Lady Pamela Hicks

Family background

Lady Pamela was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1929, the younger sister of Lady Patricia Mountbatten. Through her father, she is a first cousin of the Duke of Edinburgh and a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria. Through her mother, she is the second great-granddaughter of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. During her youth, Lady Pamela lived with her paternal grandmother, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven, during school holidays.

India

In 1947, Lady Pamela accompanied her parents to India remaining with them throughout her father's term as Viceroy of pre-Independence India and then Governor-General of post-Partition India through 1948, living with them in Government House, New Delhi and the summer Viceregal Lodge in Simla.

Bridesmaid and Lady-in-Waiting to The Queen

In November 1947, Lady Pamela acted as a bridesmaid to then-Princess Elizabeth at her 1947 wedding to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (Lady Pamela's first cousin). As lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth she was with her and the Duke of Edinburgh in Kenya when King George VI died on 6 February 1952. In late 1953 and early 1954, she accompanied the Queen as lady-in-waiting on the royal tour to Jamaica, Panama, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Aden, Libya, Malta and Gibraltar.

Marriage and children

Lady Pamela is the widow of interior decorator and designer David Nightingale Hicks (25 March 1929 – 29 March 1998), son of stockbroker Herbert Hicks and Iris Elsie Platten. They were married on 13 January 1960 at Romsey Abbey in Hampshire. The bridesmaids were Princess Anne, Princess Clarissa of Hesse (daughter of her cousin Sophie), Victoria Marten (god-daughter of the bride), and Lady Amanda Knatchbull and the Hon. Joanna Knatchbull (daughters of the bride's sister Patricia). Upon returning from honeymoon in the West Indies and New York she learnt of the death of her mother in February 1960.

Together, the couple had three children:

David Nightingale Hicks died on 29 March 1998, aged 69, from lung cancer.

Later life

Lady Pamela Hicks has been a Director of H Securities Unlimited, a fund management and brokerage firm, since 1991. She is a former director of Cottesmore Farms. In 2002, she sold off her mother's tiara at Sotheby's.

In 2007, Lady Pamela published her memoirs of her days in New Delhi and Simla, when India was partitioned into India and Pakistan and the Union Jack came down. She wrote in India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power that, while her mother, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Prime Minister of India, were deeply in love, "the relationship remained platonic". In 2012, she published the second volume of her memoirs titled Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten, chronicling her childhood, her time in India, and her time as lady-in-waiting to The Queen. In 2016 she was portrayed in the first season of The Crown.

In film

She is portrayed by Lily Travers in the 2017 film Viceroy's House.

Styles from birth

Published works