An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (14 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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