In 1942, while Bill Astor was serving in the Middle East, his father took two decisions which snubbed him. Lord Astor’s friend, Lord Lothian, had instigated in 1938 a change in the law which enabled the National Trust to accept ownership of country houses as well as landscape (he bequeathed his own house, Blickling, to the Trust in 1940), and thus inaugurated a new phase in that charity’s protection of rural England. Two years later Lord Astor gave the house at Cliveden, together with 250 acres of gardens and woods, to the National Trust as a way of mitigating death duties. The same year he dismissed the intransigent, elderly editor of the Observer, installed a temporary replacement, gave forty-nine per cent of the shares to his second son, David, and indicated that David (then aged thirty) would become postwar editor. Bill, brought up as the heir to Cliveden and expecting to inherit the Observer, reeled under this double rebuff.
Bill Astor was thought a superlatively lucky man by those who did not know him well. He lost his Fulham seat in the general election of 1945, failed by a few hundred votes to win High Wycombe in 1950, but was returned to the Commons at the next election in 1951, despite being one of the few Conservative candidates who made clear that (based on his prewar experience as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Home Secretary) he supported the abolition of capital punishment and opposed birching. His views were influenced by reading Arthur Koestler’s death-cell book, Darkness at Noon. Unlike many in his party, he believed that ‘the de-brutalisation of punishment’ resulted in a falling crime rate. His father’s death in 1952 sent him to the Lords, and put an end to his ambitions for political office. In the Lords he advocated ‘civilised’ values: ‘arguments based on the emotions of revenge, of righteous indignation and of fear’ made bad law, he told peers when speaking against the death penalty in 1956. Homosexuality should not be criminalised, he argued, because ‘those of us who are lucky enough to be normal should have nothing but pity for people in that situation’.11
With women Bill was fidgety and luckless. In the 1930s he was in love with a married American woman five years his senior who had no wish to wed him. While serving in the war-torn Middle East he had a romance that petered out. Returning to England, he married in June 1945 only a month after the end of fighting in Europe – hastily, as many (including his brother David) did at that time. His bride, Sarah Norton, was recovering from the recent death of a much-loved mother and from a broken engagement to Dorothy Macmillan’s nephew, Billy Hartington, who had married someone else and been killed in action in quick succession. (Sarah Norton’s father, Lord Grantley, was a monocled clubman who worked in the film business with Valerie Hobson’s first husband; Sarah Norton’s mother had been Lord Beaverbrook’s favourite mistress.)
The newly married Astors suffered the heartbreak of three miscarriages before the birth in 1951 of their only child, William. Sarah Astor subsequently endured serious post-natal depression (a condition not then recognised or understood by physicians). In the thrall of this, during 1952, she left her husband for an Oxford undergraduate who was seven years her junior. There were long, miserable consultations with lawyers and bystanders. One mutual friend spent eight hours with her, urging reconciliation, and then had another long talk with Bill. ‘He gave it to her straight from the shoulder, giving home truths about the disastrous effect on a child of a broken home, of the cruelty of her action on me, of the deteriorating effect of this on her own character & her letting the side down generally,’ Bill reported that autumn. ‘My intention is to sit & do nothing; do nothing to create ill-will or make it harder for her to return … What hell this all is. But William is wonderful, healthy, happy, gregarious, noisy.’12 The Astors were divorced in 1953, but remained good friends and ensured that their son had an untroubled childhood.
Soon after his first marriage, wishing to provide his wife with her own country house and to plant himself in the Bicester hunting country, Bill Astor had bought Bletchingdon Park, a Palladian house in Oxfordshire, from a penurious bachelor (Lord Valentia) whose heirs were distant and obscure. Bletchingdon was still Bill’s legal residence at the time of his divorce in 1953, but was sold immediately after the judicial decree was secured, when he returned to Cliveden. It had lain in desuetude for several years, and he hoped to revive the great days when his mother had drawn smart Society, political lions and literary panthers to the house. While serving in the Middle East he had been nostalgic for the Cliveden parties that were held during Ascot Week: ‘tennis and riding in the morning: and all the girls in their best dresses and men in grey top hats fixing on buttonholes and sprays of flowers in the hall at twelve and the cars all lined up and the Royal Procession and Father’s colours on the course and polo in the evening and swimming and all the rhododendrons out and for once my parents forgetting politics and giving themselves over to social joy! I hope so much I won’t find a new order when I get back: I enjoyed the old order so much.’13
The 1950s were an envious decade. Envy was most intense among those who had lately risen in the world, as Geoffrey Gorer noted in 1951. ‘Some of the formerly prosperous classes, especially the women, are quite venomous about the advantages the working classes enjoy today, compared with before the war. But they are not as venomous as the working-class and middle-class men who are making good money and getting higher positions. Many of these people are filled with hatred for those they call “the idle rich”.’ Bill Astor encountered such resentment when he was parliamentary candidate at High Wycombe. If his wife attended a meeting in a fur coat, people seethed: ‘Look at her, flaunting her riches!’ If she left it at Bletchingdon, they hissed: ‘She’s dressing down to us! We all know she’s got a mink at home!’14
Bill Astor’s Cliveden regime did not conciliate haters of the idle rich. His belief (broadcast on BBC Radio in 1956) that the management of French stud farms was superior to their English rivals made him further enemies. Yet ‘Bill was quite snobbish in an English way’, recalled his friend Pamela Cooper. Her son Grey Gowrie thought Bill ‘lacked self-belief’, despite some remarkable qualities. ‘He worried too much about what people thought of him. He was conventional to the degree of not escaping the conventions of upper-class society, but they certainly didn’t fit him like a glove.’ Some of his guests were the smart end of rag, tag and bobtail. A luncheon guest at Cliveden noted: ‘Lord Astor had some anonymous lords and ladies (their personalities and names did not impinge on one).’15
This same guest, the writer and connoisseur Maurice Collis, in 1955 watched Astor driving in his Bentley ‘accompanied by one of those well-born but colourless chits of girls who are often to be met with at Cliveden’.16 The girl was twenty-four-year-old Philippa Hunloke, the stage-manager daughter of Dorothy Macmillan’s sister Lady Anne Holland-Martin and Harold Macmillan’s goddaughter. A fortnight later she married Bill. The couple had a discontented honeymoon in the South of France and at the Astor stud in Ireland, from which they returned estranged, but with the bride pregnant. There was an intimidating collection of guests at the new Lady Astor’s first big Cliveden dinner: King Gustav of Sweden, the Dowager Duchess of Rutland, Nancy Astor, the octogenarian pro-consul Lord Hailey, the former head of the Foreign Office Sir Alexander Cadogan, Maurice Collis, an air marshal called Lord Bandon, Isaiah Berlin, and an old courtier called Lady Worsley, all exuding stale, elderly aplomb. Philippa Astor faced her duties as chatelaine of Cliveden with flurried dread.
Moreover, Nancy Astor was captious and undermining to the women in her family circle. She resented her daughters-in-law for supplanting her in her sons’ lives, went careening through the family, and grew more destructive with age. Her four Astor sons married a total of eleven times: there is no doubt that her brutal, intrusive rudeness upset her sons’ domesticity. Bill’s wives, installed in his mother’s place at Cliveden, suffered worst of all. ‘The most detestable woman in England; boring, rude and guilty of interference in British politics which has brought nothing but disaster,’ Isaiah Berlin judged of Nancy in 1954; but