PROFILE


Secretary, Brigadier “Jack” Gannon to help with the paperwork. Both men had day jobs, and since Dickie was also maintaining his busy social schedule with Edwina and friends, he could not meet up with Gannon until after midnight in his Brook House penthouse at the top of Park Lane. “My view,” wrote Mountbatten to Gannon,


“is that once you start monkeying about with the rules, you might just as well start afresh and build them up logically.” So that is what the two men did, as Gannon


later recalled, laying out all the different countries’ handbooks on the table at midnight, then working together through the small hours to draft and re-draft the various wordings of field rules with multiple examples and umpires’ regulations – often until 4.30am. Studying how the game was played


elsewhere, Mountbatten was particularly struck by evidence from America and other countries that “most accidents to ponies, lameness etc, occur in the last half minute of play when they are getting tired.” So he proposed reducing the length of British chukkas from eight minutes to the American period of seven and a half. “I think very few players would notice 30 seconds being knocked off a chukka,” he wrote to Gannon in 1938, “and in any case, it is common practice in three-quarters of the polo- playing community of the world.” Mountbatten’s recommendation was


Lord Mounbatten with some of his family at Classiebawn, County Sligo, Ireland


1947, and first Governor-General of independent India from 1947-1948. From 1954 to 1959, Mountbatten


was First Sea Lord, the position held by his father 40 years earlier. He went on to become Chief of the Defence Staff, holding that post until 1965, the longest-serving professional head of the British Armed Forces to date. On 27 August 1979, Lord


HRH The Duke of Edinburgh with his uncke, Admiral of the Fleet, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, at the Royal Marines Barracks, Eastney, 1965


Mountbatten, his grandson and two others, were assassinated by a radio-controlled bomb concealed aboard his fishing boat in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, by the Provisional IRA. His funeral was held in Westminster Abbey in the presence of The Queen and other


members of the Royal Family on 5th September 1979. His embalmed body is buried at Romsey Abbey, Hampshire, where his memorial stone reads ‘In Honour Bound’.


The author would like to thank the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton, Special Collections, for permission to consult and to quote from the private papers of Lord Mountbatten. For further reading, Philip Ziegler’s Mountbatten (Collins, 1985) is the finest, and also the official, biography. Andrew Lownie’s forthcoming Dickie and Edwina (Bonnier, 2019) will trace the story of the couple’s marriage through their letters and papers.


GUARDS POLO CLUB OFFICIAL YEARBOOK 2019


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© Camera Press


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