Astor did not dare to challenge the official lie that was being asserted, but was brave enough to skewer its inefficacy. ‘We may accept – I am sure we all do – what the Government have said, that there is no question of collusion between Israel and ourselves. The trouble is going to be that the Arab states will not believe that.’ The Suez crisis had calamitously diverted attention from Eastern Europe, where the communist hegemony was crumbling in Hungary, and ‘had the extraordinary effect of bringing America and Russia together against Great Britain’. He reproached, too, the United States for appointing an ‘anti-British’ ambassador to Cairo, and American managers of oil companies in the Middle East for their gullibility. His intervention offended many people, who cut him in London. A year later he alluded to the unpopularity of Conservative peers with independent views on controversial subjects such as Suez and the death penalty.18
On 4 November, David Astor’s Observer ran its famous Suez editorial: ‘We had not realised that our Government was capable of such folly and crookedness … Never since 1783 has Great Britain made herself as universally disliked’, together with articles demonstrating the political and military fallacies underlying Eden’s strategy, and letters from bishops and clerics denouncing the attack on Egypt. Three Observer trustees resigned, readers cancelled subscriptions and manufacturers their advertisements. On 5 November, when the Anglo-French force landed at Port Said, and it was reported in the Commons that Egyptian forces were discussing surrender, there was elated uproar among Tory MPs. Jakie Astor alone remained seated: Lennox-Boyd shouted at him, bullyingly, to stand up. On 8 November, Jakie spoke in the Commons against the Suez expedition – one of only eight Tory MPs to do so. A week later David Astor wrote to Iain Macleod urging him to lead younger Tories in repudiation of Eden’s leadership. Macleod did not reply to the letter, which he took to Downing Street to show the Cabinet Secretary and Eden’s Private Secretary, Freddie Bishop. ‘That Astor is using such tactics makes us feel quite sick,’ Bishop told Eden.19
Although politicians and foreign potentates came to Cliveden, the atmosphere was lighter than in its prewar heyday. Bill Astor kept an open house. Harold Macmillan later quipped that Cliveden was like a hotel, and a regular visitor recalled other guests sitting around ‘gossiping in the great hall, as if they were staying in a hotel’.20 There were no cabals, schemes to reform human nature, unofficial diplomatic initiatives, or grave pronouncements on duty. Instead, Bill Astor strove valiantly to perpetuate the social sheen and resplendent hospitality of the old order. His princely generosity was such that when guests came to Cliveden, their cars would be driven to the garage block, cleaned, polished and filled with petrol for the return journey to London. Cliveden was so much a millionaire’s model estate that if Astor’s wife was to be driven across country, one of the two chauffeurs would make a trial run to find the time needed to make the journey at a steady rate: there was no question that any Lady Astor could drive herself.
Bill Astor disliked sitting still. He was always on the move, and seemed to feel lonely without a bevy of people around him. At their best, his guests were diverse, eminent and interesting. The signatures in the visitors’ book of Field Marshal Alexander, Alan Lennox-Boyd, John Boyd-Carpenter, Lord Home, Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, C. P. Snow, Freya Stark, Mervyn Stockwood, Bill Deakin, and Peter Fleming indicate the diversity and quality of the talk. Astor liked to introduce people to one another, although at the dinner to which he invited the painter Stanley Spencer and cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, the two men eyed one another like dogs, and vied to dominate the conversation. The racing Earl of Derby (who allowed Astor’s mares to be serviced by his stallions, and encouraged him to invest in commercial television shares) was bewildered when, after the ladies had withdrawn, he was saddled with Spencer wearing pyjamas under borrowed evening clothes. Astor’s munificence also drew parasites and opportunists with smooth manners and envious spirits: those who accepted his food and drink, played his games, had their petrol tanks filled by his chauffeurs, dropped his name, but did not respect him. There were risks in his indiscriminate open-handedness.
After the end of his Commons career and failure of his first marriage, Bill Astor took up charitable work. At a time when the British government imposed onerous, effronting limits on the amounts of sterling that could be taken abroad by travellers, he gave $2 million from his New York funds to support British scholars wishing to study in the United States. The intense suffering that he had seen in Manchuria under Japanese occupation in the 1930s, and in the war-torn Middle East during the 1940s, shaped his benefactions. He supported the Save the Children Fund, which had been started in 1919 by two English sisters to provide emergency relief for children suffering from malnutrition or other deprivation in the aftermath of the Great War, and was soon responding to famines, earthquakes and floods. Another pet cause was the Ockenden Venture, started in 1951 by three Englishwomen who gave education and vocational training to Latvian and Polish girls from displaced persons camps, and subsequently provided reception centres and resettlement help for refugees. Of the first six girls who joined the Ockenden Venture, one took honours at Nottingham University, two went to Oxford University, one won a scholarship at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School, and another qualified at a technical school.
Astor detested communism and in 1951 proposed launching a global coalition of Protestant Churches to fight atheism, which he felt was softening Western resistance to Soviet penetration.21 He visited Hong Kong to study the plight of fugitives from Mao’s China. It astonished him that English progressives, despite professing their commitment to freedom and humanity, had sided since the 1920s on one issue after another with mass murderers and slave masters as atrocious as any the world had known. Despite all the exposures of communism’s brutal inefficiency, written by its victims and repentant dupes, regardless of the thousands who tried every month to escape across communist frontiers, such progressives insisted that this system of servitude represented progress. These delusions were harder than ever to maintain after the Hungarian uprising of November 1956.
With his usual easy munificence, Astor had given a rent-free lease of Parr’s Cottage on the Cliveden estate to Zara, Countess of Gowrie, the widow of a former Governor-General of Australia. Lady Gowrie’s only son had been killed leading a Commando raid in Tripoli in 1943, and his widow Pamela had subsequently married an army officer named Derek Cooper. In 1956, Astor offered Spring Cottage to the Coopers, but they demurred and the property was taken by Stephen Ward. The Coopers reacted immediately to the agonies of the Hungarian oppressed. They motored to Andau, an Austrian border village, where they helped rescue refugees and shelter them in improvised accommodation. In spare moments they sent descriptive letters to their neighbour Lady Gowrie, which she showed Bill Astor. His niece Jane Willoughby (only daughter of his sister Wissie Ancaster), who had been one of the earliest to start rescue work on the Austro-Hungarian frontier, visited him soliciting a donation. Jane Willoughby’s tales, and the fact that he was facing Christmas alone after his wife’s departure, spurred him to action.
In December 1956, Astor and his ex-Commando chauffeur drove to Austria in a Land Rover. He installed himself in the comforts of the Hotel Sacher in Vienna, but motored each night into Andau. The refugees, he found, drugged their babies with barbiturates to stop them from betraying their presence to borderguards by crying, trudged across frozen riparian plains covered by rifle fire, tanks and land-mines, crouched at night beside a canal bank until Western volunteers found them and paddled them to safety in a rubber dinghy. Bill Astor’s Andau weeks changed the direction of his life: his brother David thought they saved him at the nadir of his confidence, and proved a lifeline, until calamity overwhelmed him with the Profumo Affair.
Subsequently, Astor flew to New York, where he appeared on television talkshows and collected over $100,000 for the refugees. As part of his fund-raising efforts, he compiled a brief Hungarian memoir which he circulated to potential donors:
There were two dramatic moments that stick in my mind. One was on Christmas Eve, a mother and baby arriving quite alone when I was single-handed. The baby doped, with a frost-bitten foot, but it was saved. The other was when a big party of refugees had reached the edge of the canal, and we had got about a dozen of the women and children over. Suddenly a Tommy gun was fired into the air and a security patrol appeared on the other side of the canal, firing shots and Verey flares into the air, and driving the rest of the refugees back. They knelt and wept and prayed, but were driven off at gunpoint when they were only fifty yards from freedom, the security guards firing a few shots at us for good measure. We were left with children separated from their parents, women separated from their husbands, in a state of complete collapse and agony.22
There were reminders at Andau of the base stupidity of British journalists. One of the frontier volunteers was John Paterson-Morgan, Lord Cadogan’s agent in London and Scotland. ‘It was some time before the national newspapers cottoned on to the fact that we were “news”,’ he recalled. Then, one night, a gang of reporters from Fleet Street ‘barged’ into the emergency surgery where they overwhelmed hard-pressed doctors. Without thought for the refugees and their children, frozen and weary after their ordeal, the reporters chivvied them into standing up and singing the Hungarian national anthem for a crass photo opportunity.23
Millions of people in the world had fled from war, oppression or danger, including Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis. Fifteen years after the Second World War there were over 100,000 refugees in Europe, some still living in unofficial camps (at places like Laschenskyhof, near Salzburg) including children who had been born there. To alleviate this suffering, a young Conservative called Timothy Raison suggested a worldwide fundraising effort. World Refugee Year ran from June 1959 to May 1960 with Bill Astor as one of its organisers. In an eloquent speech in the House of Lords he attacked the phrase ‘a genuine refugee’, which he likened to the nauseating Victorian phrase ‘the deserving poor’. It was cruel and stupid, he said, to distinguish between political refugees, in fear of their lives or torture, and economic refugees trying to escape privation. Given the levels of Commonwealth immigration, especially from the Caribbean, it was mean-spirited to exclude East European refugees from communist oppression who, he felt, were more easily assimilated: ‘We know perfectly well that with Europeans the Mr Shapiro of one generation becomes the Mr Shepherd of another, and is soon indistinguishable from people in this country.’ The previous year’s government grant to refugees had been £200,000 out of a budget of £5,254 million, including £44 million on roads: ‘If we forwent fifty miles of trunk roads for a year, we could probably solve the European refugee problem.’ For every refugee in a camp there were three or four living in garrets, attics, cellars, shanties, or even old buses: he wanted to provide them with houses, furniture, vocational training, and tools of trade.24
Astor became chairman of the executive committee of the Standing Conference of British Organisations for Aid to Refugees during this busy time. He made countless speeches and signed thousands of letters. Publicity films were made; promotional books and pamphlets issued; a charity film première, fundraising concerts and a Mansion House dinner were held. He liaised with the Royal Household to win support from the the Royal Family. A pledge of £100,000 was extracted from the government. Harold Macmillan, who spoke at the final rally in the Royal Albert Hall, felt that the campaign ‘touched the imagination of the country’.25 In Britain, over £9 million was raised out of a global total exceeding £35 million. There were few precedents to such fundraising fifty years ago.
Astor’s greatest moment of public self-revelation came in a tribute, which was published in The Times, to his friend Prince Aly Khan, who had been killed in a car smash while returning from Longchamps races in 1960. It was a cryptic self-portrait, which showed Astor’s sense of the discrepancies between public perceptions of heavily publicised individuals and their private characters. ‘If only one knew Aly Khan by repute it was easy to preconceive a dislike towards him. When one met him, it was impossible not to be stimulated and attracted by his charm, his perfect manners, his vitality, his gaiety and sense of fun. But if you were fortunate enough to know him really well, and have him as a friend, you acquired a friendship which was incomparable – generous, imaginative, enduring and almost passionately warm.’ Like Astor, Aly Khan had suffered a privileged but lonely childhood. Just as Astor had been relegated in the inheritance of Cliveden and the Observer, Aly Khan had been elided from the succession of the leadership of the Ismaili Muslim community, which his father conferred on Aly Khan’s son, Karim. Astor admired Aly Khan as ‘the most sportsmanlike of losers’, who loyally accepted this adversity. This blow was softened by the Pakistan government naming Aly Khan as its ambassador to the United Nations. This appointment ‘produced the most useful, rewarding and happiest days of his life’, Astor judged, thinking, too, of his own efforts for refugees. ‘Both his staff and the press viewed his arrival at the UN with some doubt. He was a complete success, showing unexpected caution, seriousness and conscientiousness, as well as his usual intelligence and charm.’
Recalling perhaps his loneliness when his marriages failed, Astor affirmed that ‘when a friend was going through a bad patch … Aly was at his best. He would telephone you from the other side of the world; his houses were at your disposal for as long as you wanted, his sympathy, intuition and imaginative kindness were rocks you could rely on. He was curiously defensive towards the world, and intensely sensitive to real or imagined slights, but if he was sure of your friendship he returned it a hundredfold.’ Astor’s last sight of his friend ‘was an untidy gay figure bustling through London Airport, leaving a trail of laughter by a cheery and courteous word to each person he came into contact with, and each of whom he treated as a human being he was glad to see’. This was how Astor, in 1960, hoped to be remembered.26
Bill Astor was one-third playboy, one-third idealist and one-third magnate. Reacting against his finicky upbringing, he was not discriminating in his friendships. He needed to be liked: he was the sort of man who would pay for a friend’s honeymoon. ‘I always think of Bill as more vulnerable and childish than over-sexed, a man of pillow fights and romping, not some kind of sex maniac,’ said Grey Gowrie twenty years after Astor’s death.27 Before the Life Peerages Act of 1958, Astor supported the admission of women to the House of Lords. He was a founder member of the parliamentary committee for British entry into the Common Market, sponsored legislation to introduce lie-detectors into police work, and supported reform of laws covering abortion and divorce. He also had one deadly enemy to whom he had never done a jot of harm. In 1949 his brother David published a profile in the Observer of Lord Beaverbrook, describing him as ‘a golliwog itching with vitality’ and whose editorial policies were ‘political baby-talk’. In 1931, the Astors’ half-brother, Bobbie Shaw, had been sentenced to five months’ imprisonment on a charge of homosexuality. Nancy Astor asked Beaverbrook to use his influence to suppress the story in the Daily Express and other newspapers. ‘I am deeply grateful to you for the trouble you have taken to keep my name out of the papers,’ she later wrote to him. ‘Nothing matters very much about me – but I felt I should like to spare the other children.’ After the Observer profile, Beaverbrook fulminated that the Astors were sanctimonious and ungrateful. His underlings retrieved Bobbie Shaw’s dossier, and primed themselves to serve their paymaster’s spiteful rage. In 1958, for example, John Gordon, the Sunday Express editor, whose virulence about homosexuality was fit for an ayatollah, wrote a vindictive revelation of the Shaw case, which at the last moment was held back. Beaverbrook’s staff continued his relentless vendetta against the Astors, which reached its crescendo with the Profumo Affair.28
At New Year 1958 in St Moritz, Bill Astor met a twenty-seven-year-old ‘model girl’ called Bronwen Pugh. She was the Garboesque muse of the couturier Pierre Balmain, standing nearly six feet tall, with piercing blue-green eyes and an all-encompassing instinctive elegance. Her father was a barrister specialising in Welsh coal-mining cases who eventually became a county court judge. Her unusual aura derived, possibly, from a series of mystical experiences which began at the age of seven, when she believed she heard the voice of God speaking to her about the primary importance of love. Bronwen Pugh trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama before going to teach at a girl’s school. Only later did she plunge into modelling. Some thought her too tall for the London catwalks; Cecil Beaton refused to do a photographic portrait because he claimed that her nose was too ugly; but her purposive self-possession proved startling at fashion shows.
In the spring of 1957, Bronwen Pugh went to Paris to model for Balmain. ‘Bronwen takes Paris by Scorn’, was Picture Post’s headline. ‘Some loathed it. Some were entranced. But everybody remembered that scornful, dirt-beneath-my-feet style of modelling.’ Recalling that Pugh has been ‘a schoolmistress’, Picture Post added, ‘the glare that quelled the Lower Fourth has become the stare that sweeps the salons at Balmain’. Katharine Whitehorn, who went to see the Paris fashions, reported: ‘At Balmain this extraordinary girl somehow acquired a manner of showing dresses which put her instantly on a pedestal. It was half-Bournemouth, half-goddess; scornful, aristocratic, insufferable. It staggered Paris.’29
There was confusion among journalists and the public between ‘model girls’, as Bronwen Pugh and her colleagues were then called, and ‘models’, as young women were euphemistically docketed when they appeared in newspaper reports of divorce or criminal cases. Anne Cumming-Bell led the way for socially ascendant ‘model girls’ by marrying the Duke of Rutland in 1946 (newspapers still calling her ‘a mannequin’ and reporting that she had always insisted on appearing fully-clothed); Norman Hartnell’s ‘model girl’ Jane McNeill married the future Duke of Buccleuch in 1953; Fiona Campbell-Walter married Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza in 1956; Anne Gunning Parker married Sir Anthony Nutting in 1961. Dior’s muse Jean Dawnay married a major in the Welsh Guards, Prince George Galitzine, in 1963. These, however, were the rare, publicised exceptions. Many model girls acquired husbands who earned less than themselves. They were unable to save because of the enormous outlay required in shoes, nylons, hats, bags, gloves, cosmetics and hair-dos.
Fiona Campbell-Walter met Heini Thyssen on a St Moritz train rather as Astor and Bronwen Pugh met in the same ski resort. Thyssen wooed her with a Ford Thunderbird, and married her post-haste. ‘He had the fastest plane, the best motor car, the most precious paintings,’ she is supposed to have said; ‘of course he had to have the most beautiful woman.’ She was the third of Thyssen’s five wives. Talking about her later, with the smugness of a lifelong womaniser, he said: ‘She wasn’t very intelligent but she would talk endlessly in that wonderful dark brown voice of hers. One day, when we were driving, she asked me a question and I didn’t answer. I said: “You’ve got such a sweet charming voice, you can’t expect me to listen to what you’re saying as well. Just talk to me”.’ Thyssen lusted after Campbell-Walter, although he ungallantly said that she looked better dressed than nude. ‘When it comes to women,’ he philosophised, ‘one should not fall madly in love, travel with them, trust or spoil them. One should, however, show jealousy. Women like that.’30
Astor was Thyssen’s antithesis as a suitor. Between his first luncheon with Bronwen Pugh, and their next, months later, she underwent an unheralded mystical experience which filled her with joy. She read The Phenomenon of Man, by the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin, discovered St Theresa of Avila, and felt transformed. Astor’s first words on seeing her again were: ‘You’ve changed, what is it?’ Soon he was head over heels. ‘I got a shock,’ he wrote after watching her on a catwalk, ‘as I had always imagined you at work as lovely and gay, and I was knocked off my emotional perch when you looked cold and aloof.’ Unlike Thyssen, he appreciated his fiancée’s talk. ‘The extraordinary thing about you,’ he explained, ‘is that your mind has survived the chicken chatter of the cabine for so long, remaining lively, enquiring, and deep.’31
They married at Hampstead register office in October 1960. When news of the impending marriage seeped out the night before, her parents were hounded by journalists. On the wedding day reporters crowded a pub opposite the gates of Cliveden buying rounds in the hope that drinkers would help them to concoct a juicy quote. Dorothy Macmillan, aunt of both Bill’s second wife and his first wife’s ex-fiancé, had the impertinence to show her disapproval of an ex-model viscountess when she met Bronwen Astor.
The newly married couple were united by humour. He liked boyish practical jokes, while she had a jolly-hockey-sticks sense of fun. She described herself as light-hearted, but not particularly amusing, and Bill as a serious-minded man who liked to be playful. Grey Gowrie, whose grandmother gave the new Lady Astor the nickname of ‘The Pencil’ because she looked so long and thin, recalled: ‘Bill was suddenly bubbly and looked so happy. And she had real energy. “Come on, let’s do this, let’s have fun,” she used to say. She was so much better for him than one of those conventional upper-class wives … she gave him back a feeling of being alive.’ There were charades, guessing games, songs at the piano as entertainment for guests after dinner. The women sat in groups discussing their children, dogs and horses. Bronwen Astor liked to embroider. There were no erotic carousals.32
Many middle-class women, who were expected to abandon their working lives on marriage, were relieved to become the subordinate partners who did not have to take full responsibility for the future. Some found fulfilment playing new roles that were supportive and secondary to their husbands. Bronwen Astor, as the wife of a lordly Croesus, had to accept his settled ways more than most women. Some of her husband’s Cliveden guests were condescending towards her because she was not upper class (‘the class system was much stronger then’, she recalled). Bill Astor, who disliked the way she pronounced ‘round’, tried to teach her to say ‘rauwnd’. She felt socially precarious. Her biographer likened her position to that of a junior partner joining a well-established firm: she had to move discreetly to win acceptance.33
Bronwen Astor felt as disempowered by Cliveden’s traditions and staff as Maxim de Winter’s second wife in Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca, after moving into his great house Manderley. The household staff in 1960 comprised a chef, assistant cook, butler, valet, housekeeper, laundry maid, sewing maid, three housemaids, two footmen, two secretaries, two stable-hands, two chauffeurs, two carpenters, a night-watchman, a handyman, and eight gardeners. In 1965, shortly before his death, Astor estimated that it cost £40,000 a year to run Cliveden. Everything was already the way that he wanted. His young wife shifted a sofa, replaced some curtains and attempted to make her clothes fill the spacious wardrobes in her dressing room. Her lady’s maid, who had come from the Duchess of Roxburghe at Floors Castle, was mortified by how few dresses the new Lady Astor owned. The maid laid out the clothes that she judged should be worn each day by her mistress, who had no choice in the matter; but soon left Cliveden declaring that she could not work for a woman who did not know how to behave. The chef resigned when Bronwen Astor visited the kitchen to discuss the day’s menus, and opened the refrigerator to see what was inside; Bill Astor pacified the man’s outrage, and she had to apologise.
Nicky Haslam, who had been Bronwen Pugh’s walker, recalled visiting the Astors around 1962:
We turned in to the gates of Cliveden [and] … circled a vast fountain, its cavorting creatures carved of meat-pink marble, before the last long stretch of drive to the palatial facade. The new Lady Astor, wearing an unusually shapeless mustard-coloured country suit, met us in the vast pseudo-baronial hall. It was strange to see her pouring tea amid tables bearing publications like the Farmer and Stockbreeder, and the Tractor News, rather than Jardin des Modes or L’Officiel … However rich the Astors, however grand and gilded the Cliveden salons, however luxe the food served in them, the upstairs arrangements were curiously Spartan … single gentlemen’s quarters were narrow bedrooms off school-like corridors, not very near a huge communal washroom, and far above the main rooms. The hard mattress in my room did not, however, stop me having a little rest before dinner. I slept through the dressing gong. A footman was sent to wake me, and I hit the dinner table just as an elaborate soufflé was being brought into the astonishing blue-and-gold French boiserie’d dining room. Bronwen motioned me to my place … and I was relieved to find the soufflé was the entrée rather than the pudding. I hadn’t entirely blotted my copybook in this aristocratic, ruling-the-country company.
The next morning Bill Astor took us to meet a friend who had a cottage on the estate. His name was Stephen Ward. Within a few months the scandal of his trial and suicide was to bring irredeemable sorrow into Bronwen and Bill’s marriage.34