95 Facts About Louis Mountbatten

Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma was a British naval officer, colonial administrator and close relative of the British royal family.

Louis Mountbatten, who was of German descent, was born in England to the prominent Battenberg family and was a maternal uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and a second cousin of King George VI.

Louis Mountbatten joined the Royal Navy during the First World War and was appointed Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia Command, in the Second World War.

Louis Mountbatten later served as the last Viceroy of India and briefly as the first Governor-General of the Dominion of India.

Louis Mountbatten attended the Royal Naval College, Osborne, before entering the Royal Navy in 1916.

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Louis Mountbatten saw action during the closing phase of the First World War, and after the war briefly attended Christ's College, Cambridge.

Louis Mountbatten saw considerable action in Norway, in the English Channel, and in the Mediterranean.

Louis Mountbatten was appointed chief of Combined Operations and a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee in early 1942, and organised the raids on St Nazaire and Dieppe.

In March 1947, Louis Mountbatten was appointed Viceroy of India and oversaw the Partition of India into India and Pakistan.

Louis Mountbatten then served as the first Governor-General of India until June 1948.

In 1952, Louis Mountbatten was appointed commander-in-chief of the British Mediterranean Fleet and NATO Commander Allied Forces Mediterranean.

Louis Mountbatten received a ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey and was buried in Romsey Abbey in Hampshire.

Mountbatten, then named Prince Louis of Battenberg, was born on 25 June 1900 at Frogmore House in the Home Park, Windsor, Berkshire.

Mountbatten's maternal grandparents were Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, who was a daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Louis Mountbatten was baptised in the large drawing room of Frogmore House on 17 July 1900 by the Dean of Windsor, Philip Eliot.

Louis Mountbatten's godparents were Queen Victoria, Nicholas II of Russia and Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg .

Louis Mountbatten wore the original 1841 royal christening gown at the ceremony.

Louis Mountbatten was educated at home for the first 10 years of his life; he was then sent to Lockers Park School in Hertfordshire and on to the Royal Naval College, Osborne, in May 1913.

The king's British relatives followed suit with Louis Mountbatten's father dropping his German titles and name and adopting the surname Louis Mountbatten, an anglicization of Battenberg.

In June 1917, when the royal family stopped using their German names and titles and adopted the more British-sounding "Windsor", Mountbatten acquired the courtesy title Lord Louis Mountbatten and was known as Lord Louis until he was created a peer in 1946.

Louis Mountbatten paid a visit of ten days to the Western Front, in July 1918.

Louis Mountbatten attended Christ's College, Cambridge, for two terms, starting in October 1919, where he studied English literature in a programme designed to augment the education of junior officers which had been curtailed by the war.

Louis Mountbatten was elected for a term to the Standing Committee of the Cambridge Union Society and was suspected of sympathy for the Labour Party, then emerging as a potential party of government for the first time.

Louis Mountbatten had to command a platoon of stokers, many of whom had never handled a rifle before, in northern England.

Louis Mountbatten survived the deep defence cuts known as the Geddes Axe.

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Louis Mountbatten became a Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, now the Institution of Engineering and Technology .

Louis Mountbatten successfully brought Wishart back to port in Malta and then attended the funeral of King George V in January 1936.

Louis Mountbatten was appointed a personal naval aide-de-camp to King Edward VIII on 23 June 1936 and, having joined the Naval Air Division of the Admiralty in July 1936, he attended the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in May 1937.

When war broke out in September 1939, Louis Mountbatten became Captain of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla aboard HMS Kelly, which became famous for its exploits.

In late 1939 he brought the Duke of Windsor back from exile in France and in early May 1940 Louis Mountbatten led a British convoy in through the fog to evacuate the Allied forces participating in the Namsos Campaign during the Norwegian Campaign.

Louis Mountbatten rejoined Kelly in December 1940, by which time the torpedo damage had been repaired.

Louis Mountbatten was mentioned in despatches on 9 August 1940 and 21 March 1941 and awarded the Distinguished Service Order in January 1941.

On 27 October 1941, Louis Mountbatten replaced Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes as Chief of Combined Operations Headquarters and was promoted to commodore.

Louis Mountbatten was central in the planning and promotion of the raid on the port of Dieppe.

Louis Mountbatten claimed that the lessons learned from the Dieppe Raid were necessary for planning the Normandy invasion on D-Day nearly two years later.

British interpreter Hugh Lunghi recounted an embarrassing episode during the Potsdam Conference when Louis Mountbatten, desiring to receive an invitation to visit the Soviet Union, repeatedly attempted to impress Joseph Stalin with his former connections to the Russian imperial family.

South East Asia Command was disbanded in May 1946 and Louis Mountbatten returned home with the substantive rank of rear-admiral.

Louis Mountbatten was then in 1947 further created Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Baron Romsey, of Romsey in the County of Southampton.

Louis Mountbatten's instructions were to avoid partition and preserve a united India as a result of the transfer of power but authorised him to adapt to a changing situation in order to get Britain out promptly with minimal reputational damage.

Louis Mountbatten arrived in India on 22 March 1947 by air, from London.

Louis Mountbatten's arrival saw large-scale communal riots in Delhi, Bombay and Rawalpindi.

Louis Mountbatten concluded that the situation was too volatile to wait even a year before granting independence to India.

Louis Mountbatten hurried so he could return to his senior technical Navy courses.

Louis Mountbatten was fond of Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru and his liberal outlook for the country.

Louis Mountbatten set a date for the transfer of power from the British to the Indians, arguing that a fixed timeline would convince Indians of his and the British government's sincerity in working towards a swift and efficient independence, excluding all possibilities of stalling the process.

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When Louis Mountbatten's timeline offered the prospect of attaining independence soon, sentiments took a different turn.

Louis Mountbatten developed a strong relationship with the Indian princes, who ruled those portions of India not directly under British rule.

Louis Mountbatten's intervention was decisive in persuading the vast majority of them to see advantages in opting to join the Indian Union.

Louis Mountbatten brought forward the date of the partition from June 1948 to 15 August 1947.

Pakistani accounts suggest that Louis Mountbatten favoured the accession of Kashmir to India, citing his close relationship to Nehru.

Louis Mountbatten clearly expressed his lack of support and faith in the Muslim League's idea of Pakistan.

When Louis Mountbatten was asked by Collins and Lapierre if he would have sabotaged the creation of Pakistan had he known that Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis, he replied, "Most probably".

Louis Mountbatten became Fourth Sea Lord at the Admiralty in June 1950.

Louis Mountbatten then returned to the Mediterranean to serve as Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet and NATO Commander Allied Forces Mediterranean from June 1952.

Louis Mountbatten was promoted to the substantive rank of full admiral on 27 February 1953.

Louis Mountbatten served his final posting at the Admiralty as First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff from April 1955 to July 1959, the position which his father had held some forty years before.

Louis Mountbatten was promoted to Admiral of the Fleet on 22 October 1956.

Louis Mountbatten argued that such a move would destabilize the Middle East, undermine the authority of the United Nations, divide the Commonwealth and diminish Britain's global standing.

Louis Mountbatten served in this post for six years during which he was able to consolidate the three service departments of the military branch into a single Ministry of Defence.

Louis Mountbatten was appointed colonel of the Life Guards and Gold Stick in Waiting on 29 January 1965 and Life Colonel Commandant of the Royal Marines the same year.

Louis Mountbatten was Governor of the Isle of Wight from 20 July 1965 and then the first Lord Lieutenant of the Isle of Wight from 1 April 1974.

Louis Mountbatten was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and had received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1968.

In 1969, Louis Mountbatten tried unsuccessfully to persuade his cousin, the Spanish pretender Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona, to ease the eventual accession of his son, Juan Carlos, to the Spanish throne by signing a declaration of abdication while in exile.

From 1967 until 1978, Louis Mountbatten was president of the United World Colleges Organisation, then represented by a single college: that of Atlantic College in South Wales.

Louis Mountbatten supported the United World Colleges and encouraged heads of state, politicians, and personalities throughout the world to share his interest.

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In 1978, Louis Mountbatten passed the presidency of the college to his great-nephew, the Prince of Wales.

Louis Mountbatten helped to launch the International Baccalaureate; in 1971 he presented the first IB diplomas in the Greek Theatre of the International School of Geneva, Switzerland.

In 1975 Louis Mountbatten finally visited the Soviet Union, leading the delegation from UK as personal representative of Queen Elizabeth II at the celebrations to mark the 30th anniversary of Victory Day in Second World War in Moscow.

Peter Wright, in his 1987 book Spycatcher, claimed that in May 1968 Louis Mountbatten attended a private meeting with press baron Cecil King and the government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Solly Zuckerman.

The documentary makers alleged that a coup was planned to overthrow Wilson and replace him with Louis Mountbatten using the private armies and sympathisers in the military and MI5.

Louis Mountbatten's was the favourite granddaughter of the Edwardian magnate Sir Ernest Cassel and the principal heir to his fortune.

Louis Mountbatten had a long-running affair with American actress Shirley MacLaine, whom he met in the 1960s.

Louis Mountbatten was passionate about genealogy, an interest he shared with other European royalty and nobility; according to Ziegler, he spent a great deal of his leisure time in studying his links with European royal houses.

Louis Mountbatten was equally passionate about orders, decorations and military ranks and uniforms, though he himself considered this interest to be a sign of vanity and constantly tried to distance himself from it, with limited success.

Particular about details of dress, Louis Mountbatten took an interest in fashion design, introducing trouser zips, a tail-coat with broad, high lapels and a "buttonless waistcoat" that could be pulled on over the head.

Louis Mountbatten introduced the sport to the Royal Navy in the 1920s and wrote a book on the subject.

Louis Mountbatten served as Commodore of Emsworth Sailing Club in Hampshire from 1931.

Louis Mountbatten was a long-serving Patron of the Society for Nautical Research .

Apart from official documents, Mountbatten was not much of a reader, though he liked P G Wodehouse's books.

Louis Mountbatten enjoyed the cinema; his favourite stars were Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly and Shirley MacLaine.

In 1974, Louis Mountbatten began corresponding with Charles about a potential marriage to his granddaughter, Hon.

Four years later, Louis Mountbatten secured an invitation for himself and Amanda to accompany Charles on his planned 1980 tour of India.

Louis Mountbatten usually holidayed at his summer home, Classiebawn Castle, on the Mullaghmore Peninsula in County Sligo, in the north-west of Ireland.

Louis Mountbatten knew the danger involved in coming to this country.

On 5 September 1979, Louis Mountbatten received a ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey, which was attended by the Queen, the royal family, and members of the European royal houses.

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Louis Mountbatten's coffin was drawn on a gun carriage by 118 Royal Navy ratings.

Louis Mountbatten was tried for the assassinations in Ireland and convicted on 23 November 1979 based on forensic evidence supplied by James O'Donovan that showed flecks of paint from the boat and traces of nitroglycerine on his clothes.

Louis Mountbatten was released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

Louis Mountbatten sought to rewrite history with cavalier indifference to the facts to magnify his own achievements.

Louis Mountbatten's tolerance was extraordinary; his readiness to respect and listen to the views of others was remarkable throughout his life.

Louis Mountbatten was an executor of policy rather than an initiator; but whatever the policy, he espoused it with such energy and enthusiasm, made it so completely his own, that it became identified with him and, in the eyes of the outside world as well as his own, his creation.

Louis Mountbatten supported the burgeoning nationalist movements which grew up in the shadow of Japanese occupation.

Louis Mountbatten's priority was to maintain practical, stable government, but driving him was an idealism in which he believed every people should be allowed to control their own destiny.

Louis Mountbatten took pride in enhancing intercultural understanding and in 1984, with his elder daughter as the patron, the Louis Mountbatten Institute was developed to allow young adults the opportunity to enhance their intercultural appreciation and experience by spending time abroad.

Louis Mountbatten was appointed personal aide-de-camp by Edward VIII, George VI and Elizabeth II, and therefore bore the unusual distinction of being allowed to wear three royal cyphers on his shoulder straps.