An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (12 page)

These were the ruminative confidences and formative memories that family men shared when unbending on a late night train in 1963. Jack Profumo’s England cannot be understood without them.

THREE

Lord

The Astors began at Cliveden with a row. William Waldorf Astor, the New York plutocrat, smarting from the way that he had been traduced by American newspapers during his failed candidatures for the state assembly, settled in England in 1890. Three years later he bought Cliveden, an Italianate pleasure palace perched on a high spacious site above a bend of the Thames, with a magnificent terrace commanding a prospect downstream towards Maidenhead, rather than a short view of the opposite bank.

Immediately he was mired in ill-will. He quarrelled with Cliveden’s previous owner, the Duke of Westminster, over so paltry an object as the visitors’ book. The Duke denounced the Yankee to the Prince of Wales. Astor gave a sturdy defence to the Prince’s Private Secretary, for he was intent on buying his way into the Marlborough House set. In 1895, for example, when he joined the prince’s house party at Sandringham, he made a show of paying £1,000 for a pair of bay carriage horses from the royal stud. In appreciation of Astor’s outlay, the Prince of Wales, with the Duke of Buccleuch in tow, attended a house party at Cliveden.
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Astor’s prickliness ensured his unpopularity. Staying with Lord Burton at Rangemore in 1897, the Marquess of Lincolnshire noted of his fellow guest: ‘Astor is another instance of the utter inability of American men to get on in England. Here is a man with millions – probably the richest man in the country; and yet he is given to understand that, though he is tolerated on account of his wealth, he is of society and yet not in it.’ Astor had represented Ferdinand de Rothschild when Empress Elizabeth of Austria visited London, but her suite ‘refused to call him “Thou”, though he implored them to do so. Astor assumes a … scornful deference to Ladies to whom he is speaking. He evidently resents the way he is treated; but tries not to show it.’ Two years later, Lincolnshire met Astor at Lord Lonsdale’s racing stud in Rutland. ‘He is a social failure. Pompous & proud, with an aggressive air of mock humility … The boy (who is Captain of the Boats at Eton) is at present voted a Prig.’
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Astor bought a London evening newspaper, the
Pall Mall Gazette
, in order to enhance his social influence, and appointed as its editor a Society swell, Harry Cust. Astor’s aunt Caroline, a snob who had imposed the notion of the exclusive ‘Four Hundred’ on New York City, had inaugurated the custom among New York millionaires of publicising their parties and controlling reputations by issuing tit-bits of news about their guests to the social columns. Astor tried to foist this foolery on London. He gave Cust a list of names, headed by the Duke of Westminster, of people who were never to be mentioned in the
Pall Mall Gazette
, in the mistaken belief that the English nobility cared about being mentioned in newspaper Society paragraphs. At first this was mocked, but in 1900 it brought his social nemesis.

Sir Berkeley Milne, a naval officer in command of the royal yacht (whom the Prince of Wales dubbed Arky-Barky), was taken to a musical evening at Carlton House Terrace by an invited guest who assured him that he would be welcome there. Astor ordered the interloper from his house and inserted a paragraph in the
Pall Mall Gazette
announcing that ‘Sir A. B. Milne RN was not invited to Mr Astor’s concert.’ This upset the
haute monde
more than the Boxer rebellion in China, as Lincolnshire noted at a house party for the Prince of Wales and his mistress Alice Keppel: ‘HRH quite open-mouthed with fury: and vows he will never speak to him again.’ In retaliation for this royal ostracism, Astor called Mrs Keppel ‘a public strumpet’, and told people that King Edward VII (as the Prince became after his mother’s death in 1901) had been impotent for twenty years. He believed that the government wished to nominate him for a peerage in 1902, but that this was forbidden by the King, ‘who hated me’. Thereafter, he said, he never relented in seeking ‘to attain what Edward’s spite had withheld’.
³

Cliveden was never a conventional English country house. It was not the centre of a great estate which gave the owner political influence and social prestige in the county. When in 1890 Lord Cadogan, who owned much of Chelsea but no landed estates, spent £175,000 to buy Culford in Suffolk, he acquired a house with 400 acres of parkland and 11,000 acres, and got his eldest son elected as MP for a nearby constituency two years later; and in 1893 the newly created Lord Iveagh, the brewery millionaire, spent £159,000 to buy the 17,000 acre Elveden estate, which made him a power in the district. Although Astor paid a vast sum for Cliveden, he got only 450 acres, comprising woods and riverside pleasure gardens. Cliveden proved a showhouse rather than a powerhouse.

In 1906 Astor gave Cliveden to his elder son, Waldorf, who that year married an American divorcée, Nancy Shaw. The young man, whom Lincolnshire had dismissed as a prig, left Oxford with a social conscience that was rare in an American millionaire. He deplored his father as a selfish reactionary, and wished to make amends by a life of public service. This paragon entered Parliament as MP for Plymouth in 1910, before becoming effectual
proprietor of the
Observer
, a Sunday newspaper which his father bought in 1911. He was diagnosed with a weak heart, which made him medically unfit for trench warfare, and spent the early war years monitoring wasteful army organisation. This was an indelible stain on his reputation so far as some Tories and combatants were concerned. His hopes of appointment as the country’s first postwar Minister of Health were accordingly frustrated, and his advocacy of public health reforms got him called a ‘doctrinaire Socialist’ by reactionaries. Nevertheless, by his late thirties, Waldorf Astor was entrenched among the nation’s great and good. He was a patient chairman of committees, without a dash of flamboyance, whose attitude to his good causes could be described as reticent enthusiasm (rather as his attitude to his children might be called frigidly tender).
⁴

Old man Astor, in the midst of the Kaiser’s war, by judicious distribution of £200,000 to King George V’s favourite war charities and the fighting funds of both the Conservative and Liberal parties, obtained first a barony and then a viscountcy. When he died in 1919, Waldorf Astor went reluctantly to the House of Lords. His wife was elected for the vacant Plymouth constituency, and became the first woman MP to take her seat in the Commons.

Nancy Astor, when young, was generous, bold and funny, with quick-witted shrewdness and inexhaustible energy; but after turning fifty her sudden amusing parries turned to rash outbursts, and she became a domineering, obstinate and often hurtful spitfire. Her religion put claws on her. She converted to Christian Science in 1914, coaxed her husband into becoming a disciple of Mrs Baker Eddy, and nagged her children along the same lines. Her first marriage had ended because her husband was a dipsomaniac who became sexually importunate when drunk. She and Waldorf were both prudish teetotallers, and her temperance campaigning became notorious for its scolding tone. Before 1914 she kept two infatuated young men, Billy Grenfell and Eddie Winterton, enthralled as her
amis de marie
, though she was the sort of flirt who required only to be the centre of admiring attention: Billy and Eddie were never permitted any pounces.
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Nancy Astor had six children: Bobbie Shaw by her first marriage, and four sons and a daughter by her second. The eldest child of her second marriage, William Waldorf Astor (known to his friends as Bill and to his parents as Billie), was born in 1907, and became the last Astor to live at Cliveden. From his mother he received the least affection of all her children, although he strove to win her approval and pretended to believe her Christian Science indoctrination long after he had privately rejected it. She belittled, chastised, and rejected him; and resented the fact that her favourite son, Bobbie, would inherit neither the Astor money nor title. Even in old age she spread discord: as a man in his fifties, Bill would still tense when she bustled into a room; people saw him blanch before her jibes began; and his widow believed that the aortic aneurism that killed him at the age of fifty-eight was partly attributable to the anxiety that his mother had generated. Certainly, her angry obsessions wearied her husband: Waldorf described her in 1951, a year before he died, as ranting against ‘Socialism, Roman Catholicism, Psychiatry, the Jews, the Latins and the
Observer
’.
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The Astor children suffered from their family’s reputation for ostentatious wealth. Bill was held by his ankles out of a school window to see if gold would fall from his pockets. He was victimised by his classics tutor at Eton, Charles Rowlatt – ‘rather a nasty bounder at the best of times’, he told his mother, ‘so I hope you’ll … have his blood’. Rowlatt was an austere bachelor who commanded the Eton Officer Training Corps and heaped Bill’s next brother David with work and punishments: ‘What annoys me is the way when he loses his temper with me (a daily affair) he always ends up by saying something about all the family talking much too much,’ David complained; ‘I call it awful cheek but I daren’t tell him so.’ Nancy Astor was indeed of confounding volubility, and during the 1920s still retained her sense of the ridiculous, though this vanished with the complacent egotism and rudeness of her old age. In Rowlatt’s day she amused her children by mimicking the county ladies (and perhaps Eton ushers) deploring ‘those vulgar Americans’ at Cliveden.
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As an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, Bill Astor began to blossom, although Cliveden’s proximity to the university made it hard to break his shackles to his parents’ home. His outlook as an undergraduate was glossed by his acceptance of conventional proprieties: ‘I do like a disciplined life, belonging to a properly organised & ordered society either at the bottom, the middle or the top,’ he wrote shortly after the General Strike. Polo, hunting and racing were his chief avocations. He described a flat race in fancy dress at Oxford in 1928. ‘We had an oyster and fish and chips lunch and then fared out. I arrayed myself tastefully in a white turban, in which I placed two poppies; a blue sweater, high neck, a red and blue sash and pyjama trousers of broad pink and white stripes. I had a hireling of Mac’s, called Nippy, who really went very well. There were all sorts of costumes, Proctors, Scouts, clerics, beards, and so on. It was as muddy as a ditch.’
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Bill Astor was thoroughly anglicised for a child of American parents, although he was never convincing as a traditional Englishman. ‘There are a lot of Middle West people on board,’ he wrote to his mother from the liner
Olympic
as it approached New York. ‘The language of course is a difficulty as I understand not everything they say & they hardly understand a thing I say, otherwise we get on splendidly.’ He was trained for the responsibilities of public life, and instilled with an international outlook. When in 1929 he was sent to Hanover to live in a family and learn German, provincialism made him shudder. The audience at the local opera house were, he reported, ‘
repulsive
: in the intervals they go up to a large hall & walk round & round it, very slowly & solemnly: all in ugly ill-fitting dresses & suits’. He recoiled from ‘the dirt and perversion and vulgarity that abounds in Berlin’, as he reassured his parents. ‘The Germans deliberately go out to bring nasty things into their plays. Not funny, just horrible.’
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He was also instilled with his father’s sense of duty. Both men were meliorists who wished to be competent and kind; but whereas the older man, at a pinch, gave precedence to competence, Bill’s preference was for kindness. In 1932 his father secured his appointment as personal secretary to the Earl of Lytton, chairman of the League of Nations’ investigation into Japanese aggression in Manchuria. This visit to China (during which he had an affair with a young Russian woman who was a refugee from the Soviet system) triggered his lifelong compassion for war refugees, displaced persons and civilian casualties. Subsequently he attended the League of Nations’ discussions in Geneva on the Japanese seizure of Manchuria, deputising for Lytton who was ill. He was adopted as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for East Fulham (no doubt helped by the assurance that Astor money would pay his election expenses and subsidise constituency party funds) and in 1935 joined his mother in the Commons. He subsequently took a tall house in Mayfair at 45 Upper Grosvenor Street. Only a year later he became, through family influence, Parliamentary Private Secretary to Sir Samuel Hoare, who was successively First Lord of the Admiralty and Home Secretary. Bill Astor, who was conscientious and keen to please, visited Czechoslovakia in 1938, and returned with undiminished support for Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.

The phrase ‘the Cliveden set’ first appeared in a socialist Sunday newspaper of November 1937 in a story about pro-German machinations. The phrase was promoted by the Marxist Claud Cockburn in his newssheet
The Week
, and popularised by left-wing journalists, who made play with the Astors’ (remote) German ancestry. Cliveden, in this smear campaign, became the headquarters of a conspiracy of manufacturers, bankers, editors, landlords and diplomatic meddlers, all intent on appeasing Hitler. The Astors at Cliveden, who had been shunned by the Prince of Wales’s set at the turn of the century, were to be reviled at the time of the Profumo Affair. But these cycles of denigration were nugatory beside the abuse in the late 1930s, when communists and their sympathisers concocted their shabby half-truths about the Cliveden set. Harold Nicolson’s trenchant assessment of the Cliveden set was fairer than the communist propaganda. ‘The harm which these silly selfish hostesses do is really immense,’ he noted in April 1939 of Nancy Astor and a Mayfair counterpart. ‘They convey to foreign envoys that policy is decided in their own drawing rooms … They wine and dine our younger politicians, and they create an atmosphere of authority and responsibility and grandeur, whereas the whole thing is a mere flatulence of the spirit’.
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