# John Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne

John Ulick Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne, CBE (9 November 1924 – 23 September 2005), professionally known as John Brabourne, was a British peer, television producer and Oscar-nominated film producer. Married to the elder daughter of 1st Earl Mountbatten, Brabourne was a survivor of the bombing which killed his father-in-law, mother and son.

## Biography

Brabourne was born in 1924, the second son of Michael Knatchbull, 5th Baron Brabourne, and his wife, Lady Doreen Browne. He was educated at Eton College and Brasenose College, Oxford. He was barely 14 when his father died in February 1939 and his elder brother, Norton, inherited the Barony.

### Marriage

At the end of the war, Brabourne returned to England and settled in the family seat, Mersham in Kent. On 26 October 1946, at Romsey Abbey in Hampshire, at the age of 21, he married Patricia Mountbatten, elder daughter of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Viscount Mountbatten, later 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Brabourne's best man at the wedding was Squadron Leader Charles Harris-St. John.
Lady Brabourne was to inherit her father's peerages in due course. This would make Lord and Lady Brabourne among the few married couples to each hold peerages in their own right. Also, Lady Brabourne was related to the British royal family, and her aunt Louise Mountbatten was at that time the Crown Princess (later Queen) of Sweden. In February 1947, only months after the wedding, Brabourne's father-in-law was appointed Viceroy of India. The newly-wed couple spent several months in India, residing with her parents in the viceregal palace. In November the same year, Lady Brabourne's first cousin Philip, Duke of Edinburgh wed Princess Elizabeth, future Queen of the United Kingdom.
Lord and Lady Brabourne had eight children:
* Norton Louis Philip Knatchbull, 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma (born 8 October 1947), married Penelope Meredith Mary Eastwood (born 16 April 1953) on 20 October 1979 and have three children.
* The Hon. Michael-John Ulick Knatchbull (born 24 May 1950), producer and editor, married Melissa Clare Owen (born 12 November 1960), daughter of judge Sir John Arthur Dalziel Owen, on 1 June 1985 and had one daughter; divorced in 1997; married Susan Penelope "Penny" Jane Henderson née Coates (born 23 October 1959), daughter of Stephen Cedric Coates, a civil engineer and businessman, on 6 March 1999 and had one daughter; divorced on 13 February 2006.
* The Hon. Anthony Knatchbull (born/died 6 April 1952)
* Lady Joanna Edwina Doreen Knatchbull (born 5 March 1955), married French Baron Hubert Pernot du Breuil (2 February 1956 – 6 September 2004) on 3 November 1984 and had one daughter; divorced in 1995; married Azriel Zuckerman (born 18 January 1943 in Bucharest, Romania, and educated at the University of Oxford) on 19 November 1995 and had one son.
* Lady Amanda Patricia Victoria Knatchbull (born 26 June 1957), married Charles Vincent Ellingworth (born 7 February 1957) on 31 October 1987 and had three sons.
* The Hon. Philip Wyndham Ashley Knatchbull (born 2 December 1961), married Atalanta Vereker née Cowan (born 20 June 1962), daughter of John Cowan, on 16 March 1991 and had two daughters, including Daisy Knatchbull; married Wendy Amanda Willis née Leach (born 20 July 1966), daughter of Robin H. Leach, of Ugley Park, Ugley, Essex, on 29 June 2002 and had two sons.
* The Hon. Nicholas Timothy Charles Knatchbull (18 November 1964 – 27 August 1979), killed by an IRA bomb.
* The Hon. Timothy Nicholas Sean Knatchbull (born 18 November 1964), married Isabella Julia Norman (born 9 January 1971), a great-great-granddaughter of the 4th Earl of Bradford, on 11 July 1998 and had five children.

### Career and service

In the late 1940s, shortly after leaving the army, Brabourne began working as an assistant production manager for certain television productions, mostly based on war-related themes. He graduated to the role of production manager by the early 1950s, and finally became a producer in his own right in 1958, with Harry Black a romantic story set in India, with war as the distant context. This was followed by Sink the Bismarck! (1960). War, Empire and India were recurrent themes in his work, and A Passage to India (1984) is among his films. His other motion pictures include Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Death on the Nile (1978), and Little Dorrit (1988).
In 1970, he founded Mersham Productions, a production house named after his family seat in Kent, which produced many of his works thereafter. He served as a director of Thames Television (later chairman) and Euston Films from 1978 to 1995, and a director of Thorn EMI from 1981 to 1986.
John Brabourne received two Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, as producer of Romeo and Juliet (1968) and A Passage to India. In 1985, Brabourne was invested as a Fellow of the British Film Institute, an organisation he also served as a Governor. In 1993, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1990 when he was surprised by Michael Aspel at the Old Brewery venue in London.
Despite an active career, Brabourne was also a country gentleman, and took his local responsibilities seriously. He served as a governor of various schools, including Norton Knatchbull School (founded by an ancestor c. 1630 AD) from 1947 to 2000; Wye College in Kent from 1955 to 2000, and Gordonstoun School from 1964 to 1994. He also served as Pro-Chancellor of the University of Kent from 1993 to 1999.

### The IRA bombing

On 27 August 1979, while the family was on holiday in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, Lord Brabourne's father-in-law, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, took a number of family members out lobstering on his motorboat, Shadow V, in Donegal Bay. Having planned to murder Mountbatten, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) placed a bomb inside the boat on the night of the 26th. Mountbatten and several members of the party were killed the next morning when the bomb was triggered by an IRA observer onshore who was armed with a radio detonator. The dead included Brabourne's 83-year-old mother, the Dowager Baroness Brabourne; one of his twin 14-year-old sons, Nicholas Knatchbull; and a local boy, 15-year-old Paul Maxwell from County Fermanagh who had been hired for the summer as Mountbatten's boat boy. Brabourne, his wife Patricia, and their other twin son Timothy were severely injured, but survived the attack.
Lord Brabourne died in 2005 at his home in Kent at the age of 80. His wife Patricia, Countess Mountbatten of Burma died in June 2017.

## References and notes

* ↑ Willis, Daniel A., The Descendants of King George I of Great Britain, Clearfield Company, 2002, p. 719. ISBN 978-0806351728
* ↑ Forbes, Sacha (25 September 2024). "Actually made in Chelsea: meet reality TV's first real aristocrat Freddy Knatchbull". Tatler. Retrieved 21 October 2024.
* ↑ "It's heir kissing". Sunday Mail. Glasgow. 12 July 1998. Retrieved 15 June 2013.
* 1 2 Death on the Nile producer dies, BBC News, 23 September 2005.
* ↑ Search of Academy Awards Database Archived 8 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 23 March 2011.
* ↑ "BFI Fellows". British Film Institute. Retrieved 11 August 2024.
* ↑ "New governor for BFI". Screen International (481): 15. 26 January 1985.