After much dispute and manoeuvring, the local Conservatives eventually resolved their differences, and on 22 October Nancy received a telegram inviting her to stand. Fully cognisant of the implications of the offer, she agonised over the decision. Although Nancy’s experience of campaigning with Waldorf had given her a taste for electioneering, she had never considered an independent career in politics. If she did agree to stand, she reasoned, it would only be a temporary measure, carried out to support her husband, and in the hope that Waldorf would succeed in his latest bid to reclaim his seat, this time by obtaining an Act of Parliament. ‘It seemed that it was best to keep it in the family,’ she later said.13 Hopefully, she would not be taking her husband’s seat, only keeping it warm until his return. Eventually, at a loss, her ‘moods changing hourly’, Nancy called for her butler Mr Lee. ‘Oh Lee,’ she said, ‘I’ve talked to so many people about Plymouth, what do you think I should do?’ ‘I should go for it my lady,’ he replied. In his memoirs, Lee recounted the rest of the story: ‘Now I’m not so big headed as to think that my opinion swayed her in any way but a couple of days later she again sent for me. “Lee, I’ve decided to take your advice. I’m going to ‘go for it’, as you said.’”14 Nancy wired Hawker and the Unionist Association of Plymouth: ‘Fully conscious of great honour and grave responsibility, I accept the invitation to stand for Plymouth.’15
Chapter 5
‘A LADY FOR PARLIAMENT’
NANCY’S SELECTION SPARKED a transatlantic media furore. Sensing that something remarkable was about to occur, newspapers across Britain and America headlined the story. The reaction of her friends was mixed. The Marquess of Salisbury’s stance was perhaps typical of most of Nancy’s circle, who were supportive of her personally, but unsure of the political implications should she be elected. ‘I am as usual lost in admiration of your energy and public spirit. Of course it is a new idea to me and you know I am a hopeless mass of prejudice,’ he wrote. ‘I am torn by conflicting emotions – on the one side friendship and on the other purblind fossilized Toryism!’1 Others were less self-aware. The author J. M. Barrie, who had often been a guest at Cliveden, dashed off a furious note. ‘I hear of your presumptuous ambitions at Plymouth. How any woman can dare to stand up against a man I don’t understand. What can you know about politics?’ he thundered. ‘These things require a man’s brains, a man’s knowledge, a man’s fairness, a man’s eloquence. Women’s true sphere in life is to be a (respectful) helpmeet.’2
But tirades like Barrie’s only spurred Nancy on. On 3 November 1919, she addressed the voters at Plymouth’s Masonic Hall:
If you want an M.P. who will be a repetition of the 600 other M.P.s don’t vote for me. If you want a lawyer or a pacifist don’t elect me. If you can’t get a fighting man, take a fighting woman. If you want a party hack don’t elect me. Surely we have outgrown party ties. I have. The war has taught us that there is a greater thing than parties, and that is the State.3
Canvassing began immediately. Nancy’s campaign committee booked many of the local public rooms and scheduled a series of women’s meetings for every weekday afternoon until polling day, which was fixed for Saturday 15 November.4 She had a hard fight ahead of her. Sutton was an unpredictable constituency. Waldorf had done well in the 1918 general election, winning a majority of 11,757. But interest in the Labour Party was rising, and Sutton had a large working-class population – railwaymen, fishermen, servicemen and chemical workers – who mainly lived in the oldest part of town, known for its slums. Unemployment was soaring after 6,000 dockyard workers had been laid off at the end of the war. William Gay, the Labour candidate, looked to be in the ascendant.
Nancy began her campaign by appealing to the women of Plymouth. Posters targeted women directly, with slogans such as ‘Sutton Women! Vote for Lady Astor’, and ‘If you vote against Astor you vote against Lloyd George who gave women maternity benefit’ – Lloyd George was head of the coalition government supported by the Conservatives. She called women-only meetings, and created an instant sorority by repeating the phrase ‘we women’. ‘I think that women had better put a woman in the House of Commons,’ she declared. ‘Much as I love you, Gentlemen, you have made a terrible muddle of the world without us.’5 Nancy claimed that unlike her opponents Isaac Foot, standing on the Liberal ticket, and William Gay, her sole priority was the interests of the voters, not partisan loyalty: ‘You have not got much of a choice if you don’t elect me,’ she announced matter-of-factly at one such gathering. ‘Mr Foot is pledged to Mr Asquith. I like Foot much better than his leader, but as for Mr Gay, my other opponent, he belongs to the most poisonous section of the Labour Party that ever existed on earth.’6
Nancy’s claim that she was not a ‘sex candidate’ has sometimes been interpreted as to suggest that her campaign was not feminist, but in the light of her connections with the suffragettes and her statements about the inadequacies of male politicians, it reads more like a declaration that she was not standing on her sex alone – that she was a serious politician, and not a novelty. Nancy was a self-identified ‘ardent feminist’.7 Women, she believed, were morally and cerebrally superior to men, and men needed to be kept ‘in their place’.8 She frequently cited her care for women and children and her knowledge of ‘the working man’ as qualifications for the job. The former was a much more plausible claim than the latter, and her approach to labour politics often boiled down to trite appeals to the Victorian distinction between deserving and non-deserving poor. In one meeting she accused Mr Gay of representing the ‘shirking classes’, whereas she represented the ‘working classes’. Her concern for ‘women’s issues’ was more authentic. In a speech to a gathering of women at Palace Street School she announced: ‘Unless I cared tremendously about the things which affect the women and children of England I could not, I would not, want to go into the House of Commons. But I do care tremendously.’ Men, she continued, were ‘only grown-up boys. If men have failed us, it is our own fault. Women have a great parliamentary vision. And now they must go out and fight for it. Men think they have to help us; but it is a great mistake – it is really we who have to help them.’9 She may not, she often acknowledged, be an expert on economic theory, but her ‘practical knowledge’, ‘sound ideals’, and experience of motherhood more than made up for it. Most importantly, she never failed to draw attention to what her election would mean for womankind. Slogans included: ‘Make history and the first lady M.P.’, and ‘A woman for economy. A lady for Parliament. Astor for Plymouth.’
While this direct targeting of women was essential to Nancy’s campaign, she was also keen to emphasise the continuity with Waldorf’s term in Plymouth. One handbill carried that slogan ‘Astor once again’, while another quoted past election results, and predicted the future one: ‘Astor first in 1910. Astor first in 1918. Astor first in 1919.’ Nancy recognised the importance of the Astor name and made every effort to appear in public with Waldorf by her side. They braved the icy November weather to tour the constituency in a horse-drawn carriage, which was decorated with red, white and blue rosettes and driven by a local called Churchward. Decked out in her pearls, furs and white gloves, she blazed a trail through the bleakest parts of the city – the dockyards, gasworks, wharves and tenements. She visited wives, widows and children, stopped in at church bazaars, street gatherings and her opponents’ rallies, and turned up uninvited at birthday parties.10 Nancy’s bold and unconventional campaigning style delighted the press, who were fixated by this ‘peppy’ American and her crusade. She was fearless on the hustings, and did not hesitate to wag her finger at irksome hecklers and deliver her favourite admonition: ‘Now you just shut up!’
Nancy had a natural talent for campaigning, and was more comfortable talking to people in the street than she was at ‘serious-minded’ gatherings of middle-class constituents.
An election flyer from Nancy Astor’s 1919 campaign. The text begins by saying that Nancy ‘hesitated long before contenting to stand at the coming Electio
n’. It goes on to promise that ‘If you decide that Plymouth is once again to help making history by being the first English constituency with a woman member. I shall do all in my power to maintain the high traditions of the Borough, the ideas of my sex, and the credit of Parliament.’
Though a natural performer who relied on instincts, wit, quick thinking and confidence to carry her through, Nancy was ‘lamentably ignorant of everything she ought to know’ about politics.11 To disguise her lack of expertise, she became particularly adept at deflecting technical questions. The Daily Herald reported from one meeting that ‘there was in the audience one of those learned men of a statistical turn of mind and an insinuating politeness, who launched one question after another on income taxes and super taxes and suchlike awkward things.’ Nancy simply replied that she did not know. ‘I am not a paid politician,’ she cried, ‘therefore I can afford to speak the truth and declare straightforwardly I don’t know.’12 Phyllis, who was on hand to support her sister through the campaign, captured Nancy’s predicament. ‘The campaign seems to be going well, always overflowing meetings, but the Liberal opponent has hit Nancy’s weak spot when he asks her to state what she stands for, Tariff Reform, etc.’ she wrote in a letter to Bob Brand. ‘Last night Nannie… was not at her best, and there was a large gathering of middle-class serious-minded people out to hear facts, and facts are not her strong point.’13 Nancy found these ‘serious-minded’, middle-class hustings far more arduous than her visits to Plymouth’s working-class districts. At the gasworks, she mounted a lorry and addressed the employees during their lunch break; in the streets of the Barbican, she remonstrated with dissatisfied mothers and angry coal-heavers. ‘A woman,’ one constituent told her, ‘should be at home looking after her children.’ ‘Well, I want to help you look after yours,’ Nancy fired back.14 On the final day of campaigning, she spent 12 hours canvassing throughout the city. Tokens of goodwill, from teddy bears to laurel wreaths, were tossed into her carriage. Later on, she held her final rally, at which the prime minister’s wife, Margaret Lloyd George, spoke in her support.
The count took place on 28 November; Nancy received 51 per cent of the vote and was elected with a comfortable majority of 5,000.15 Plymouth reacted rapturously, and Nancy was paraded through the streets in a hired carriage pulled by her supporters. Afterwards she stood on the balcony of the Guildhall, smiling and waving, though visibly moved. The priorities of the newspapermen present left something to be desired. ‘They all wanted me to talk about what I was going to wear,’ Nancy wrote in her diary. ‘Especially in the matter of hats, but that was just newspaper foolishness.’16 The first she saw of Cliveden, as she returned there the evening of her victory, was the glow of celebratory bonfires. At the Fountain of Love, Nancy and Waldorf stepped into a Victorian carriage, and were pulled up to the entrance of the house by cheering staff.
On 1 December 1919 Nancy Astor, aged 40 years old, arrived in London with Waldorf to make her debut in the Commons. In reply to the newspapermen, she wore a simple black skirt suit with a white satin blouse, and a three-cornered velvet hat; ‘It is obvious that women MPs must dress in a business-like way,’ she wrote. But the question of clothes was not so easily dismissed: when she visited the new room for lady members, she found it full of boxes sent by milliners who ‘want me to accept a House of Commons hat from them’.17 She sent them all back. Her skirt suit, blouse and hat were to be her uniform for the next 25 years. Just before four o’clock, the Speaker summoned the country’s first female member, and Nancy, flanked by Arthur Balfour and the prime minister Lloyd George, bowed and stepped forward to take the oath of office. The chamber was filled to capacity. Phyllis and Nora looked on from the spectators’ gallery: their father Chillie had died of ‘paralysis’ a few months previously, missing the moment his daughter walked into the annals of history. Even at this most portentous moment of her life, Nancy could not resist her impulse to chat. She and Balfour were so engrossed in conversation that they did not notice the Speaker’s summons, and Lloyd George, who had inadvertently proceeded on his own, had to be pulled back. Later, in October 1943, Nancy described the event in a BBC documentary. ‘I was introduced by Mr Balfour and Mr Lloyd George, men who had always been in favour of votes for women. But when I walked up the aisle of the House of Commons I felt that they were more nervous than I was, for I was deeply conscious of representing a Cause, whereas I think they were a little nervous of having let down the House of Commons by escorting the Cause into it.’18 As Nancy sat down in her corner seat to watch her first debate, she did so not only as a Member of Parliament, but as a symbol of female power. Five hours later, when she left Charles Barry’s Gothic Palace of Westminster for his neo-Renaissance villa at Cliveden, Nancy must have been struck by the splendid peculiarity of her position – mistress of one great house and pioneer in another.
Nancy Astor doing some finger wagging during a 1919 campaign speech.
Nancy in her three-cornered hat and dress suit, which served as her uniform throughout her parliamentary career. ‘It is obvious that women MPs must dress in a business-like way,’ she wrote.
Chapter 6
‘A RATTLESNAKE IN THE HOUSE’
NANCY DELIVERED HER maiden speech in February 1920 on a subject close to her heart: the evils of alcohol. ‘I know that it was very difficult for some hon. Members to receive the first lady MP into the House,’ she began. ‘It was almost as difficult for some of them as it was for the lady MP herself to come in. Members, however, should not be frightened of what Plymouth sends out into the world.’1 She went on to argue that alcohol consumption posed a profound threat to the welfare of the community, and should be actively discouraged. Wartime alcohol regulation, Nancy explained, had brought ‘moral gains’: fewer convictions of drunkenness among women, fewer deaths from delirium tremens (a condition caused by withdrawal from alcohol), and fewer accidental deaths of children from smothering. ‘I am thinking of the women and children,’ she said. ‘I am not so tremendously excited about what you call the freedom of the men. The men will get their freedom. I do not want to rob them of anything that is good. I only want to ask them to consider others.’ She firmly believed that drink impaired not only the judgement of men, but also their ability to work productively. Thus, she argued, excess alcohol consumption and economic stagnation went hand in hand. She stopped short of advocating prohibition – ‘I am far too intelligent for that,’ she told the House. But she did ‘hope very much from the bottom of my heart’ that England would eventually become alcohol-free of its own accord, and predicted that it would. ‘I do not want you to look on your lady Member as a fanatic or a lunatic,’ she concluded. ‘I am simply trying to speak for hundreds of women and children throughout the country who cannot speak for themselves. I want to tell you that I do know the working man, and I know that, if you do not try to fool him, if you tell him the truth about drink, he would be as willing as anybody else to put up with so-called vexatious restrictions.’
Drink was an emotive subject for Nancy. She had experienced, all too painfully, its effects on both her father and first husband. Though Nancy’s prophesied prohibition never took place, the ban on under-18s buying alcohol did, and was one of her enduring legacies. Her 30-minute maiden speech, delivered in a studied English accent given away by only the occasional dropped G, was deemed a success. ‘Quite a good performance. Style rather “street corner” but delivery good, and points made well,’ was the reassuring verdict of the government whips. ‘Very few members could have done so well.’2
Despite this positive reception, Nancy’s first months as an MP were trying and humiliating. Even the services of her large army of privately paid staff, which included the prominent feminist writer and activist Ray Strachey as a part-time parliamentary secretary and adviser, could not shield her from the vicious onslaught of abuse from her colleagues.3 Nancy was forced to confront the reality of being the only woman in a parliament of over 600 men, many of whom would have preferred a ‘rattlesnake in th
e House’ to a female member.4 There was a tacit consensus among Tory MPs that Nancy had gone against the natural order of the establishment. Their aim was to marginalise, ostracise and discourage her, in the hope of deterring further candidates of her gender. Even politicians whom she had previously considered to be friends, her own brother-in-law John Astor included, turned their backs on her. Winston Churchill made it his personal mission to ritually insult Nancy, declaring that ‘I find a woman’s intrusion into the House of Commons as embarrassing as if she burst into my bathroom when I had nothing with which to defend myself, not even a sponge.’5 Other members resorted to childish tactics to embarrass her, often huddling together in a row to block her from reaching her seat, and sniggering at her ungainly attempts to squeeze past them, or conversing loudly in lewd language whenever she was in earshot.6
Nancy’s refusal or inability to grasp time-honoured rules of the House further incited her opponents. One of her earliest skirmishes occurred when she began sitting in the seat usually occupied by Sir William Joynson-Hicks, which was vacant due to his long trip to India. On his return, Hicks reclaimed his position, reserving it with his card, as was the custom. When Nancy arrived and found Joynson-Hicks’s card already in place, she replaced it with a pink card with her own name on it. Outraged by the contravention of etiquette, Joynson-Hicks made a speech listing his complaints, and concluded by tearing up Nancy’s card and throwing it to pieces on the floor.7 Even for someone as resilient as Nancy, these bullying tactics caused ‘unbearable strain’ and she often returned home on the verge of tears. Her parliamentary uniform, chosen for its businesslike quality, now came into its own. ‘Often my knees were shaking so I was glad that women wore skirts,’ she wrote.8 Her only comfort in these bleak, solitary days was the milestone she had reached on behalf of her own sex. ‘I had to do what the women wanted me to do,’ she sighed. ‘I just had to sit there.’9 Important words of encouragement came from Millicent Fawcett, who had recently retired as the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. In July 1920, Nancy wrote to Fawcett asking her to ‘please always tell me when you think I am doing wrong.’ Fawcett replied that Nancy was doing exactly as she had hoped. Later, Nancy would look back on the day she received this reply as ‘the proudest moment of my life’.10
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 36
