Source: MEGA
Royal families around the globe are certainly no strangers to sex scandals, such as those involving the U.K.’s Prince Andrew and his alleged links to the now-dead sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. However, even those allegations might pale in comparison to one other figure who sat at the heart of Britain’s first family for decades — Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Mountbatten is a towering figure in the recent history of the Royal Family and the British Isles. The uncle to the late Prince Phillip and second cousin to Queen Elizabeth, Mountbatten, served as Supreme Allied Commander in East Asia, Chief of the Defence Staff and First Sea Lord. Still lauded by the U.K. press as a national hero, in part given his assassination by the IRA in 1979, he was also a well-documented and accused pedophile.
In 2019, an FBI dossier on Mountbatten revealed that the United States had deep reservations and distaste for the royal. The file states both he and his wife Edwina were “persons of extremely low morals” and that Mountbatten was a pedophile with “a perversion for young boys.” The fallout was quick, and The London Times attempted to pass off Mountbatten’s pedophilia as merely “Lust for Young Men.”
Source: MEGA
This claim not only conflated his proclivities for children with homosexuality, but it continued the media’s age-old complicity in prominent cases of child abuse. Describing Mountbatten as a “sexually voracious man whose bisexuality became a theme of U.S. intelligence files,” the newspaper ignored the dossier’s explicit naming of his preference as “boys.”
The FBI files were released under a Freedom of Information Act request and compiled in 1944 after Mountbatten was named supreme allied commander of southeast Asia. It featured comments from Baroness Decies, Elizabeth de la Poer Beresford.
Baroness Decies stated that Mountbatten was “known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys” and was “an unfit man to direct any sort of military operations because of this condition. She stated further that his wife, Lady Mountbatten, was considered equally erratic.” EE Conroy, head of the New York FBI field office, added in the file she “appears to have no special motive in making the above statements.”
It wasn’t long after their marriage that an unhappy Edwina was engaging in affairs, with an early-1930s divorce petition for Marjorie Hall Simpson mentioning Edwina by name as engaging in liaisons with her husband, Henry Anthony Simpson. The scandal pushed the Mountbattens into having an open marriage, and more affairs would follow, perhaps most notably with legendary Black American singer and Marxist Paul Robeson.
AN OPEN SECRET
The Baroness’ comments show the behavior of the Mountbattens was an open secret within elite British circles for some considerable time and not limited to the actions of Edwina. However, the FBI had little interest in Mountbatten once his loyalty to the West was assured. Investigators once feared some level of Marxist sympathies with Mountbatten or within his close circle, perhaps not surprising given Edwina’s indiscretions with Robeson.
Mountbatten’s preference for boys, as opposed to men, was confirmed by his driver during the war, Norman Nield. Nield admitted he transported young boys aged between 8 and 12 to his commander while speaking with “New Zealand Truth” in 1987. He alleged Mountbatten used “brandy and lemonade” to subdue the children before committing sex acts, admitting that he was paid £5 a time to keep quiet — worth more than £200 in today’s currency.
Details of the shocking dossier were revealed with the 2019 publication of “The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves“ by the historian Andrew Lownie. As part of the book, Lownie interviewed Anthony Daly, a male sex worker for London’s rich and famous during the 1970s.
