Louis Mountbatten

Killed on 27 August 1979 by a Provisional IRA bomb aboard his fishing boat at Mullaghmore, County Sligo; the last viceroy of India died on holiday with family.

Overview

Mountbatten, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the war hero who had supervised the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 and later served as chief of the defence staff and mentor to Prince Charles, was aboard his boat Shadow V when the IRA remote bomb detonated; his teenage grandson Nicholas, the boatboy Paul Maxwell, and his mother in law died with him or of their wounds. The IRA statement called him a symbol of British imperialism, and the same day it killed eighteen soldiers at Warrenpoint. The 2015 visit of Prince Charles to Mullaghmore marked the long aftershadow of the killing. The murder of a ninety-year-old icon of empire by a border fishing dock shocked Britain and Ireland alike.