While Waldorf cautiously embraced the notions of collectivism and egalitarianism, Nancy’s politics swung to the right. Her forthright criticism of the government’s mismanagement of the home front had already alienated a swathe of the press and many of her parliamentary colleagues. ‘The prime minister is a magnificent military leader, but we want a home front leader as well… I never wanted a government job until lately, but I have come to the conclusion that men are timorous animals,’ she declared in May 1941. ‘They are always passing the buck onto someone else. Women are not like that… There are plenty of women standing about idle when we have doddering old politicians in all parties that should have been buried long ago.’3 In 1942 Nancy lost further support by denouncing the Soviet government at a time when Russia was a crucial ally in the war. In August that year, after a spring and summer of brutal fighting on the eastern front, Nancy told a United Nations rally: ‘I am grateful to the Russians, but they are not fighting for us. They are fighting for themselves. In the Battle of Britain it was America who came to our aid. The Russians were allies of Germany. It is only now that they are facing German invasion that they have come into the fight. To hear people talk you would think that they came to us in our own dire need. Nothing of the kind.’4 Nancy’s tactless comments did not go down well. Her friend Thomas Jones, the diplomat who helped to arrange the meeting with von Ribbentrop at Rest Harrow in the late thirties, wrote her an excoriating letter. ‘What an ungracious speech and at this moment. Do you think this is the way to increase sympathy for America? You achieve the exact opposite,’ he fulminated. ‘I have no reason to love the Bolsheviks but I hope I have some magnanimity and some pity left in me. You are the despair of your friends and we all deeply miss Philip’s restraining hand.’5
Nancy’s extremism also caused problems for her immediate family. Bill Astor had been elected to the Commons as Conservative MP for Fulham East in 1935; his role in the House had always to some extent been overshadowed by that of his mother, but during the war, as his colleagues became increasingly exasperated with Nancy’s conduct, the proximity of their working lives became difficult. Even when Nancy was advocating important and progressive causes, such as the inclusion of more women within the Foreign Office, she had the tendency to digress lengthily, offering anecdotes of dubious relevance and prejudices of wearying predictability. In a Foreign Office debate that took place on 18 March 1943, it was ‘Latins’ who incurred her disapproval: ‘The Foreign Office has been dominated by the Latin point of view,’ she postulated. ‘That is why the policy is dominated by France. Since the last war France has been a shell-shocked nation and everyone knows it but the Foreign Office. The Latin point of view is dangerous. What is wanted is the British point of view.’ In a letter to his two sons, Harold Nicolson, who spoke after Nancy in the debate, described attempting to respond to her as ‘like playing squash with a dish of scrambled eggs’.6
Nancy was also to become a thorn in the side of her younger son David. In February 1942 J. L. Garvin left the Observer, after Waldorf refused to renew his contract as editor. The natural candidate to fill the vacuum was David Astor, who had been wounded during a covert mission to make contact with the resistance in France, and since his return to London had been working for the Observer in his evenings and lunch hours. David, an intuitive and brilliant journalist, collaborated with his father to bring in Geoffrey Crowther of The Economist as a temporary editor. It was Crowther who introduced David to a number of influential writers, including the Marxist intellectual Isaac Deutscher, and Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, whom he would eventually employ.7 When Bill Astor returned from his naval intelligence duties in the Middle East at the end of 1942 expecting to assume the editorship, he was dismayed by David’s new pre-eminence at the paper. It was left to Waldorf to settle the dispute. While he admired David’s incisive mind, he was aware that his younger son could be emotional and unpredictable at times. Bill was reliable and methodical, but his centre-right politics did not sit well with the direction of the newspaper.
In 1944, Waldorf found a solution by establishing an Observer Trust. This consisted of three or four trustees who would have the power to hire and fire editors and general managers, thus preventing a concentration of power within a proprietor-editor. The Trust was guided by several memos, which made it clear that while the Observer ‘should not be a Party paper’, it nevertheless had a clear political programme: ‘The first task is to end the mad competition of nations by a world-wide organic control, a control not based on dictatorship but on the principles of representative authority and liberty. The second is to destroy the social injustices of an ill-balanced society without creating a sluggish conformity and a dull inertia.’ He was equally clear about the roles he wished his sons to occupy. ‘I hope that the trustees and directors will give David a main share in the control of the paper and that at some stage he will be appointed editor …’ he stated. ‘In general I support the political objectives that he has in mind… I have a high regard for his capacity, judgement, and public spirit… I have shown my confidence in Bill by giving him most of my British real estate. I have also looked to him largely for the supervision of my American property… As to the Observer, if he desires to have some connection… Then in my judgement he should be asked to assist on the business side … but not to the exclusion of David.’8
Nancy was in no uncertainty as to what this combination of instructions meant. The break from ‘Party’ was, more specifically, a departure from the broadly Conservative allegiance of the paper thus far, and the appointment of David was an endorsement of her son’s ‘leftish’ politics. On 23 May 1944, David wrote to Thomas Jones about the conflict with his mother:
I learn today re: the Observer and Bill… that part of the trouble is my mother. She apparently says (a) I am too ‘Bolshie’ and (b) she resents the way my father and I have got together to her exclusion. Egging Bill on and advising my father to take him into the Observer is apparently her reply.9
Henceforth, the Observer became one of what Nancy’s family called her ‘array of dragons’ – things she would miss no opportunity to criticise, in public or private, often to the pain and embarrassment of those closest to her.
While Nancy’s relationship with her family teetered precipitously between froideur and outright animosity, the fate of Cliveden was also in jeopardy. In stately homes and on estates throughout the country, the great threat to the preservation of property was not enemy bombers, but the changing contours of British society. The erosion of landed privilege during the First World War and the rise of Labour politics in the interwar years had created a new political landscape in which country houses, like other kinds of big private asset, were prime targets for requisitioning. In the Second World War country houses such as Chatsworth, Longleat and Blenheim were used variously to accommodate evacuees, store treasures from national art collections and house schools. Others like Blickling, Alton Towers, and Keddleston were used to house troops and airmen. Such was the fate of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead, a fictional hybrid of Madresfield Court and Castle Howard, where Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, grew up. By the end of Brideshead Revisited, the resident Marchmain family is confined to the upper floors. Downstairs has fallen prey to the philistine abuse of clerks and soldiers, who defile the historic furnishings and turn the grand fountain into a dumping ground for cigarette butts and sandwich crusts.
Cliveden was one of the lucky houses that did not endure the depredations that so horrified Waugh. The sculpted newel posts on the great staircase were not lopped off; the Fountain of Love remained clean and if anybody broke a window, it was likely to be Nancy, who enjoyed practising her golf drive down the length of the parterre. Though Cliveden did host soldiers, they were in no fit state to cause damage – in the Second World War, as in the First, the estate was used as a hospital by the Canadian Red Cross. On 16 July 1940 a new hospital block, constructed in the grounds to the southeast of the main house, was ready to admit patients.10
Military usage, however, was a symptom rather than the cause of the decline of an aristocratic way of life that had its roots in complex social changes accelerated by the war. In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, England had suffered an agricultural depression that ruined many landed families, with land prices falling to less than 10 per cent of their value 60 years previously. The Astors’ dependence on urban rather than rural rents insulated them from this slump, but they had still felt the bite. In response, they laid off their casual staff and reduced the wages of the permanent staff. ‘This will be fair,’ reasoned Waldorf, ‘as our wages are higher than those paid at Dropmore, Taplow Court and Hedsor.’11 During the war, increases in income tax and death duties made it harder to maintain or inherit large stately homes without incurring financial ruin in the process. On top of these fiscal burdens, it was clear to foresighted owners like Waldorf that once the war ended, fewer people would want to return to the service jobs which they had left a few years earlier. The war was effecting a cultural shift away from old class-bound service roles: those who remained at the house after the war would increasingly be referred to as ‘staff’, rather than ‘servants’.
Faced with these challenges, the owners of country houses increasingly turned, in the early 1940s, to the National Trust. The Trust had run a country-house programme since the 1930s, but there had been few donations during the early years. The war changed that, as James Lees-Milne, the diarist and secretary to the Country Houses Committee, explained: ‘By 1942 owners had a future of a sort to look to, yet how were they to cope with their massive piles and possessions in the brave new world ahead? They guessed that it would be heavily weighted against the squirearchical system and way of life which, until hostilities broke out, had endured for centuries. Already they were contending with high taxation, lack of domestic staff and the disesteem of the Zeitgeist. Several returned and many turned to the National Trust for a discussion, if not a solution, of their problems. This explains how I was largely occupied during the last years of the war and the immediate post-war years.’12
While the acquisition of country houses was undertaken by the Trust in the interest of ‘the nation’, the programme also served – and in many cases saved – struggling owners. As Lees-Milne wrote in 1943, the scheme was ‘first conceived by owners for their own benefit as well as of their historic houses.’ It was the burden of death duties, and the impossibility of his heirs running the house with their post-tax inheritance, that convinced Philip Kerr to donate his Blickling Hall estate to the National Trust. And though Waldorf’s politics were to the left of Kerr’s, it was financial considerations rather than ideological commitments that led him to approach the National Trust in 1942, with the purpose of negotiating the house’s donation. For precisely this reason, it was not long before the Country House Scheme became the subject of satire: a cartoon in Punch on 22 January 1947, for instance, showed two figures who appear to be father and son, standing in the cavernous Corinthian-columned library of a stately home. ‘This is my last warning, Charles,’ says the father. ‘If you do not mend your ways I shall leave the estate to you instead of to the National Trust.’
When James Lees-Milne joined in 1942, the National Trust operated from West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, the ancestral seat of Sir John and Lady Dashwood. Its staff consisted of the ‘harassed secretary’ Donald Macleod Matheson, and his assistant Eardley Knollys, plus female administrators. An indispensable asset to the Trust was a ramshackle Austin bequeathed by Hilda Matheson, who had worked as Nancy’s political secretary in the twenties before moving to a job in the fledgeling BBC. She had died in the autumn of 1940, and her gift to the Trust saved Lees-Milne many long journeys by train, foot and bike.
The negotiations over Cliveden began on 11 May 1942 at St James’s Square, where Lees-Milne met with Waldorf’s private secretary Miss Davy. Davy, ‘a dear lady, dressed in a well-tailored coat and skirt’, announced to Lees-Milne Waldorf’s decision to make over Cliveden to the National Trust with ‘as little delay as possible’: ‘contents and grounds with an endowment of £200,000, and a hospital in the park, providing another £3,000 to £4,000 p.a.’13 While the Trust was well-geared towards helping owners out of financial trouble, it could not take on properties without sufficient endowments to cover the cost of maintaining them. The next month, Lees-Milne met with the Chief Medical Officer to try to get an assurance that the Ministry of Health would rent the hospital after the war. Though he was assured that they would, he was not given a rental figure. Without a certain amount of rent guaranteed, he was unsure whether the endowment would be adequate. Meanwhile, at St James’s Square, Waldorf was piling on the pressure: ‘When I saw Miss Davy afterwards, she said that Lord Astor was adopting the attitude of “take it or leave it” (Cliveden). We must make up our minds at once. This is hardly fair, for the Trust cannot commit itself to accepting a property of such size without carefully weighing income and expenditure.’14
In fact, Waldorf’s negotiation position was not very strong. Miss Davy, who soon became a sort of ‘beloved, old-fashioned aunt’ to Lees-Milne, had also confided to him that due to high tax rates ‘Lord Astor in giving away £200,000 is actually losing only £150 a year’.15 On top of this, in 1942 he was quite seriously ill, and it was clear that he wanted to dispose of Cliveden before he died, in order to avoid Bill having his inheritance decimated by death duties. For his part, Lees-Milne was interested in the house, but not so interested as to leave him at Waldorf’s mercy. ‘The site over the river is, as John Evelyn observed in the 17th century, superb,’ he wrote after a trip there. ‘The house too is well worthy of the trust. It illustrates the very end of the Palladian tradition. Barry conceived it with a real regard for architectural principles. It is heavy and majestical outside.’ On the other hand, he thought that the interior commissioned from Pearson by William Waldorf had ‘very little distinction’, noted that the ‘splendid gardens’ were ‘very unkempt’, and thought that ‘apart from a few Reynoldses and the Blenheim tapestries there is nothing much in the furniture line’.16 Later, he would deny that the house had any exceptional architectural value, claiming that it was accepted ‘ostensibly because of its majestic setting and grand garden above a stretch of the Thames’, but ‘virtually because of the handsome endowment offered’.17
While Nancy could see the necessity of donating the house in a time when tax ‘left you sixpence in the pound’, she was not so comfortable with the idea of it becoming a site of educational or touristic interest, as Lees-Milne learnt abruptly in a meeting at St James’s Square. ‘Lady Astor swept in and began rather offensively with, “Whatever you people do, I cannot have the public near the place”, and before I had time to expostulate, corrected herself to the extent of adding, “At any rate their hours will have to be clearly defined.” There is an insolence and a silliness about her. But how young and handsomely dressed she is.’18
The Trust acceded to Nancy and Waldorf’s strict conditions of public access. The most important of these conditions was that the family be allowed to continue living at Cliveden for as long as they wished. Bill, who was to succeed Waldorf and Nancy at the house, was also to be given White Place Farm, and the surrounding paddocks. Given the financial problems the family would have inevitably come up against if they had not donated, it was a pretty generous deal. Too generous, many people thought. A friend of the National Trust, writing in November 1943, warned of ‘the widespread and growing criticism of the country houses scheme… Briefly, the criticism is that the country houses scheme is a funk hole for death duty dodgers, and that the public has got by far the worst of the bargain inasmuch as it merely has the promise of some unknown amount of access – presumably, however, occasional and limited – in some unknown future.’19 Similar criticism of the Trust’s loose terms appeared in the left-leaning popular press, including the Daily Herald and the Sunday Pictorial (a forerunner of the Sunday Mirror). The latter berated the National Trust for taking on Gunby Hall with only limited public ac
cess. When Lees-Milne remonstrated over luncheon with Campbell Stuart, the paper’s editor, he received a bruising lesson in the remoteness of his own ideas on architecture. Stuart ‘thought Blenheim too ugly for words’ and ‘was surprised that the Trust should want to own any 18th-century buildings’. The luncheon, however, was not entirely fruitless: Lees-Milne took up Stuart’s offer to publish a reply, in which he invited Sunday Pictorial readers to come up with their own ways of preserving country houses. The readers who accepted his invitation mooted a host of alternative uses, including ‘a good beer house with dancing room’. It is hard to think of a use that would have more offended Nancy’s sensibilities.
By late 1944, Nancy was ineffective and marginalised in Parliament, alienated by the politics of her family and defensive about the future of her home. But the worst was yet to come. The government had announced that once the fighting in Europe was done, a general election would be held. Unbeknown to Nancy, the chairman of her local Conservative Association had already advised Bill to dissuade his mother from standing. Aware of her deteriorating performance in the Commons and isolation within her own party, Waldorf took matters into his own hands, informing Nancy that neither he nor their sons would support her should she stand for re-election. The first of December marked the 25th anniversary of her election to Parliament, and the day’s papers were full of the celebrations: a lunch was held in her honour at the Commons, as well as a dinner at the Grosvenor House Hotel, hosted by the British Federation of Business and Professional Women, of which Nancy had long been the president. Waldorf, the only man present, told The Times: ‘When I married Nancy, I hitched my wagon to a star. And then when I got into the House of Commons in 1910,1 found that I had hitched my wagon to a shooting star. In 1919, when she got into the House, I found I had hitched my wagon to a sort of V2 rocket. But the star which is represented by Nancy Astor will, I am sure, remain a beacon light for all with high ideals.’20
The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home Page 41
