by Siân Evans
As soon as possible after the city was liberated, Laura Corrigan returned to Paris and her old haunts; in September 1944 Duff Cooper, who had just been appointed British Ambassador to France, spotted her occupying her favourite corner of the restaurant at the Ritz Hotel, exactly as she had in the late 1930s. As before, she divided her time between her two favourite capitals. Noel Coward spotted her in London on New Year’s Eve 1944 at Loelia Westminster’s party: ‘Everyone was there, from Laura Corrigan to Laura Corrigan.’12
Nancy Astor was delighted when the country of her birth came to the aid of her adopted homeland in December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. She had known Franklin D. Roosevelt since 1918, and had successfully lobbied him to send warships to Plymouth to augment the Royal Navy’s campaign before America formally entered the war. Nancy made every effort to ensure the American servicemen arriving in Britain were made welcome.
Her dedication to serving the people of Plymouth was remarkable, but as the war ground on, her abrasive nature affected her personal relationships. Her long-standing lack of reverence for Churchill was well known; on one occasion years before the war Nancy had yelled, ‘If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee!’ Winston replied, ‘And if I were your husband I would drink it.’ More recently she had speculated aloud about what disguise might suit him for a masquerade ball. ‘Why don’t you come sober, Prime Minister?’ Just two weeks after the Churchills visited Plymouth, her critical remarks in Parliament about ‘doddering old politicians in all parties who ought to have been buried long ago’, actually aimed at Herbert Morrison, the Minister for Home Security, were taken to include Churchill.
To compound her offences, in August 1942 Nancy publicly questioned the Soviet Union’s volte-face to support the Allies against Germany, counter to the previous Nazi–Soviet Pact. While most British politicians were welcoming Uncle Joe’s change of heart, Nancy (who, unlike them, had met and locked antlers with Stalin in 1931) stated: ‘I am grateful to the Russians, but they are not fighting for us. They are fighting for themselves […] the Russians were allies of Germany. It is only now that they are facing German invasion that they have come into the fight.’13
Churchill privately agreed with her logic, but being right does not always make one popular. Nancy’s constant, audible commentary on her fellow MPs as they spoke in the House had long irritated many, but now she seriously misjudged the urgent, staccato national mood. In a Parliamentary debate on 18 March 1943 Nancy spoke in favour of women being employed in the Diplomatic Service, but drifted into condemning the historic immorality of France and attempted to blame all the ills of the current world on men, which was not well received by a House of Commons at the height of the struggle for the nation’s survival.
Meanwhile Waldorf’s health was deteriorating, and he spent more time at Cliveden, where he was involved in the hospital and its 250 patients. He was worried about the future of Cliveden. When the Astors’ great friend Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, had died in 1940, he had left Blickling Hall, his seventeenth-century stately home in Norfolk, and its contents to the National Trust under the innovative Country House scheme, which he had devised. In 1942 Waldorf decided on a similar plan to conserve Cliveden, leaving the house, contents, estate and an endowment to the National Trust. The mansion and grounds were to be opened to the public on designated days, an arrangement that would have infuriated his father, ‘Walled-off’ Astor. It was agreed that the Astor family should stay in occupation as long as they wanted to remain.
Their London house, 4 St James’s Square, became progressively more damaged by bombs until it was almost uninhabitable and was requisitioned for use as a services canteen. The four Astor boys served in the armed forces, and Major Jacob Astor was awarded both the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. In 1944 ‘Jakie’ married the daughter of the Argentinian Ambassador. Nancy was horrified that he was marrying a Catholic, and this led to a froideur with her favourite son. When she suggested that her sons should come to Cliveden for a family weekend without their wives, they all refused.
By 1944 Nancy’s family were convinced that her political career had to end. She was now sixty-five years old, and her reputation was still compromised by her association with the appeasement movement. Her behaviour in Parliament, always unorthodox, had recently become quite erratic. In addition, the political mood in the country was changing; the electorate were turning against the patrician classes who had led them before the war, and Socialism was on the rise. Waldorf was convinced that Nancy would not be returned at the next General Election, and therefore she should resign in advance. Bravely, he persuaded her to announce her forthcoming retirement; she agreed, but was outraged. Typically, Nancy chose a party at Grosvenor House on 1 December 1944, held to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the entry of women into Parliament, to announce that she was retiring at the next General Election.
Sadly, agreeing to leave public life led to a bitter estrangement between Nancy and Waldorf. He was patient with her, but she was furious at being asked to give up her political career. When the war ended, she mourned the closure of the most exciting, productive and worthwhile era of her life. She said, ‘Only I and Mr Churchill enjoy the war, but only I admit it.’
The Londonderrys were also still tainted by their attempts to appease the Germans before the war, but they both made sterling efforts to defeat the enemy once war was inevitable. Edith had written in 1938 of the duties that she felt incumbent on her because of her social position:
There is still […] an Upper Class, its ranks diminished and impoverished by the war, who still wield a certain influence behind the scenes, and, in times of crisis, their presence will still be felt, something solid and very British, and, above all, they are people who were born and bred to the old tradition – that possessions carry duties with them, before pleasure.14
Lady Londonderry divided her time between Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland and Londonderry House. She was President of the County Down and Durham branches of the Red Cross, and was greatly involved in the war work of the Women’s Legion, training non-combatants to produce their own food on allotments, and she helped organise the Woman’s Legion, once again supplying women to vital war work such as delivering planes and running mobile canteens.
She piled mattresses in the basement of Londonderry House and offered shelter to anyone caught by the Blitz. However, Londonderry House was damaged by successive bombing raids over London; by the middle of September 1940 Irene Curzon, sister-in-law of Oswald Mosley and friend of Nancy Astor, noticed that many of its windows had been smashed. The Londonderrys were also struck by the accumulation of financial worries; by 1939 Lord Londonderry’s annual expenditure exceeded his income by £106,000.
Because of his prominent position as a figurehead in Northern Ireland and his extensive air experience, Lord Londonderry was appointed as the Regional Commandant of Northern Ireland’s Air Training Corps. At the end of 1940 Charley Londonderry tried to persuade Winston Churchill to give him a ministerial job in Whitehall, or in Northern Ireland, but his cousin declined; just before the war, over dinner at Emerald Cunard’s, they had rowed over the likely response of France in the event of a German invasion. It was a supreme irony that during Lord Londonderry’s four years at the Air Ministry he had been far-sighted enough to authorise the development of the first all-metal monoplane fighter aircraft, which led to the Hurricane and the Spitfire, even though Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald had been reluctant to fund the initiative to rearm the Air Force on the grounds of cost. As the RAF fought the Luftwaffe through the skies over the Home Counties during the summer of 1940, few were aware that the British planes so vital to the country’s survival had been brought into being by a career politician who had once described Hitler as ‘kindly’.
The Londonderrys were struck by personal tragedies: their eldest daughter Maureen, who had married Oliver Stanley, Minister for War, died of TB on 20 June 1942, and the controversial marriage of another
daughter, Margaret, to Alan Muntz, which her parents had so bitterly contested, ended in divorce. While Edith kept busy with her war work in order to keep sorrow at bay, Charley was under-occupied, depressed and in poor health; in 1945 he wrote to his old friend Ettie Desborough: ‘the war, the crisis of our lives, finds me completely isolated and under a sort of shadow which I cannot get away from […] I want you to know that I have no illusions about it and that I am bitterly disappointed. I had great chances and I have missed them by not being good enough and that really sums up the whole thing.’15
The last years of the war were, if anything, more difficult than the first for the hostesses. In 1944 Sibyl fell in the blackout, breaking an arm and injuring her back. She was now seventy years old, and her frenetic lifestyle and intense workload had taken its toll. She decided it was time to retire from the firm of Colefax & Fowler, and she sold her share of the business to Nancy Lancaster, the American niece of Lady Astor. Mrs Lancaster was a beauty, well connected, an ardent enthusiast for British country house life and a decorator of great flair; both Syrie Maugham and Sibyl Colefax had approached her in the past with proposals for a professional partnership, but she had demurred.
The relationship between Nancy Lancaster and John Fowler was not always smooth – Lady Astor described them as ‘the unhappiest unmarried couple in England’ – but creatively it was very successful. She was a perfectionist, familiar with American standards of comfort and convenience, and Fowler designed coherent decorative schemes that distilled traditional English taste while discreetly indicating the social status of the client. Wisely Nancy Lancaster retained the name of the company, as by now it had established a reputation for quality and originality. Sibyl found it hard to let go of Colefax & Fowler, and continued to use the London premises as her office, frequently dropping in to write letters and make phone calls in pursuit of her social life. Meanwhile, her relentless namedropping and claims that she knew everyone irritated Margot Asquith, who commented that one could not even discuss the birth of Christ without Sibyl insisting that she had been there in the manger.
Forthright Margot Asquith also clashed with Emerald Cunard, who gave a candlelit dinner party in her Dorchester suite on 7 January 1944. The two women crossed swords when Margot accused her of having ‘done a bunk’ to avoid the bombing earlier in the war; Emerald’s real reason for going to America had been to try to win back the waning affections of Sir Thomas Beecham, but she could hardly say so.
Emerald’s cosy and antique-cluttered drawing room at the Dorchester now became a bolthole for many as the war dragged on. James Lees-Milne, a sensitive and perceptive Old Etonian working for the National Trust, frequently dropped in for tea or dinner, and spent part of Christmas Day 1943 alone with her. On 15 June 1944 Lady Cunard was hosting a dinner party at the hotel. It was the first night of the V2 rockets, pilotless flying bombs whose engines could cut out at any moment; they were a new form of terrorism for battle-weary Londoners. Emerald vigorously refused to believe such technological developments were possible, and told Duff Cooper, Minister for Information, that stupid people would believe anything in wartime.
Emerald loathed the war and described it as ‘vulgar’; throughout fearsome air raids she resolutely ignored the sound of explosions and artillery fire outside, and any dinner guest cowardly enough to flinch over his caviar would be shot a look of scorn. While Emerald kept calm and carried on in her cluttered hotel suite, occasionally taking cover during air raids under her dining table with the telephone and a Shakespeare play, her estranged daughter Nancy was leading a rickety existence in rooms in Half Moon Street, less than a mile from the Dorchester. Nancy had arrived in Liverpool on 22 August 1941, on a ship from New York, and stayed in London for the next three and a half years, with occasional trips to France as soon as it was liberated. Mother and daughter had many London friends in common, some of whom were keen to try to mend the rift between them, but the gulf was too great, and even the Second World War could not reunite them.
As the war ground to its conclusion, the surviving Queen Bees resolutely continued their work and personal commitments in the face of various privations: food and petrol rationing, the shortage of servants, a lack of money, the demise of friends and family members, and in some cases personal betrayal, bitter disappointments and family tragedies. However, during the Second World War many in Britain were in a similar position and there was a sense of solidarity, as most were engaged either in vital war work or some other form of active service. For six years the population of Britain dedicated themselves solely to surviving and then to winning the war. In the face of bombing and the threat of invasion, the desire for occasional entertainment, recreation, mental stimulation and psychological escape had been stronger than ever, and the hostesses, now in their sixties and seventies, had acquitted themselves with honour. With the return of peace the indomitable old ladies hoped to resume some aspect of their previous lives. Five of them had survived the war; now that peace had been achieved, each of them, adaptable and resilient as they were, faced the challenge of devising new roles for themselves, and new strategies to cope with an uncertain future.
11
Peace and Austerity
In 1945 Britain was depleted, nearly bankrupt, and its infrastructure had been pulverised. Most people were shabbily dressed, thin and poorly housed. Families were sundered; many had lost their homes, their incomes, their friends and loved ones. People of all classes and backgrounds had taken on enormous responsibilities, and coped with unfamiliar threats and privations. For formerly wealthy women, fending for themselves without servants had been a revelation. Mistresses suddenly found themselves in the previously unknown realms of their own basements, first sheltering from bombardment, and then gradually getting to grips with recalcitrant ovens, poor lighting, iron rations, mystifying cookery books and inadequate cleaning materials. Class distinctions had eroded, and there could be little doubt that the adjective ‘pre-war’ would come to have a nostalgic aura, but meanwhile there was immense cause for celebration.
On 8 May 1945, VE Day marked the end to hostilities in Europe; in London an exhausted but jubilant populace flooded into Trafalgar Square, and crowds cheered MPs as they left the House of Commons; Nancy Astor was slightly hurt that the cheers for her were less effusive than for her colleagues. That evening Sibyl Colefax and Ivor Novello went to a party at ‘Chips’ Channon’s house, which had been damaged by bombs, but the candelight still flickered in the exquisite Amalienburg room. Outside, London was jubilant; searchlights had been turned on, and the city was lit up, the streets awash with people dancing and celebrating. On VJ Day, 15 August 1945, the end of the war was announced. James Lees-Milne dined at one of Sibyl’s ordinaries, and hordes of people flocked to Buckingham Palace.
In the aftermath Nancy Astor was jubilant to find that her name was included in the Sonderfahndungsliste GB, the Germans’ ‘Black Book’, which listed 2,820 prominent names considered the enemies of the Nazis, who were to be arrested immediately after the planned invasion of Britain in the autumn of 1940. The opponents of the Third Reich included Vera Brittain, Winston Churchill, Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf and Charles de Gaulle. It was a considerable source of pride to find one’s name on the list; Rebecca West sent a telegram to Noel Coward, saying: ‘My dear – the people we should have been seen dead with’. Nancy commented, ‘It is the complete answer to the terrible lie that the so-called “Cliveden Set” was pro-Fascist.’
Nancy reluctantly stood down as an MP on 5 July 1945, at the age of sixty-six. Announcing her retirement, she remarked that the decision had been forced upon her, and that it should please the men of Britain. ‘I am an extinct volcano,’ she seethed. Waiting for the storm to pass, patient Waldorf went to stay with his stepson, Bobbie, and then with his own son David, but when he returned to Cliveden, Nancy decamped to their holiday house in Kent.
Waldorf persevered, and they agreed to travel together to the United States in 1946. Nancy was desperate to see her family
after the long years of war, but it was difficult to get a passage. They obtained passenger tickets on a Fyffes’ banana boat, the utilitarian Eros (a far cry from the Queen Mary, the Aquitania and her other pre-war modes of transport). It took fourteen days to reach New York from Tilbury instead of the usual seven because of the weather. The chef had been unenthusiastic to find Nancy’s name on the manifest as she was the MP who had attempted to abolish rum rations for merchant seamen, but so effective was her charm campaign that the entire crew lined up to sing ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow’ as the Astors disembarked in New York, their first homecoming since the start of the war. They stayed in the luxurious Ritz Carlton, a world away from grey, austere and gritty Britain. Waldorf gave a lunch party at the Hotel Astor for the crew of the Eros, and the chef asked Rose out on a date, an evening that involved energetic dancing fuelled by rum and Coca-Cola.
The Astors toured the States, accompanied by Rose and Arthur Bushell. Nancy even rode a performing horse, hanging on with great aplomb as it reared and bucked, a feat impressive at any age, but especially for one approaching seventy. She was treated in America as an international media celebrity, but following their return to Britain, Nancy and Waldorf returned to their separate lives. Waldorf showed tenacity and forbearance in the face of all her tirades, and rarely complained.
Matters might have gone more smoothly if Nancy Astor had achieved the recognition she undoubtedly deserved after all those years as an MP, by elevation to the House of Lords. But women were barred, and it was not until 1958 that they were accepted. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was denied the reward deemed suitable for so many male MPs after decades of public service. It is a savage irony that the same constitutional protocols that drove her husband, Waldorf (and, following his death, their eldest son, William), unwillingly into the House of Lords were to curtail her pioneering career, because of her gender.
