![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/The-Conversation-e1535448713758.jpg?resize=176%2C18&ssl=1\")
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By Jenny Hocking<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n An immense trove of the most important royal historical material for decades has quietly been released in the United Kingdom. These are the diaries of\u00a0Lord Louis Mountbatten\u00a0and his wife Lady Edwina, from the 1920s until 1968.<\/p>\n As the last great-grandchild and godchild of Queen Victoria, uncle of Prince Philip and adored great-uncle of Prince Charles, Mountbatten exercised a \u201cRasputin-like influence\u201d in the court of Queen Elizabeth.<\/p>\n He had a long, typically aristocratic, naval officer career from head of combined operations during the second world war to admiral of the fleet. He was also the last viceroy of India, presiding over transition and partition. All this gave Mountbatten an unmatched insight into the royal family and its intersections with the highest levels of wartime and post-imperial governance.<\/p>\n But the release of this material doesn\u2019t just shed light on the royal family. It again highlights the significant barriers to accessing our history; specifically, the claimed \u201cconvention of royal secrecy\u201d that imposes strict secrecy over royal communications across the Commonwealth nations.<\/p>\n A four-year battle<\/strong><\/p>\n The release of the Mountbatten diaries is entirely due to the work of historian and Mountbatten biographer\u00a0Andrew Lownie, who fought for four years to get public access to the previously secret diaries.<\/p>\n They are held in the\u00a0Broadlands Archives, purchased by Southampton University from the Mountbatten family in 2010 for\u00a0\u00a32.8 million ($A5.3 million)\u00a0using public funds. At the time, the university\u00a0said\u00a0it would \u201cpreserve the collection in its entirety for future generations to use and enjoy\u201d and \u201censure public access\u201d.<\/p>\n The university\u2019s catalogue gives their legal status as \u201cpublic records\u201d, and states they were \u201copen on transfer\u201d. Yet the papers were\u00a0closed\u00a0after an officious university historian warned the government the papers contained \u201cmany references to the royal family\u201d.<\/p>\n Lownie\u2019s initial\u00a0request for access\u00a0under the UK\u2019s freedom of information regime was rejected by the university, citing a cabinet directive preventing the release of the diaries and letters. A successful appeal followed, which the university ignored until threatened with a contempt action.<\/p>\n Finally, late last month, 22 MPs\u00a0signed a motion\u00a0tabled in the House of Commons calling for \u201ctheir publication without further obfuscation and delay\u201d. The university finally released many \u2014 though not all \u2014 of the diaries.<\/p>\n Lownie, meanwhile, has spent \u00a3250,000 (A$472,000) of his own money in pursuit of public access to the Mountbatten archives, which were always purportedly a public resource.<\/p>\n A fascinating window<\/strong><\/p>\n Former US ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith has previously\u00a0described\u00a0Mountbatten\u2019s unabashed use of royal privilege for personal advancement:<\/p>\n no one was ever better served by the accident of birth or put royal connection to greater use.<\/em><\/p>\n So the Mountbatten archive will provide a fascinating window into a rare familial link to the final years of a fading, disintegrating, European royalty and its intersection with key episodes in British political history.<\/p>\n Many of Mountbatten\u2019s (at times conflicting) roles attracted significant controversy, on which the diaries and letters in particular will shed great light. This includes the\u00a0fiasco\u00a0of the raid on the French coast at Dieppe in 1942. As Galbraith\u00a0also noted, this was<\/p>\n widely believed the single most ill-advised, costly and generally disastrous operation of the war.<\/em><\/p>\n There is also the contentious, brutal, partition of India. And his unconventional \u201copen marriage\u201d, including Edwina\u2019s close relationship with the first post-independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. All of these will be re-evaluated in light of this remarkable shared archive.<\/p>\n Yet, several files Lownie is particularly interested in are missing from the public release.<\/p>\n These include the 1947 and 1948 diaries covering the Mountbattens\u2019 involvement in pre-Independence India, transition and\u00a0partition, among \u201cscores of files\u201d not yet released. These crucial historical documents covering a contentious time in British imperial history remain locked away and the fight for public access to them continues.<\/p>\n \u2018Eeerily similar\u2019 to the palace letters<\/strong><\/p>\n Lownie\u2019s case has been described as \u201ceerily similar\u201d to the long-running palace letters case I took against the National Archives of Australia, in its denial of access to archival documents relating to the royal family, \u201cthe effect being that public knowledge of key constitutional and\u00a0political events is limited\u201d.<\/p>\n The denial of access to royal documents shields royal activities from the consideration of history, simply because of their absence from the public record, profoundly distorting the history itself.<\/p>\n Our own history gives us a clear example of this. The queen did not want the palace letters \u2014 her correspondence with governor-general Sir John Kerr about the dismissal of the Whitlam government \u2014 to be made public. And the National Archives of Australia and federal government unsuccessfully\u00a0fought\u00a0against public access to the letters all the way to the High Court, to a total cost of close to\u00a0A$2 million. With their release, the history of the dismissal of the Whitlam government has changed dramatically.<\/p>\n As Australian National University historian Frank Bongiorno\u00a0recently concluded:<\/p>\n the claim the palace had no involvement in the dismissal is now unsustainable. The palace was indeed a player.<\/em><\/p>\n Still waiting<\/strong><\/p>\n Lownie has done us all a great public service in his efforts to bring the Mountbatten archives to public view. However, it should not be up to individual historians to take arduous legal action to ensure public archives \u2014 whether in universities or government-funded national archives \u2014 adhere to their requirements to make official records publicly available.<\/p>\n This includes royal communications between governors-general and the monarch, as our High Court\u00a0ruled\u00a0in the palace letters case in 2020.<\/p>\n The National Archives of Australia has said that, as a result of the High Court\u2019s decision, it would also\u00a0release\u00a0the royal correspondence of all governors-general from Richard Casey to Bill Hayden (1965 to 1996), thirty years of exceptionally significant archival records.<\/p>\n More than a year later, we are still waiting for their release.<\/p>\n Jenny Hocking,<\/span> * Published in print edition on 10 August 2021<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Jenny Hocking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":139,"featured_media":32242,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8348],"tags":[27409,28135,29451,165,29450,12998,17521],"class_list":["post-32241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-conversation","tag-archives","tag-british-royal-family","tag-historical-record","tag-india","tag-palace-letters","tag-queen-elizabeth","tag-the-conversation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/C-Secret-history.jpg?fit=1198%2C723&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8QzSF-8o1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/139"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32241\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/C-Secret-history.jpg?resize=640%2C386&ssl=1\")
Lord Mountbatten, Ghandi and Lady Mountbatten in New Delhi in 1947. Pic – AP<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Emeritus Professor,
\nMonash University<\/span><\/p>\n
\n