Churchill came to Nancy’s Cliveden, and Chaplin, the Asquiths and Arthur Balfour. The eclectic but increasingly political atmosphere of the 1909 weekends is conveyed in an account by the wealthy German heiress Daisy, Princess of Pless. ‘The house is full of people, amongst these being Sophy Torby and the Grand Duke Michael, and Winston Churchill, who sat next to me at dinner,’ she wrote on 24 July 1909. ‘I am awfully sorry for him; he is like a racehorse wanting to start at once – even on the wrong race track; he has so much impetuousness that he cannot hold himself back, and he is too clever and has too much personal magnetism… He is not happy if he is not always before the public, and he may some day be Prime Minister – and why not, he has energy and brains.’27 To the newspaper-reading public, the Princess of Pless was known for her pearl necklaces and family scandals, but over dinner at Cliveden, she, like everyone else, was talking politics.
The political drift of the Astor parties was no coincidence, for around this time Waldorf was embarking on a career in the Conservative Party. In January 1910 he stood for election as MP for Plymouth. He was defeated by his Liberal rival, but the campaign afforded Nancy her first taste of electioneering, and she found herself to be a natural. ‘Addressed a collection of workmen,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I am becoming a mob orator. A female Lloyd George – God forbid.’28 Actually, the campaigning concerns of the Liberal chancellor – whose radical ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 proposed a brace of new taxes on the rich in order to fund social services, pensions, transport, agriculture, research and rearmament – were not too far off Waldorf’s own priorities, though for her part, Nancy instinctively disliked the idea of an interventionist state, and preferred that wealthy and conscientious individuals should make their own choice to undertake good works. In this respect her politics were already to the right of her husband’s, a gulf that would increase with time. Waldorf was inspired by the reforming politics of Lord Shaftesbury – who had penned Harriet’s anti-slavery manifesto – and diverged from his Conservative Party colleagues in his support for the People’s Budget. It was one of several points in which he would have been quite at home in the Liberal Party, and his decision to join the Conservatives may have been more to do with a sense of propriety than with a real ideological affinity: Lloyd George’s party was seen by many in the upper classes as threatening and populist, and even if this view was not held by Waldorf, it was certainly held by his father, and by Nancy.
The January 1910 defeat wasn’t enough to deter Waldorf and Nancy from poaching their seat. If the mood of the constituency was for the Liberals, they would work to find a new mood, rather than a new constituency. The feud between the Commons and the Lords over the attempt of the latter to block the passage of Lloyd George’s budget meant that there was a second election in December of that year, and this one they intended to win. For Nancy, the Plymouth constituency had already taken on a sort of spiritual-historic significance. Not only had the Pilgrim Fathers set sail from there, but there were apparently more personal connections too. ‘It was not like a new place to me. I felt that here was where I belonged. I remember sitting down and writing to father and telling him all this,’ she reminisced. ‘He wrote back saying there was nothing strange about it. One of the Langhornes was Member of Parliament in St Just – a Cornish town – in 1697.’29
Waldorf and Nancy bought a large town house at 3 Elliot Terrace on the Hoe, from where Francis Drake had set out to defeat the Spanish Armada, and began devising a campaign strategy. Unlike Waldorf, who was a stern but unassuming figure, Nancy commanded attention. Mastering her debilitating fear of cats – which, in the narrow, dilapidated streets and alleys of the poverty-stricken Barbican district, were numberless – she marched from tenement to tenement, dressed in her fur and jewels, knocking on every door, and delivering the same line: ‘I am Mrs Astor. My husband is standing for Parliament. Will you vote for him?’30 In December, thanks in part to Nancy’s energy, Waldorf won the election.31
Chapter 4
LIFE AMONG THE RUINS
FOR ALL THE growing serious-mindedness of Nancy’s parties in her first decade at Cliveden, her guest lists would never calcify into a single clique along the lines of Lady Desborough’s Souls at Taplow Court. The closest she came to presiding over such a group was not, as the popular press of the time presented it, in the thirties, when she was lampooned as the hostess to an influential pro-Nazi cabal – for this ‘Cliveden Set’, as it became known, was largely a work of fiction. Rather, it was in the 1910s, with a lesser-known group of very young and very bright diplomats known as the Round Table group.
The key members of the Round Table group had met working for the high commissioner for South Africa, Lord Milner. Between 1899 and 1902, the British Cape Colony fought a war with the two Boer Republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The latter years of the Boer War were a brutal guerrilla conflict in which the British adopted a scorched-earth policy, attempting to deprive the guerrillas of sustenance by burning houses, destroying crops, poisoning wells and interning the Boer population in ‘concentration camps’ – a term that came into general usage in this period. Even in 1900, before the tide of the war had turned in favour of the British, Lord Milner was devising plans for a future Union of South Africa in which the former Boer Republics would be given a degree of self-government within a context of overall British control. Before this ambitious plan for the colony could be realised, there was an enormous amount of more fundamental post-war reconstruction that had to take place. Anxious to avoid a conventional administrative system, Milner recruited in a personal and haphazard way, largely through an Oxford old-boys network that drew in recent graduates from Balliol, New College, and All Souls. The youth and inexperience of the recruits earned them the nickname ‘Lord Milner’s kindergarten’.1 Two of the kinder, Bob Brand and Philip Kerr, would have a particularly profound impact on Nancy’s life.
Brand was the seventh child of Viscount Hampden of Glynde, but had the air of a very middle-class intellectual, and Nancy was shocked when, years into their friendship, she discovered him to be ‘a Right Honourable’. Philip Kerr came from a devoutly Catholic family descended from the dukes of Norfolk. He was serious and academic-minded like Brand, but far more impressionable. In South Africa, when they were not visiting mining camps, trekking across the Veld, or otherwise administering the vast and foreign territory into which they had been dropped, Brand, Kerr and Milner’s other young men held ‘bachelor parties’ at their shared house and talked long into the night. On their return to England, many of the kinder were drawn into another Milner-inspired project, the Round Table group, which aimed to advance the project of a federal British empire, united in a central Imperial Parliament. But the precocity of the young men’s political experience had come at a personal cost. Milner’s protégés were highly neurotic young men – serious about ideas, but emotionally immature and overwrought about sex. In short, they were perfect playmates for Nancy.
Bob Brand first came to Cliveden in 1912, for a weekend with J. L. Garvin, the editor of the Observer. While Nancy’s frankness and energy surprised and excited the young men, she also shared their seriousness about religion, and her prudishness outflanked even the most awkward of the kinder. One afternoon Bob and Nancy were sitting in the garden at Cliveden and saw two pigeons flying overhead. ‘You know, Bob,’ Nancy said to him, ‘I can’t even see two mating birds without wanting to separate them.’2 Nancy first met Philip Kerr during a trip to Hatfield in 1910, and the following summer Kerr appeared in the Cliveden guest book for the first time. ‘There was an affinity between Philip and my mother, love on his side, and something deeper than friendship and less passionate than love on hers,’ Nancy’s son Michael would later observe.3 But it was their near simultaneous conversion to Christian Science that allowed their companionship to mature into the very affectionate, quasi-romantic bond that they shared for many years. He appeared in her letters to the others as a saint, priest and prophet and they shared a secret, ex
clusive language of election, as evident in a note written by Nancy in the flyleaf of a book she gave to Philip:
You and I have found the secret way
None shall hinder us not say us nay.
All the world may stare and never know
You and I are twined together so.4
At other times, it simply came down to deflecting physical desire with orisons. In a rare admission of having experienced any sexual feeling, Nancy would later inform her niece that on one occasion, when she and Philip found themselves overcome with desire for each other, they solved the problem by dropping to their knees in prayer. As one of her sons put it: ‘There isn’t any question that they were in love, and also that it was never consummated in any way.’5 Waldorf appears to have been tolerant of the relationship, and responded to Philip with warmth: ‘I must say Philip comes closer to making Waldorf talk than anyone I have known,’ wrote Nancy to Phyllis. ‘That is a Godsend.’6 Waldorf knew that Nancy and Philip had a peculiar, ecstatic connection in which he couldn’t share, even if he converted to the religion himself – this he would do, in his own more diffident way, in 1924. Though he sometimes ‘found it a bore having Philip Kerr round the house the whole time’, he approached the unusual friendship with tact, tolerance and a remarkable lack of jealousy.
In 1912 Nancy gave Bob Brand a letter of introduction to Phyllis. Phyllis was in New York seeing lawyers about her separation proceedings from Reggie, and the two first met at a dinner given by Irene at her house on East 73rd Street, a fashionable road of old carriage houses. Bob was ‘knocked over’ by Phyllis, and managed to wangle an invitation to the family home at Mirador. He travelled down from Washington, where he had been on business, wearing his ‘Wall Street Suit’. The rest of his luggage was mistakenly shipped to Florida, and so the Wall Street Suit became his uniform for the trip. He ate dinner with Phyllis in his Wall Street Suit, went horse riding in his Wall Street Suit, fell from the horse in his Wall Street Suit, and bled from his nose all over his Wall Street Suit. The only time he wore anything else was in bed, when he wore Phyllis’s pink silk nightgown.7 By the time he left, he’d fallen in love. Barred by etiquette from attempting to start a correspondence, Bob bade his time. Eventually, Phyllis wrote. She was ‘so glad that you did come to Mirador’ and thought it was ‘most awfully good of you to have taken so much trouble for those very few hours’.8
Much to Nancy’s irritation, Bob did not displace the Captain in Phyllis’s affections. Bob was, Phyllis wrote to Nancy, ‘the most liveable sort of creature, like a cosy liveable room and as you say a clever being… but of course not so clever or far seeing as the C!!!’9 Upon the Captain’s death, Bob maintained a respectful distance before resuming correspondence. There followed two years of tumultuous friendship, in which proposals from Bob were followed by fraught silences from Phyllis and then attempts to resume their relationship on platonic terms. Eventually, in 1917, after much patience on Bob’s part, Phyllis summoned him to her room at Cliveden, and announced that she would marry him if he still wanted. They were married in June 1917 at the Savoy Chapel, London. The Brands had intended to spend their honeymoon in America, but in April 1917 America had entered the war, and passenger ships departing from Liverpool were now used as vessels of combat, with a brief to shoot at German submarines. The few brave civilians who dared to embark on these treacherous voyages were issued with waterproof suits and helmets in case of attack. Phyllis and Bob delayed their crossing, spending their first week of marriage in the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, awaiting clearance. When they finally did board a ship, rough weather and fear of German submarines did not make for a romantic crossing.
When fighting finally ceased, both Bob Brand and Philip Kerr went on to play a central part in the negotiations to remake Europe. The Paris Peace Conference, which began on 18 January 1919, was a meeting of the victorious allied powers, called in order to agree the peace terms that would be imposed on Germany following the armistices of late 1918. Brand and Kerr were both members of the British delegation, Kerr as Lloyd George’s private secretary, Brand on loan from his job at the bank Lazards to advise Lord Robert Cecil, a government minister and chairman of the Supreme Economic Council of the Allies. In Paris, the Round Table kinship between Bob and Philip would be forever fractured as the two became embroiled in the violent disagreements over the treatment of Germany. In the bitter aftermath of war, Europe’s economy was falling apart – inflation was soaring, food was scarce, and an aggressive strain of nationalism was rearing its head. Both the trauma of the recent conflict and relief at it having ended were visible all over the city. While a few of the conference delegates found their way out to the Folies Bergère or to the city’s nightclubs where couples danced foxtrots and tangos, many more saw the boarded-up windows and the crater in the middle of the Tuileries rose garden, and none could avoid the crowds of scarred and limbless soldiers who begged in the streets.
Paris was an emotive choice of location for the conference: of all the powers present, it was France who most wanted to make Germany pay for wreaking this global havoc. Kerr was broadly in favour of a treaty that imposed substantial reparation payments on Germany, but Brand advocated a more moderate line. The German economy, he argued, was just as shattered as her European counterparts and she simply could not afford to pay the ‘wild figures’ the Allies were demanding. Instead he supported a scheme of debt cancellation and much smaller reparations put forward by the economist John Maynard Keynes, head of the British Treasury delegation. Ultimately, however, it was the harsh line supported by Kerr that was adopted, a decision that would have catastrophic consequences for Europe and the rest of the world in the following two decades. Kerr was personally involved in the final peace terms, having drafted some of the most controversial passages, including the infamous ‘war guilt clause’, which forced Germany to admit full responsibility for the carnage of the conflict. On 4 May, when Keynes saw for the first time an outline of the proposed peace settlement, he reacted with horror. The reparations clauses were ‘unworkable’ and showed ‘a high degree of unwisdom in almost every direction’. To a friend he wrote that ‘the Peace is outrageous and unworkable and can bring nothing but misfortune… with such a Peace as the basis I see no hope anywhere.’10
Nancy arrived in Paris on 6 April 1919, excited to witness this flurry of diplomatic activity. She asked Philip Kerr to secure accommodation and the services of a chauffeur, an unenviable task in a city heaving with delegates from across the world. Kerr, who was wretchedly overworked attending meetings from early morning until midnight, was concerned he would have little energy left for Nancy, but his letters immediately after her visit suggest that they did spend time together, often among the city’s Christian Science community. The CS scene in Paris comprised ‘all sorts of races, French, American, Canadian, British’, who testified together at the Christian Science church and met at the CS Reading Rooms where Kerr often worked. On 23 April, Kerr wrote to Nancy: ‘I was glad to hear that you had got back safely. But you never told me what you had seen. Did you get to Ypres and Passchendaele?’ He concluded: ‘I enjoyed your visit very much. In fact I don’t think I ever had a better time in my life than that whole trip.’11
Later that year, a death in the Astor family would turn Nancy from a spectator of politics into an actor of seminal importance. Events unfolded at a precipitous pace. On the morning of 19 October 1919, Waldorf received a phone call informing him that his father William had died the previous night. Discreet to the last, William had eaten a dinner of mutton and macaroni, withdrawn to the toilet, and died there of a heart attack. Waldorf had little time to digest the news: he now became Viscount Astor and his political career in the House of Commons was over. A new member for his constituency, renamed the Sutton division of Plymouth following boundary changes that carved the city into three separate districts, would have to be found within a few weeks, and a by-election fought. On 23 October, Waldorf appealed to Lord Stamfordham, the king’s private secretary, for
permission to renounce his peerage. He reasoned that he could do more good in the Commons than in the Lords, and that natural aptitude, dedication and hard work were of far greater consequence to him than a meaningless title. But it was to no avail – Stamfordham rejected Waldorf’s case. Given that the Astor name was well known within Plymouth, local party officials were keen to find a replacement from within the family. Their first inclination was to approach Waldorf’s younger brother John, and the constituency chairman, Frank Hawker, was dispatched to London to persuade him to stand. When John declined the invitation, the party evaluated their options. It was only a matter of time before they looked to Nancy.
By 1919, women were able to stand for Parliament. The monumental Representation of the People Act of February 1918 had extended the vote to women, though only to those aged over 30, and even then with property qualifications. Nine months later, the Qualification of Women Act allowed women to stand for Parliament and to sit and vote as members of the House of Commons. In December 1918 seventeen women candidates stood in the election, and one – Constance Markiewicz – was successful. Markiewicz was an Irish radical who had fought for the Irish Citizens’ Army during the Easter Rising of 1916, as second-in-command of the St Stephen’s Green area of Dublin. Like other successful Sinn Fein candidates, after being elected in December 1918 she refused to take her seat. If Nancy was selected and returned as MP for Plymouth Sutton in the November 1919 by-election, she would be the first woman to sit in Parliament.
The prospect of Nancy’s selection divided the local party association. The main objection of this group was, obviously, that Nancy was a woman. In a statement they decreed: ‘Though we admit that nobody could have done more benevolent work than Lord and Lady Astor, we say that neither a kind heart nor a coronet fits a woman to take her place in Parliament.’12 There were other objections too: her straight-talking manner was seen by many as ‘abrasive’, and her behaviour in debates as ‘bolshie’ – though in a man, these attributes would surely have been described differently, and not seen as impediments to a political career.
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 35
