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his stallions, and encouraged him to invest in commercial television shares) was bewildered when, after the ladies had withdrawn, he was saddled with Spencer wearing pyjamas under borrowed evening clothes.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
