John Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne

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John Ulick Knatchbull, 7th Baron Brabourne,

• Norton Louis Philip Knatchbull, Lord Romsey – later the 8th Baron Brabourne (born 8 October 1947), married Penelope Eastwood and has issue. 3rd Earl Mountbatten of Burma
  from 13 June 2017.
• Michael-John Ulick Knatchbull (born 24 May 1950)
• Anthony Knatchbull (born/died 6 April 1952)
• Lady Joanna Edwina Doreen Knatchbull (born 5 March 1955), married Baron Hubert Pernot du Breuil and later Azriel Zuckerman, and had issue by both.
• Lady Amanda Patricia Victoria Knatchbull – later Lady Amanda Ellingworth (born 26 June 1957), married Charles Ellingworth and had three sons.
• Philip Wyndham Ashley Knatchbull (born 2 December 1961)
• Nicholas Timothy Charles Knatchbull (18 November 1964 – 27 August 1979), killed at the age of 14 by an IRA bomb.
• Timothy Knatchbull (born 18 November 1964), twin with his brother Nicholas.

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).^[1]

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.^[2] In 1979, Brabourne was invested as a Fellow of the British Film Institute. In 1993, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

He was the subject of

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.^[1] Patricia Brabourne died in June 2017.

References and notes

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Lord Brabourne
• John Brabourne at
  IMDb
• Tribute & Memorial web-site to Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, mountbattenofburma.com. Accessed 8 December 2022.
• Interview with John Brabourne, HistoryProject.org.uk. Accessed 8 December 2022.