This Ex-Royal Moved To Canada For A Quieter Life. Sound Familiar?
Iris loved the pool. This was a fact. She would go every day if she could, in her one-piece swimsuit and terry cloth swimming robe.
She would ring our buzzer and say, “Can Kristine come down to swim?”
I don’t know what was stranger: that she wanted to go to an outdoor pool in the company of a little Black child in Toronto (it was the early 1970s, just post the Civil Rights movement), or that Iris was, in fact, Lady Iris Mountbatten, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and second cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.
The name Mountbatten will be familiar to Royal Family watchers. The birth of Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, son of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, made headlines last year. Archie’s parents, who have since dropped their royal titles, recently announced they are making a move to Canada.
The name Mountbatten is steeped in tragedy. As noted in her New York Times obituary (she died in Toronto on Sept. 2, 1982), Lady Iris Victoria Beatrice Grace Mountbatten was first cousin of Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was killed by Irish Republican Army terrorists in 1979 — hence the name Louis for the son of Prince William and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.
But one could not say that tragedy marked the life of Lady Iris. No, she had been a train bearer at George VI’s coronation, and was known for being a beautiful debutante and leggy fashion plate, with photographs of her seen regularly in the papers.
It was not always that way for Lady Iris; she often was described as a rebel or a “black sheep” in the papers. She renounced any claim to the throne in 1941 upon marrying Captain (later Major) Hamilton Joseph Keyes O’Malley of the Irish Guards, a Roman Catholic. That marriage would end in divorce in 1946, just as her two subsequent marriages, first to American jazz guitarist Michael Neely Bryan, and lastly to Toronto actor-announcer William Alexander Kemp. She left England for the U.S. of A in 1947.
By the time I was born in 1970, five years after...
