PART V
NANCY
1879–1964
Chapter 1
THE CHRONICLES OF CLIVEDEN
BENEATH THE STARCHED cotton sheets of the newly installed hospital beds at Cliveden lay soldiers from the battlefields of Mons and Ypres. Some had mutilated limbs, others were paralysed from shrapnel wounds, and many had been blinded by poison gas. They were the first of 24,000 wounded to arrive at the house straight from the muddy killing fields of Europe.1
By 1915 Cliveden had been transformed by war. The manicured gardens where Harriet and Victoria had passed many tranquil afternoons and ‘Rule Britannia!’ had been performed were stripped of their foliage, ploughed and sown. Uniformed aides and nurses scurried around the grounds unloading men and medical supplies from convoys of thundering trucks. The glamour of the house was, for now, overlaid by the grit of modern war, the ornamental replaced by the functional.
Cliveden had been a gift from William Astor to his son, Waldorf, and the Virginian divorcee Nancy Langhorne, on the occasion of their marriage. When war broke out, Waldorf Astor volunteered for the army, but was rejected on medical grounds. Four days after the fighting started, he offered Cliveden for use as a hospital. Refused by the British War Office, Waldorf turned to the Canadians, and upon inspection, the chief commissioner of the Canadian Red Cross accepted. Although the main house was deemed unsuitable for conversion to a hospital, facilities could be built about a mile away on the covered tennis court and bowling alley. Construction began in September 1914, funded by the Astors themselves.2
The first casualties arrived at Taplow station in April.3 They had endured a bleak journey from the trenches. When there was no space on the ambulance trains, any available transport – coaches, vans, trucks – was used. Where possible, railway carriages were cleaned and disinfected, but the volume of maimed men was so overwhelming that many arrived from the front in dirty freight trains, with only a covering of straw on the floor.4 Compared with the transport, the new Duchess of Connaught’s Canadian Red Cross Hospital was state-of-the-art. It was ‘thoroughly up to date, complete and convenient’, equipped with X-ray apparatus, ‘a laboratory for pathological investigation, a dispensary’, ‘a Thresh Steam Disinfector’, ‘a perfect system of electric light,’ and operating theatres.5 The architect, Charles Skipper, had designed wards with tall south-facing windows so that they received as much sunlight as possible. Prevailing medical wisdom dictated that wards be kept cold and well-aired. In his First Eastern Military Hospital at Cambridge, Skipper had designed wards that were entirely open to the south, but the canvas sun-blinds rattled noisily and let in rain, so at Cliveden, he reverted to a more conventional design by stretching gauze across the window frames.6 The wounded were also well nourished: ‘great sides of the best English beef and ‘rows of plump chickens’ hung in the hospital’s larder, along with dozens of eggs, home-made jams and Canadian biscuits.7 Parts of the main house were used as a convalescent wing. ‘I warn you we shall be broke & may not be able to live here for some time,’ Nancy Astor wrote to her sister of the cost. ‘It will be so expensive, but who cares?’8 The hospital could accommodate no patients; this would increase sixfold over the course of the war.9
The new chatelaine of Cliveden, a five-foot-two dynamo with a deceptively delicate frame, fine fair hair and piercing blue eyes, was in charge of running the hospital. It provided an ideal stage for her boundless energy as she bustled from one bed to the next, a frenetic Florence Nightingale, rallying the wounded, forbidding any self-pity, goading them to defy death. The characteristics that had made Nancy a celebrity in pre-war society – her comic timing, her disarming candour, her effervescence – were now deployed to lift the spirits of the stricken men and pull them back from oblivion. At times, she sat up all night with terminal patients, reading to them in their final hours. On other occasions, she resorted to plain insults to bring her men back to life. ‘No wonder you don’t want to live, if you come from Yorkshire!’ she once berated a dying sailor, fixing him with a steely gaze. The patient raised himself on one elbow, and declared that Yorkshire ‘was the finest place in the world’. He was, he vowed, going to defy death and return to Yorkshire.10 Several months later, in no small part thanks to Nancy’s harsh invective, he did. Bribery too was part of her arsenal. To a Canadian soldier, she bet her Cartier watch that he would be dead the following day, because he had ‘no guts’. The soldier rallied: he attributed his survival to Nancy’s tough love and kept the watch for the rest of his life.11
When war was declared, Nancy was a 35-year-old mother of four. She had a son, Bobbie Shaw, from a disastrous first marriage, and three further children, William, David and Wissie, from her marriage to Waldorf Astor in 1906. Nancy was born in 1879 in Danville, Virginia. Her father, Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, or ‘Chillie’, as he was known, was a volatile, heavy-drinking bully, capable of intermittent flourishes of charm and charisma. Nancy’s mother, Nanaire, was his saintly counterpart – softly spoken, genteel and altruistic. Chillie had suffered financial ruin in the American Civil War, after which the family had endured years of privation. When Nancy was eleven, Chillie won a big railroad contract and the family’s fortunes soared. The Langhornes moved to Mirador, a picturesque Virginian country house framed by cedar trees. It was in this romantic setting that Nancy spent the rest of her childhood, although the memory of that poverty-stricken youth stayed with her throughout her life. She grew into a confident, self-possessed young woman, with a tomboyish beauty and contagious vitality. Like Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, Nancy admired Joan of Arc and Mary Queen of Scots – though an equally important heroine was the American frontier markswoman Annie Oakley.12 Forthright and fierce, with an acerbic wit, Nancy was to become one of the most powerful and compelling women of her era.
Religion was central to Nancy’s life. Her greatest desire in childhood was to become a saint so that ‘everyone can feel my influence when I walk into a room’. At the age of 14, Nancy formed a deep bond with her parish priest, the Oxford-educated Venerable Archdeacon Frederick Neve. She was inspired by his missionary work and his compassion for the old, sick and poor: in her early teens, she accompanied him on a mission through the poverty-stricken Blue Ridge mountains that overlooked Mirador. Neve imbued in Nancy the sense that she must guide others in the way of righteousness – an ethos she retained throughout her life. It was this strong sense of religious vocation that eventually led her away from the Protestantism of Neve and towards the new and controversial religion of Christian Science. Devised in the late 19th century by Mary Baker Eddy, ‘CS’ was a sect that held illness to be a trick of the mind, a mere illusion that could be overcome by prayer. ‘I deny disease as a truth,’ wrote Baker Eddy. ‘But I admit it as a deception.’13 Drugs and medicine, which conspired in the ‘materialistic’ illusion of illness, were strictly forbidden to practitioners of the faith. Even though Nancy’s attempts to compel soldiers to survive by sheer force of will were in line with the self-healing doctrine of her adopted religion, the conventional medical treatments administered at her own hospital at Cliveden were affirmatively not.
Nancy was one of five sisters: Lizzie, the eldest, who was stern and matronly; Irene, renowned for her beauty and elegance; the soulful, empathetic Phyllis; and fun, frivolous and flighty Nora. It was her relationship with Phyllis, 18 months her junior, that dominated Nancy’s life. Even as children, the two were deeply enmeshed. Although very different in temperament – Phyllis was more passive and contemplative than Nancy – they suffered similar difficulties as a result of catastrophic first marriages. Nancy loved Phyllis fiercely and unconditionally. ‘She and I were always inseparable,’ Nancy recalled in her autobiography. ‘We were really devoted to one another.’14 In the summer of 1914 Phyllis came to England, ostensibly to help Nancy with the arrangements for the hospital, but mainly because it was the only place where she could meet Henry Douglas Pennant, known to the sisters as ‘the Captain’. Phyllis and the Captain had fallen in love in 1910, b
ut were forced to keep their relationship secret because Phyllis was married, albeit unhappily, to Reggie Brooks. The Captain was a welcome relief from Phyllis’s heavy-drinking, polo-playing dilettante husband: after leaving the army Pennant had taken up the dangerous and exciting pursuit of hunting game, collecting specimens for the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. During his absences, postcards arrived from remote and exotic locations, and on his return to England there were always stories of perilous treks and near-fatal encounters with wildlife. In the Rift Valley, he was mauled by a leopard, sustaining gaping wounds that exposed his vertebrae. Despite extreme pain, he managed to travel 130 miles on an improvised litter, swimming across flooded rivers, until he reached the nearest village. So extensive were his injuries that he spent a month in a Nairobi hospital; his wounds took a year to heal.15
The Captain was determined to marry Phyllis and begged her to obtain a divorce. Nancy, who was wildly possessive of her sister, resented the hold this charismatic adventurer exerted over Phyllis. She described him as a ‘half-wit’ and snobbishly wrote to Phyllis: ‘My goodness, don’t you want a superior?… No Phyl that aff. will never have my blessings I warn you so don’t expect it.’16 Nancy and the Captain fell out decisively in October 1914, when they were seeing Phyllis onto the boat-train to America. As the train pulled away from the platform, the Captain jumped aboard; this grand romantic gesture enraged Nancy and she began shouting at him, running alongside the train and waving her arms frantically.17 Later, angered not only by the train incident but also by the fact that Phyllis had sent a goodbye telegram to him but not her, Nancy demanded a meeting. He refused. She sent various letters to Phyllis criticising him; he wrote to Phyllis that her sister was ‘veritably crazy’.18
In mid-November 1914, the Captain joined the war. Before sailing for France, he left a strikingly insightful letter for Nancy. ‘I am off today,’ he wrote. ‘I should not like to go away without making one or two things plain. Heaven forbid that you should think I dislike you… I know you are at times very jealous of my having intervened between yr affections and Phyllis. But its no use being like that, you will only lose over it and give Phyllis no happiness. Whether you like it or not she will love me alive or dead better than anything else, it is natural for woman to love man more intensely than for woman to love woman. Not even you can prevent that.’19 Nancy forwarded the letter to Phyllis in astonishment, writing: ‘You see he really thinks that I am personally jealous of him and thinks I am so small as to stand … in the way of your happiness.’20 Her reply to the Captain reassured him that she was not in fact ‘so small’, and that it was merely his ‘lack of understanding’ that made him so certain of Phyllis’s happiness. At the end of February, the Captain warned Phyllis that he was being moved to a more dangerous part of the line, but in March, reprieve came in the form of an offer of a senior staff job in the Welsh Guards, a new regiment. This would allow the Captain to leave the trenches immediately, but meant he would have to continue his military career for at least ten years. Instead of expressing relief that her love had been spared the perils of trench warfare, Phyllis was disapproving: ‘I must confess I never dreamt that this, for years to come would be soldiering!’21 She later tempered her initial reaction to the prospect of the Captain’s future in the Welsh Guards, writing in a further letter: ‘Don’t think me a timid, weak-kneed sort of person when I write you that I wd like to see you safely back with the W. Gds. I shd. of course like it but not if it meant you came because you thought it safe. Thank heavens you are not built that way. It is one of the many things I like about you my old darling.’22
Tragically, due to postal delays, the Captain only received her first, disapproving message. On 10 March, in what was to be his final letter, he apologised with heart-rending earnestness for having suggested a career in soldiering, realising that such a future was ‘distasteful’ to Phyllis. After reading her letter, he had immediately cabled the general to decline the job. ‘I know you well enough… that you do not like my soldiering project. So the show is off. It was not quite fair of me to give you such a fright and I’m sorry my darling I did so!… So you can look at life under a pleasanter aspect than as a Major’s wife.’23 The Captain was killed on the morning of 11 March. His death came three weeks before the first wounded soldiers arrived at Cliveden. Distraught and guilt-ridden, Phyllis attempted to assuage her grief by helping the wounded. For the first time, she was able to witness the horror of the Captain’s existence at the front and grasp the devastating effect of war.
Once the hospital was fully operational, Nancy swung into action. With electrifying pace and efficiency, she set about organising weekly events and activities for the patients. In May 1915, Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, visited the hospital, and a few months later the prime minister of Canada arrived, followed by George V and his wife Mary. At Christmas there was a fancy-dress ball; one boy in a wheelchair was dressed as a baby and given a bottle, and, according to Nancy, ‘he was delighted with himself, and kept bawling in a most realistic manner at intervals.’24 Soldiers were able to borrow books from the Astor library: Corporal Bell wrote to Nancy from his bed in the Queen Alexandra Ward of the hospital to thank her for the loan of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History and Animal Heroes.25 The patients even formed their own magazine, Chronicles of Cliveden, to create ‘a permanent record of our life at Cliveden’. It contained poetry, short stories, and a column called ‘Ward Notes’, which recorded hospital news and gossip. Amusing anecdotes included tales of one patient who could ‘eat nine porridges in any morning’, and another who ‘took a fancy to Sister Miller’s soap one bright morning, and incidentally took possession of it at the same time?’26
Although Nancy tried to maintain a semblance of normality at Cliveden in the summer of 1914, the outbreak of war had an immediate impact on the running of the house. One of the servants, a part-time special constable, took on the role of recruiting men from the estate, and by the middle of August 1914, Nancy reported to Phyllis that ‘Every one of our men from here have gone & all of the footmen, odd men, school room Samuel & the lot all but Edward who is here & George but they may go this week, I am really v proud of them.’27 As the men of Cliveden went off to fight, female members of staff were expected to take over their duties. Housekeepers set about planting potatoes and cabbages, which had replaced the flowers in the gardens, while maids tended to the sheep and poultry now on the lawns, assisted by members of the Women’s Land Army.28
Nurses and patients in the New Brunswick ward of the Red Cross Hospital, which was built over the estate’s tennis courts.
During VWVI, hospital patients formed their own magazine, Chronicles of Cliveden, to create ‘a permanent record of our life at Cliveden’. It contained poetry, short stories, and a column called ‘Ward Notes’, which recorded hospital news and gossip.
Nancy wrote regularly to friends and members of the Cliveden staff who had joined up. The postal system that distributed letters to the front was known as the ‘Field Service’, and letters reached the trenches from Cliveden within two or three days. Nancy often sent out copies of Mary Baker Eddy’s work to accompany her letters, which were received variably: Julian Grenfell, the son of Nancy’s neighbour Lady Desborough, resisted Nancy’s efforts to discuss ‘the soul’.29 Viscount Cranborne began reading Eddy, and was ‘really much more impressed than I expected’, but wished that she had ‘a superior education in the English language’. For a ‘prophetess’, he thought, ‘her style is deplorable’.30 He soon gave up and ‘relapsed into the trashiest novels’.31 Waldorf’s pheasants, dispatched to the front weekly from Cliveden, were altogether better appreciated.
Nancy’s youngest sister Nora was also at Cliveden during the war. Like Phyllis, she was unhappily married, though to an Englishman, the architect Paul Phipps. The pair had been living in Canada with their two children. In August 1914, Nora left Phipps for the famous American football player, ‘Lefty’ Flynn, with whom she set out across th
e States, performing in music halls to earn money. She was quickly sought out by her father and sisters and ordered back to England. Phipps, who had returned to England after Nora’s desertion, met her off the boat and immediately forgave her. His indifference to the affair enraged Nora. At Cliveden, Nancy put her sister to work at the hospital. Phipps had been declared unfit for military duty and took a part-time job at the Admiralty in London. Nora took advantage of her husband’s absence, spending time with the Guards officers who came and went from Cliveden. ‘Nora went through the Guards like a knife through butter,’ her niece Nancy Lancaster recalled. Nancy, characteristically, took a harsher line. ‘She is too free and easy with everyone and I’ve warned her,’ she noted. ‘I shall try to send her away for a week or so. I believe it would do great good but she really has v few friends. She has let people down so dreadfully… I’m trying to hold the right thought. It is the only thing that can help.’32
Nancy’s work in the hospital, her access to the Astor fortune and her avowals of ‘ardent feminism’ inevitably attracted the attention of the suffragette movement.33 ‘Everyone knows that you are in a position to do extremely valuable war work and are doing it splendidly,’ Emmeline Pankhurst wrote to Nancy in July 1915.34 Pankhurst sent Nancy editions of the revived Suffragette magazine, wrote to her with news about meetings with Lloyd George, and expressed surprise to her at the Observer’s lack of coverage of the need for women’s work.35 The Astors owned the Observer and the Pall Mall Gazette, so Pankhurst undoubtedly brought up this omission in the hope that Nancy would intercede. Despite her interest in Pankhurst’s cause, Nancy disapproved of the violent tactics – arson and looting – employed by the more extreme suffragettes. Nancy’s religious dogma and sexual prudishness also left her with limited sympathy for the plight of unmarried mothers, another subject on which she and Pankhurst disagreed. In May 1915, Pankhurst wrote of the bad conditions in which illegitimate children were often raised, and although Nancy’s response does not survive, it must have been negative: in her follow-up letter Pankhurst protested that ‘you… seem to misunderstand what I am trying to do. You say if I saw the things you have seen! I have been seeing them and sorrowing over them for 30 years and because I have seen them I seldom blame either young men or young women for being what bad education and false ideas of the relationship of the sexes have made them. It is because I realise that to alter these bad conditions you must begin at the beginning that I want to do something for illegitimate children.’36 In spite of their different perspectives, Nancy admired Pankhurst on a personal and ideological level. As well as attending a march during the First World War to agitate in favour of women working in munitions factories, Nancy invited Pankhurst to Cliveden, and encouraged Waldorf to donate money to cover hiring halls for suffragette meetings.37
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