forster died in 1970, but King's College, Cambridge, which owned
the rights to all Forster's books, took a dim view of the film world. For 10
years Brabourne wrote an annual letter to the Provost, until he was finally told
that the rights were available. The subsequent film, directed by David Lean, was
a meticulous and epic study of the tensions between the Indians and the colonial
British in the 1920s. It won two Oscars, and earned nine other Oscar nominations
- Brabourne was nominated for Best Picture.

Although he went on to produce several other films, the
devastation of his family and his own injuries in the IRA attack, inevitably had
an impact on Brabourne's career. The 50 lb device, which had been set off by
remote control by two members of the Provisional IRA on the cliffs above the
shore at Mullaghmore, had been placed underneath the boat's steering wheel,
below Mountbatten's feet. Brabourne and his wife suffered broken legs and
lacerated skin, while Tim Knatchbull nearly died.

The family did not return to Classiebawn Castle, Co Sligo, where
the Mountbattens had taken holidays for 35 years, although they harboured no
bitterness and bore no grudges. In 1998 Thomas McMahon, the man who made and
planted the bomb, was freed from prison as part of that year's Ulster peace
agreement.

After her father's death, Brabourne's wife inherited her father's
title courtesy of an arcane First World War law which stated that if a general
or admiral was lost without a male heir, his title could pass, for one
generation only, to a daughter.

In 1960 Brabourne was appointed deputy chairman, under the
chairman Viscount Slim, of British Home Entertainment, which introduced
coin-in-the-slot television. Four years later, under Brabourne's chairmanship,
Pay-TV (a precursor to the pay-per-view television of today) gave direct
reception of the Cassius Clay-Henry Cooper boxing match to several thousand
viewers in London.

Brabourne subsequently went on to become a director of Thames
Television from 1975 to 1993 and its chairman between 1990 and 1993. That same
year he was appointed CBE.

He rarely spoke publicly about the bombing, but last year he and
his wife gave a substantial sum of money towards the endowment of a bursary in
Nicholas's name at the Dragon prep school in Oxford, which has been associated
with the Mountbatten family for 50 years. Shortly before the launch of a public
appeal to raise money for the award, Lady Mountbatten spoke about the tragedy,
and its effect on her family. "The past 25 years," she said, "would have been
far more difficult without my husband. In fact it would have been unbearably
ghastly. We have been married a long time, but I dare say that if we had a spare
lunch or dinner and had to pick one person, we'd still choose each other."

Latterly, Lord Brabourne and his wife led a peaceful existence at
their comfortable 18th-century family house, Newhouse (so-called because it
post-dated the Knatchbulls' nearby ancestral home), in Kent. There they
delighted in the company of their children and grandchildren.

Lord Brabourne died on Thursday with his wife and six children at
his bedside. His son, Lord Romsey, succeeds to the peerage.

Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of
Telegraph Group Limited

Comments

[a11.livejournal.com]

насколько я понимаю из того, что слышал про Вас, у нас с Вами довольно много общего ))

[favorov.livejournal.com]

Может быть... А вы кто?

[a11.livejournal.com]

ну, у меня же в info написано - пересмешник, птица такая ))
вывод об общности сделан на основании специальности, места получения диплома, (географически) последующего места работы и, last but not least, так сказать, увлечений.
которые у Вас уже стали профессией, а у меня (пока что??) остаются хобби...
ну и общие знакомые, конечно, имеются, но это у кого же они не имеются ))

[favorov.livejournal.com]

Понимаю...
Удачи вам в Лондоне.

[a11.livejournal.com]

спасибо )