by Siân Evans
Invitations to stay at well-connected country houses were also very welcome in the early 1930s. Cliveden had a reputation for comfort and stimulating company, and could accommodate forty guests, who arrived on Friday evenings. Weekend parties attracted friends, family members, visiting Americans, personalities and celebrities, rather than the overtly political and ‘High Society’ cast who frequented the Astors’ London house. Nancy liked literary people and actors, but musicians largely left her cold. She had no interest in classical music and preferred popular songs of the American South, which gave her the opportunity to play the mouth organ as accompaniment.
Ascot week was intensely social at Cliveden, as the house was close to the racecourse. Although Nancy enjoyed riding herself, she was too impatient to enjoy a day at the races, even though Waldorf owned a high-class stud and bred racehorses, so she would often wave off her guests as they left every day for the course, sporting buttonholes in the Astor colours, and occupy herself more profitably at home till they returned around 6 p.m. The dressing gong was rung at 7.45, and everyone would change into evening clothes with the help of their valets or maids. Ascot week would end with the Royal Ball at Windsor Castle, an opportunity for Nancy to wear the famous Astor tiara.
Not everyone was assured of a warm reception from the doyenne of Cliveden. The journalist Beverley Nichols was invited to lunch after mentioning Lady Astor in one of his regular columns for the Sunday Chronicle.
Cliveden struck me as a house of the dead. The immediate effect was of a luxury hotel. It reeked of money but it had no feeling of welcome. And though every room brimmed with flowers they were arranged with less taste than the bouquets in the foyer of the Savoy. Nor was there any warmth in the greetings of our hostess. There were about twenty of us and as she strode into the room she waved her hand towards the drinks tray. It was loaded with every conceivable variety of alcoholic refreshment, from vodka to Pimm’s Number One. ‘If you want to poison yourself,’ she announced in strident tones, ‘you know where it is.’9
Some were also critical of the Astors’ luxurious lifestyle at a time of economic depression and hardship, but Rose Harrison, Nancy’s maid, defended them:
Entertaining for the Astors wasn’t just something that they did, it was indeed an industry. Now there will be people who will criticise them and talk about poor people and the unemployed. But this was the accepted way of life at that time, people spent where it gave them the most pleasure. They also provided employment and kept money circulating. Workmen and tradesmen alike were grateful to them.10
There were tensions within the Astor family too. Nancy’s eldest son, Bobbie Shaw, was a drifter and although brought up with the younger Astors, he felt excluded. He was sent to school at Shrewsbury, while his half-brothers went to Eton. In September 1921 he joined the Household Cavalry; he was an excellent rider and race jockey, but he had three bad falls and sustained head injuries that left him both volatile in temperament and with a bad reaction to alcohol; like his father, he was fond of the bottle. He inherited his mother’s tendency to make caustic remarks – on one occasion he declaimed to an embarrassed dining table, ‘Why did Mama marry Uncle Waldorf? Because she wanted a millionaire who said nothing.’ Nancy snapped back sarcastically, ‘There he is; there’s my son. Wouldn’t anybody be proud to have him?’
Bobbie was very good-looking and entertaining company, so he was attractive to women. Alexandra Curzon, known as Baba, daughter of the former Viceroy of India, was very keen on him but he explained that he was ‘not the marrying kind’. In truth, he was bisexual and found fleeting physical encounters with like-minded men preferable to relationships with women. Perhaps he was also anxious to avoid the type of marriage exemplified by his domineering mother and acquiescent stepfather.
It was not illegal to be homosexual between the wars, but sexual activity between two men was both illegal and vilified by many. George V had muttered darkly about ‘men like that’ shooting themselves. Punitive laws did not prevent people from seeking out illicit sex, as the more salacious newspapers of the time were keen to report, but blackmailers could ruin their professional and personal lives. (Even the Duke of Kent made the fundamental error in 1932 of sending compromising letters to a male lover in Paris, and Buckingham Palace officials had the delicate task of buying them back, at great expense.) So when Bobbie was caught with a soldier ‘in conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman’ in the summer of 1929, he was forced to choose between resigning his commission and facing a court martial. The regiment disguised the real nature of the offence, claiming that Bobbie had been drunk on duty, a plausible story, given his history. However, this ‘fig leaf’ of alcoholism was embarrassing to his mother, the fervent teetotaller.
Two years later, in 1931, Bobbie was accused of propositioning a guardsman. The police warned him they were planning to charge him, giving him ample opportunity to follow the time-honoured route across the Channel to seek sanctuary in France. If he had escaped, the charges would have been quietly dropped and he could have returned to Britain a few years later with an unblemished record, a better appreciation of the wisdom of discretion and, presumably, competent colloquial French. However, like Oscar Wilde, Bobbie decided to stay and face the ordeal of a public trial. He was sent to prison on 17 July 1931 for four months, as incarceration in a male-only environment was deemed the appropriate deterrent for active homosexuals. A single terse line in the London Gazette announced that His Majesty had ‘no further occasion for his services’. The Astor family controlled the Observer and The Times, and Lord Beaverbrook agreed to Nancy’s request to omit any reference to Bobbie’s conviction in his many papers.
In some respects it was fortunate that Bobbie’s prosecution was just before the Astors’ trip to the Soviet Union. While he was awaiting trial, Nancy gritted her teeth, visited her constituency, opened a fête and hosted a visit from the Prince of Wales. The Prince wrote her a kind letter saying ‘how absolutely marvellously I think you behaved and bore up […] It does seem a cruel shame that a minute’s madness should be victimised when we know many who should have “done time” in prison years ago.’ Despite her distress at Bobbie’s problems, on her return from Russia she stood by him, visiting him in prison, and took him to Rest Harrow for a holiday after his release.
Meanwhile, Nancy’s professional interests were changing. She had championed the interests of her Plymouth constituency, defended the rights of women and children and campaigned against the evils of alcohol. But in the early 1930s she took up international concerns. Through her friend George Bernard Shaw she had the rare opportunity to visit the Soviet Union, and although she had little sympathy with the Communist regime, she was determined to go.
Shaw and his wife, Charlotte, had been invited to visit the Soviet Union by the Russian Ambassador in London, Grigori Sokolnikoff. Charlotte was unwell and couldn’t face the lengthy journey to Moscow by rail, so Shaw asked if he could bring a party of his friends instead. The group consisted of Lord and Lady Astor, their son David, Philip Kerr (now Lord Lothian), Charles Tennant, a writer and Russian expert called Maurice Hindus, and Nancy’s American friend Gertrude Ely, a railroad heiress. With the exception of Shaw and Hindus, the entire party were Christian Scientists. Perhaps surprisingly, consent was forthcoming; but it was typical of Shaw to invite wealthy and titled friends to accompany him to Moscow, and he introduced them with relish as ‘very rich capitalists’ when he gave a speech to the Soviet high command at an official banquet.
They departed for Moscow on 18 July 1931, the day after Bobbie was convicted and jailed. GBS was convinced that, on balance, the Soviet Union was a successful social experiment, despite the Stalinist purges that were terrorising the populace, but Nancy remained sceptical. It was rumoured she had packed enough tinned food to feed the party for two weeks, in anticipation of the austere conditions ahead. The highlight of their visit was a two-hour meeting with Stalin himself. Nancy Astor tackled the ‘Man of Steel’, asking him: ‘When will you sto
p killing people?’ He answered, ‘We are living in a state of war. When peace comes we shall stop it.’ In return, Stalin asked why the English-speaking peoples governed so much of the world. Nancy told him it was because of the translation of the Bible into English, which had both enriched the demotic language and promoted independence of thought. Canny Stalin also asked about the future career of Winston Churchill, once again in the political wilderness; he had evidently spotted the potential in Nancy’s rival.
Nancy returned to Britain to discover she was suspected of pro-Soviet tendencies, because Shaw had made speeches in support of the Communist regime. The writer declared that he had seen no signs of food shortages (despite a desperate famine in the Ukraine, caused by Stalin’s measures) and applauded the Soviet system for having freed the workers from economic slavery, privation and unemployment. It was ironic that before long Lady Astor was also suspected of being a supporter of Nazi Germany, diametrically opposed to the Soviet Union.
The early 1930s also brought personal and family problems for Emerald Cunard. Her daughter Nancy, now living in France, was becoming increasingly estranged. Emerald disapproved of much of Nancy’s behaviour, including arranging a private screening in London of a banned French Surrealist film, L’Age d’Or, on the grounds that it was blasphemous and obscene. In 1928 Nancy took a trip to Venice with her cousin Victor Cunard. There she met a handsome black American jazz pianist, Henry Crowder, and was instantly attracted to him. Before long they were living together in liberal Paris. Henry helped her operate the printing press she had set up, and played piano in bars. There is no doubt that the attraction was genuine, though it is difficult to know whether Nancy was actually in love with Henry as an individual or whether taking a black lover was a political statement for her; she was often recklessly and overtly unfaithful to him, even seducing one of his fellow band members. Tellingly, Nancy often exhorted Henry to be more ‘African’. The mild-mannered musician would protest, ‘But I ain’t African. I’m American.’
Typically Nancy Cunard challenged a number of contemporary taboos, including bringing Henry to London as her lover, to test the reactions of English society. In the late 1920s most British people’s knowledge of African Americans was superficial; they were seen primarily as entertainers in various fields, and as the creators and performers of exciting new music. Evelyn Waugh noted the increasing fascination with black performers, and even Lady Astor, who had grown up in Virginia, engaged a group to sing ‘Negro folk songs and spirituals with banjo accompaniment’ to follow the dancing at one of her balls at Cliveden. But dancing with one’s peers to the music of a band of ‘exotic’ black Americans at a London night club was very different from forging an intimate relationship that transgressed the ‘colour bar’.
The couple visited London in the summer of 1929; Henry was staying in a hotel in Bloomsbury, while Nancy saw her mother most days. In the evenings the couple would attend parties together. Lady Cunard gave no sign she knew of the relationship, but secretly she engaged private detectives to follow Nancy and Henry. They returned to London in the summer of 1930 and were seen together at a cocktail party. Nancy’s last appearance at her mother’s house was on the evening of 21 July 1930, for dinner. The mood was sombre as a plane crash that day had killed the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and five friends. Many of the guests also knew of Nancy’s relationship with Henry, and felt awkward keeping that information from Emerald.
But Emerald was forced to react in December 1930, when Margot Asquith burst into one of her grand lunch parties and boomed, ‘Hello Maud, what is it now? – drink, drugs or niggers?’ The other guests were aghast, and Emerald was mortified; she first denied that her daughter ‘even knew a negro’, then threatened to have the police arrest and deport Henry. Sir Thomas Beecham despatched a telegram to Nancy in Paris, telling her not to come to London till she received an urgent letter he had sent her explaining the situation. Nancy ignored his warning and set out for London with Henry; they stayed at the Eiffel Tower restaurant, but were harassed by phone calls and police visits. On their return to Paris, Nancy received a letter from her bank stating that her mother’s allowance to her would be reduced by a quarter, due to Emerald’s straitened financial circumstances. Her substantial American investments had been badly affected by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and her large fortune had been whittled away by her twin passions for Beecham and entertaining. However, Nancy saw this as an attempt to punish her for her transgressive love affair with Henry, and mother and daughter were never to meet again.
As revenge, Nancy publicised her relationship with Henry to her mother’s friends. She printed a pamphlet, entitled Black Man and White Ladyship. Nancy described her ‘negro friend – a very close friend’ who had often accompanied her to London. She referred to her mother as ‘Her Ladyship’ throughout, and called her ‘the most conscientious of ostriches’, a snob, a hypocrite and a racist. ‘Her Ladyship may be as hard and buoyant as a dreadnought but one little touch of ridicule goes straight to her heart. And she is so alone – between these little lunches of sixteen, a few callers at tea and two or three invitations per night.’ The pamphlet also detailed the cruelties and indignities to which black people had been subjected by Western societies. It was December 1931, and Nancy posted copies to about a hundred of her mother’s friends and acquaintances, including the Prince of Wales, as a shocker of a Christmas card.
Even Nancy’s loyal friends felt that such a vicious personal assault on her mother detracted from her worthy advocacy of better treatment for black people. Henry told her it was ‘idiotic’; disagreeing in private with a parent was a different matter from defaming them publicly. Nancy’s recent behaviour had been incomprehensible to Emerald, and though she said little on the subject, she thought that Nancy was mentally unbalanced.
British society took a mixed view of Nancy’s campaign in support of the Scottsboro Boys. Nine black youths had been arrested in Alabama and charged with raping two white girls; the eldest eight had been sentenced to death, and their fate became an international cause célèbre. Nancy organised a fundraising dance at a London hotel, and the Marquess of Donegall ran an inaccurate story in his regular gossip column in the Sunday Dispatch on 9 July 1933, suggesting that the police had intervened in the multi-racial bathing party that followed the dance, and suggesting that Nancy return to her ‘spiritual home in Harlem’. The paper was forced into an apology the following week because the police had not been called. Nancy also successfully sued a number of British newspapers for libelling her in their coverage of her 1931 trip to London with Henry.
She used the money to commission and produce a massive illustrated book entitled Negro, tackling the injustices suffered by black people and celebrating black achievements. It was published in 1934, and was two inches thick and 800 pages long. Once again Nancy railed against her mother, ‘an American-born frantically prejudiced society woman’, who was willing to be photographed with ‘an Indian rajah’, because he was rich and therefore powerful. Negro was passionate; it raised important issues about harrowing inequalities, past and contemporary. If it was occasionally incoherent, there was no doubting Nancy’s sincerity, and it garnered favourable reviews in the New Statesman and the Daily Worker. However, it was expensive, costing 2 guineas, and did not sell; when London was bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, hundreds of remaining copies were destroyed in a warehouse fire.
7
Parties and Politics: 1933–1936
Even the grandest household had its problems. The heir to the throne, known to his family as David, was a concern to his parents and the courtiers who sought to check his behaviour. While the public followed the career of the Prince of Wales with benign interest, those who knew him better tended to be less enthusiastic. The golden-haired Prince enjoyed all the benefits of a playboy existence, from night clubs and cocktail parties to bagpipe-playing and glamorous travel. Like a more worldly Bertie Wooster in P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, he even took up the ukulele.
He
was bored rigid by the role that he was to inherit. King George V was dutiful, critical and uxorious; the Prince was averse to discipline. He was modern; he not only followed fashion but led it with sartorial innovations that enraged his father. For formal occasions he preferred soft collars and dinner jackets; informally he wore loud checks, plus-fours and assertive Argyll socks. On Saturday evenings he would parade around his home, Fort Belvedere, in a blue and white tartan kilt playing the bagpipes. He could be petulant and unreliable, complaining in letters to his mistresses about the business of ‘kinging’, as he called it. The Prince’s Assistant Private Secretary, Alan Lascelles, criticised him to the Prime Minister in 1927. He said that the heir to the throne was unfit for the role because of his selfish preoccupations, his drinking and his womanising, and opined that the best possible outcome for the country might be if the Prince were to break his neck in a riding accident. ‘God forgive me, I have often thought the same,’ replied Baldwin.
Although the Prince claimed to have at heart the interests of the working classes, he preferred to spend his time with the wealthy, especially amusing Americans such as Henry ‘Chips’ Channon and Emerald Cunard. ‘Chips’ was from Chicago; he moved to London, became an MP and married a brewing heiress, Honor Guinness. He kept a diary that recorded his ambitious socialising; he cultivated both the Prince of Wales and his glamorous younger brother, the Duke of Kent, and would have his butler add Benzedrine to cocktails served at his beautiful house. ‘Chips’ personified the new transatlantic social elite who entertained the Prince. As Stanley Walker wrote:
