MICKEY BOARDMAN speaks to INDIA HICKS about Lady Pamela: My Mother’s Extraordinary Years as Daughter to the Viceroy of India, Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen, and Wife of David Hicks – Hicks’ new book about her always-fascinating mother.
India Hicks’ new book about her mother, Lady Pamela Mountbatten, is an uncommon glimpse into the rarefied world of England’s Royal Family. At 95, Lady Pamela Mountbatten has lived a life filled with more adventure, pageantry, glamour, and tragedy than an epic novel or sweeping Hollywood adventure. The daughter of Lord Mountbatten and his heiress wife, Edwina, she has been surrounded by many of the 20th century’s most fascinating people. As a teen she joined her parents in India, where her father was the last Viceroy, and became close to Gandhi and Nehru. Lady Mountbatten returned to London to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of the future Queen Elizabeth II to her cousin Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. She went on to be lady-in- waiting to then-Princess Elizabeth and was with her on a royal tour in Kenya when news arrived of the death of King George VI, making his daughter the new queen. Lady Mountbatten married David Hicks, a legendary interior designer, and they had three children. Recently, their daughter India released an illustrated biography of her mother entitled Lady Pamela: My Mother’s Extraordinary Years as Daughter to the Viceroy of India, Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen, and Wife of David Hicks. India and her mother are a charming and engaging duo, with the latter clearly amused and delighted as she asks her mother questions about her fascinating life.
Avenue caught up with Hicks when she was in NYC for the launch of the book. As always, she had a packed schedule of activities around the publication; her various fashion and lifestyle endeavors; and her humanitarian work with Global Empowerment Mission, which has brought Hicks around the world, often with one or two of her children in tow.
You have so many incredible women family members in your history. My favorite picture in the book is the one of your mother with her grandmother, Victoria Milford Haven. I just think it’s the most stunning image because she was born in the 1860s and your mother is alive now in 2024, so there’s really so much history in those two people.
That grandmother was the sort of anchor to my mother’s life. She was extremely bright, very brilliant, and an encyclopedia of knowledge. I think when my mother went through so many changes of different places of living and different people looking after her and different ways of seeing the world, her grandmother was steadfast in that.
Her grandmother lived through so much— losing her family in the Russian Revolution and going from women in corsets and horse carriages to the coronation in the ’50s. Talk about a time to live.
Extraordinary, isn’t it? And my mother remembers, of course, her grandmother always wearing long black skirts, as was the fashion. In the bottom, in the hem, it’s where she kept her cigarettes. She was a chain-smoker.
So funny!
You had this wonderful princess who’s always got a cigarette in her hand. And when she tried to cut down on smoking, she would simply snap the cigarette in half and then smoke one half and then smoke the other half. She thought that was cutting down.
I loved the way you looked at the Queen’s funeral. I mean pushing your mother’s wheelchair while wearing those stiletto boots.
The funny part of it was, of course, we hadn’t anticipated that most of London had been shut off by this stage. We’d driven up from the countryside. And we realized we weren’t going to get any closer and I said, “Mum…” We had a driver with us, and I said, “We’re going to abandon the car and we’re going to have to run.” And I ran in those damn Christian Louboutin boots across London to get us onto that bus to get to the Abbey.
What did you think of the funeral?
I thought they did an amazing job… No one does pageantry or that kind of thing like the English. It was literally perfection. It was very moving, I have to say, for me, being with my mother at Windsor. Because Windsor felt much more intimate. And when that coffin came by, my mother went down to this deep curtsy. And I know that those 93-year-old knees were… It was an effort. And she just stayed down. And I thought to myself, “That’s a chapter closing.”
Below are images from Lady Pamela: My Mother’s Extraordinary Years as Daughter to the Viceroy of India, Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen, and Wife of David Hicks
