The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

by Natalie Livingstone

  Once she had abandoned her hopes of peace with Germany, Nancy was apparently moved by the plight of German Jewish refugees, and responded to appeals from Lewis Namier and ‘Baffy’ Dugdale to help find Jewish academics places in British universities. Given the lamentable asylum policies of the British and American governments towards Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, she deserves some credit for this. She was involved in some of her own rescue missions too. In March 1938, when Dr Solomon Frankfurter was rounded up by the Nazis after the Anschluss, his nephew, the American legal scholar Felix Frankfurter (who had previously been a guest at Cliveden), appealed to Nancy for help. She spoke to the German ambassador in London, warning that if Dr Frankfurter was not released, she would go to Vienna herself and get him; Dr Frankfurter was released. But her subsequent correspondence with Felix Frankfurter was still marred by the same wild opinions about, for instance, a Jewish conspiracy of the press, a point on which Felix had to correct her, adding that if Nancy carried on like this, people would ‘infer a sympathy on your part with Hitler’s anti-Semitism’, which ‘I know to be untrue’.18

  Rather than contradicting the prevailing evidence, instances such as these suggest that Nancy conformed to a familiar sort of bigotry whereby she was quite tolerant of individuals, but suspicious of the collective entities to which they belonged. Thus she was averse to the French, but also very fond of her French chef Monsieur Lamé; suspicious of communists, yet devoted to George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey; and hostile to Jews, though friendly with Felix Frankfurter. It was this sort of prejudice, of course, that led to her describing Weizmann as ‘the only decent Jew I have ever met’. How Nancy would have reacted to news that a Jewish family – my family – had acquired Cliveden just 50 years after her death is something best left to the imagination.

  Chapter 10

  CARTWHEELS IN THE BUNKER

  ON 25 JUNE 1940, France surrendered to Germany, and the Luftwaffe were able to fly unhindered from the French north coast to targets in the south of England. By the end of October, Nancy’s beloved Plymouth had been battered by 21 bombing raids. The following month, an oil depot just outside Plymouth at Turnchapel was hit. The fire burned for five days, and was so hot that water from the fire hoses evaporated before it reached the flames; it illuminated the city by night, and marked it with a pillar of smoke by day.1 Soon after the fire had been put out, bad news arrived from America. On 11 December, Philip Kerr had died of kidney failure, having refused the medical treatment that could have saved his life. Nancy maintained that given the tenets of Christian Science, his demise was not a cause for grief, but there is no doubt she was devastated by the loss.

  The night of 20 March 1941 marked the first major attack on the densely populated heart of the city. That day, King George and Queen Elizabeth had visited, and had been met by crowds of Plymothians waving Union Jacks. The Royals toured the Virginia House Settlement, the welfare centre established by the Astors in 1925; there the king, flanked by Nancy and the queen, delighted in a rendition of ‘All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor’.2 As the royal train was about to depart for London, the air-raid sirens sounded. After some deliberation, it was decided that the royal couple should continue their journey despite the risk of being hit en route. Two hours later, the sirens blared again.

  Nancy stood on the steps of 3 Elliot Terrace in her tin helmet and fur coat, her hands defiantly on her hips. She and the American journalist Ben Robertson, who was currently staying at the house, watched the enemy planes drone in over the Channel. Rose Harrison was one of the block’s fire wardens. As the sirens went she donned her protective headgear ‘and saw to it that we had buckets of water and stirrup pumps on every floor’.3 Rose told Nancy and Robertson to go inside at once, but Nancy, acerbic as ever, barked her familiar ‘shut up, Rose’. Eventually, an air warden ordered Nancy back into the house. As she entered the hall, a bomb dropped nearby, blowing in the glass on the front door and knocking her over in the blast. ‘I helped my lady up,’ Rose recalled, ‘and we went to the shelter in the basement, with Mr Robertson sensibly following. As we were going down she was reciting the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd: therefore I can lack nothing” and when we were in the shelter she began on the 46th Psalm, “God is our hope and strength: a very present help in trouble…” She seemed serene as she sat there and quite without fear.’ While the Luftwaffe pounded the city, Nancy chatted about her childhood days in Virginia, as Rose removed shards of glass from her mistress’s hair.4

  The next day, the Australian prime minister Robert Menzies arrived in town. When the bombing continued for a second night, he chose to go out and, ‘regardless of danger’, make a tour of the city, for which he was roundly praised in the national papers.5 Nancy and Waldorf were out too, but did not get the same treatment in the nationals: perhaps this was because it was expected of them (on top of Nancy’s constituency connection, Waldorf had been elected mayor at the start of the war), or else a sign that their reputation was still tarnished by the Cliveden Set allegations. While they were on their rounds, the Astors saw the end of Elliot Terrace burning, and mistakenly thought that their own house had been destroyed. Terrified that Rose had been crushed in the debris, Nancy rushed back, and upon seeing her maid alive, became uncharacteristically affectionate, crying: ‘I’ll never leave you again.’6 Although the house had been spared a direct hit, the windows of Nancy’s room had been smashed, the walls cracked, the ceiling partly brought down, and the bed and floor covered in glass. Rose did a superficial tidy-up, put Nancy to bed in her clothes, and then went up to the roof to watch the aftermath of the bombing. She ‘stood there watching the city burn, seeing the flames from one house moving to the next and demolishing that, and eventually the whole row’. In the morning things looked even worse, ‘skeletons of houses, twisted girders, wrecks of cars, the rubble that was once a home and possessions strewn across the street’.7 Plymouth had been ravaged in two days of raids, ‘wasting away in reddish trails of smoke’. The French writer André Savignon, who lived in Plymouth during the Blitz, described a cityscape enveloped by ‘ashes, mud, dust… this poignant acrid smell… this effluvia of death’. As night fell, the town braced itself for further onslaughts. ‘Those who were staying were snatching sleep before the bombers came,’ Savignon wrote. ‘Those who could were walking, or waiting silently for lorries, on the main roads out of town.’8

  The Auxiliary Fire Service tried in vain to fight the blazes that engulfed the city centre, but it was soon evident that ‘the fires were so numerous and so fierce’ that tackling them all, especially given the shortage of equipment, was impossible.9 The flames engulfed one street at a time, devouring churches, cinemas, hotels, shops and post offices. A bomb struck the maternity ward of the local hospital, instantly wiping out babies, mothers and nurses. To the diarist J. C. Trewin, the burning city was reminiscent of Pepys’s description of London during the Great Fire. ‘It was what Pepys, long ago, had called “a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire”,’ he wrote. Later, he again turned ‘helplessly’ to the 17th-century diarist to describe this very 20th-century carnage. ‘The churches, houses, and all on fire,’ he transcribed into his own journal, ‘and flaming at once, and a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruin. So home with a sad heart.’10 During the five nights of incessant raiding, all of which continued until well after midnight, 1,140 high-explosive bombs were dropped, and incendiaries by the thousand; 1,172 civilians were killed, with 4,448 civilian casualties overall.

  Nancy picked through rubble, handed out food and clothing, rallied the residents with her dauntless energy. Now aged 61, she was still able to turn cartwheels in air-raid shelters ‘to cause a diversion when things were at their worst’.11 War once again brought out the best in Nancy. Faced with adversity, she summoned her unique brand of courage: ‘not the “backs to the wall” stoic kind of British courage, but the flashing tempestuous rousing roistering courage of the Virginian …
Not your sixty-one year old Nancy Astor, Lady of Cliveden, hostess to the aristocracy and member of Parliament, but Nannie the wild-eyed girl who rode unbroken horses’.12

  Following the early raids, several unexploded bombs were thought to be buried near the house, and the Astors moved out of Plymouth to a nearby village. Three Elliot Terrace was tidied up and put to use as a mayoral office. After a while they moved further afield to Rock, and then back to Dartmoor to Bickham House, from which they could commute into the city more easily. ‘Some people may criticise them for leaving the battleground when others couldn’t,’ wrote Rose, ‘but commanders have to if they’re to be in a fit condition to direct operations in the future, and in these circumstances I looked upon my two as generals.’13 The Astors were certainly not unique in commuting: in heavily bombed towns all over the country, a large proportion of the urban population decamped nightly to the surrounding countryside and slept under hedges or in barns, or just in the open. Some 6,000–7,000 people trekked out of Plymouth every night, and returned to the city during the day to work.14 On their way back to Bickham at night, the Astors’ car was often packed with these ‘nocturnal refugees’.15

  As Lord Mayor, Waldorf oversaw the conversion of ruined buildings into rest centres for the homeless, and came up with the idea of inviting a band to perform on the Hoe in the evenings. ‘Now, when Plymouth lay battered across her hills, a dance band from the Army Pioneer Corps began to play on the Hoe for two hours in the light evenings of Double Summer Time,’ J. C. Trewin wrote. ‘Tired as they were, people crowded up through the ruins. On the promenade, itself free from bombing, Lady Astor often led the dance with a Serviceman. Hundreds, while the sun sank behind the Cornish hills, joined in as Plymouth had done during the wars of Napoleon… It grew into a custom, this laughing of a siege to scorn.’16

  As MP to the embattled constituency, Nancy was responsible for more than leading dances on the seafront. In between trips up to Parliament – during which her outspoken criticism of the government’s home-front policies became an increasing irritant to Winston Churchill – she applied her prodigious energy to meeting, rallying and aiding her constituents. ‘We were always told to look for cases of individual hardship, for people who were too proud to ask for help, or who didn’t know what was available for them,’ Rose Harrison remembered.17 In the summer of 1941, the entertainer Noel Coward visited Plymouth preparing ‘accuracy of detail’ for his upcoming film, the patriotic naval drama In Which We Serve. On his arrival, Coward drove ‘through terrible devastation’ to the Grand Hotel, where he had drinks with Dorothy the barmaid. The next morning he walked with Nancy around the town. ‘A strange experience, Lady Astor very breezy, noisy and au fond incredibly kind, banging people on the back and making jokes. The people themselves stoic, sometimes resentful of her but generally affectionately tolerant. The whole city a pitiful sight, houses that have held sailor families since the time of Drake spread across the road in rubble and twisted wood.’ At lunch Nancy ‘delivered tirade against Winston’, and the pair discussed the appointment of the diplomat and secret agent Bruce Lockhart to the head of the Political Warfare Executive. Nancy argued that Lockhart could not really be a good appointment, as he had written a book discussing his travels around Europe with a mistress. ‘This point of view baffling and irritating,’ wrote Coward. ‘How sad that a woman of such kindness and courage should be a fanatic.’18

  There were, of course, limitations to the sort of assistance Nancy offered, and the ambivalence of some Plymothians towards her efforts (or their suspicion of her pose of solidarity) is hinted at in Coward’s diary entry. The real benefits to the city arose from the combination of Nancy’s flamboyant energy with Waldorf’s methodical efficiency. As Harrison puts it: ‘His lordship, while he wasn’t so communicative, did things his own way. It was said at that time about the Astors that “she found out what needed doing, and he saw that it was done”.’19 But effective as their partnership might have been, there was, perhaps for the first time, real distance growing between the two. Hitherto, Nancy’s viciousness had very rarely, if ever, been directed at Waldorf. One of her children recalled how, when Nancy went on the rampage, Waldorf would rest his hand on the scruff of her neck and rock her gently from side to side, whispering that she should ease off. Now he too fell victim to his wife’s destructive impulses.

  Florrie the housemaid described one of the early scraps to Rose Harrison. Waldorf had recently caught a cold, and Nancy had agreed to spend a short time with him at a hotel near Rock while he convalesced. In keeping with the strictures of Christian Science, he declined the care of doctors – but he insisted that Nancy be there to look after him. The day of their intended departure, they ate lunch at Elliot Terrace with some local dignitaries. Some sweets had arrived at the house from America, intended for the people of Plymouth. After lunch Nancy, who had always been partial to sugary treats, asked Waldorf to break open the stash for her. He refused, explaining that they were intended for those whose need was greater than hers. This was not the first occasion on which Nancy gave unreasonable priority to her own desires against a background of general deprivation: Rose Harrison admits that ‘she did fiddle a few coupons’, and in 1943 she would be arraigned at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court after she asked a friend of hers in the Red Cross to bring some nylons over when he next came to Britain. This was probably a running irritation to the scrupulous Waldorf, but whatever his motivations at that moment, his refusal to hand over the sweets had disastrous consequences. ‘She [Nancy] straightaway went into a tantrum, was rude and spiteful to him in front of the guests, and told him she wouldn’t now go to Rock with him,’ Rose recalled. ‘His lordship left the room … When I went to his office I could see at once that he was in a dreadful state: he had difficulty with his breathing and his face was high-coloured. I thought he must have had a stroke, and to this day I’m convinced I was right.’ Rose furiously confronted her mistress, warning her to accompany Waldorf to Rock and threatening to tell the children of their mother’s ‘greed’ and ‘selfishness’ if she did not comply. Nancy, looking ‘meek and ashamed’, backed down.20 It was an explosive prelude to a gradual estrangement that would play out, for the most part, in distance and silence, as Waldorf’s and Nancy’s ways of looking at the world diverged irreversibly.

  Lord William Waldorf Astor visiting with his wife, Lady Nancy Astor, in her study at their Cliveden estate.

  Chapter 11

  FAREWELL TO BOTH MY HOUSES

  THE ROW IN 3 Elliot Terrace had clearly been about more than just sweets. Nancy resented having to spend time away from her constituency to accompany the increasingly ill Waldorf on convalescent trips to Rock, or to their house on the remote island of Jura in Scotland, and went to great lengths to express her displeasure. When asked if she was heading to Scotland, her standard response was: ‘Yes, I’m going to Hell.’1 She rebuked Waldorf for his failing body, invoking the tenets of Christian Science in a bid to make him feel that it was a weakness of mind that had induced his fragile state. Waldorf, meanwhile, took her complaints to heart, fervently apologising for irritating her and thinking up ways to compensate for his flagging energy. At Jura, he commissioned a special ‘lighthouse’ for Nancy, complete with a glass-walled office with panoramic views of the sea so she could work in peace. She remained unimpressed.

  During Waldorf’s extended absences from Plymouth, he applied himself to the question of the city’s reconstruction. The post-war Plymouth of Waldorf’s imagination was not the old city rebuilt, but a radically modern city planned for a more collective age. At Waldorf’s behest, Plymouth council began recruiting urban planners in 1941, and in the autumn of that year The Plan for Plymouth was formally commissioned: at the head of the team producing the plan were James Paton Watson, the council’s surveyor, and Patrick Abercrombie, who was at the time also working on his influential vision for the post-war capital, The County of London Plan. Addressing an American radio audience, Waldorf outlined the vision he and the planne
rs shared for the city. ‘What about Plymouth as a place to live in – the modern city, the Plymouth of the future?… We want, too, proper living space – for all the needs of citizens living in a modern town… so the plan offers us at Plymouth a City where the daily life of the ordinary man will be more spacious and dignified … The people of Plymouth have danced on the Hoe during the darkest days of the war. They will dance there again in peace – as they did after Waterloo – but the boys who come back from this war will dance on a Hoe which overlooks the building of a new city, a city which has been planned for them, for a wider, freer, healthier and more prosperous life.’2 Despite her husband’s nostalgic appeals, Nancy was not convinced by the plan. One of the most innovative aspects of Waldorf’s regeneration project was the construction of a marketplace where the small shops, which had been destroyed in the Blitz or displaced by the development scheme, could operate alongside bigger stores. Nancy strongly objected to the idea, and whipped the small shopkeepers into a frenzy, warning them that their business risked being cannibalised by bigger competitors.