Читать книгу An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 10

The Astors began at Cliveden with a row. William Waldorf Astor, the New York plutocrat, smarting from the way that he had been traduced by American newspapers during his failed candidatures for the state assembly, settled in England in 1890. Three years later he bought Cliveden, an Italianate pleasure palace perched on a high spacious site above a bend of the Thames, with a magnificent terrace commanding a prospect downstream towards Maidenhead, rather than a short view of the opposite bank.

Immediately he was mired in ill-will. He quarrelled with Cliveden’s previous owner, the Duke of Westminster, over so paltry an object as the visitors’ book. The Duke denounced the Yankee to the Prince of Wales. Astor gave a sturdy defence to the Prince’s Private Secretary, for he was intent on buying his way into the Marlborough House set. In 1895, for example, when he joined the prince’s house party at Sandringham, he made a show of paying £1,000 for a pair of bay carriage horses from the royal stud. In appreciation of Astor’s outlay, the Prince of Wales, with the Duke of Buccleuch in tow, attended a house party at Cliveden.¹

Astor’s prickliness ensured his unpopularity. Staying with Lord Burton at Rangemore in 1897, the Marquess of Lincolnshire noted of his fellow guest: ‘Astor is another instance of the utter inability of American men to get on in England. Here is a man with millions – probably the richest man in the country; and yet he is given to understand that, though he is tolerated on account of his wealth, he is of society and yet not in it.’ Astor had represented Ferdinand de Rothschild when Empress Elizabeth of Austria visited London, but her suite ‘refused to call him “Thou”, though he implored them to do so. Astor assumes a … scornful deference to Ladies to whom he is speaking. He evidently resents the way he is treated; but tries not to show it.’ Two years later, Lincolnshire met Astor at Lord Lonsdale’s racing stud in Rutland. ‘He is a social failure. Pompous & proud, with an aggressive air of mock humility … The boy (who is Captain of the Boats at Eton) is at present voted a Prig.’²

Astor bought a London evening newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, in order to enhance his social influence, and appointed as its editor a Society swell, Harry Cust. Astor’s aunt Caroline, a snob who had imposed the notion of the exclusive ‘Four Hundred’ on New York City, had inaugurated the custom among New York millionaires of publicising their parties and controlling reputations by issuing tit-bits of news about their guests to the social columns. Astor tried to foist this foolery on London. He gave Cust a list of names, headed by the Duke of Westminster, of people who were never to be mentioned in the Pall Mall Gazette, in the mistaken belief that the English nobility cared about being mentioned in newspaper Society paragraphs. At first this was mocked, but in 1900 it brought his social nemesis.

Sir Berkeley Milne, a naval officer in command of the royal yacht (whom the Prince of Wales dubbed Arky-Barky), was taken to a musical evening at Carlton House Terrace by an invited guest who assured him that he would be welcome there. Astor ordered the interloper from his house and inserted a paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette announcing that ‘Sir A. B. Milne RN was not invited to Mr Astor’s concert.’ This upset the haute monde more than the Boxer rebellion in China, as Lincolnshire noted at a house party for the Prince of Wales and his mistress Alice Keppel: ‘HRH quite open-mouthed with fury: and vows he will never speak to him again.’ In retaliation for this royal ostracism, Astor called Mrs Keppel ‘a public strumpet’, and told people that King Edward VII (as the Prince became after his mother’s death in 1901) had been impotent for twenty years. He believed that the government wished to nominate him for a peerage in 1902, but that this was forbidden by the King, ‘who hated me’. Thereafter, he said, he never relented in seeking ‘to attain what Edward’s spite had withheld’.³

Cliveden was never a conventional English country house. It was not the centre of a great estate which gave the owner political influence and social prestige in the county. When in 1890 Lord Cadogan, who owned much of Chelsea but no landed estates, spent £175,000 to buy Culford in Suffolk, he acquired a house with 400 acres of parkland and 11,000 acres, and got his eldest son elected as MP for a nearby constituency two years later; and in 1893 the newly created Lord Iveagh, the brewery millionaire, spent £159,000 to buy the 17,000 acre Elveden estate, which made him a power in the district. Although Astor paid a vast sum for Cliveden, he got only 450 acres, comprising woods and riverside pleasure gardens. Cliveden proved a showhouse rather than a powerhouse.

In 1906 Astor gave Cliveden to his elder son, Waldorf, who that year married an American divorcée, Nancy Shaw. The young man, whom Lincolnshire had dismissed as a prig, left Oxford with a social conscience that was rare in an American millionaire. He deplored his father as a selfish reactionary, and wished to make amends by a life of public service. This paragon entered Parliament as MP for Plymouth in 1910, before becoming effectual proprietor of the Observer, a Sunday newspaper which his father bought in 1911. He was diagnosed with a weak heart, which made him medically unfit for trench warfare, and spent the early war years monitoring wasteful army organisation. This was an indelible stain on his reputation so far as some Tories and combatants were concerned. His hopes of appointment as the country’s first postwar Minister of Health were accordingly frustrated, and his advocacy of public health reforms got him called a ‘doctrinaire Socialist’ by reactionaries. Nevertheless, by his late thirties, Waldorf Astor was entrenched among the nation’s great and good. He was a patient chairman of committees, without a dash of flamboyance, whose attitude to his good causes could be described as reticent enthusiasm (rather as his attitude to his children might be called frigidly tender).⁴

Old man Astor, in the midst of the Kaiser’s war, by judicious distribution of £200,000 to King George V’s favourite war charities and the fighting funds of both the Conservative and Liberal parties, obtained first a barony and then a viscountcy. When he died in 1919, Waldorf Astor went reluctantly to the House of Lords. His wife was elected for the vacant Plymouth constituency, and became the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons.

Nancy Astor, when young, was generous, bold and funny, with quick-witted shrewdness and inexhaustible energy; but after turning fifty her sudden amusing parries turned to rash outbursts, and she became a domineering, obstinate and often hurtful spitfire. Her religion put claws on her. She converted to Christian Science in 1914, coaxed her husband into becoming a disciple of Mrs Baker Eddy, and nagged her children along the same lines. Her first marriage had ended because her husband was a dipsomaniac who became sexually importunate when drunk. She and Waldorf were both prudish teetotallers, and her temperance campaigning became notorious for its scolding tone. Before 1914 she kept two infatuated young men, Billy Grenfell and Eddie Winterton, enthralled as her amis de marie, though she was the sort of flirt who required only to be the centre of admiring attention: Billy and Eddie were never permitted any pounces.⁵

Nancy Astor had six children: Bobbie Shaw by her first marriage, and four sons and a daughter by her second. The eldest child of her second marriage, William Waldorf Astor (known to his friends as Bill and to his parents as Billie), was born in 1907, and became the last Astor to live at Cliveden. From his mother he received the least affection of all her children, although he strove to win her approval and pretended to believe her Christian Science indoctrination long after he had privately rejected it. She belittled, chastised, and rejected him; and resented the fact that her favourite son, Bobbie, would inherit neither the Astor money nor title. Even in old age she spread discord: as a man in his fifties, Bill would still tense when she bustled into a room; people saw him blanch before her jibes began; and his widow believed that the aortic aneurism that killed him at the age of fifty-eight was partly attributable to the anxiety that his mother had generated. Certainly, her angry obsessions wearied her husband: Waldorf described her in 1951, a year before he died, as ranting against ‘Socialism, Roman Catholicism, Psychiatry, the Jews, the Latins and the Observer’.⁶

The Astor children suffered from their family’s reputation for ostentatious wealth. Bill was held by his ankles out of a school window to see if gold would fall from his pockets. He was victimised by his classics tutor at Eton, Charles Rowlatt – ‘rather a nasty bounder at the best of times’, he told his mother, ‘so I hope you’ll … have his blood’. Rowlatt was an austere bachelor who commanded the Eton Officer Training Corps and heaped Bill’s next brother David with work and punishments: ‘What annoys me is the way when he loses his temper with me (a daily affair) he always ends up by saying something about all the family talking much too much,’ David complained; ‘I call it awful cheek but I daren’t tell him so.’ Nancy Astor was indeed of confounding volubility, and during the 1920s still retained her sense of the ridiculous, though this vanished with the complacent egotism and rudeness of her old age. In Rowlatt’s day she amused her children by mimicking the county ladies (and perhaps Eton ushers) deploring ‘those vulgar Americans’ at Cliveden.⁷

As an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, Bill Astor began to blossom, although Cliveden’s proximity to the university made it hard to break his shackles to his parents’ home. His outlook as an undergraduate was glossed by his acceptance of conventional proprieties: ‘I do like a disciplined life, belonging to a properly organised & ordered society either at the bottom, the middle or the top,’ he wrote shortly after the General Strike. Polo, hunting and racing were his chief avocations. He described a flat race in fancy dress at Oxford in 1928. ‘We had an oyster and fish and chips lunch and then fared out. I arrayed myself tastefully in a white turban, in which I placed two poppies; a blue sweater, high neck, a red and blue sash and pyjama trousers of broad pink and white stripes. I had a hireling of Mac’s, called Nippy, who really went very well. There were all sorts of costumes, Proctors, Scouts, clerics, beards, and so on. It was as muddy as a ditch.’⁸

Bill Astor was thoroughly anglicised for a child of American parents, although he was never convincing as a traditional Englishman. ‘There are a lot of Middle West people on board,’ he wrote to his mother from the liner Olympic as it approached New York. ‘The language of course is a difficulty as I understand not everything they say & they hardly understand a thing I say, otherwise we get on splendidly.’ He was trained for the responsibilities of public life, and instilled with an international outlook. When in 1929 he was sent to Hanover to live in a family and learn German, provincialism made him shudder. The audience at the local opera house were, he reported, ‘repulsive: in the intervals they go up to a large hall & walk round & round it, very slowly & solemnly: all in ugly ill-fitting dresses & suits’. He recoiled from ‘the dirt and perversion and vulgarity that abounds in Berlin’, as he reassured his parents. ‘The Germans deliberately go out to bring nasty things into their plays. Not funny, just horrible.’⁹

He was also instilled with his father’s sense of duty. Both men were meliorists who wished to be competent and kind; but whereas the older man, at a pinch, gave precedence to competence, Bill’s preference was for kindness. In 1932 his father secured his appointment as personal secretary to the Earl of Lytton, chairman of the League of Nations’ investigation into Japanese aggression in Manchuria. This visit to China (during which he had an affair with a young Russian woman who was a refugee from the Soviet system) triggered his lifelong compassion for war refugees, displaced persons and civilian casualties. Subsequently he attended the League of Nations’ discussions in Geneva on the Japanese seizure of Manchuria, deputising for Lytton who was ill. He was adopted as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for East Fulham (no doubt helped by the assurance that Astor money would pay his election expenses and subsidise constituency party funds) and in 1935 joined his mother in the Commons. He subsequently took a tall house in Mayfair at 45 Upper Grosvenor Street. Only a year later he became, through family influence, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Sir Samuel Hoare, who was successively First Lord of the Admiralty and Home Secretary. Bill Astor, who was conscientious and keen to please, visited Czechoslovakia in 1938, and returned with undiminished support for Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

The phrase ‘the Cliveden set’ first appeared in a socialist Sunday newspaper of November 1937 in a story about pro-German machinations. The phrase was promoted by the Marxist Claud Cockburn in his newssheet The Week, and popularised by left-wing journalists, who made play with the Astors’ (remote) German ancestry. Cliveden, in this smear campaign, became the headquarters of a conspiracy of manufacturers, bankers, editors, landlords and diplomatic meddlers, all intent on appeasing Hitler. The Astors at Cliveden, who had been shunned by the Prince of Wales’s set at the turn of the century, were to be reviled at the time of the Profumo Affair. But these cycles of denigration were nugatory beside the abuse in the late 1930s, when communists and their sympathisers concocted their shabby half-truths about the Cliveden set. Harold Nicolson’s trenchant assessment of the Cliveden set was fairer than the communist propaganda. ‘The harm which these silly selfish hostesses do is really immense,’ he noted in April 1939 of Nancy Astor and a Mayfair counterpart. ‘They convey to foreign envoys that policy is decided in their own drawing rooms … They wine and dine our younger politicians, and they create an atmosphere of authority and responsibility and grandeur, whereas the whole thing is a mere flatulence of the spirit’.¹⁰

In 1942, while Bill Astor was serving in the Middle East, his father took two decisions which snubbed him. Lord Astor’s friend, Lord Lothian, had instigated in 1938 a change in the law which enabled the National Trust to accept ownership of country houses as well as landscape (he bequeathed his own house, Blickling, to the Trust in 1940), and thus inaugurated a new phase in that charity’s protection of rural England. Two years later Lord Astor gave the house at Cliveden, together with 250 acres of gardens and woods, to the National Trust as a way of mitigating death duties. The same year he dismissed the intransigent, elderly editor of the Observer, installed a temporary replacement, gave forty-nine per cent of the shares to his second son, David, and indicated that David (then aged thirty) would become postwar editor. Bill, brought up as the heir to Cliveden and expecting to inherit the Observer, reeled under this double rebuff.

Bill Astor was thought a superlatively lucky man by those who did not know him well. He lost his Fulham seat in the general election of 1945, failed by a few hundred votes to win High Wycombe in 1950, but was returned to the Commons at the next election in 1951, despite being one of the few Conservative candidates who made clear that (based on his prewar experience as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary) he supported the abolition of capital punishment and opposed birching. His views were influenced by reading Arthur Koestler’s death-cell book, Darkness at Noon. Unlike many in his party, he believed that ‘the de-brutalisation of punishment’ resulted in a falling crime rate. His father’s death in 1952 sent him to the Lords, and put an end to his ambitions for political office. In the Lords he advocated ‘civilised’ values: ‘arguments based on the emotions of revenge, of righteous indignation and of fear’ made bad law, he told peers when speaking against the death penalty in 1956. Homosexuality should not be criminalised, he argued, because ‘those of us who are lucky enough to be normal should have nothing but pity for people in that situation’.¹¹

With women Bill was fidgety and luckless. In the 1930s he was in love with a married American woman five years his senior who had no wish to wed him. While serving in the war-torn Middle East he had a romance that petered out. Returning to England, he married in June 1945 only a month after the end of fighting in Europe – hastily, as many (including his brother David) did at that time. His bride, Sarah Norton, was recovering from the recent death of a much-loved mother and from a broken engagement to Dorothy Macmillan’s nephew, Billy Hartington, who had married someone else and been killed in action in quick succession. (Sarah Norton’s father, Lord Grantley, was a monocled clubman who worked in the film business with Valerie Hobson’s first husband; Sarah Norton’s mother had been Lord Beaverbrook’s favourite mistress.)

The newly married Astors suffered the heartbreak of three miscarriages before the birth in 1951 of their only child, William. Sarah Astor subsequently endured serious post-natal depression (a condition not then recognised or understood by physicians). In the thrall of this, during 1952, she left her husband for an Oxford undergraduate who was seven years her junior. There were long, miserable consultations with lawyers and bystanders. One mutual friend spent eight hours with her, urging reconciliation, and then had another long talk with Bill. ‘He gave it to her straight from the shoulder, giving home truths about the disastrous effect on a child of a broken home, of the cruelty of her action on me, of the deteriorating effect of this on her own character & her letting the side down generally,’ Bill reported that autumn. ‘My intention is to sit & do nothing; do nothing to create ill-will or make it harder for her to return … What hell this all is. But William is wonderful, healthy, happy, gregarious, noisy.’¹² The Astors were divorced in 1953, but remained good friends and ensured that their son had an untroubled childhood.

Soon after his first marriage, wishing to provide his wife with her own country house and to plant himself in the Bicester hunting country, Bill Astor had bought Bletchingdon Park, a Palladian house in Oxfordshire, from a penurious bachelor (Lord Valentia) whose heirs were distant and obscure. Bletchingdon was still Bill’s legal residence at the time of his divorce in 1953, but was sold immediately after the judicial decree was secured, when he returned to Cliveden. It had lain in desuetude for several years, and he hoped to revive the great days when his mother had drawn smart Society, political lions and literary panthers to the house. While serving in the Middle East he had been nostalgic for the Cliveden parties that were held during Ascot Week: ‘tennis and riding in the morning: and all the girls in their best dresses and men in grey top hats fixing on buttonholes and sprays of flowers in the hall at twelve and the cars all lined up and the Royal Procession and Father’s colours on the course and polo in the evening and swimming and all the rhododendrons out and for once my parents forgetting politics and giving themselves over to social joy! I hope so much I won’t find a new order when I get back: I enjoyed the old order so much.’¹³

The 1950s were an envious decade. Envy was most intense among those who had lately risen in the world, as Geoffrey Gorer noted in 1951. ‘Some of the formerly prosperous classes, especially the women, are quite venomous about the advantages the working classes enjoy today, compared with before the war. But they are not as venomous as the working-class and middle-class men who are making good money and getting higher positions. Many of these people are filled with hatred for those they call “the idle rich”.’ Bill Astor encountered such resentment when he was parliamentary candidate at High Wycombe. If his wife attended a meeting in a fur coat, people seethed: ‘Look at her, flaunting her riches!’ If she left it at Bletchingdon, they hissed: ‘She’s dressing down to us! We all know she’s got a mink at home!’¹⁴

Bill Astor’s Cliveden regime did not conciliate haters of the idle rich. His belief (broadcast on BBC Radio in 1956) that the management of French stud farms was superior to their English rivals made him further enemies. Yet ‘Bill was quite snobbish in an English way’, recalled his friend Pamela Cooper. Her son Grey Gowrie thought Bill ‘lacked self-belief’, despite some remarkable qualities. ‘He worried too much about what people thought of him. He was conventional to the degree of not escaping the conventions of upper-class society, but they certainly didn’t fit him like a glove.’ Some of his guests were the smart end of rag, tag and bobtail. A luncheon guest at Cliveden noted: ‘Lord Astor had some anonymous lords and ladies (their personalities and names did not impinge on one).’¹⁵

This same guest, the writer and connoisseur Maurice Collis, in 1955 watched Astor driving in his Bentley ‘accompanied by one of those well-born but colourless chits of girls who are often to be met with at Cliveden’.¹⁶ The girl was twenty-four-year-old Philippa Hunloke, the stage-manager daughter of Dorothy Macmillan’s sister Lady Anne Holland-Martin and Harold Macmillan’s goddaughter. A fortnight later she married Bill. The couple had a discontented honeymoon in the South of France and at the Astor stud in Ireland, from which they returned estranged, but with the bride pregnant. There was an intimidating collection of guests at the new Lady Astor’s first big Cliveden dinner: King Gustav of Sweden, the Dowager Duchess of Rutland, Nancy Astor, the octogenarian pro-consul Lord Hailey, the former head of the Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan, Maurice Collis, an air marshal called Lord Bandon, Isaiah Berlin, and an old courtier called Lady Worsley, all exuding stale, elderly aplomb. Philippa Astor faced her duties as chatelaine of Cliveden with flurried dread.

Moreover, Nancy Astor was captious and undermining to the women in her family circle. She resented her daughters-in-law for supplanting her in her sons’ lives, went careening through the family, and grew more destructive with age. Her four Astor sons married a total of eleven times: there is no doubt that her brutal, intrusive rudeness upset her sons’ domesticity. Bill’s wives, installed in his mother’s place at Cliveden, suffered worst of all. ‘The most detestable woman in England; boring, rude and guilty of interference in British politics which has brought nothing but disaster,’ Isaiah Berlin judged of Nancy in 1954; but said that Bill, who often entertained him at Cliveden, was ‘one of the kindest, most public-spirited, human beings’. By the autumn of 1956, Bill Astor’s second marriage was so stressful, and soaring his blood pressure to dangerous levels, that he left for New York, and asked Philippa Astor to leave Cliveden before his return (their divorce, however, was not finalised until 1960).¹⁷

This marital breakdown coincided with the Suez crisis. Bill and his brothers David and Jakie (a Tory backbencher) put themselves at loggerheads with their adopted class by opposing Eden’s bungling. They showed themselves as Anglo-Americans, supporters of the Atlantic Alliance, who saw the dangers posed to the English-speaking hegemony by Anglo-French collusion in the Israeli attack without consulting the US government. Bill raised the die-hards’ ire by criticising the Suez adventure in the Lords debate on 1 November 1956. The debate had given the impression, he said, ‘that it is Colonel Nasser who has mounted a massive invasion into the territory of Israel and whom we are condemning as the aggressor and the invader, rather than the other way around’. It was unclear, he continued, whether Eden’s government aimed to displace Nasser from power in Egypt or safeguard shipping through the canal – which, despite dire predictions, had never been disrupted since nationalisation.

Astor did not dare to challenge the official lie that was being asserted, but was brave enough to skewer its inefficacy. ‘We may accept – I am sure we all do – what the Government have said, that there is no question of collusion between Israel and ourselves. The trouble is going to be that the Arab states will not believe that.’ The Suez crisis had calamitously diverted attention from Eastern Europe, where the communist hegemony was crumbling in Hungary, and ‘had the extraordinary effect of bringing America and Russia together against Great Britain’. He reproached, too, the United States for appointing an ‘anti-British’ ambassador to Cairo, and American managers of oil companies in the Middle East for their gullibility. His intervention offended many people, who cut him in London. A year later he alluded to the unpopularity of Conservative peers with independent views on controversial subjects such as Suez and the death penalty.¹⁸

On 4 November, David Astor’s Observer ran its famous Suez editorial: ‘We had not realised that our Government was capable of such folly and crookedness … Never since 1783 has Great Britain made herself as universally disliked’, together with articles demonstrating the political and military fallacies underlying Eden’s strategy, and letters from bishops and clerics denouncing the attack on Egypt. Three Observer trustees resigned, readers cancelled subscriptions and manufacturers their advertisements. On 5 November, when the Anglo-French force landed at Port Said, and it was reported in the Commons that Egyptian forces were discussing surrender, there was elated uproar among Tory MPs. Jakie Astor alone remained seated: Lennox-Boyd shouted at him, bullyingly, to stand up. On 8 November, Jakie spoke in the Commons against the Suez expedition – one of only eight Tory MPs to do so. A week later David Astor wrote to Iain Macleod urging him to lead younger Tories in repudiation of Eden’s leadership. Macleod did not reply to the letter, which he took to Downing Street to show the Cabinet Secretary and Eden’s Private Secretary, Freddie Bishop. ‘That Astor is using such tactics makes us feel quite sick,’ Bishop told Eden.¹⁹

Although politicians and foreign potentates came to Cliveden, the atmosphere was lighter than in its prewar heyday. Bill Astor kept an open house. Harold Macmillan later quipped that Cliveden was like a hotel, and a regular visitor recalled other guests sitting around ‘gossiping in the great hall, as if they were staying in a hotel’.²⁰ There were no cabals, schemes to reform human nature, unofficial diplomatic initiatives, or grave pronouncements on duty. Instead, Bill Astor strove valiantly to perpetuate the social sheen and resplendent hospitality of the old order. His princely generosity was such that when guests came to Cliveden, their cars would be driven to the garage block, cleaned, polished and filled with petrol for the return journey to London. Cliveden was so much a millionaire’s model estate that if Astor’s wife was to be driven across country, one of the two chauffeurs would make a trial run to find the time needed to make the journey at a steady rate: there was no question that any Lady Astor could drive herself.

Bill Astor disliked sitting still. He was always on the move, and seemed to feel lonely without a bevy of people around him. At their best, his guests were diverse, eminent and interesting. The signatures in the visitors’ book of Field Marshal Alexander, Alan Lennox-Boyd, John Boyd-Carpenter, Lord Home, Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, C. P. Snow, Freya Stark, Mervyn Stockwood, Bill Deakin, and Peter Fleming indicate the diversity and quality of the talk. Astor liked to introduce people to one another, although at the dinner to which he invited the painter Stanley Spencer and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, the two men eyed one another like dogs, and vied to dominate the conversation. The racing Earl of Derby (who allowed Astor’s mares to be serviced by his stallions, and encouraged him to invest in commercial television shares) was bewildered when, after the ladies had withdrawn, he was saddled with Spencer wearing pyjamas under borrowed evening clothes. Astor’s munificence also drew parasites and opportunists with smooth manners and envious spirits: those who accepted his food and drink, played his games, had their petrol tanks filled by his chauffeurs, dropped his name, but did not respect him. There were risks in his indiscriminate open-handedness.

After the end of his Commons career and failure of his first marriage, Bill Astor took up charitable work. At a time when the British government imposed onerous, effronting limits on the amounts of sterling that could be taken abroad by travellers, he gave $2 million from his New York funds to support British scholars wishing to study in the United States. The intense suffering that he had seen in Manchuria under Japanese occupation in the 1930s, and in the war-torn Middle East during the 1940s, shaped his benefactions. He supported the Save the Children Fund, which had been started in 1919 by two English sisters to provide emergency relief for children suffering from malnutrition or other deprivation in the aftermath of the Great War, and was soon responding to famines, earthquakes and floods. Another pet cause was the Ockenden Venture, started in 1951 by three Englishwomen who gave education and vocational training to Latvian and Polish girls from displaced persons camps, and subsequently provided reception centres and resettlement help for refugees. Of the first six girls who joined the Ockenden Venture, one took honours at Nottingham University, two went to Oxford University, one won a scholarship at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School, and another qualified at a technical school.

Astor detested communism and in 1951 proposed launching a global coalition of Protestant Churches to fight atheism, which he felt was softening Western resistance to Soviet penetration.²¹ He visited Hong Kong to study the plight of fugitives from Mao’s China. It astonished him that English progressives, despite professing their commitment to freedom and humanity, had sided since the 1920s on one issue after another with mass murderers and slave masters as atrocious as any the world had known. Despite all the exposures of communism’s brutal inefficiency, written by its victims and repentant dupes, regardless of the thousands who tried every month to escape across communist frontiers, such progressives insisted that this system of servitude represented progress. These delusions were harder than ever to maintain after the Hungarian uprising of November 1956.

With his usual easy munificence, Astor had given a rent-free lease of Parr’s Cottage on the Cliveden estate to Zara, Countess of Gowrie, the widow of a former Governor-General of Australia. Lady Gowrie’s only son had been killed leading a Commando raid in Tripoli in 1943, and his widow Pamela had subsequently married an army officer named Derek Cooper. In 1956, Astor offered Spring Cottage to the Coopers, but they demurred and the property was taken by Stephen Ward. The Coopers reacted immediately to the agonies of the Hungarian oppressed. They motored to Andau, an Austrian border village, where they helped rescue refugees and shelter them in improvised accommodation. In spare moments they sent descriptive letters to their neighbour Lady Gowrie, which she showed Bill Astor. His niece Jane Willoughby (only daughter of his sister Wissie Ancaster), who had been one of the earliest to start rescue work on the Austro-Hungarian frontier, visited him soliciting a donation. Jane Willoughby’s tales, and the fact that he was facing Christmas alone after his wife’s departure, spurred him to action.

In December 1956, Astor and his ex-Commando chauffeur drove to Austria in a Land Rover. He installed himself in the comforts of the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, but motored each night into Andau. The refugees, he found, drugged their babies with barbiturates to stop them from betraying their presence to borderguards by crying, trudged across frozen riparian plains covered by rifle fire, tanks and land-mines, crouched at night beside a canal bank until Western volunteers found them and paddled them to safety in a rubber dinghy. Bill Astor’s Andau weeks changed the direction of his life: his brother David thought they saved him at the nadir of his confidence, and proved a lifeline, until calamity overwhelmed him with the Profumo Affair.

Subsequently, Astor flew to New York, where he appeared on television talkshows and collected over $100,000 for the refugees. As part of his fund-raising efforts, he compiled a brief Hungarian memoir which he circulated to potential donors:

There were two dramatic moments that stick in my mind. One was on Christmas Eve, a mother and baby arriving quite alone when I was single-handed. The baby doped, with a frost-bitten foot, but it was saved. The other was when a big party of refugees had reached the edge of the canal, and we had got about a dozen of the women and children over. Suddenly a Tommy gun was fired into the air and a security patrol appeared on the other side of the canal, firing shots and Verey flares into the air, and driving the rest of the refugees back. They knelt and wept and prayed, but were driven off at gunpoint when they were only fifty yards from freedom, the security guards firing a few shots at us for good measure. We were left with children separated from their parents, women separated from their husbands, in a state of complete collapse and agony.²²

There were reminders at Andau of the base stupidity of British journalists. One of the frontier volunteers was John Paterson-Morgan, Lord Cadogan’s agent in London and Scotland. ‘It was some time before the national newspapers cottoned on to the fact that we were “news”,’ he recalled. Then, one night, a gang of reporters from Fleet Street ‘barged’ into the emergency surgery where they overwhelmed hard-pressed doctors. Without thought for the refugees and their children, frozen and weary after their ordeal, the reporters chivvied them into standing up and singing the Hungarian national anthem for a crass photo opportunity.²³

Millions of people in the world had fled from war, oppression or danger, including Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis. Fifteen years after the Second World War there were over 100,000 refugees in Europe, some still living in unofficial camps (at places like Laschenskyhof, near Salzburg) including children who had been born there. To alleviate this suffering, a young Conservative called Timothy Raison suggested a worldwide fundraising effort. World Refugee Year ran from June 1959 to May 1960 with Bill Astor as one of its organisers. In an eloquent speech in the House of Lords he attacked the phrase ‘a genuine refugee’, which he likened to the nauseating Victorian phrase ‘the deserving poor’. It was cruel and stupid, he said, to distinguish between political refugees, in fear of their lives or torture, and economic refugees trying to escape privation. Given the levels of Commonwealth immigration, especially from the Caribbean, it was mean-spirited to exclude East European refugees from communist oppression who, he felt, were more easily assimilated: ‘We know perfectly well that with Europeans the Mr Shapiro of one generation becomes the Mr Shepherd of another, and is soon indistinguishable from people in this country.’ The previous year’s government grant to refugees had been £200,000 out of a budget of £5,254 million, including £44 million on roads: ‘If we forwent fifty miles of trunk roads for a year, we could probably solve the European refugee problem.’ For every refugee in a camp there were three or four living in garrets, attics, cellars, shanties, or even old buses: he wanted to provide them with houses, furniture, vocational training, and tools of trade.²⁴

Astor became chairman of the executive committee of the Standing Conference of British Organisations for Aid to Refugees during this busy time. He made countless speeches and signed thousands of letters. Publicity films were made; promotional books and pamphlets issued; a charity film première, fundraising concerts and a Mansion House dinner were held. He liaised with the Royal Household to win support from the the Royal Family. A pledge of £100,000 was extracted from the government. Harold Macmillan, who spoke at the final rally in the Royal Albert Hall, felt that the campaign ‘touched the imagination of the country’.²⁵ In Britain, over £9 million was raised out of a global total exceeding £35 million. There were few precedents to such fundraising fifty years ago.

Astor’s greatest moment of public self-revelation came in a tribute, which was published in The Times, to his friend Prince Aly Khan, who had been killed in a car smash while returning from Longchamps races in 1960. It was a cryptic self-portrait, which showed Astor’s sense of the discrepancies between public perceptions of heavily publicised individuals and their private characters. ‘If only one knew Aly Khan by repute it was easy to preconceive a dislike towards him. When one met him, it was impossible not to be stimulated and attracted by his charm, his perfect manners, his vitality, his gaiety and sense of fun. But if you were fortunate enough to know him really well, and have him as a friend, you acquired a friendship which was incomparable – generous, imaginative, enduring and almost passionately warm.’ Like Astor, Aly Khan had suffered a privileged but lonely childhood. Just as Astor had been relegated in the inheritance of Cliveden and the Observer, Aly Khan had been elided from the succession of the leadership of the Ismaili Muslim community, which his father conferred on Aly Khan’s son, Karim. Astor admired Aly Khan as ‘the most sportsmanlike of losers’, who loyally accepted this adversity. This blow was softened by the Pakistan government naming Aly Khan as its ambassador to the United Nations. This appointment ‘produced the most useful, rewarding and happiest days of his life’, Astor judged, thinking, too, of his own efforts for refugees. ‘Both his staff and the press viewed his arrival at the UN with some doubt. He was a complete success, showing unexpected caution, seriousness and conscientiousness, as well as his usual intelligence and charm.’

Recalling perhaps his loneliness when his marriages failed, Astor affirmed that ‘when a friend was going through a bad patch … Aly was at his best. He would telephone you from the other side of the world; his houses were at your disposal for as long as you wanted, his sympathy, intuition and imaginative kindness were rocks you could rely on. He was curiously defensive towards the world, and intensely sensitive to real or imagined slights, but if he was sure of your friendship he returned it a hundredfold.’ Astor’s last sight of his friend ‘was an untidy gay figure bustling through London Airport, leaving a trail of laughter by a cheery and courteous word to each person he came into contact with, and each of whom he treated as a human being he was glad to see’. This was how Astor, in 1960, hoped to be remembered.²⁶

Bill Astor was one-third playboy, one-third idealist and one-third magnate. Reacting against his finicky upbringing, he was not discriminating in his friendships. He needed to be liked: he was the sort of man who would pay for a friend’s honeymoon. ‘I always think of Bill as more vulnerable and childish than over-sexed, a man of pillow fights and romping, not some kind of sex maniac,’ said Grey Gowrie twenty years after Astor’s death.²⁷ Before the Life Peerages Act of 1958, Astor supported the admission of women to the House of Lords. He was a founder member of the parliamentary committee for British entry into the Common Market, sponsored legislation to introduce lie-detectors into police work, and supported reform of laws covering abortion and divorce. He also had one deadly enemy to whom he had never done a jot of harm. In 1949 his brother David published a profile in the Observer of Lord Beaverbrook, describing him as ‘a golliwog itching with vitality’ and whose editorial policies were ‘political baby-talk’. In 1931, the Astors’ half-brother, Bobbie Shaw, had been sentenced to five months’ imprisonment on a charge of homosexuality. Nancy Astor asked Beaverbrook to use his influence to suppress the story in the Daily Express and other newspapers. ‘I am deeply grateful to you for the trouble you have taken to keep my name out of the papers,’ she later wrote to him. ‘Nothing matters very much about me – but I felt I should like to spare the other children.’ After the Observer profile, Beaverbrook fulminated that the Astors were sanctimonious and ungrateful. His underlings retrieved Bobbie Shaw’s dossier, and primed themselves to serve their paymaster’s spiteful rage. In 1958, for example, John Gordon, the Sunday Express editor, whose virulence about homosexuality was fit for an ayatollah, wrote a vindictive revelation of the Shaw case, which at the last moment was held back. Beaverbrook’s staff continued his relentless vendetta against the Astors, which reached its crescendo with the Profumo Affair.²⁸

At New Year 1958 in St Moritz, Bill Astor met a twenty-seven-year-old ‘model girl’ called Bronwen Pugh. She was the Garboesque muse of the couturier Pierre Balmain, standing nearly six feet tall, with piercing blue-green eyes and an all-encompassing instinctive elegance. Her father was a barrister specialising in Welsh coal-mining cases who eventually became a county court judge. Her unusual aura derived, possibly, from a series of mystical experiences which began at the age of seven, when she believed she heard the voice of God speaking to her about the primary importance of love. Bronwen Pugh trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama before going to teach at a girl’s school. Only later did she plunge into modelling. Some thought her too tall for the London catwalks; Cecil Beaton refused to do a photographic portrait because he claimed that her nose was too ugly; but her purposive self-possession proved startling at fashion shows.

In the spring of 1957, Bronwen Pugh went to Paris to model for Balmain. ‘Bronwen takes Paris by Scorn’, was Picture Post’s headline. ‘Some loathed it. Some were entranced. But everybody remembered that scornful, dirt-beneath-my-feet style of modelling.’ Recalling that Pugh has been ‘a schoolmistress’, Picture Post added, ‘the glare that quelled the Lower Fourth has become the stare that sweeps the salons at Balmain’. Katharine Whitehorn, who went to see the Paris fashions, reported: ‘At Balmain this extraordinary girl somehow acquired a manner of showing dresses which put her instantly on a pedestal. It was half-Bournemouth, half-goddess; scornful, aristocratic, insufferable. It staggered Paris.’²⁹

There was confusion among journalists and the public between ‘model girls’, as Bronwen Pugh and her colleagues were then called, and ‘models’, as young women were euphemistically docketed when they appeared in newspaper reports of divorce or criminal cases. Anne Cumming-Bell led the way for socially ascendant ‘model girls’ by marrying the Duke of Rutland in 1946 (newspapers still calling her ‘a mannequin’ and reporting that she had always insisted on appearing fully-clothed); Norman Hartnell’s ‘model girl’ Jane McNeill married the future Duke of Buccleuch in 1953; Fiona Campbell-Walter married Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1956; Anne Gunning Parker married Sir Anthony Nutting in 1961. Dior’s muse Jean Dawnay married a major in the Welsh Guards, Prince George Galitzine, in 1963. These, however, were the rare, publicised exceptions. Many model girls acquired husbands who earned less than themselves. They were unable to save because of the enormous outlay required in shoes, nylons, hats, bags, gloves, cosmetics and hair-dos.

Fiona Campbell-Walter met Heini Thyssen on a St Moritz train rather as Astor and Bronwen Pugh met in the same ski resort. Thyssen wooed her with a Ford Thunderbird, and married her post-haste. ‘He had the fastest plane, the best motor car, the most precious paintings,’ she is supposed to have said; ‘of course he had to have the most beautiful woman.’ She was the third of Thyssen’s five wives. Talking about her later, with the smugness of a lifelong womaniser, he said: ‘She wasn’t very intelligent but she would talk endlessly in that wonderful dark brown voice of hers. One day, when we were driving, she asked me a question and I didn’t answer. I said: “You’ve got such a sweet charming voice, you can’t expect me to listen to what you’re saying as well. Just talk to me”.’ Thyssen lusted after Campbell-Walter, although he ungallantly said that she looked better dressed than nude. ‘When it comes to women,’ he philosophised, ‘one should not fall madly in love, travel with them, trust or spoil them. One should, however, show jealousy. Women like that.’³⁰

Astor was Thyssen’s antithesis as a suitor. Between his first luncheon with Bronwen Pugh, and their next, months later, she underwent an unheralded mystical experience which filled her with joy. She read The Phenomenon of Man, by the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, discovered St Theresa of Avila, and felt transformed. Astor’s first words on seeing her again were: ‘You’ve changed, what is it?’ Soon he was head over heels. ‘I got a shock,’ he wrote after watching her on a catwalk, ‘as I had always imagined you at work as lovely and gay, and I was knocked off my emotional perch when you looked cold and aloof.’ Unlike Thyssen, he appreciated his fiancée’s talk. ‘The extraordinary thing about you,’ he explained, ‘is that your mind has survived the chicken chatter of the cabine for so long, remaining lively, enquiring, and deep.’³¹

They married at Hampstead register office in October 1960. When news of the impending marriage seeped out the night before, her parents were hounded by journalists. On the wedding day reporters crowded a pub opposite the gates of Cliveden buying rounds in the hope that drinkers would help them to concoct a juicy quote. Dorothy Macmillan, aunt of both Bill’s second wife and his first wife’s ex-fiancé, had the impertinence to show her disapproval of an ex-model viscountess when she met Bronwen Astor.