This marital breakdown coincided with the Suez crisis. Bill and his brothers David and Jakie (a Tory backbencher) put themselves at loggerheads with their adopted class by opposing Eden’s bungling. They showed themselves as Anglo-Americans, supporters of the Atlantic Alliance, who saw the dangers posed to the English-speaking hegemony by Anglo-French collusion in the Israeli attack without consulting the US government. Bill raised the die-hards’ ire by criticising the Suez adventure in the Lords debate on 1 November 1956. The debate had given the impression, he said, ‘that it is Colonel Nasser who has mounted a massive invasion into the territory of Israel and whom we are condemning as the aggressor and the invader, rather than the other way around’. It was unclear, he continued, whether Eden’s government aimed to displace Nasser from power in Egypt or safeguard shipping through the canal – which, despite dire predictions, had never been disrupted since nationalisation.
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