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
