Lord Mountbatten abuse allegations

[beatrice14]

uk.news.yahoo.com/abused-lord-mountbatten-claims-former-184401740.html

Andrew Lownie's joint bio 'The Mountbattens' quotes multiple accounts of Mountbatten abusing children and teenagers. One source is one of the Queen Mother's ladies-in-waiting, Lady Decies, who told the FBI that Mountbatten was thought of as a 'person of very low morals' with 'a perversion for young boys'. If Mr Smythe wins the case, would it damage the monarchy? Charles would have been too young to know about it while Mountbatten was alive, but it does put him and the others in an uncomfortable light now, especially since Prince William named Louis after Mountbatten.

This has echoes of the excuses found for Andrew's behaviour .

I'll leave it at that .

I’ve never excused Andrew’s behaviour, Novella.

Again, Mountbatten isn't on trial here. Mr Smyth is suing the Department of Health, the secretary of state, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Belfast Health and Social Care Trust and the Business Services Organisation (BSO).

@Serenster

Thank you for posting the link. I have read some bits of the report and there were definitely a lot of criticisms at the time. The report included the testimony of 6 victims, which is a very small number.

This file in particular is really astounding. A complete rabbit hole!

www.hiainquiry.org/sites/hiainquiry/files/media-files/Colin%20Wallace%20%20Material_0.pdf

One of the victims did testify about seeing important people like Ian Paisley and Lord Fitt visit the school even though he didn't think they were part of the abuse. I still think this is interesting because I suspect high-ranking politicians visiting a place like that would have been a red flag to the British secret service bearing in mind it was the 70s and the height of the Troubles. It seems unlikely that they wouldn't have looked into it and asked some questions. And, I'm sure if they did, they would have heard the rumours about Kincora Boys' Home. And if they knew, why didn't they do anything about it? Colin Wallace says that they did know about McGrath and they did know about the abuse, but says it was covered up by the MoD, not just at a local level as the report states. Anyway, the Colin Wallace file is a conspiracy theorist's dream, so I will read through it slowly when I have time.

For what it's worth, I never believed that the British government killed Diana. It would have been too messy to do it in such a public way, in front of the paparazi in a foreign country. She was known to have mental health problems. They would have done a Marilyn Monroe, too many painkillers, on British soil. Much easier to cover up. Or maybe pushed her down the stairs.

Well, interestingly Epstein was also rumoured to have been encouraging the rich and powerful to have sex with with teenage girls and then using that as leverage in the same way as McGrath was rumoured to have set up the rich and powerful with teenage boys and used that as leverage against them. So, there are parallels...

If you read the interview Mountbatten's driver, Norman Nield, gave to a newspaper, he said that Mountbatten liked boys aged 8-12. The boys at Kincora were generally older than that, but Nield worked for him in the 40s.

I will be very interested to read/hear Mr. Smyth's testimony when it's released.

BlackberryCat
Again, Mountbatten isn't on trial here.

You're quite right, of course, I was going by Novella4 who seemed to be predicting disaster for the Royal Family.

Sorry, I gotcha!

I suspect the RF will just distance themselves from the whole thing, say they had no idea and do as many deals as they can behind the scenes to get the whole thing squashed. Mountbatten died several years before William was even born.

@BadgerB
Do you seriously think this string of pedophiles ( Saville , Peter Ball, Mountbatten ) at the heart of the monarchy is anything but bad news??

No doubt tue monarchy will have known about it for years and I'm sure they will have a strategy worked out . Not that they need much of strategy - some royalists kick their boots regardless of what they cover up

Lol -lick their boots
Most admirers of the royals don't kick back at anything the royals do

The chair of the Northern Ireland historic abuse inquiry, the late Sir Anthony Hart stated that if the RUC had carried out an adequate investigation into allegations of sexual abuse at the Kincora home,"....those sexually abused after 1976 would have been spared their experience.."

I would like to see an independent inquiry into the death of Noah Donohue instead of the redacting of police files.

Most admirers of the royals don't kick back at anything the royals do

Not much point. We are just about too get an unelected, installed PM. The governance systems are all cut from the same cloth and 'they' have got us by the short and curlies. If we abolish one unelected lot, we get another. If we abolish them, we get the other lot back. You are wasting your energy, Novella.

@MaulPerton
That's a very depressing view .
And not accurate actually .

Let's see how things shake out once we are rid of them .
Human nature doesn't change . But that's no argument for letting rot at the top remain and spread

And I know we've rehearsed these arguments many times @MaulPerton but again it is not legitimate to draw a comparison between politicans and the monarchy .
Politicans are voted out

@Novella4

There's always a top and it's always populated by the same humans, as you point out, who are themselves subservient to the wealthy class (the bankers), the military complex (the reason why we go to war when there's no need - they make money out of it) and other wealthy individuals who can push us around (e.g., the billionaires). It hasn't changed, well, ever. Who do you think Rishi is if not an ex- Goldman's installation? If they try something different, they are removed. The RF are a part of this. They all support each other while we provide their wealth. They are chums with each other!

Novella4
@BadgerB
Do you seriously think this string of pedophiles ( Saville , Peter Ball, Mountbatten ) at the heart of the monarchy is anything but bad news??

Apart from Mountbatten I wouldn't have said they were "at the heart of the monarchy." Saville, it seems, fooled everybody. Ball was a bishop, and Charles was too trusting. I get the impression that the most hoped-for outcome for you would be damage to the Royal family? And before you accuse me - I've never licked a boot, even metaphorically...

Regarding Mountbatten too - he was born more than 120 years ago. You’d have to be in your sixties now to even have personal recollections of him being alive (if you are not a follower of the Royal Family’s history, I mean). If he is revealed now to be a paedophile, I don’t imagine that will be that damaging - it’s too far past for most people.

Just a generation before Earl Mountbatten was the Duke of Clarence, the heir to the throne as the oldest son of Edward VII. Engaged to marry Mary of Teck, who became Queen Mary He has been openly speculated to have been Jack the Ripper. No fall out whatsoever there, despite him being at the heart of the Royal Family.

@Serenster Not yet in my sixties, but I remember vividly when he was killed. It was such a shock to everyone at the time.

Oh yes, Riverlee - I imagine many people will remember that a member of the Royal family (and several other innocent victims) were killed by an IRA bomb. I don’t imagine as a child that you’d have had any awareness of him before his death though, would you?

(Or maybe you did, I’m not sure how famous he was by the 1970s! I am assuming for the majority of members of the public now though he’d just be “that guy that Charles Dance/Greg Wise played in The Crown”).

Private Eye has had all the allegations about Lord Louis Mountbatten for many years, it has very good sources and although it has been wrong in the past, it has also been very much correct about several highly influential figures who sued it, and sadly won, only for the ghastly truth to come out after their death. For example, see Robert Maxwell.
On Mountbatten they had evidence from young naval ratings who served with him (all years ago now, of course.)
And more recently the Royal Family actually changed their surname to Mountbatten-Windsor from just Windsor...
(Even though the Mountbattens had earlier changed their name from the too-Germanic-sounding Battenberg....)

@Serenster He was quite well known back in the 70s. He wasn’t an unknown figure. Not central royalty, but definitely up there.

This is an amazing time to be alive when these things are openly spoken about. The Mountbatten allegations are long known. I remember watching the episode of the Crown that featured his murder and it was fascinating how carefully it was constructed - absolutely nothing that could be libellous but a very subtle subtext if you knew what to look for.

On what 'young boys' would have meant in 1944, when the FBI filed Lady Decies' info, Andrew Lownie interprets it as referring to 'paedophilic tendencies'. I know this is unscientific, but I asked my grandmother (born in 1932) what she would interpret 'young boy' as referring to and she said 'someone about ten' ( I then told her about why I wanted to know and about the allegations - she was unaware and horrified. My mother had been aware of them before Mr Smythe's case was brought.) I'll post the extracts from Lownie's book that point to possible paedophilia.

I'm old, I remember Mountbatten very well

Charles adored him.

More info - The Private Eye journalist Francis Wheen claimed he had a letter, lost in a fire, by a man who claimed Lord M had tried to seduce him when he was a 17-year-old naval rating.
Sean and Amal, who spoke to Lownie (perhaps Sean is Arthur Smythe – they both say they only realised who it was when his death was on TV) were both 16 when he abused them – they say they know other boys from Kincora were brought to him.

Norman Nield, M’s driver from 1942-3 told the tabloid mag Truth in 1987 that he was bribed to drive 8-12-year-olds, as has been posted above, to be abused by M, after he (M) got them drunk first. Lownie says there was no reason for him to make this up, especially in so much detail.
The Irish magazine Now wrote a 1980 article titled ‘M was part of a gay ring which was linked with Kincora’. It said ‘M was a great one for boys in the first year of public school, like at Portora Royal, which was thirteen or fourteen.’

In 1990, Now published another article saying M was ‘particularly attracted to boys in their early teens’.
To give the full Anthony Daly quote- M’s friend, Tom Driberg said he ‘had something of a fetish for uniforms- handsome young men in military uniforms (with high boots) and beautiful boys in school uniform.’ Daly says he also heard that ‘M had a sexual preference for’
well-bred young men ‘or public school boys’. He says Lord Noel Annan, a client, indicated to him that there was ‘an Anglo-Irish vice ring, with the landed gentry on both sides of the Irish border abusing boys and young men’ in venues near to M’s castle Classiebawn.

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/mountbatten-biographer-appeals-to-garda-chief-harris-for-his-help-in-uncovering-secret-kincora-papers-38493136.html

Lownie also writes that M's dd Patricia replaced Edwina in his affections and that their relationship with intense - he was upset when she married.

I am not in my sixties and was aware of him when a child. Principally because of the IRA bomb, there was a lot of coverage at the time.