Wissie’s accident did not deter Nancy from her own thrill-seeking and sometimes dangerous antics. Out of fear for her safety, Waldorf had banned her from hunting shortly after their marriage, but he was powerless to stop an impromptu pillion ride or two on the motorbike of T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence, who had achieved great fame as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ for his role in the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule during the First World War, was in the early 1930s living in the UK pseudonymously as ‘Aircraftman Shaw’. During one visit to Cliveden he and Nancy were talking conspiratorially when ‘suddenly both of them got up, rushed outside, jumped on his bike, her riding on the pillion, and drove off at top speed in a cloud of dust down the drive.’ ‘They were only away for a few minutes,’ Rose recalled, ‘but it seemed an eternity, and his lordship was beside himself with worry and embarrassment.’ Nancy and Lawrence returned even faster than they had set out, coming to a halt in a skid across the gravel. ‘We did a hundred miles an hour!’ Nancy boasted, as she dismounted from Lawrence’s Brough Superior SS100. She was not greeted with the enthusiasm she had expected. Enraged, Waldorf stalked off. It would not deter Nancy from future adventures. ‘There was always a next time,’ Rose wrote, ‘and we knew there would be.’15
While Waldorf’s ‘embarrassment’ says something about his careful, puritanical disposition, his ‘worry’ would have been shared by anyone. T. E. Lawrence was in the habit of riding his motorbike at terrifying speeds around the lanes near his Dorset home, and Nancy was not the sort to ask anyone to slow down. In the course of her own driving career she had several near misses, including one right by Parliament, in which she narrowly avoided ploughing through a marching band. Shortly after his joyride with Nancy, a similar ‘near miss’ would have fatal consequences for Lawrence: on 13 May 1935, he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles on a country lane not far from his cottage in Cloud Hill, near Wareham. He was thrown over the handlebars of his bike and died in hospital six days later. Nancy had not even heard of his injury when Mr Lee brought her the news of Lawrence’s death. She was entertaining at the time, and needed help leaving the room.16 His funeral was a rare occasion for authentic solidarity between Nancy and Winston Churchill: ‘As Mr Churchill was leaving afterwards she ran to him and caught hold of his hand, and they stood in silent understanding with tears falling from their eyes.’ Lawrence’s death was a key influence in the widespread adoption – and, later, the mandatory use – of motorcycle helmets: among the doctors who treated him was the young neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns, who was moved by the tragedy to research avoidable head injuries and deaths that could be prevented by head protection.
In the 1950s, the writer Richard Aldington would publish Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Inquiry, in which he made several controversial claims, one of which was that Lawrence had been gay. Writing ten years after the publication of Aldington’s book, Rose Harrison said that ‘her ladyship always treasured Mr Lawrence’s memory, even after Richard Adlington besmirched him in his book. I didn’t read it, but I’m told it was the truth. Even so, her ladyship refused to believe anything bad of him.’17 Homosexuality definitely was, in Nancy’s eyes, something ‘bad’ that she should ‘refuse to believe’ about a friend. In the late twenties and early thirties, this widely held prejudice would be tested in her precious relationship with her eldest son, the charming and irreverent Bobbie Shaw.
Chapter 8
CONVICTIONS
IN JUNE 1929, Bobbie was reported drunk on duty, and decided to resign his commission from the Life Guards, the most senior regiment of the British army, rather than face a court martial. Given his mother’s views on alcohol, this was embarrassing enough for Bobbie, but in fact the ‘drunk on duty’ version of events was a cover story concocted by Bobbie’s commanding officer to disguise a larger taboo – a homosexual act with another officer. Nancy and Waldorf believed the commanding officer’s account, and in the months following Bobbie’s dismissal Nancy’s main complaint against her son was that he spent all his time in cinemas and visiting friends, and had shown no inclination to get a new job. But Bobbie’s situation was far more desperate than Nancy, in the remoteness of her disapprobation, could conceive of. His friendships and identity had all been tied up in his army life, and now, forced out of uniform, he began to drink heavily and have increasingly careless sexual encounters, picking up partners in familiar pubs near his old barracks in London.
It was not long before Nancy’s illusions about her eldest son were shattered. After his resignation from the Guards, Bobby was cautioned twice for propositioning guardsmen, and in July 1931, was warned by the police that he was going to be arrested for a homosexual offence. The idea behind the tip-off was that Bobbie would have a chance to leave the country; in most cases of this sort, the charges were dropped after a year or so, and it was possible to return. Self-imposed exile was the option chosen by many of those persecuted under the laws against gay sex. Bobbie decided he would rather face the prison sentence, and remained in London, at Brown’s Hotel, waiting to be arrested. Nancy was informed of Bobbie’s situation on a Monday night in July after returning from church. Unable to master her emotions, she wept openly and uncontrollably. Just before his arrest, Bobbie wrote his mother a heart-rending note, expressing a sense of relief at longer having to conceal his struggle. In language redolent of the mentality of the time, he described his sexuality as ‘a horrible disease’, ‘a tyranny’, and ‘what I have been up against’.1
Responses from family and friends often adopted a similar, medicalised terminology and, when they were supportive, attempted to offer advice to Bobbie in the struggle against his ‘condition’. Bobbie’s predicament fell easy prey to the paradigm of Christian Science, as Philip Kerr made clear in a letter to Nancy: ‘It [jail] is really exactly what we have all known he needs – a period when he will have to work & be kept from idleness and false pleasures. It’s just the charm of sensuality destroying itself. From the Science point of view it is a blessing for him & but preparation for healing. Scientifically you can rejoice in it.’2 George Bernard Shaw’s advice was rather more measured and enlightened: ‘In this matter Mrs Eddy, bless her, is no use. The Bible, with its rubbish about Lot’s wife, is positively dangerous’ – in Genesis, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt after she looks back at the city of Sodom while fleeing: the gesture of looking back had generally been taken as a sign that she regretted leaving the sinful city. ‘A man may suffer acutely and lose his self respect very dangerously if he mistakes for a frightful delinquency on his part a condition for which he is no more morally responsible than for colour blindness.’3
The trial took place at Vine Street Magistrates’ Court and lasted several hours; Bobbie was sentenced to four months in prison at Wormwood Scrubs. Nancy sobbed unremittingly throughout the hearing, traumatised by the sordid revelations. It was, however, her concern for Bobbie, not fears about personal defamation, that tortured her most during this darkest time. In fact, thanks to the Astors’ far-reaching influence – Waldorf’s ownership of the Observer, his brother John’s controlling interests in The Times, and the Astors’ familiarity with Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Express Group – the press was effectively muzzled, and nobody’s reputation was put widely at risk.
The day after Bobbie’s conviction, Nancy was due to visit Russia with George Bernard Shaw, and whether to distract herself from the situation in England or simply because she had been looking forward to it, she insisted that she would still be making the trip. Shaw was famous internationally as an evangelist for socialism, and had been invited to Russia several times previously, but had always declined on the grounds that people were expecting too much of the Soviet state too soon. It was apparently Nancy’s enthusiasm, rather than a change in his own feelings about the burden of expectation on the revolutionary project, that convinced Shaw to accept an invitation to Moscow in the summer of 1931. At 75, he was probably not going to get another chance to visit. Nancy would be a roistering companion: the two regularly clashed
on the question of communism. George thought Nancy was incapable of maintaining a train of thought for longer than 60 seconds (he believed she had the potential to become a brilliant thinker if only she could focus); Nancy thought Shaw was in deep denial about the true conditions experienced by Russians under communist rule. There was some truth in both criticisms.
Shaw’s hosts allowed him to bring a small group with him to Moscow, and in the end this included not only Nancy, Waldorf and their son David, but also Philip Kerr, a Christian Science friend called Charles Tennant, and Maurice Hindus, an expert on Soviet Russia. It was an outrageous gaggle to bring in tow: there were a handful of aristocratic titles, there was landed wealth, there were millionaires, there was religious faddism. And probably that was Shaw’s intention: despite his admiration for Russian socialism, he conducted himself there, as elsewhere, with a mischievousness that knew no ideological bounds. Mrs Shaw did not make the journey, and in her absence it fell to Nancy to make sure George took care of his beard. She did this by washing it herself in Shaw’s en-suite at the Hotel Metropole.4
Despite suffering intermittent panic attacks and an inner sense of despair that she had not experienced since her conversion to Christian Science, Nancy displayed stoic determination throughout the two-week expedition. She visited the Kremlin and shook hands with a ‘neatly dressed’ Stalin, and in the subsequent two-hour meeting grilled the Soviet leader on his questionable methods of quashing political opposition. According to an account by Waldorf, Stalin was charmed by the forthright Lady Astor and amused by her feistiness. When Nancy asked him how long he would continue to employ Tsarist methods of oppression, Stalin replied, ‘Only so long as may be necessary in the interest of the State.’ The dictator, wrote Waldorf, ‘had quite a sense of humour.’5
A Professor Krynin at Yale University had written to Nancy and Shaw at the beginning of their trip begging for help to extricate his family from Russia. Some years previously, he had left Russia, and like all who failed to obey official summons to come back, was under sentence of death. His wife and children were trapped in Moscow and desperate to join him in America. Krynin believed that a request from high-profile figures such as Nancy and George Bernard Shaw might help his case. Nancy, hoping that publicity would force the hand of the Russian authorities, wasted no time in taking up the cause of the Krynin family. During a drinks party, she assailed Maxim Litvinov, the commissar for foreign affairs, and presented him with Krynin’s telegram. The story made headlines for three consecutive days in America. Embarrassed by the media onslaught, the Soviet government placated Nancy, claiming it had no desire to keep a wife and children from their husband and father. On subsequent investigation, the journalist Eugene Lyons found Nancy’s spirited intervention had landed the family in some secret exile, where they would never attract bad publicity for the government again.6
Two years later, Waldorf was asked to head a Christian Science delegation to Germany, where adherents of the religion had been accused – rather improbably – of distributing Marxist propaganda. In September 1933, the delegates flew to Berlin and met the minister of the interior, William Frick, who assured them that Christian Scientists would not be harassed so long as they kept away from politics. Before his return to England, Waldorf was offered a meeting with Hitler. The pair spoke for 20 minutes, in which time the Führer managed to convince Waldorf that ‘CS’ had nothing to fear from Nazism. From 1931 onwards, Bob Brand was also in Berlin for long periods of time, working for Lazards as part of an international effort to save the German banking system. Neither Bob nor his colleague J. M. Keynes had become any more optimistic about the consequences of the Paris peace terms since the latter had proclaimed in 1919 that the vindictive peace was bound to start a new and terrible European conflagration.
The news Bob received from Phyllis was no more comforting than events in Berlin. Over in New York, David ‘Winkie’ Brooks, Phyllis’s son from her first marriage, had developed a reputation for being a ‘lady-killer and man about town’, who was incapable of holding down a job. After a string of high-profile romances, in 1936 he married Adelaide Moffatt, who had achieved young fame by flouting the expectations of her oil-tycoon father to become a nightclub singer. The two married in a room at the Hotel Pierre and had a cake sent up by room service; Phyllis and the rest of the family only found out retrospectively. But there was worse news to come. In November that year, after a dance at the Hotel Pierre in New York, Winkie and Adelaide returned to their suite at the Mayfair Hotel. Adelaide went to the bedroom to take off her coat and returned to the sitting room to find no trace of her husband, only the sight of a gaping window. She rushed down in the elevator and found Winkie’s body on the pavement; he had been killed instantly on impact. It later transpired that Adelaide’s father had sent Winkie a shovel in the post: a jibe at his failure to get a job that would support them both.7
Winkie’s death destroyed Phyllis, who saw it as a reflection on her own parental failings. She spent Christmas at Cliveden with Nancy and the extended family, her behaviour alternating – according to Nora’s daughter Joyce – between composure and paroxysms of grief. Soon after leaving Cliveden to return to Eydon Hall in Northamptonshire – which the Brands had bought in 1929 – Phyllis caught flu. After a few days it appeared that she was recovering, but at the end of the first week of January, following a hunt in particularly cold, wet weather, her condition worsened. Thankfully Bob was in London at the time, not Germany. He received a call at 4.30 in the morning, informing him that Phyllis had contracted pneumonia. Bob hurried up to Eydon. Nancy arrived shortly after with Rose Harrison and a Christian Science practitioner in tow. The Brands, however, opted for conventional doctors. Bob recounted Phyllis’s last days with moving clarity. ‘She said to me “Bob do you think I’m going to pass away?” I said “Of course not.” But she knew the danger… And then she became delirious and it was too late… I never said what I wanted.’8 Phyllis died shortly before dawn on Sunday 17 January 1937. Nancy and Bob were by her bedside in her final moments. Nancy had lost her ‘soul mate’.
The chasm between their religious outlooks prevented Bob and Nancy, the two people to whom Phyllis was closest, from offering each other the support they both craved in their bereavement. While Bob entered into a period of deep and depressive searching for a spiritual doctrine he could actually believe in, Nancy grieved with a combination of religious zeal and extrovert despair, ‘crying and screaming and praying’. ‘I went to her and hugged her,’ Rose recalled. ‘It was the only time I’d ever done that and I said “Now stop this my Lady, nothing on earth will bring Mrs Brand back. For goodness sake stop yelling and screaming.” And she did. She did.’9
Bob Brand’s depression following Phyllis’s death was only exacerbated by his trips to Germany, where he began to get a clear and terrifying perspective on the brutality of the Nazi regime. One night in 1937, Bob took his seat at a concert at the Esplanade Hotel in Berlin where he was staying with some colleagues from Lazards. ‘When we got in, to my surprise I saw within 20 feet of me in a box only just raised above floor level, Hitler, Goering and his wife, Goebbels and his wife, Blomberg and one or two more. I said to my young friend. “If I had a hand grenade I could get them all.” I have often thought, “Would I, if I had had a grenade have thrown it?”’ Soon after the concert, when he was back at Cliveden, Brand told David Astor that he regretted not having acted on his thoughts. ‘He said a thing I’ve never heard anybody else say: “There’s only one reason why I don’t try to assassinate Hitler and why you and other people don’t, and that’s vanity. We have this ludicrous belief that there’s something more valuable that we can do than give our lives in that effort but there’s nothing more important.’”10
Chapter 9
THE CLIVEDEN SET UP
ON 24 OCTOBER 1937, Nancy hosted a lunch at Cliveden that would come to transform her own reputation and that of the house. Among the guests were the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and his wife; Sir Nevile Henderson, the
newly appointed British ambassador to Berlin; Alec Cadogan, soon to take over as permanent under-secretary to the Foreign Office; Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times; Bob Brand and Philip Kerr. The prevailing topic of conversation, as was so often the case at Nancy’s Cliveden, was politics.
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