University of Southampton: The University of Southampton is publishing online previously unavailable papers from the Broadlands Archives collection.

The first material to be unveiled is the early diaries of Earl Mountbatten of Burma, for the period 1918-1934, and diaries of Countess Mountbatten of Burma, 1923-1934, providing a fascinating insight into their public and private lives.

Further material from the Broadlands Archives collection will be made available later this year.

Louis Mountbatten was born in 1900, the fourth and youngest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse, one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. Edwina was the elder of the two daughters of Wilfrid Ashley, Baron Mount Temple of Lee and his first wife, Amalia (Maudie), only child of Sir Ernest Cassel, financier and philanthropist. Edward VII, Edwina’s grandfather’s friend and client, was her godfather.

The Broadlands connection comes through Edwina who inherited the Hampshire estate that had once belonged to Lord Palmerston, together with Classiebawn Castle in County Sligo, from her father in 1939.

The Broadlands Archives collection is one of the University Library’s foremost collections of manuscripts. Centred on the Temple (Palmerston), Ashley, Cassel and Mountbatten families, this substantial collection dates from the sixteenth century to the present. The material provides a preeminent resource for British politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.