by Siân Evans
Her new title was the Dowager Lady Londonderry, and she was now seventy years old. Charley’s political career had been irreparably damaged by his association with Nazi Germany. Opinion on his motivation is still divided. His patriotism was not in doubt, and he always advocated that all dealings with Germany should be negotiated from a position of well-armed strength, but it was his judgement that gave cause for concern. He told Bob Boothby, ‘There were really only two things I could do. Build an Air Force, or try to make friends with the Germans.’ His intentions were honourable, but his personal reputation had suffered because of his pro-German stance between 1935 and 1938. His former guest von Ribbentrop had been captured by the Allies at the end of the Second World War and faced justice at the Nuremberg War Trials. Von Ribbentrop boasted of his pre-war friendships with the Duke of Windsor and Lady Astor, and he asked that they and Lord Londonderry be called as character witnesses in his defence. Unsurprisingly, his request was denied; after a lengthy trial he was found guilty and executed in 1947.
The Londonderrys’ son Edward, always known as Robin, became the eighth Marquess, but he too died, on 17 October 1955. Robin was the second of Edith and Charley’s children to die; her eldest, Maureen, had died in June 1942. Lady Londonderry was concerned about the future of her beloved family home, Mount Stewart. She gave the gardens to the National Trust in 1957, and her last surviving daughter, Lady Mairi Bury (née Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Dowager Viscountess Bury), handed over the house and most of its contents to the Trust in 1977.
Despite the vicissitudes and tragedies of her final years, Edith still felt she had a role to play as an important hostess. Her last great political reception at Londonderry House was in 1958, more than four decades after she had presided at her first, and her last Prime Minister to act as guest of honour was Harold Macmillan. Edith was already ill with the cancer that was to kill her, but even in her final months she maintained the determination, practical common sense and humour that had governed her life, as Beverley Nichols recalled:
When I last entered Londonderry House [Edith] had only a short time left to live. Most of the place had been shut up, never to be reopened, and one had the feeling that the great staircase was thronged with ghosts. We lunched upstairs in a room brimming with flowers sent over from Mount Stewart, the estate in Ireland. She was in considerable pain, with a broken hip, but she was still the life and soul of the party, which included Jack Profumo. Somebody mentioned an unfortunate member of Parliament who had been arrested in Hyde Park for indecent behaviour with a guardsman. Apparently he had led the young man into a shrubbery, where his improprieties were clearly visible to the police. This was not the sort of topic which in those days was considered suitable for discussion with octogenarian dowagers, but Circe was more than equal to the occasion. ‘What a silly man!’ she exclaimed. ‘There are plenty of laurels in Hyde Park. Why did he have to choose a deciduous shrub?’9
Edith died on 23 April 1959, aged eighty. Her body was also buried at Tír-n’an Óg, the family plot she created at Mount Stewart. She is interred next to her much-loved husband, and their graves are surrounded by statues of Irish saints.
Nancy Astor in her old age was physically vigorous, white-haired and beautiful, with an excellent complexion. She now lived in Hill Street in London, as there was no longer the pre-war need to entertain lavishly. Practical problems, such as rationing and the shortages of servants and fuel, irritated her. Deprived of the chance to express her scorn in the House of Commons, she had developed a habit of berating and intimidating younger men on her twin passions, Catholicism and Communism. Waldorf spent the last years of his life at Cliveden, managing the estate and his business affairs, taking the opportunity to explain everything to Billie, his eldest son, who would succeed him. His health had declined, and he used a wheelchair. In August 1952 Waldorf had a massive heart attack while staying with David. He was determined to return to Cliveden because ‘It would distress your mother if I die anywhere else’. They had been estranged for seven years; now Nancy came back for his final days, and the couple were reconciled. Before dying he told each of his children, ‘Look after your mother’. After his death Nancy bitterly regretted the years wasted. She felt she couldn’t remain at Cliveden, and so spent most of her time in London, moving in 1958 into an apartment at 100 Eaton Square. Her eldest son instructed that Nancy was to want for nothing, so she had Charles Dean as her butler, a housekeeper, an Austrian chef, a chauffeur and Rose Harrison as her maid.
A determined teetotaller to the last, Lady Astor did not know that her staff added a tot of Dubonnet to her mid-morning Ribena, on the instructions of her niece Nancy Lancaster. She also acquired a dog, a burly and self-willed corgi called Madam, who was taken out for a walk every evening by William, the odd-job man. The Belgravia backstreets housed a number of small pubs frequented by servants, where William and Madam became well known. The other regulars habitually fed the greedy dog with snacks, while William tackled the thirst for which odd-job men were famous. But one evening, energetic and restless Lady Astor snapped a lead onto the collar of a surprised Madam before anyone could intervene, and the mis-matched pair set out together into the dusk. At the first corner, the corgi dragged her horrified mistress down a cobbled mews and into the ‘snug’ of a pub, where they were greeted, appropriately enough, with genial cries of ‘Evening, Madam!’ As an internationally recognisable public figure and lifelong teetotaller, Nancy was horrified that Madam had betrayed the standards of behaviour normally expected of her household.
In 1953 she visited the States again, and once more made headlines. At one of the many parties she attended, she watched as influential Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the scourge of the Liberal Left, sipped a cocktail. ‘Too bad it isn’t poison,’ she hissed, torn between her hatred for alcohol and the loathing of Communism she shared with McCarthy. Throughout the 1950s Nancy Astor travelled extensively, exploring Rhodesia, America and Europe, wintering in Nassau, Casablanca and Marrakesh. Lady Astor remained fit and healthy, celebrating her eightieth birthday with a game of golf. However, she lacked purpose now that her career had ended and Waldorf had died. At the end of April 1955 Noel Coward found her ‘still full of vitality but sad at heart, obsessed with the idea that her life is over. In spite of her tiresome Christian Science and temperance tirades, I have a great affection for her. She is a remarkable character, frequently wrong-headed but I don’t think wrong-hearted, and undoubtedly a tremendous personality.’10
There were some compensations: in 1959 she was given the freedom of the city of Plymouth, and in return she donated a magnificent set of jewellery, to be worn by Lady Mayoresses in the future. It comprised a platinum necklace nearly four feet long, set with diamonds and sapphires, with matching ear-rings. It was valued at around £600,000 in 2015, and was an extraordinarily generous gift to the city from the woman who had done so much for its people.
Nancy Astor survived to see (but, perhaps fortunately, not comprehend) the Profumo affair, which had erupted at her old home Cliveden, and which implicated her eldest son, Billie. He and Nancy had been the first mother-and-son partnership in the House of Commons. Following Waldorf’s death, Bill inherited his title, and entertained his friends and contacts at Cliveden. He knew Stephen Ward, society osteopath, who had treated him following a riding accident. Ward became a tenant of Spring Cottage on the Cliveden estate, and occasionally used the open-air swimming pool in the walled garden, which Bill had installed. It was in these glamorous surroundings, in July 1961, that a pool party organised by Ward led to the Profumo affair, which brought down a government. It occurred during the Cold War, shocking the establishment with the revelation that a Soviet Embassy official and the British Minister for War had shared the affections of the same beautiful demi-mondaine, Christine Keeler.
The scandal broke in 1963, two years after the pool party. Stephen Ward took a fatal overdose and died during the trial. Bill Astor’s reputation suffered too – he was given a tough time by the press, who assumed he
had abandoned his friend Stephen, though in fact he had funded Ward’s legal and day-to-day expenses. Although Bill had not been charged with any wrongdoing, his name was also dragged through the mud. One of the witnesses, Mandy Rice-Davies, was quizzed over her allegation that Bill Astor had been one of her lovers, something that he had denied. ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ she replied, a short but pithy phrase that has since entered the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations.
Nancy Astor was now eighty-two years old, and her grip on reality was fading. Her friends and family agreed that it would be better to keep the Profumo affair from her. They arranged a rota to telephone her daily at her London apartment just before the 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. radio news. The newspapers were censored, and the television at Eaton Square mysteriously no longer functioned. Visitors were warned not to tell her, but Bobbie Shaw showed up one evening drunk, insisting that ‘mother ought to know’, keen to prove that he wasn’t the only black sheep of the family. Nancy was agitated and ordered Charles her butler to phone Cliveden; instead he rang the servants’ quarters at Eaton Square, having first taken the receiver off the hook, so that all evening it appeared to be impossible to contact Cliveden. Nancy insisted they should go to Cliveden the following morning to be at her son’s side, but Rose managed to distract her that night, and by the following day she had forgotten about it.
Lady Astor’s memory, always so sharp, began to fail. Her sleep habits became erratic, and Rose had to put her to bed, tucking her in like a child to ensure that she slept. She worried about money, but she also became a ‘soft touch’ for scroungers. Her family gave her a magnificent diamond solitaire ring for her birthday – diamonds were always her favourite gems. ‘What do I look like, Rose?’ she asked. ‘Cartier’s, my lady’, came the loyal reply.
Nancy’s long and passionately led life finally ended on 2 May 1964. She was staying at her daughter Wissie’s home, Grimsthorpe Castle, in Lincolnshire, when she had a severe stroke. Her final days were attended by her family and her long-suffering maid Rose. ‘Jakie, is it my birthday, or am I dying?’ she asked with typical frankness, on waking to find all her relatives around her bed. She spent a week in a coma, but revived a little on the evening of 1 May and uttered a single word, ‘Waldorf’. She died the next day. Rose remembered: ‘I went into the bedroom. She looked so beautiful and so very peaceful. She had suffered so little. It was a good picture to take away with me. I had one other thing to take as well, a link with the past, “Madam”, my lady’s dog. Together we slipped out of the house.’11
Nancy Astor’s body was cremated and her ashes interred at the Octagon Temple at Cliveden, next to Waldorf’s. At her request, her casket was draped with a Confederate flag given to her in Virginia.
12
Legacies
‘Giving parties is a trivial avocation, but it pays the dues for my union card in humanity.’1
Elsa Maxwell
Between the wars these six singular women chose to collect, to cultivate and to influence prominent people in the diverse fields of British society where they hoped to make an impact. It is important to assess their legacy, their achievements and their failures, to understand how they changed society and to appreciate the motivations that drove them.
In an era where it was still very unusual for respectable women to have any sort of public role, or even acceptable for them to work outside the home, each of the Queen Bees created her own social milieu and populated her receptions and dinner parties with those she wished to encourage, to promote and to bring into contact with like-minded individuals. It is notable that each of the Big Six was already mature in years before she established herself as a hostess of note. These exceptional women saw their social role as a vocation, a career or a calling.
Had they been born in the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth, they might well have had satisfying professions of their own, becoming political leaders, theatrical or musical impresarios, social reformers, businesswomen, diplomats, advocates or full-blown celebrities. As it was, they worked within the parameters of what was achievable at the time to change British society for the better in a number of different ways. It is perhaps difficult to appreciate nowadays just how radical these women were, born and brought up in the Victorian era, when male supremacy was assumed and assured as a matter of course.
These individuals were self-motivated, and often largely self-educated. The three Americans, Nancy Astor, Emerald Cunard and Laura Corrigan, came from very different backgrounds, but each benefited from being largely unplaceable in terms of her class when she arrived in British society. The three Britons similarly exemplified the changing nature of the English scene; while Lady Londonderry was a blue-blooded aristocrat who grew up in a castle, Sibyl Colefax was the overlooked child of an unhappy middle-class marriage, and Margaret Greville was the illegitimate daughter of a millionaire brewer from Edinburgh and his servant.
The ‘ladies of influence’ were able to take advantage of the increasingly permeable nature of British society after the Great War. The rigid hierarchy of class, stratified by the landowning aristocracy grouped around the court and much involved in the political life of the nation, where everyone knew their place, was overturned by the seismic social upheaval caused by four years of war and the financial ramifications that followed. With the return of peace, many of the aristocratic families withdrew from professional entertaining, and the wealthy and well-connected new hostesses filled the gap, despite their often humble origins. Through the deliberate courting and acquisition of those people who in former times might have cut them dead, the Queen Bees demonstrated that, in a more democratic era, aptitude and determination could achieve more than high birth could alone.
These were symbiotic relationships; each hostess provided a forum for the ambitious, the curious and those who wanted to climb the greasy pole. To be taken up by a well-connected society lady, to be invited to her soirées, her dinner parties and receptions greatly helped people with ambitions, because it was at such occasions that they could be introduced to power-brokers and king-makers, in surroundings of seductive luxury.
The hostesses exerted ‘soft power’ over their guests, providing them with a forum where they might find allies, explore arguments, make useful contacts, expand their views, share information and form friendships, even romances. In addition, the sense of ‘exclusivity’ in being one of the ‘chosen few’ was inherently flattering to the participants. In the political realm such opportunities were in marked contrast to the combative cockpit that was the House of Commons, where formal protocols and a strict pecking order governed the business of Parliament. In addition, proceedings in Parliament were recorded in Hansard, and reported in the press; for a young and inexperienced MP an invitation to Mrs Ronnie Greville’s evening reception in Charles Street or Lady Astor’s weekend house party at Cliveden was a valuable opportunity to side-step the competition, to get the ear of a senior party grandee in a convivial and informal setting.
The ‘clubbable’ nature of the hostesses’ opulent homes, both in London and in the country, is often overlooked as an important factor in their charm offensives. The effect of candlelight glittering on old silver, the smooth deference of liveried servants, comfort, luxury and the provision of excellent food and wine were also appealing, and each of the Queen Bees competed to provide the perfect setting for her guests. Of course, almost any woman of substantial means could arrange dinner parties and receptions; it took a hostess of genius to exert ‘soft power’ sufficient to change society.
Two of them were trailblazers for generations of women who followed. Nancy Astor was a lone female MP in the largely hostile House of Commons for a number of years after her first election in 1919, but she was determined to champion the valuable contribution that women could make to public life, advocating their employment in the police force, the judiciary, the diplomatic corps and social work. A more reticent character might have been cowed by the ostracism she faced from fellow back-benchers, but Nancy single-
mindedly pursued the causes to which she was committed. By using the Astors’ fortunes to host receptions and social events in London she provided a much-needed forum for men and women to be able to meet and lobby lawmakers and opinion-formers to whom they had previously had little access. She described her motivation:
What I really like to have in my house is a party which contains thoroughly opposing elements – pacifists and fire-eaters, reformers and die-hards, rich and poor, old and young. When they meet each other, they generally make friends, and when they make friends, they can find some of the solutions to their problems.2
While Nancy had not been an active supporter of the pre-war suffrage movement, she saw no reason why a woman should be barred from an active and fulfilling life merely because of her gender.
Despite animosity, ridicule and occasional personal attacks, Nancy Astor became a role model for many ambitious and committed women who didn’t start with her advantages. She proved that a woman could represent a geographical community, her beloved constituency of Plymouth, as well as representing and defending the interests of a specific sector of society, namely women and children. Undoubtedly it was the Astors’ wealth that allowed her to embark on a political career, and she would not have been successful without a phalanx of staff and an acquiescent husband, but it was her own stamina and determination that drove her as an MP throughout her twenty-six-year career. She sustained her marriage, helped to run a number of complex houses and a huge estate and brought up six children.
The manner in which Nancy Astor’s contemporary Edith Lady Londonderry expressed her commitment to politics was fundamentally different, but the results were even more far-reaching. She had been brought up as a blue-blooded daughter of the aristocracy and married into a High Tory family. Nevertheless, Edith Castlereagh, as she was at the start of the Great War, had the foresight to identify British women of all classes as the disregarded workforce who had the potential to help win the war. She also had the persuasive powers and organisational abilities to tackle and overcome reactionary views, creating the Women’s Legion as a body that could harness the knowledge, expertise and willpower of women, freeing up their menfolk to fight overseas. She campaigned for her cause through the press and garnered support from the influential to mobilise wives, mothers, daughters and girlfriends of all classes. It was an immense achievement; by the end of the First World War many of the jobs previously monopolised by men were being filled by women. Such a social transformation in the space of less than four years was instrumental in convincing the British government that women should have the vote. In addition, the Sexual Disqualification Act, which followed in 1919, lifted the restrictions that had previously denied them access to many of the professions. Without Edith’s motivating force, persuasive abilities and excellent political contacts the campaign for women’s suffrage might have foundered once again.
