In May 1937, Neville Chamberlain had taken over as prime minister from Stanley Baldwin; Eden and Chamberlain agreed that Britain should pursue a strategy of appeasement – responding to Hitler’s expansionist programme with negotiation rather than military force. The Astors had been instrumental in supporting and developing the policy of appeasement. In June 1935, just two weeks after Germany had remilitarised the Rhineland, Nancy hosted a party at her London home attended by the German, American and Russian ambassadors. After dinner, she encouraged everyone to partake in a game of musical chairs. ‘Some of the older ones stood by thinking, no doubt, that the English are mad, quite mad,’ recalled her niece Joyce Grenfell. ‘But they smiled benignly and were amused.’ After the jovialities, more serious ‘group conversations’ took place.1 The German ambassador, von Hoesch, was among the amused onlookers. If at this early meeting the Nazi representative can be discounted as just one of many at what was, by all accounts, an ecumenical gathering, the same cannot be said of the Astors’ next contact with a Nazi diplomat, which took place a year later, in June 1936. Von Hoesch had died soon after the St James’s party, and was succeeded in the post by von Ribbentrop, whose ambition was to broker a meeting between Hitler and Baldwin. To this end, he arranged several meetings with cabinet figures, first in Berlin with Thomas Jones, Baldwin’s deputy secretary to the cabinet, and then – with Jones’s help – in England, with Sir Thomas Inskip, the new minister for the coordination of defence.
The meeting took place at the Astors’ house Rest Harrow in Sandwich, with Nancy Astor and Philip Kerr present. Waldorf was in Geneva on political business. At 5.10 on the afternoon of 2 June 1936, von Ribbentrop collected Jones from Tufton Court, a mansion block in Westminster, and drove him in a silver Mercedes-Benz to Sandwich, where they were met by Nancy, Philip Kerr and Thomas Inskip. After dinner they plunged into debate, with von Ribbentrop stressing the importance of collaboration between England and Germany. Together the two countries would form a new centre of European power around which the smaller states on the Continent would crystallise. He hinted that Germany was already receiving secret advances from some of these small states, and confirmed that a number of English trade unions were paying a private visit to Germany at that very moment. In return, Inskip expressed concerns about the persecution of the church in Germany, and Jones insisted that there was strong support for the League of Nations in Britain. The party ‘talked till nearly midnight’ and when the others had gone to bed, Philip Kerr and Jones retired to Waldorf’s study to continue talks with von Ribbentrop until 12.45.2
The atmosphere the following morning was light-hearted, with Nancy teasing the German ambassador over breakfast about the ‘bad company’ he kept in England, namely her rival hostesses Lady Londonderry and Lady Cunard. Jones and von Ribbentrop then took a tour of the Roman fort at Richborough – where a rather over-enthusiastic retired marine acted as their guide – before returning to London for a meeting with Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times.3 While these meetings were covert, they were not kept secret from those in power. Stanley Baldwin was informed of the Sandwich discussions, and in a meeting with Thomas Jones several days later, said that he was in favour of meeting Hitler, and was prepared to go to Berlin to do it. The meeting, however, never took place.
The spirit of appeasement pervaded Nancy’s Cliveden weekend of October 1937. There was a consensus among her guests sitting down to lunch on that blustery Sunday that Hitler could be handled, talked down, reasoned with. Compromise and concession, they believed, were a more palatable alternative to conflict, and nobody wished for another conflagration on the scale of the Great War. Nevile Henderson later wrote that his appointment to Berlin could ‘only mean that I had been specially selected by Providence for the definite mission of, as I trusted, helping to preserve the peace of the world’.4 Meanwhile, Phillip Kerr, driven in part by his own sense of guilt, was convinced that every act of German antagonism could be traced back to the injustice of the Versailles Treaty. Kerr defended the policy of appeasement with vigorous perseverance, in the hope that leniency on Germany would, in some way, grant him absolution. Of all the guests, only Bob Brand was sceptical of appeasement. His visits to Berlin in the mid-1930s had given him an ominous insight into the nature of the Nazi regime and he believed that Britain would ultimately have to ‘defend herself from Hitler.
The next month, the International Hunting Exhibition was held in Berlin. Just as the Nazis had used the 1936 Munich Olympics to promote their racial ideology, so, under the direction of the Reichsjägermeister Hermann Goering, they would use the International Hunting Exhibition as a platform for various historical fantasies that informed the National Socialist project. There were medieval hunting horns and swords, a whole stuffed bison, and commemorative plates and medals that merged the iconography of Nazism with references to the mythological past of the Nibelungenlied. Among the attendees at the exhibition was Lutz Heck, who had been working on a programme to breed back the European auroch – a type of large wild cattle, extinct since the 17th century – so that Goering could reintroduce it to the Bialowieza Forest in Poland, and hunt it there. Also in attendance, looking rather out of place with his bowler hat, rangy figure and polka-dot tie, was Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary. A British Pathé newsreel shows him strolling through galleries full of hunting trophies, and paying particular attention to the head of a deer shot by the wife of George VI, before giving a brief speech about how much he had enjoyed himself.
But Halifax’s visit was more than just a junket: both the British and Nazi governments intended to use it for diplomatic negotiations. After seeing the exhibition and going hunting with Goering, Halifax was escorted to Berlin, and then to Berchtesgaden where, on his arrival, he nearly caused a diplomatic incident by mistaking Hitler for a footman. ‘As I looked out of the car window, on eye level, I saw in the middle of this swept path a pair of black trouser legs, finishing up in silk socks and pumps. I assumed this was a footman who had come down to help me out of the car and up the steps, and was proceeding in leisurely fashion to get myself out of the car when I hear von Neurath throwing a hoarse whisper at my ear of “Der Führer, der Führer”. And it then dawned upon me that the legs were not the legs of a footman, but of Hitler. And higher up, the trousers passed into khaki tunic with swastika armlet complete.’ Hitler greeted Halifax politely and led him up to his study, which was ‘very overheated, but with a magnificent mountain view from immense windows’.5
Had it not been for the work of one journalist these two events – the October weekend at Cliveden and Halifax’s November trip to Germany – would have remained distinct entities, forever unconnected in the public consciousness. Claud Cockburn had been editor, chief writer and printer of a mimeographed paper called The Week since 1933. The paper was muck-raking and strongly anti-appeasement, and the various scraps of information Cockburn had about the Astors, Cliveden and Berchtesgaden suggested to him an irresistible story. In a November edition of The Week, Cockburn cannily stitched Halifax’s trip and Nancy’s weekend together, alleging that the plan for the visit to Germany had been hatched at Cliveden during the weekend of 23–4 October. A sinister cabal, acting under the auspices of the Astors, had instructed Halifax to make a clandestine deal with the Führer, who had offered, among other things, a 10-year ‘colonial truce to Great Britain in exchange for a free rein in central Europe’. It was a conspiracy of unrivalled proportions.
The first two issues of The Week that carried supposedly inside information on Halifax’s visit to Berlin had very little impact. As Claud Cockburn himself put it: ‘Absolutely nothing happened. It made about as load a bang as a crumpet falling on a carpet.’6 All this changed on 22 December 1937, when the paper developed its coverage of the ‘Halifax coup’ by restyling the villain of the story. Previously the Astors had appeared as ‘the most important supporters of German influence here’ and as people who commanded ‘an extraordinary position of concentrated political power’; now, in the is
sue of 22 December, they appeared simply as the leaders of ‘the Cliveden Set’. The term was not his own invention – it had first appeared in the 28 November edition of the Labour-leaning Reynolds News. But it was Cockburn whose fortunes would be transformed by the phrase. ‘The consequences astounded me,’ he wrote. The enigmatic, elitist ring of the new slur turned his campaign into an international sensation, and his tiny newspaper office in a London attic into a journalistic shrine. Nancy was vilified in the national and international press, painted as a pro-German Machiavelli, fiendishly pulling the strings of the British government from her bunker at Cliveden. The left-wing press in particular pounced on the story, accusing her cabal of forcing Eden to resign as foreign secretary, and replacing him with their puppet, Halifax. David Low, the Evening Standard’s cartoonist, created his ‘Shiver Sisters’ series, in which Nancy, Kerr and Dawson were depicted as gargoyles of appeasement, their slogan ‘Any Sort of Peace at Any Sort of Price’. In one Low cartoon, they appear dressed in tutus, dancing to the tune of a Nazi ‘Foreign Policy’ gramophone record, while Joseph Goebbels gleefully conducts.
Like most compelling stories, Cockburn’s claim had a grain of truth in it. The Astors were pro-appeasement and remained in favour of the policy until the spring of 1939. Their position was shared by the Observer and The Times, though the assumption that, as owners, Waldorf Astor and John Astor directed the editorial policy of these organs was misguided. Nancy, Waldorf, Kerr and Dawson all felt to different degrees, and with various personal caveats, that eastern Europe was Germany’s sphere of influence, or at least that British interests in the region were small enough that Nazi expansion was not worth another murderous conflict. Moreover, the Astors had played an active role in brokering negotiations between Nazi and British diplomats and politicians. Writing to Hitler at the end of 1937 about the prospects for Anglo-German relations, von Ribbentrop did not quite use the term ‘Cliveden Set’ but he did refer favourably to an ‘Astorgruppe’.7
And yet the notion of a ‘Cliveden Set’ as a group of conspirators rather than a circle of like-minded people was, even by Cockburn’s own admission, the product of fabrication and embellishment. Cockburn’s brand of journalism purposefully relied on speculation, rumour and gossip as the basis of his stories, and The Week had made a name for itself thanks to his refusal to exercise any form of self-censorship. A consensus of opinion among the Astor circle did not mark these people out as a cabal. As Cockburn put it later in his autobiography: ‘They would not have known a plot if you handed it to them on a skewer.’ Support for appeasement extended far beyond the realms of Nancy’s coterie. Neville Chamberlain was supported by most MPs, large sections of the press, and the majority of public opinion. As a Foreign Office report had it: ‘Right or Left, everybody was for a quiet life.’8 There was no need for a conspiracy in order to establish appeasement as the keystone of government foreign policy – it was already there.
On top of all this, the outline of the ‘Cliveden Set’ conspiracy was based on a number of provable errors. Cockburn’s original account had Halifax visiting Cliveden on the weekend of 23–4 October and Eden absent, when in fact the opposite was the case; a subsequent meeting of the Cliveden Set was alleged to have happened in January 1938, but Nancy and Waldorf were in America that month, and Cliveden was empty. In response to the news that Eden had been at Cliveden on the weekend a plot was supposedly hatched against him, Cockburn claimed that the invitation had been made on purpose in order to incriminate the foreign minister – in his own downfall.
But then as now, the niceties of veracity did not prevent readers from lapping up a sensational story. The accusations made good copy, and the antics of the Cliveden Set gripped audiences across the world. Inevitably, the extensive coverage provoked some hot-headed responses; quantities of vindictive hate mail began to arrive at Cliveden and 4 St James’s Square. These ranged from the poisonous – ‘You blasted American whore of a chorus girl. Go back to your own country’ – to the shrill – ‘Resign! Pro-Germans are not wanted in a British Parliament’ – to the amazingly jejune – ‘Nancy had a Fancy Boy named Hitler. When’s the baby arriving?’ (this addressed to ‘Mrs Judas’).9 In the Commons, Nancy was heckled when she spoke on foreign policy, and questioned about her interviews with German diplomats. The idea of a ‘Cliveden Set’ reinforced the suspicions of many Labour members that Nancy’s politics were grounded in a plutocratic ignorance of the real world, and her more ill-considered interventions were met with increasingly short shrift, especially when they transparently related to her own limited life experience. On one occasion, wading into a debate on unemployment in Wales, she not only claimed authority to speak on the subject because she had visited the relevant area once in the last four years, but also went on to advance the argument that, in an imperfect world, there would always be people unemployed. She was met with an understandably righteous anger.
Rather than prompting her to reconsider her position or moderate her views, growing criticism only made Nancy more assertive and inflammatory, a tendency that was particularly evident in her pejorative use of the word ‘Jew’. On 28 February 1938, after a heated meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Harold Nicolson witnessed the following:
In the corridor a friend of mine called Alan Graham (Conservative MP for the Wirral Division of Cheshire) came up to Nancy and said, ‘I do not think you behaved very well.’ She turned upon him and said, ‘Only a Jew like you would dare to be rude to me’. He replied, ‘I would much like to smack your face’. I think she is a little mad.10
When opposition came from the left, Nancy’s habitual but increasingly rabid anti-communism made her all the more liable to respond in bad temper. After a council representing 30,000 Plymouth trade-union members expressed their concerns at the fascist sympathies of the ‘Astor group of politicians’, Nancy retorted: ‘I notice that in spite of their democratic principles your members never send me resolutions of protest against the mass murder under Russian dictatorship; I wonder at their omission.’11 Her two great prejudices did not exist independently of each other. In 1938, she rebuked the Jews for being ‘anti-German’ and warned them ‘not to allow themselves to be got at by the Communists as has too often been the case in the past.’12
The previous summer, leaving New York for England, Nancy had complained to the press about ‘the appalling anti-German propaganda here’, and warned that ‘if the Jews are behind it, they’ve gone too far. And it will react on them.’13 Louise Wise, president of the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress, wrote to Nancy: ‘Dear Lady Astor… If Jews in America are against Nazi Germany, it is because they conceive it to be their duty as Americans to battle for civilisation and humanity and therefore to stand against the crimes of Hitlerism… to render their country the service of making it aware of that monstrous iniquity – imperilling all that men hold dear in the political and spiritual world – of Nazism or Hitlerism.’ Publicly, Nancy retracted the comments, claiming somewhat nebulously that she had spoken out because she wanted ‘to help the Jews’. Yet in letters to Philip Kerr she continued to refer to ‘the Jewish Communistic propaganda’.14 The response of contemporaries and the press to these outbursts indicate that Nancy’s anti-Semitism was fierce enough to stand out against the background noise of prejudice in thirties England. Guests at an English Speaking Union dinner found that Nancy’s ‘emotions about the Jews’ had overcome her ‘sense of fitness’; the News Chronicle asked, ‘Is not this lady’s spiritual home Berlin?’ Nancy responded weakly to these charges, claiming, as many an anti-Semite had done before her, that they ‘caused pain not only to me but to many of my friends who are themselves Jews’.15
On 4 March 1939, Nancy offered a more measured defence of herself in the Saturday Evening Post, in an article called ‘Lady Astor Interviews Herself. The outline of her argument was quite simply that Cockburn had got his facts wrong. On top of this, she advanced the important point that she had always invited to Cliveden a wide cross-section o
f people with varied political affiliations and social backgrounds, and that selective examination of the guest book could prove the existence of any number of ‘Cliveden Sets’. She wrote:
We entertained Krassin not because we sympathised with Communists but because I sympathised with the starving children in Russia. Sokolnikoff, too, when Soviet ambassador to England, often came. He was intensely interesting. He had accompanied Lenin on his entry into Russia, in disguise, to overthrow Kerensky. Some time ago? Yes, certainly. But typical. It would be better called a Kremlin Set than a Cliveden Set, would it not? … My father once said in despair that I respected nothing but goodness – and this brings me to Gandhi. He came several times to St. James’s Square, and he met strange company, including a crown prince who is as good as Gandhi. Those two had much in common. He also met Charlie Chaplin, but they didn’t seem to click. This doesn’t mean that I personally agreed either with Charlie Chaplin’s belief in Douglas credit or with Gandhi’s civil disobedience. But I liked both men.
There is another example. I had a little Cliveden Set all by myself with Lawrence of Arabia, when, as Aircraftsman Shaw, he was stationed near Plymouth. There was nothing political about it, though I suppose people who like imputing motives would have made certain I turned pro-Arab!
Her point was summed up by George Bernard Shaw: ‘I could prove that Cliveden is a nest of Bolshevism, or indeed of any other bee in the world’s bonnet.’16 Shaw’s articles in defence of Nancy were rebutted by Upton Sinclair, who on 22 April published ‘An Open Letter to George Bernard Shaw About Lady Astor’ in Liberty. By that time, however, the debate over the Cliveden Set had been outstripped by events: on 15 March the Nazi troops in the Czech Sudetenland, which had been ceded to Germany by the Munich Agreement of the previous autumn, crossed the border into Czechoslovakia, and Nancy’s faith in appeasement began, at last, to falter. Philip Kerr had come to doubt the policy of appeasement several months earlier than his friend. The violent ‘Kristallnacht’ pogrom of 9–10 November had alerted him to the racist agenda of the Nazi regime. On 20 November, Kerr wrote an article in the Observer under the title ‘Britain Awake!’ in which he bemoaned the slowness of British rearmament, and argued for full military containment of Germany, in the hope that this would prevent the need for war. ‘There is no time to lose. I doubt if most people yet realise how rapidly the next crisis of power may arise,’ he warned, ‘how formidable will be the threatened blow, and how much has still to be done in a very short time to organise our defences.’17
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 39
