“Uncle Dickie”: A Personification – Lord Mountbatten’s sexual abuse at Kincora Boys’ Home
By Geoff Bell
Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten was born in Windsor on 25 June 1900. He was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. He was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. He was an uncle of her husband Prince Philip. He was a great uncle to the present King Charles III. Charles has been reported by many as being very close to “Uncle Dickie” in his teenage years and early twenties.
Mountbatten joined the Royal Navy in 1916. In 1934 he received his first command of a destroyer. He was a British military leader during the Second World War. After the war he was appointed viceroy of India and then became governor-general of India until June 1948.
In 1953, Mountbatten returned to the Royal Navy, becoming commander of a new NATO Mediterranean command. In 1954 he became first sea lord, a position held by his father more than 40 years before. Finally, in 1959, he became chief of the defence staff; in 1965 he retired from the navy.
Oh yes. One more thing. He was a paedophile who raped boys.
This last bit of information is claimed and detailed in a new book, Kincora: Britain’s Shame by former BBC journalist Chris Moore, recently published in Ireland by Merrion Press.
The revelation concerning Mountbatten is one of many in the book. Its centrepiece is the story of a Belfast boys’ home, Kincora, which opened in 1958 and became a centre for child rape by the three men who ran it for two decades. One of the three was William McGrath who was also a leading organiser and theorist for unionism/loyalism and a member of the Orange Order. As Moore shows, McGrath – “the beast of Kincora” as he became known – was also a paid agent of MI5.
Kincora had ugly rumours attached to it for most of the 1960s and 1970s, and many people who lived in Belfast then heard them, including myself. The problem was sorting out fact from fiction, innuendo from reality. This is what Chris Moore has now done.
He shows that Kincora staff subjected the boys and young men who were placed there to all manner of sexual, physical and mental horrors; and that it was also somewhere used by many others, especially from British and north of Ireland elites, who visited the home to rape the boys.
The involvement of MI5 was not an incidental sub plot. Rather, it was fundamental to the continued existence of the home and what went on there. Anytime anyone started asking too many questions about Kincora then MI5 and others, operating with the full knowledge of the British government, were warned off. Meanwhile, MI5 worked in partnership with McGrath to direct unionist/loyalist paramilitaries and, in return, covered up the child rape.
Lord Mountbatten was one of those who visited Kincora, but he also had Kincora boys trafficked to his estate on the other side of the Irish border. There were at least five Kincora victims of “Dickie” as he tended to introduce himself. Chris Moore tracked down and interviewed three of these. One, Arthur Smith, was eleven when he was raped. He and the others identified Mountbatten when his face was all over the newspapers after he was blown up by the IRA, on a boat in a lake near his southern Irish estate.
It is this connection, the author concludes, that explains why the government, mainly through MI5, covered up Kincora as best they could, although the M15/unionist collaboration was also a factor. There was a trial and guilty verdict of McGrath, the other two staff members and three others. There were other enquiries. But they were limited, usually deliberately so by the British government. Margaret Thatcher was one of those who, Moore shows, played her part in this.
The nature of Chris Moore’s enquiries means the book often uses unattributed sources and non-referenced documentation. But the essential veracity of the author’s account shines through. And there is one unchallengeable fact that backs up his account: the government has declared its files on Kincora so top secret that they will not be fully released until 2085. If they have nothing to hide, then what are they hiding?
Of course, this question can be asked about much else concerning the British state in the north of Ireland during the Troubles. In that sense the story of Kincora, Mountbatten, MI5 and its partnership with loyalism doesn’t shock as much as it should: these days such revelations are almost commonplace. Nevertheless, the book is another important educational about the British elite in Ireland: Mountbatten is an apposite personification of that elite in that country.
- ‘Kincora: Britain’s Shame: Mountbatten, MI5, the Belfast Boys’ Home Sex Abuse Scandal and the British Cover-Up‘ by Chris Moore was published in paperback on 15 May.
- Geoff Bell is an executive member of Labour for Irish Unity and the author The Twilight of Unionism – you can order a copy from Verso books here.
- You can follow Labour for Irish Unity on Facebook and Twitter/X.
No comments:
Post a Comment