Like ants we were, or worker bees, and just as susceptible to the whims of wind and weather as we shook out the hay on warm summer days, or feverishly made ‘lappings’ if rain was on the way. Most of the time it was. Above us, Classiebawn, that great impressive hulk of Mountcharles sandstone built in the 1860's by twice Prime Minister of England, Lord Palmerston, looked impassively down. Vying for attention with Benbulben and Maeve’s Knocknarea, those majestic natural landmarks, it failed — but only just.

VILLAGE LIFE

Classiebawn’s owners then, the Ashleys, were absentee. The Bracken family were gamekeeper/managers on the estate: bachelor Watty, Jules and his wife, and their daughter, Yvonne. Wearing tweed knickerbockers, jackets and hats, their manner of dress alone pointed them out as different to everyone else in the area. Their relationship with the villagers in Mullaghmore was a Jekyll and Hyde one. On pitch-black winter nights they patrolled the Classiebawn estates with shotguns and flashlights, protecting Lord Ashley’s rabbit warrens. The local poachers with carbide lamps and hounds played cat and mouse with them. Sometimes the poachers won and carried off a haul of rabbits; sometimes the Brackens succeeded and the miscreants were forced to plead their case before a hard-faced D.J. in Grange District Court.

Classiebawn gatehouse 2006. Mountbatten crests on pillars.

During the Civil War, soldiers of the new Freestate were stationed there. Many years later, the war a fading memory, Jules Bracken often stopped at our house. Leaning across the stone ditch my father and he talked for hours. About the concerns of small farmers I suppose: cattle prices, weather, will the turf be saved at all this year? Don’t mention the poachers — or the war!

ORIGINS OF OWNERSHIP

The fateful Monday morning of August 27th 1979 came in bright and clear. ‘Hope springs forever’, and it looked like there might at last be some good weather ahead. Mountbatten and his family were among the many holidaymakers who took advantage of the good day, prepared the boat, left Mullaghmore harbour, and eagerly put to sea. Everyone on board was in a good humour as Paul Maxwell steered the Shadow V around Mullaghmore Head to the fishing ground.

Local man Martin Dowdican, taking advantage of the sunshine, worked his hay in the field up above. It might be saved after all if this weather would only hold for a day or two. Watching while he worked on the heights overlooking the bay he noticed the green boat move smoothly towards the lobster pot markers outside of Oilean Ruadh. Green was Edwina's favourite colour...

Part Two

The Explosion Heard Around the World

Suddenly there was a massive bang. A column of water, fragments of boat and shattered bodies blasted into the air. People looked up in surprise as windows shook when the shock waves hit miles away in Cliffoney and Bunduff. They wondered what could have made such a great noise. Like many others I thought the sound came from Finner Army Camp across the bay. We often heard shooting and explosions from that direction.

Mullaghmore Harbour and village

Martin Dowdican was frozen on the spot. It was too much to take in. Those in the vicinity looked towards the sound in time to see the splintered remains of Shadow V fall back into the sea in a tumultuous fury of froth and water. Paul Maxwell’s father, John, hearing what he recognised as an explosion went immediately to the pier. Boats rushed from the harbour to the site of the explosion to see how they could help.

Four died on that day: Mountbatten, his grandson Nicholas, Lady Brabourne and Paul Maxwell. Lady Patricia, her husband and Timothy were badly injured, but survived. Fortunately for them, the day was good and boats in the vicinity sped immediately to the rescue. If the incident had happened at any time in the bad weather of the preceding days there would have been no other boats at sea, no survivors.

Debris of Shadow V

Fragmented, shattered wood, pieces no bigger than matchsticks and barely recognisable as part of a boat, were picked up by fishermen for days after the explosion. Gardai collected them and pieced them together in an effort to discover exactly what had happened: where exactly in the boat was the bomb hidden; how was it detonated; what kind of explosives. On lobster fishing trips I found many such pieces and handed them over. Tides had carried them all over the bay. A helicopter hovered over the site for weeks. Divers went down to scour the seabed for clues.

On the same day as the explosion at Mullaghmore the British army suffered the biggest number of casualties in a single incident in the North of Ireland. Eighteen British soldiers were killed in an explosion in Warrenpoint, Co. Down. The I.R.A. claimed responsibility for both incidents.

If the ‘shot heard around the world’ was fired at Concord, U.S.A. in 1775 then the explosion heard around the world was triggered at Mullaghmore in 1979. Reporters from the international print and TV media poured into the village. They filled its hotels and guesthouses — on anniversaries, they still do. Things would never be the same here. Mullaghmore had entered the history books; forever linked with a chain of mayhem and carnage in the age-old struggle: Benburb, Kinsale, Drogheda, Killala, Omagh, Collooney, Falls Road, Shankill, Loughgall, Enniskillen, Greysteel, Mullaghmore: a dreary litany. Will it ever end? Will the peace process hold?

On the day of the killing, August 29th, 1979, Hugh Tunney the present owner of Classiebawn, claims that young Knatchbull asked his mother, Lady Pamela Mountbatten: 'Why did they do this to Grandpapa?' Her enigmatic reply was: 'Oh, they have their reasons son, they have their reasons.'

‘I have a place in Eire, Classiebawn Castle in County Sligo,’ Mountbatten told a gathering of the Empire Club of Canada in 1967, ‘and I and my family could not be treated with greater friendship by the Irish. My son-in-law's grandmother was the Marchionness of Sligo who died not long ago at the age of 98. Shortly before the second election for which Mr. De Valera stood, Lady Sligo asked her head gardener: "Do you think Mr. De Valera will be re-elected?" He replied: "Of course he will, your Ladyship, after all it was the poor who got him elected last time, and there are many more poor now.’

It seemed wrong the earth did not cry out...

Hugh Tunney, recent owner now deceased, atop Classiebawn Castle

The bomb is believed to have been triggered by a remote control device from the cliffs overlooking the bay. Thomas McMahon of Monaghan and Francie McGirl of Leitrim were tried for the murder and convicted in a non-jury court. Mc Mahon has since been released. Mc Girl died in a farming accident. Mullaghmore today is a prosperous holiday village comprised mostly of holiday homes for the wealthy. Their yachts throng the harbour, built by Lord Palmerston in 1820, and spill out into the sea beyond. Holidaymakers crowd the village in the summer months. Building sites sell for astronomical figures.

Standing once on Omaha Beach in Normandy, where the D-day landings took place, I wondered that things could be so normal in a place where death rained from sea and sky; where thousands died horribly: mutilated bodies on blood soaked, gut-strewn strand. Wavelets gently lapped the sandy shore at my feet. A placid sea reflected blue skies and stretched away endlessly to the horizon. Somehow it seemed wrong the earth did not cry out, did not scream in anguish and mourn forever in such a place.

In Mullaghmore today the waters ripple peacefully around Oilean Ruadh. The mists of time have closed in and left no trace of the bloody event of twenty-five years ago. Perhaps somewhere in our subconscious a dark shadow clings — but Sliabh League and the Donegal shore still delight our eyes as we gaze out over the assassination site from Mullaghmore’s 'Circular Road'.

Classiebawn has a new owner now. It still stands proudly atop the Fairy Rock and yet vies for magnificence with proud Benbulben and Maeve’s Knocknarea. It still fails — but only just.

See also Newsround

For a review of Timothy Knatchbull's acount of the assassination see below

'Oilean Ruadh' today

=======================================

Further reading:

Ziegler, Phillip: Mountbatten: the official Biography, (Collins, 1985)

The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten (Hutchinson, 1968)

Deacon, Richard: The Greatest Treason (Random Century Ltd.)

Winters, Gordon: Secrets of the Royals

June 4th 2020 In a book published recently 'The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves' the author Andrew Lownie claims Mountbatten was a paedophile who trafficked boys to Classiebawn: https://villagemagazine.ie/a-kincora-boy-abused-by-mountbatten-committed-suicide-a-few-months-late/?fbclid=IwAR3NO18Qj_L7XgcnOHeYp9BqKpbBIaAO0yiVEraNK3_67FbJucg2zf72Sik

"...The Gardai had a security at Mountbatten’s estate and must have noted the registration plates of visitors. This means that the Gardai should have logs for August 1977 which noted the arrival of the car belonging to Joe Mains, the Warden of the notorious Kincora Boys’ Home because he trafficked at least two boys to Classiebawn that month. If the logs still exist, will Garda Commissioner Drew Harris (ex-RUC and ex-PSNI link man to MI5) see to it that they are released and prove once and for all that an Anglo-Irish Vice Ring ring existed and it involved Joe Mains?
Lownie’s research unearthed a number of FBI files which reveal that Lord Mountbatten “was a homosexual with a lust for young boys”. The FBI dossier was compiled by American agents during WWII and the Suez Crisis. The Americans began compiling the Mountbatten file in February 1944, shortly after Mountbatten became Supreme Allied Commander of Southeast Asia. They kept adding to it over the next three decades...."

Knatchbull book 'From a Clear Blue Sky': a Review

Timothy Knatchbull, survivor of the Mountbatten assassination at Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo, has recorded and published for the 30th anniversary a personal account of the incident in a book titled From a Clear Blue Sky. The book is difficult to review as one feels that, given his dramatic experience, he should be allowed without question this journey of spiritual healing. It is essentially a cathartic exercise in coming to terms with the occurrence. 
Nevertheless The Times online review of the book says that: ‘…For all his qualities, you would hesitate to call Timothy Knatchbull, Mountbatten’s grandson, “old school”. In From a Clear Blue Sky, his plangent account of the innocence he lost as a 14-year-old in August 1979, when the IRA detonated a bomb on his family’s boat in Ireland, he wears his heart on his sleeve. This approach would not have done for his grandfather. Maxwell had once asked Mountbatten about his experiences in the second world war, particularly when his ship, HMS Kelly, was sunk. The boy asked the old man whether he was ever frightened during battle.
“Yes,” came the reply. “But you bloody well don’t show it!”…’

Comfort Zone
In the course of this book Knatchbull doesn’t leave his comfort zone. Apart from those involved in the rescue, his conversations are exclusively with castle retainers and admirers. His observations show an abysmal ignorance of the Irish countryside, its people and its history. He concedes as much in one passage where he writes ‘…in our granite castle behind an estate wall and crested gates we were divided physically and socially from the community’. 
Although he admits this he hasn’t learned anything from it as his bias shows clearly throughout the book. For instance some of the people he writes about are identified as ‘Republican supporters’ but nowhere does he identify any of his loyalist informants as ‘loyalist supporters’.
His book is riddled with false assumptions, and conspiracy theories. For instance on page 274 he mentions a ‘service for peace’ where his aunt said that it was very brave for people to attend as ‘the IRA could easily identify everyone taking part’. Republican supporters and activists did in fact participate in that ceremony in sympathy with young Maxwell and the Mountbatten family. One of the rescuers on the day of the explosion, and mentioned by Knatchbull, was ‘Whitey’ Gilbride, a member of the inshore rescue team and lifetime IRA supporter and activist. Knatchbull is again in error when he states that the ‘attacks were tremendously well received in Republican circles’. Many Republicans felt the killing was a tactical mistake and, for numerous reasons, did a lot of harm to their cause.

Fact or Fantasy
The author takes every outlandish story, too numerous to mention here, for fact without checking or corroborating his facts. One such claim is by an old lady in her dotage, Lady Aideen Gore-Booth of Lissadell House, that shots were fired around her place on the night of the assassination. Had he checked with the people who live in the area he would have been told the claim was a figment of an old lady’s imagination.
Pathological liars, Walter Mitty types: Knatchbull has visited them all, taken down their stories and presented them as fact. For example, one of many claims, by a woman who lived in the village for a few years, which is given several pages, asserts that she ‘was told by the local IRA’ in 1981 to close her business every time a hungerstriker died and on another occasion had ‘Scotch pigs go home’ painted on her house. Neither claim is true. It is well known locally that she daubed the slogan herself just to be in the middle of a sensation! She was that kind of person. Other ‘revelations’ in the book, such as her having Makem and Clancy booked for a function are equally wishful thinking and fantasy.
Another incident, not mentioed in the book, is a rather funny story of how this woman found herself in the middle of a major incident at a British army checkpoint on the Irish border in Belleek, Co. Fermanagh. It was Christmas and she had brought a box of biscuits to the soldiers as a Christmas present. The soldiers were astonished as no Irish person had ever done this before. Fearing it was a ruse and that the box contained a bomb she was immediately surrounded. Training their guns on her they ordered her to leave the box on the ground at once and step back. After a controlled explosion it was discovered the box did really contain biscuits, which were now ‘beyond use’, and she was released from custody.

'Paper won't refuse ink'
But back to the book. In short this publication is living proof of the old adage that ‘paper won’t refuse ink’. It is shot through with inaccuracies, opinion, misrepresentation, half fact and half fiction. Outside of his own personal experiences on the day, the content of this book is fanciful. Nevertheless, as stated at the beginning of this article we are inclined to be generous and indulge him, given his traumatic experience, in purging his life-changing near death encounter. 

Regardless of its failings, given that the Mountbatten assassination is so well known worldwide this book will sell extremely well. The downside is that readers will be misinformed about many aspects surrounding the assassination. Prior to any reprint the author would be well advised, in the interests of acuracy and his own credibility, to widen his circle of informants. The result should be a more credible account.
The events of that day in August 1979 have, for better or worse, connected him forever, albeit for the wrong reasons, to Mullaghmore, a small and remote village on the western fringe of the Atlantic. The residents of Mullaghmore are misfortunate also in having events thrust upon them which they did not invite, and which the media continue to trawl up anew.

Postscript

Of several letters received from Canadian readers concerning the above article the following is representative:

"I want to thank you for producing the story on Lord Louis Mountbatten. I remember that day very well and a few of the fellows up here in Canada took pause to remember the person who was responsible for the death and capture of 3,900 Canadians soldiers, in one day, who were sent to be slaughtered at Dieppe by one of most inept military leaders who ever existed - Lord Louis Mountbatten.

The slaughter of Canadian troops by English military commanders was one of the the prime reasons why Canada set up an independent army in WW2. The experience of WW1 taught Canadians the lesson that the English military brass had little or no appreciation of the value of human life.

The Dieppe Raid started with a memo from the Allies invasion planning group to the operations staff headed by Lord Mountbatten: What developed was a plan that violated the military principles of Unity of Command, Simplicity and Concentration. A fiasco was in the works and Canadian forces would bear the brunt of the failure. In an effort to test amphibious invasion techniques and the land and air response of the defenders, a complicated five-part land, sea and air operational plan developed that left the disjointed attacking force outgunned in every sector over an eleven-mile front. These forces included 5,000 Canadian infantrymen and tankers from the 2nd Division, 1,100 British commandos and a smattering of US Rangers and Free French forces.

On the morning of the assault, August 19, 1942, the element of surprise was lost by the chance meeting of the invasion ships and a coastal convoy. On the flanks some of the commando efforts were effective, but on the highlands west of Dieppe proper, the South Saskatchewan Regiment got bogged down and at Puys to the east, the Royal Regiment of Canada was destroyed taking 94.5% casualties.

The main attack on the beach front before Dieppe began at 5:20 and was met with crushing machine gun fire. The battle focused on the shore side casino which was eventually captured after room-to-room fighting. German defensive fire continued to increase in intensity throughout the morning. A tank assault by 27 new Churchill tanks failed to break into town. An evacuation was ordered to commence at 11am, but it turned into a horror. At 12:20 the attempts to save the survivors was abandoned. The failure was total. Over 3,600 raiders were dead or captured. The huge majority of these were Canadian soldiers.

The memory of the carnage at Dieppe under the incompetent direction of Lord Louis Mountbatten will never be forgotten in Canada."

Do you agree or disagree with the writer? Your opinion here

Dieppe Beach Aug 19th 1942

 

==============================================================================