Lord Louis Mountbatten

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 355, 12 April 1946, Page 5

Lord Louis Mountbatten

TEN, who has a sense of humour, must get a good deal of secret amusement out of the strange things destiny has done to him. First it brought him into the world a prince’s son and the playfellow of a whole school of princes; and that made him to begin with the subject of adulation on the one hand and of suspicion on the other If princes are competent the flatterers call them men of genius and the jealous belittle them; if their talent can’t be hidden it is dangerous; if it can be questioned it is family luck or a build-up. All these things and a great many more have been said about Lord Louis and would have been said whatever career he had followed, But he has played with almost diabolic deliberation into the hands both of the adulators and the denigrators, and tied them all.up in knots of confusion, To bewilder the adulators he became an engineer, an admiral, an air-marshal, and an over-all commander of combined operations (land, sea, and air). To make the denigrators wonder he became both successful and popular-not merely a machine operator or a mathematical organiser but a commander whose men knew him and trusted him and exalted him into the world’s limelight. We remember too in a broadcasting journal that he was one of the earliest students in the Navy of radio developments and made enough progress to be trusted with the preparation of a training manual. He even grew to be about six inches taller than other men. So if he is not a practical joker he sounds like one. If he had to be the son of a prince and the cousin of a king, he would be three or four other things too that most people can never be, and then they would never know. where to begin measuring him and would leave him alone. Now the joke is against the world whether it accepts or rejects him, or, like New Zealand, just looks at him with wide-eyed admiration. LOUIS MOUNTBAT-