In April 1920 Nancy faced her toughest challenge yet, following her contribution to the debate on a new divorce bill. Lord Buckmaster, the former Lord Chancellor, had introduced a bill into the House of Lords proposing that additional factors, such as adultery, cruelty, habitual drunkenness, incurable insanity and imprisonment for life, be considered as a valid grounds for divorce. After passing in the Lords, the bill was introduced into the Commons for its second reading. Nancy, apparently forgetting that she herself was a divorcee, strongly objected to the bill, citing the effects of divorce on children and its destructive impact on the family. Her speech was subjected to excoriating attacks from press and public alike. Outraged, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the president of the Divorce Law Reform Union, declared: ‘I have read Lady Astor’s speech and I am shocked by it’, and a Labour Party women’s conference resolved that Nancy had no right to represent all women on this subject.11 Lady Astor was on dangerous ground. Like the Duchess of Sutherland with her well-intentioned pronouncements on slavery, she had exposed herself to charges of hypocrisy.
While Harriet’s nemesis arrived in the forbidding form of Karl Marx, Nancy’s took the rather less memorable form of Horatio Bottomley, self-confessed misogynist and editor of the Westminster gossip rag John Bull. Ever since Nancy had spoken out against his pet project, the Victory Bonds scheme, Bottomley had been looking for an opportunity to torpedo her career. Now, investigating the circumstances of Nancy’s first marriage, Bottomley found two incriminating items: first, a mistake in Waldorf’s Debrett’s entry, claiming that Nancy was the widow of Robert Gould Shaw; second, a report from the New York Herald of 1903, which suggested that Nancy and Robert Shaw had sanctioned illegal actions relating to their divorce.12 Bottomley published his finds in John Bull, and advertised the story with street posters proclaiming ‘Lady Astor’s Divorce’. As in many times of personal hardship, Nancy sought solace in the Bible, reading her favourite passages time and again to soothe her shattered nerves.
Nancy gradually developed a thicker skin and toughened up to the daily barrage of abuse, developing her own coping strategies to counter the antagonism. Attack was the best form of defence. Nancy’s style was that of a ‘fighting woman’, heckling her critics, muttering a voluble running commentary on speeches she did not agree with, interrupting continuously. A newspaper account of a typical day described how Nancy had interrupted fifteen speeches. She even fired off insults at other members when it was her turn to speak. Although her feisty stance was becoming, as she put it, ‘a nuisance’ to some members, and sometimes resulted in her making rash or ill-considered comments, it was a vital asset in confronting the misogyny of the House.13 ‘I really do believe it needed someone with just my qualities to be the first woman in parliament,’ she reflected. ‘It had to be someone who didn’t give a damn what they thought or said; and strong, and all that vitality; and rich too, why it cost thousands.’14
Her belligerent manner was also extraordinarily effective for her causes, which she pursued with dogged determination. Nancy became the champion of women and children, demanding reforms in healthcare, housing, childcare and education, as well as agitating for greater opportunities for women in the workforce. ‘I knew I had to represent women,’ she later wrote. ‘Men have ruled the world for 2,000 years, and why in heavens name they took upon them to think that the Christ’s message was for men I do not know… As I told the Archbishop the other day, when you get to heaven God’s not going to ask whether you put on skirts or pants.’15 Nancy made it her mission to bring a plethora of concerns to the attention of the House: from the improved treatment of women in prison to the supply of milk to the poor; from the protection of the young from indecent assault to the need for nursery schools; from the abolition of the death penalty for pregnant women to the importance of slum clearance. She spoke out in favour of a government bill to introduce juvenile courts, and called for more female appointments to the Civil Service. Nancy’s ‘fight’ in Parliament did much to bolster the women’s movement, not only in terms of work and welfare, but also organisationally: in 1921, she established the Consultative Committee of Women’s Organisations, an outreach organisation which linked MPs with women’s organisations. By the end of 1921, there were more than 60 groups operating under the umbrella of the Committee.
On 22 September 1921, a second woman, Margaret Wintringham, was finally elected to the Commons. Like Nancy she became the representative of a parliamentary seat formerly occupied by her husband. Mr Wintringham, an Asquithian Liberal and MP for Louth, had died of a heart attack in the library of the House of Commons.16 Although Wintringham’s election marked a Conservative defeat, Nancy sent a telegram of congratulation, which was published in the press: ‘Rejoicing over your victory. Shall welcome you in the House of Commons.’17 This was typical of Nancy’s attitude towards other women MPs: she saw them as allies, even if they were technically representing different parties. Following her election, Wintringham confided in Nancy her anxieties about embarking on a career in Parliament. ‘Never has an MP taken up duties feeling so unsuitably equipped in every way as I do,’ she wrote. ‘It petrifies me to think what I’m in for, and it will be a tremendous thing if you will “stand by” me… I shall be proud to help you even in the smallest way in carrying out the reforms we both so much want.’18
Nancy kept on fighting through the 1920s, winning four elections in the course of the decade. The fluctuations in her support mirrored nationwide trends: in the 1923 election that brought the first Labour government to power under Ramsay MacDonald, her majority fell to 2,500, a result that prompted her to lash out at Conservative intransigence on social reform: ‘they are as stupid as owls,’ she wrote.19 In the 1924 Tory landslide that followed the Labour government’s collapse, her majority increased to 5,000, and in the Labour victory of 1929 she held onto her seat by only 200 votes. The same year, Nancy was joined by 14 women MPs, most of whom were Labour, and promptly invited them all to lunch to discuss the possibility of forming a ‘women’s party’. The bond that women shared, Nancy believed, was stronger and more enduring than any ideological divisions. In the light of the patent political differences between herself and many of the other female MPs, Nancy’s hopes of a women’s party looked somewhat naive. But it is possible that she saw strength in the variety of their opinions. She had, after all, spent a few lonely years in the House. ‘As one woman,’ she later wrote, ‘it was hopeless to try and express what women thought on all the complex matters in public affairs, and I began to feel impatient for the arrival of women of every shade of political thought in the House of Commons.’20
Tea at Cliveden on 31 December 1942.
Chapter 7
THE DOMESTIC DESPOT
THE ENERGY THAT Nancy poured into her parliamentary causes, among which children’s welfare was foremost, was energy that she ultimately failed to devote to her own children. At the end of 1924, Bobbie Shaw was 26; Bill, 17; Wisse, 15; David, 12; Michael, 8; and Jakie, 6. Even if Nancy was not quite as ‘saintly’ as her own mother during her children’s early years, she was a loving and committed parent, entertaining them with fantastical anecdotes, southern American songs and popular impressions of her more pompous friends. ‘With children she was in her element,’ wrote Michael Astor. ‘Her idea was to make it laugh. She scored success after success… This was her age group: the very young and the wholly unselfconscious.’1 In her most ebullient moods, Nancy behaved with her own brand of childish irreverence. She was certainly the first mistress of Cliveden who is on record as having performed cartwheels in the hall. But there was also Nancy the prude and proselyte, the mother who insisted on her children starting every day with a session of Bible reading, after which she immersed herself in an icy bath.
In her early years of marriage, her role as a hostess had, when it was political at all, been auxiliary to Waldorf’s job as an MP, but after being elected, she began to harness social events to her own causes. The smoking rooms and watering holes in and around the Palac
e of Westminster, important sites for informal politics, remained aggressively male territories long after the election of female MPs. Upper-class dinner hosting on the other hand was a predominantly female game. Nancy might not have been able to turn up at the smoking room, but she could make the smoking room turn up at St James’s Square, and Cliveden. ‘I was a terrific hostess in my day,’ she later recalled, ‘do you realise that, that’s the thing I’m best at.’ Nancy’s parties were never frivolous. ‘I never entertained without an object,’ she said. ‘I used to say to people I’ve got you here for a purpose, you see. Getting things done.’2
Nor did she discriminate, as many of the influential socialites of the day would have done, along party lines. When the first Labour government was elected in 1923, she invited not only the leading ministers from the administration, but also King George V and Queen Mary. The monarch hesitantly accepted the invitation, and on 9 March 1924, the king and queen dined at 4 St James’s Square in the company of socialists – not to mention republicans. As ever, Nancy made great play of her Virginian heritage as an inspiration to her ‘classless’ ideals of hospitality: ‘And therefore I can judge that it may be useful, as well as agreeable all round, for me to entertain dukes and even royal personages and members of the Labour Party on the same occasions,’ she wrote. ‘I know that they really like that sort of thing, forms and customs notwithstanding, and that it makes easier that expression of mental and political liberty which is one of the best things in England. And so, coming as I do from Virginia, I invite them all, and everything is well.’3
During the bitter, protracted labour disputes that followed the 1926 General Strike in the mining valleys of South Wales, Nancy and Waldorf managed to convene Welsh employers and trade-union leaders at Cliveden, with the intention of promoting a reconciliation. It was a typical expression of Nancy’s belief that when ‘opposing elements … meet each other, they generally make friends, and when they make friends they can find some of the solutions to their problems.’4 They were the words of someone who had no time for materialist interpretations of history: in reply to those – including many of her closest friends, such as George Bernard Shaw and the Irish communist playwright Sean O’Casey – who saw protracted class conflict as an inevitable part of history working itself out, Nancy proposed that such conflict had arisen only from some kind of misunderstanding, from people not talking to each other. By assuming this role of arbiter in conflicts such as the miners’ strike, Nancy was also implementing her notion that big property owners had a sort of paternalistic and quasi-magisterial responsibility for the working poor, an idea redolent of the Virginian culture in which she was raised. In this sense, Cliveden during the 1920s took on something of Mirador, and of the ‘Big House’ of the Old South.
An example of the Astors’ eclectic entertaining: Nancy with George Bernard Shaw (right), Amy Johnson (left) and Charlie Chaplin (second left). During their trip to Russia in 1931, Nancy was charged by Shaw’s wife with keeping his beard in order.
Nancy on a motorbike in front of Cliveden. On more than one occasion she rode pillion to her friend T. E. Lawrence, who later died in a motorbike crash.
As Nancy’s children reached adolescence, the irascible and intolerant character of her father, Chillie Langhorne, came increasingly to govern her disposition. ‘She became critical, sarcastic, and at times downright hurtful,’ Edwin Lee observed.5 The reason for the deterioration in Nancy’s parenting skills was partly, as Michael Astor explained, to do with her ideal audience. ‘With anything in between the age of innocence and a fully matured creature her performance often misfired,’ he wrote.6 Her intolerance of backchat did not sit well when pitched against the critical independence of young adults, and nor did her various fundamentalist views on drink, religion and sex. ‘I don’t like grown children,’ she later admitted in a BBC Radio interview. ‘I like children. It’s quite a different thing when they grow up.’7
There were many occasions on which the children suffered from Nancy’s swift and bewildering changes of mood. Harold Nicolson, one of the many critics of Nancy’s mothering technique, described her as bringing up her children with ‘stupidity’, and David Astor later wrote that his three eldest siblings were ‘shockingly treated’ by their unpredictable mother, whose occasional expressions of kindness were punctuated with bouts of vindictiveness. Even when she was not in her most vitriolic moods, Nancy’s conversation was barbed, and her own thick skin, which had been thickened further by years in the Commons, meant she failed to consider the damage that an insult or a put-down could wreak.
Opposition to Nancy’s despotic domestic regime came from an unexpected source – her lady’s maid Rose Harrison. Rose had originally been employed at Cliveden in the late 1920s as Wissie’s maid, but it wasn’t long before Nancy poached her. Nancy’s acerbic nature had earned her the reputation of someone ‘who couldn’t keep a maid’. All of Rose’s predecessors, floored by Nancy’s capricious outbursts and cruel impersonations, had either handed in their notice or been dismissed. But Rose was different: after a period of being told regularly to ‘shut up’, she decided to stand her ground, calmly telling her mistress: ‘My lady, from now on I intend to speak as I’m spoken to.’8 She kept her word. Her straight-talking, no-nonsense Yorkshire temperament struck a chord with Nancy, and the two women went on to develop a remarkable mutual respect. The sheer ferocity of their exchanges baffled other members of the Astor family and Cliveden staff alike. Rose stayed in Nancy’s service for 35 years, acting as stylist, hairdresser, seamstress, therapist and custodian of her vast jewellery collection – not to mention antagonist. Nancy often gave Rose items of jewellery and eventually bought her a large house on the Sussex coast. Rose, for her part, dedicated her life to Nancy, often working an 18-hour day, 7 days a week, and refusing even to take a holiday.
Despite her abiding loyalty, Rose was disapproving of Nancy’s parenting style. Only Bobbie, who still occupied a sacred place in Nancy’s affections, was spared her sadistic tirades. Bobbie possessed a rare ability to meet his mother on the gruesome battlefield of insult and counter-insult, and as a result became something of an idol to the Astor children. Nancy’s affinity to Bobbie stood in stark relief to her feelings for Bill. ‘Mr Billy was frightened of her, he would turn white when she came in the room,’ Rose recalled. On one occasion, ‘Mr Billy turned round to me and he said, “You know Rose I’ve never had my mother’s love.” I said, “Don’t you talk so silly”… I knew it was the truth. She couldn’t. I don’t think she ever took them in her arms and held them, kissed them or gave them any affection.’9
For the only Astor girl, Wissie – highly strung and insecure – it was always going to be hard to endure Nancy’s brittle nature and withering put-downs. Nancy consistently undermined Wissie’s confidence. Since their childhood in Virginia, the Langhorne sisters had been in the habit of sharing clothes with each other. In adulthood, their passion for new clothes, and Nora’s in particular, was satisfied by Nancy through both monetary and sartorial loans – Nora’s daughter Joyce remembered suitcases full of designer dresses arriving at her mother’s flat in Chelsea. In this context, the apparently small matter of Nancy refusing to loan a pearl necklace had a devastating effect on Wissie’s fragile ego. Rose Harrison interceded on Wissie’s behalf and Nancy eventually handed over the necklace, though not before substantial harm had been done. For a brief moment in the late twenties Wissie’s relationship with her mother showed some signs of improvement. ‘Darling Mummie I know now exactly what I want for my birthday!’ she wrote in 1928. ‘In Truslove the Bookshop there is the most perfect set of Thackeray’s works which I pine to collect. I have bought Queen Victoria’s letters, which I believe are good.’10 By the autumn of 1929, Nancy, who was not a very enthusiastic reader herself, had found a way of responding to her daughter’s interests. ‘O how kind of Bernard Shaw to give me his books. I am jibbering with excitement and pining to see them,’ Wissie raved in a letter of thanks to her mother, who had clear
ly asked her close friend for the favour. Nancy even managed to find a kind word or two to say about her daughter. In a letter to Bill of 21 October 1929, she wrote: ‘Mrs Strachey thinks she has got a job for Wissie. She wants her to learn library work. There are courses for it I think at Queen’s. It will be interesting, and also she would be able to help collect libraries for people in distant parts later on. She looks much better, fitter and spryer.’11
Wissie’s ‘fitness and spryness’ was not to last. On 12 December 1929, while hunting in Kelmarsh, Leicestershire, she suffered a nasty fall. Though the accident did not leave her in pain, and there was not any obvious damage, her hosts in Kelmarsh advised her to see a specialist, and called a Dr Whitling, who was experienced in treating hunting injuries. Whitling arrived from London with his portable X-ray machine, while Nancy hurried from Cliveden with a Christian Science practitioner. Whitling informed Nancy that her daughter’s condition was serious, and that further treatment was urgently needed in order to prevent permanent damage. Wissie’s injury posed an urgent challenge to Nancy’s faith in the CS doctrine, which held that all bodily injuries were in some way chimerical, and could only be healed by divine intervention. Her solution to the dilemma was somewhat bizarre. After some manic floor-pacing and furious deliberation, Nancy conceded that Wissie could see a doctor, but insisted that it could only be Sir Thomas Crisp English, the abdominal surgeon who had treated her at Rest Harrow immediately before her conversion to CS. When Dr English arrived at midnight he ‘flew into a rage’, insisting that he ‘knew nothing about spines’.12 Eventually Nancy called an orthopaedic surgeon, but her prevarication meant that Wissie received treatment much later than she ought to have done. As a result, she was plagued by back pain for the rest of her life, a complaint for which she blamed her mother’s fanaticism.13 Nancy’s response to Wissie’s injury appalled her family. Previously, they had characterised her devotion to Christian Science as somewhat comical and eccentric: in 1924 Bob Brand had written to Phyllis describing the idea of sending David to a CS prep school as ‘mad’ and narrating a story about a young pupil of Christian Science vomiting all over Science and Health as they sat on deck trying to conquer their seasickness with faith.14 ‘V. amusing letter’, Phyllis had written on the envelope. After Wissie’s fall, the unfunny side of the doctrine was strikingly clear.
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