THE CLIVEDEN HOSPITAL took the sharpest edge off Phyllis’s grief. Three weeks after the captain died, its first patients were unloaded at Taplow station, directly from the battlefields at Mons and Ypres, the first of twenty-four thousand to be admitted. Neither Phyllis nor Nancy had yet seen the horror close up. Now Phyllis described to her father “the startling idea of war,” her disbelief at going into the wards for the first time and seeing “fifty men lying there minus legs, arms, eyes” and finding “the worst of all,” in the distress of the first gas victims who had had no protection from masks. Later, in August, the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds arrived from the Dardanelles and the slaughter at Gallipoli. Phyllis wrote to Chillie, “One of them had been in that fierce fighting when they made a landing at Suvla Bay. He was quite a young boy in the Manchester Regiment & was quite pathetic when he said quite calmly, ‘All our lads were killed early that day.’” He was “stone blind” but “so good and so patient,” wrote Phyllis, astonished at this soldier’s courage expressed in meek good manners.
Nancy ran the hospital in partnership with a gangling, mustached Canadian surgeon from Yorkshire, Colonel Newbourne, a tireless, dedicated doctor in the old military-medical tradition and in Nancy’s eyes an heroic figure whom she elected to her pantheon alongside Archdeacon Neve. The hospital brought out Nancy’s comic talent, which she used to raise the spirits of traumatized, maimed young men, pulling them back from the abyss when Colonel Newbourne could do nothing more for them, challenging, cajoling, even bribing them back to life. She used every technique. She worked these gloomy wards, transforming the mood, the surroundings, laying on, as one of them observed, a permanent weekend party. She organized visiting acts, kept the wards filled with flowers. She sat all night if necessary beside the beds of terminal patients. They loved her and they were fascinated, once they had understood the switches from tenderness to bullying. Nancy bet a Canadian soldier her Cartier watch that he would be dead the following day; that he had no guts, unlike a Cockney or a Scotsman. Few people could have got away with kicking around a dying soldier, but he attributed his survival to it, and took the watch home.
The journalist and critic Alastair Forbes remembers the same technique applied in the next war when Cliveden was back in service as a Canadian army hospital and Nancy was even more fervent a Christian Scientist. “Sometimes … her cheeriness was a bit on the kinky side,” he wrote. “‘You’re frightened of dying aren’t you?’ she insisted on repeating into my ear as she accompanied my stretcher while it was being wheeled into the operating theatre. Luckily, I wasn’t, on that day at any rate.”
Bob Brand wanted to communicate with Phyllis, but felt he could say nothing. He was certain that she would marry him now the captain was dead; it was just a matter of time, and of tact. He didn’t know that Geoffrey Dawson, his Round Table colleague and editor of The Times, held the same conviction. He had not only been visiting St. James’s Square, but like Bob and the captain, had been corresponding with Phyllis, at some length and frequency.
If the captain had been transferred out of the trenches and promoted to the Welsh Guards, Phyllis would have returned to Mirador within a few days, as she had told him in her letter. She had already been away from Peter and from her neglected estate for three months. Now she delayed a further two months until May 1915. There were plenty of excuses: submarines, helping Nancy in the hospital. The more likely explanation, however, was that Phyllis was simply immobilized by grief, and once again “caught up in fear”—her apt description of depression. To return to Mirador this time was to face real loneliness. Though there were moments when she reveled in the solitude, there were also days of struggle, against “dreariness” and black moods. Mirador’s real point, compared to the other antebellum houses on the James River, was that it had produced the Langhorne sisters, their childhood, their fame, the family dynamics. This was now so far vanished that it seemed to belong to another century. It had been given to Phyllis as a consolation for her unhappiness when her marriage was over, but it had now become a place of provincial isolation.
She might have returned sooner if she had had any real understanding of the needs of the thirteen-year-old Peter. His adoration of his mother had been frustrated by a combination of boarding school, where he had been sent the moment things began to go wrong in his life, and her increasingly long absences. He had last seen her for Christmas in 1914. He wanted to resume his childhood with her, have his rights of ownership restored. He had been told to blame the hiatus on the war. Phyllis’s relationship with the captain, which had dominated much of her life since the war started, had never been explained to him. He must have wondered why the war in Europe meant that she had to spend so much time in England. There was a difference between being in boarding school while his mother was at home at Mirador, and being in England, out of possible reach or visiting distance. “Please come and visit soon,” he would write continually while she was in the United States. England had become a threat and a rival and he had begun to hate it and everything about it. As his mother became more and more of an Anglophile, he became a junior Anglophobe, despite his desire to join her. And yet Phyllis’s sense of the danger to Peter surfaces only in occasional abstract worries in her letters.
By contrast, Peter’s repetitive pleadings in his letters from his new school, the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, are pitiful to read. “I have been feeling very homesick lately also dreary and I miss you extremely. Please come over soon. I just cannot wait to see you and Winks.” Or “Please please please please take me over to England.” Phyllis must have written to him that she would come over and bring him back to England in June, at the start of the summer holidays in 1915. “Everything is just a mental [sic] whirl,” he responded. “Whenever I see your picture I just jump and squeak a little.” But there were delays, mixed signals, and Peter switched to extreme politeness, as if his childish eagerness might put her off or as if he were now an obligation and “being a bore.” “In your next letter if no trouble,” he wrote, “I wish you would tell me about when you will come back from England and if you don’t come (‘If’ I said) what will happen and who and how and by what authority will I get over there? Please send me a little picture of you to fit in my little frame also one of Winks. If it is any trouble do not by any means bother.”
Winkie was young enough to be kept close to his mother, before his own dispatch to boarding school. But even at the age of almost six, it was clear that Winkie was the blessed child, born with gifts, with looks and talents, “the most alluring and attractive boy,” as his mother described him. Phyllis’s descriptions of them both eventually give away the tragic division, that of Cain and Abel. They describe the “deliciousness” of Winkie’s presence, his laughter that she imagines hearing in the house when he’s away; her need to soak up precious moments of his childhood. Phyllis insists on her affection for Peter, again and again, as if to prove it to herself, but she is mystified by his “oddity” and his outsider tendencies, describing him as “a funny boy.” When she looks for the best in him, she writes, “He is a nice boy and I am always struck by his thoughtful ways.” Lacking Langhorne spontaneity, this was his tag—“thoughtful.” He was trying to please, but couldn’t succeed in charming like Winkie, with his “pretty ways.”
Some of this could be discounted by the onset of adolescence, which Phyllis called “the boy problem.” She had watched, with growing alarm, its effect on Bobbie, Nancy’s firstborn and Waldorf’s stepchild, particularly his rudeness to his mother. It had taken Peter in the classic way: feelings of inadequacy, shock at his own changing looks, a belief that he was ugly, even repellent, compared to others. And compared to Winkie, an Adonis in the making, Peter was small in height, his large, round head out of proportion with his body. He felt his arms were too long, his grin too wide and ready, “like a Halloween pumpkin.” He signed one of his letters to Phyllis: “from your first son with a peculiar face.” He sensed he was a disappointment to his mother and, of course, he was. He reminded her more of a Brooks than a Langhorne.
This was something that greatly worried Phyllis. She was under the impression that after her divorce, she could turn her back on the now despised Brooks family and gradually rid her children of their influence. This presumed that her children would follow the Langhorne path, “see things the right way” and close the chapter on their father. She couldn’t bear the idea that she had ever been married to Reggie Brooks.
The separation agreement, which would apply in the divorce, laid down that Reggie would see his sons in the holidays and that they would be educated in America, including college. Phyllis believed that Reggie wouldn’t care much after a while or would be too intoxicated to insist. “The present situation is hard on everyone,” Phyllis had written back in 1914, “especially the children who begin to look a little bewildered about things, and they think me very hard and unnatural when I reprove them after they have been running riot in Southampton.” She dreaded to see them go, she said, more so as they got older, “for Peter is getting to the age now when I shall have to explain some unpleasant truths to him. He is such a nice boy that I’m sure it won’t be difficult.” Peter, of course, knew all about his father’s drinking, but there was something much more fundamental to get across—the general shallowness of the Brooks family and their certain kind of wealth.
Phyllis had developed an austere and superior attitude to the Newport and Southampton money that had once provided her with a good marriage and removed her from Richmond. The Brookses’ wealth, their values, came from the Gilded Age—the days of the “scandalously” rich, the monopolists and robber barons now so discredited in the new social gospel of national progressivism (of which Teddy Roosevelt was the chief spokesman). They were the idle, the unimprovable rich. The Brookses were “a bad influence.” Phyllis had a moral purpose to keep her sons away from them.
Phyllis also believed in putting hurdles and obstacles in the way of children as they grew up, as if borrowing techniques from the training of horses. “Human beings are like gold mines,” she declared. “They have to be beaten and crushed to find out the gold from the dross.” Continual luxuries were “dulling to peoples imaginations”: “Everyone needs strong discipline, nations as well as children. The USA needs more than any other and gets less.” She worried about the effect of Waldorf’s wealth on Nancy’s children. “It’s a pity those children don’t have to rough it a bit now and again, they really are too comfortable always.”
When Peter came home, Phyllis would create a deliberate contrast to Southampton luxury. He would be subjected to a few days of decontamination, salutary correctives, tedious long hours of weeding in the garden for pocket money, which would then “somehow,” as Peter observed, be directed to the collection plate in church. Phyllis complained that Peter seemed “disturbed in his mind” when he came back from these visits to his father; “funny, stiff and reserved.” But it was Phyllis who ensured that the burden of coming and going was onerous and confusing. Peter was made to feel it was wrong to enjoy his father’s company. Phyllis believed that any affection he might feel was based entirely on material enticements. He was expected to declare his loyalty to his mother, to the Langhornes, and to reject any such claim from the Brookses, who quite obviously didn’t deserve it.
It was mid-May before Phyllis left for America. The reasons that she gave to Bob Brand for her departure made no mention of Peter: “I am going away to see if I cannot find just that peace within that you speak of. It is difficult to do this at Cliveden, where one must necessarily be with and see so many more people than one wants to, and I can’t help feeling now that they are intrusions, only keeping me from the only comfort that I have now—my own thoughts.”
This time, Phyllis left Winkie behind, with Jennie White, a trained nurse from Bellevue Hospital, who had come to look after him when he was ill at Mirador and who would stay for forty years. She was clearly a woman of great sweetness of nature and she loved the young Winkie. This was Winkie’s first separation. Phyllis thought she would be back in June at the beginning of Peter’s school holidays, although, in fact, she wasn’t to return until August. Winkie was greatly disturbed by the sinking of the American liner Lusitania off the Irish coast while Phyllis was mid-Atlantic. The papers were full of pictures of the survivors. Jennie White wrote, “Winkie asks every a.m. ‘If Mummie has landed and if the Germans will get the St. Louis.’” “I miss you every day,” dictated Winkie, “and I don’t want you to come back while the Germans are blowing up ships. Give my love to Grandpa. Do you ride Tom Brown and Castleman? Do you have any colts?”
Thirty years later, with another war over, I found myself in the same position as Winkie, left at Cliveden with a nurse while my mother went to America for four months to try and sort out her own troubled marriage, traveling on an ocean liner. I remember the acres of empty gravel, the chiming clock, the vast spaces, the giant yew hedges: although there was much more activity in Winkie’s time, the landscape hadn’t changed.
When Phyllis did come back, she saw Bob Brand only once, toward the end of her visit, in September 1915. During her time of grief, he had kept away. He needed to reopen the dialogue. He had to broach the subject of the captain first, but it was something they couldn’t mention face-to-face. As she was leaving again for America, he sent a letter to her ship. It was very carefully worded. He couldn’t pretend, in this letter, that he missed the captain, or even that he had liked him, but he must give credit to Phyllis for her deep feelings for this man, his rival, whom he saw as a cardboard romantic soldier. “I should not like you to think I did not see his great qualities,” he wrote. “There was nothing small or mean about him & he certainly had in a wonderful degree courage & steadfastness…. His character was so marked that I think a woman wd either not like him at all or, if she loved him, wd love him very much. There was no halfway house with him.” This was an honest letter. “All the Pennants I know are strange & he was no exception …” he continued, and then, without knowing of the last correspondence about the Welsh Guards, he managed to suggest again that things might not have worked out for Phyllis: “I don’t think he wd have been flexible enough for politics; that was a defect of his qualities & in war you want strength & courage & not flexibility.”
But the letter was gratefully received and Phyllis wrote back to say yes, everything he had said was true, “and the Captain had become such an essential part of my life that it is hard to see how I can get along without him.” If explanation was needed for this—Phyllis had spent very few days of her life with the captain—she provided it. It was his attentiveness that she liked so much, the antidote to Reggie’s disregard: “You see he was the only person in the world that had never failed me in anything and had always given me the very best that he had to give, at a time when I appreciated these qualities very keenly.” When he went to the front, she wrote, “I went along quite cheerfully, believing that God would not make me suffer again.”
That September meeting was the last Bob thought he would see of Phyllis until the war was over. Taking children across the Atlantic with the submarine attacks was becoming increasingly risky, and Phyllis needed to establish a solid presence in America now because of the lawyers. She had also run out of reasons to come to England so frequently. Then, timing being the handmaid of romance, Bob and another Round Tabler, Lionel Hichens, were appointed by Lloyd George, now minister of munitions—a skillful deployer of bright young men who would never vote for him—to sort out the crisis in the supply of Allied artillery shells. They were sent to Canada, where the munitions were made: Bob Brand on loan from Lazard Brothers. Production depended partly on American finance, and the arrangements were constantly on the point of collapse. Brand and Hichens, after great difficulty, formed the Imperial Munitions Board in Ottawa to get production flowing again. Bob Brand had found his way of contributing to the war effort on a grand scale, applying his “beautifully lucid brain” to the complexities of financing weapons production.
By December, he was at Mirador, riding Castleman, playing squash with Phyllis, listening to her play “Farewell to Manchester” on the piano. It was a hurried trip from Washington. But on this last evening, when he was dining alone with Phyllis, about to ask her again to marry him, two neighbors came to visit. Phyllis knew what was on Bob Brand’s mind and she kept the neighbors talking for two hours, to his despair, until he had to leave for New York. He wrote from Mirador to Nancy that Phyllis complained of depression and loneliness. It was a year before he saw her again.
* * *
“Why have you stopped writing to me?” Nancy wrote to Phyllis in the summer of 1916. “I am really hurt.” In fact, Nancy hadn’t written either. Her letters were “shorter and fewer” by each post, Phyllis confided to Bob. The sisters’ correspondence had been dwindling for some time and they—the closest alliance in the Langhorne family—were drifting apart. Nancy’s interference with the captain had taken its toll and she had missed the anniversary of the captain’s death. “You must think me so heartless & cruel not writing you a line & I have thought so much about it …” she wrote. “I know how dreadfully you miss the Capt … He loved you in an odd way far more than you ever loved him.”
On her trips to Cliveden, Phyllis had found Nancy increasingly taken up with “that continual inrush and outrush of people.” She couldn’t understand her entertaining of streams of strangers, banging together social workers, racing peers, Christian Scientists, and cabinet ministers as if she were casting a new opera each day. Nancy was becoming a public character; she had forgotten the art of companionship. Christian Science, which Nancy now carried everywhere, and was trying to force on to everybody, including Phyllis, was doing further damage. Nancy had already converted Nora and Paul Phipps, or at least ordered them into it. Phyllis found the whole bandwagon and Nancy’s new entourage exasperating, with their obsession with their own souls and bodies and their idea that suffering didn’t “exist.” She found Nancy’s Christian Science language oppressive and irritating, too, a further barrier to communication. Phyllis’s own understanding of God, she said, had made her able to stand up under some hard blows without leaving any bitterness in her heart. She didn’t want to be told now that everything she had been through was “untrue.”
In 1918, Philip Kerr finally broke the news to his family that he was officially a Christian Scientist and no longer a Roman Catholic, which his mother, the kindly and saintly Lady Anne, treated as a greater tragedy than the death of his younger brother in the trenches in October 1914. Philip’s soul was damned by this action—there was no salvation outside the Church. His mother prayed every day for him until her death in 1934. Philip Kerr said later that this was the most traumatic event of his life and that afterward, as a result, he had avoided conflict of any kind in his personal relationships, or his political life. It partly explained why, until the very end of his career, he remained in the shadows as a powerful éminence grise, but never—and it was always the accusation against the Round Table—taking political responsibility, or even political sides.
Phyllis found it “very dreary” to return to Mirador. She had “wandered about aimlessly for a bit until I became adjusted.” It took longer each time, she noticed, to settle into the routine. She had been welcomed home only by the parson, in the absence of friends or sisters. She could give no comfort to her father, who kept telling her how he longed to see Nancy and Nora and Irene. Only Winkie—whom Chillie adored—kept the channels open “with his diplomatic work between Mirador and Misfit.”
Phyllis was particularly bored by all the “bossing” she had to do as chatelaine of Mirador. The romantically imagined symbiosis with the black Virginian staff, still the old childhood hands, was less charmed in practice. What really wearied her was making decisions alone, without a “male protector,” constantly settling something with the house, the church, the school, the farm, or, when people did come, having to deal “with the most tiresome of all jobs—arranging food for people.” Phyllis had notoriously bad food compared to the excellence of that of her sisters Nancy, Nora, and Irene (who gave her name to Mrs. Gibson’s Egg Dish, still a classic of its kind). She was lonely, but as soon as people came she wanted to be alone again. She would look back on her mood in this state of manlessness as “a hungering heart for that essential thing.”
Early one morning, there came a violent break with the old days. Three of her aging horses, including Castleman, had to be put down, the pistol shots startling Phyllis as she lay in bed; the realization of what had happened making her “sort of sea-sick.” “I feel as if three human beings, especially Castleman, had been killed. Most of the fun of my life has been on his back…. I wish they had not shot him so early this a.m.—6.30 is a gloomy hour anyhow.”
When the summer came, she made expeditions: to the Shenandoah valley with Peter and Winkie; to North Carolina for quail shooting, which meant more dreary evenings trying to make conversation with “very” remote cousins. The English post was now the main event of Phyllis’s week. She wanted to come back and work in the hospital at Cliveden: “In spite of my unsociable nature I like the company I get there. They are far more like Virginians than the Yankees.” The captain, the war, the Cliveden vortex had turned her into a committed Virginian Anglophile, emotionally and politically. But with Phyllis, this was mixed with the twin fears of rural entrapment and the horror of the northern cities and Yankee culture. Staying at Islesboro that summer, she clashed irritably with Irene and Dana Gibson, who were pro Woodrow Wilson and his policy of neutrality and isolationism, which would keep America out of the war until 1917. Irene had been chairman of the New York Democratic Committee supporting Wilson’s election in 1912—such was her enduring, vote-pulling fame—and in 1916 was chairman of what Phyllis thought was called “Wilson’s Women’s League.” Phyllis feared she might come to blows with Irene “who talks like a loony” about “that slippery Wilson.”
She and Nancy blamed Irene’s views on Dana Gibson, who turned his wife “like a chicken on a spit.” Nor had Dana Gibson any right to speak on these matters. “How could he know leading the life he does? He is a visionary and artist.” Both Phyllis and Nancy took a philistine attitude to Dana as a working artist, charting his movements to and from his studio when they stayed at Islesboro, and counting his afternoon naps; it wasn’t what you call work. However, it was agreed that to avoid “heated discussions,” Wilson’s name would never be mentioned between them.
Nancy had been pestering Phyllis to come over to England, warning her, “Don’t settle down too much if you ever mean to change your virgin state. Your young old men are getting v. restive.” Geoffrey Dawson was still “true” and, wrote Nancy, “I never met a better [one] so don’t throw him over lightly.” “Unsociable” was the word now leveled against Phyllis. She received lectures on it from Nancy and even from the frustrated Bob, who accused her of a cult of solitude and, more provocatively, “selfishness.” This was an outrageous accusation; one of the rudest words in their vocabulary. He got a shocked reaction. “Your letter is full of sauce! and a very wrong assessment of my character.” Nevertheless, this trapped Phyllis into declaring herself: “You ask me if I do not think it possible for one to get great comfort and relief in a true companionship with another person, sharing their whole life, deepest feelings and thoughts etc. Goodness heavens of course I do … and yet my reserve often keeps me from having it. Perhaps as I get older, and feel the need of companionship more, that reserve instinct will fade away.”
But Phyllis couldn’t come over: “I should leave in a moment if there were no children to consider….” This had not been a consideration when the captain was alive, but now the U-boat threat was worse and it would be “madness” to cross the Atlantic at this juncture. The consideration, of course, was not about abandoning Peter, which could still be done, apparently, but about depriving him of a mother altogether.
By staying at Mirador, Phyllis avoided a period of turmoil at Cliveden. The year 1916 was one of feuds and of terminal uproar between Hever Castle and Cliveden: Astor against Astor, Waldorf against his father. It was also the year that Nancy’s fourth son, Michael, was born.
Waldorf had discovered, having received a telephone call from a newspaper on New Year’s Eve, that his father had accepted a barony from the government in return for his years of contributing large sums of cash to Unionist funds, and also running two newspapers that supported the cause. When William Waldorf died, Waldorf would automatically inherit the title and his career in Parliament would be over, along with his political power base in Plymouth. Waldorf was a rising star, heading for ministerial office. His father had not indicated that this might happen, and there had been no consultation.
Although less radical and idealistic than Waldorf, Nancy was more outraged and embarrassed by what she saw almost as a social slight. “We are so knocked out by Mr. Astor’s taking a peerage that you wd not know us,” she wrote. “It has really made me ill, we never had a hint of it until the evening of New Years Eve … Mr. A sent for Waldorf New Years day & I fear he got a shock when he saw Waldorf who was too hurt, disgusted & annoyed to even attempt hiding it,” Nancy wrote to Phyllis. “Mr. A asked him wd he like it to be Lord Astor of Cliveden & Waldorf said he felt too strongly about it to have anything to do with it at all. Never in my life have I heard of a straight man doing so shabby a trick, you can’t think how dreadful it is, Sis I believe you can, you know my love of Plymouth & my disgust at most American Peeresses & now this.”
William Waldorf must have had some difficulty understanding his son. It was not inverted snobbery that made Waldorf protest but pride in the Astor family name, or, as Nancy told Phyllis, “… the Astor family started with plain John Jacob & to think it has come to this.” According to their son David, “Everyone knew it was a cash exchange. My mother always used to say it was ‘bought and paid for.’ She said ‘What does “Lord Astor” mean? Everybody knows that the Astors come from New York. To be Mr. Astor of New York means a great deal. To suddenly call yourself Lord Astor is quite absurd. It makes one look ridiculous.’”
Waldorf’s career had indeed been partly fired by what Nancy called “living his father down.” It was, ironically, under Lloyd George’s patronage that he had succeeded so brightly. He had managed to take control of the Observer from his father in 1915, moments before he tried to sell it, again without consulting his son, who had been its de facto editor. And now Waldorf was using it, with his editor, J. L. Garvin, to espouse the radical Unionist cause. Waldorf was a Unionist in name only—in reality, he was not far from a full-blown socialist, prepared even to outflank Lloyd George in radicalism. He believed that the state had the obligation to stem “the tide of disease and sorrow,” poverty and sickness—but this would be a reformed, model state with model institutions. Through the Observer, Waldorf became entrenched in political intrigue, although he despised the obstructions of party politics. This was one trait he had inherited from his father. Waldorf wanted to work through a radical consensus, through publicizing the glaring truths, cutting red tape, and overturning vested interests. In 1913, Lloyd George had made him chairman of the state Medical Research Committee, to pull together all the various strands of research and practice, which led eventually, also under Waldorf’s guidance, to the formation of the first Ministry of Health in 1919. Undoubtedly, Lloyd George was planning to make him minister of health in the coalition government. Waldorf sat on committee after committee—for foreign affairs as well as all forms of public welfare and social reform, agriculture, and housing. In addition, he had been given the grueling job of inspector of ordnance, with the rank of major, by Lloyd George.
Waldorf vented his spleen against his father. Yet what he saw as a “decadence,” his father saw as a distinction. He explained defensively to Nancy, “The late Lord Salisbury wished to give me a peerage in 1902” (after William Waldorf had contributed some artillery matériel to the Boer War), “but the late King Edward, who hated me, forbade it … from that time I have never relinquished the purpose to attain what Edward’s spite had withheld.” Nancy relished Rudyard Kipling’s quip that William Waldorf should be called “Lord Dis Astor,” “only don’t quote,” she warned Phyllis, “as if Mr. A—pardon Lord—A should hear it he will leave us penniless Barons! Oh the shame of it.”
At their meeting on New Year’s Day 1916, Waldorf told his father that he would try and get the law changed so that he could drop his title. His father, disappointed and furious, demoted him from the head of the family by inheritance, reorganizing the trusts so that the bulk of his wealth skipped a generation to his grandsons, and they never met again.
Waldorf, meanwhile, immersed himself in political intrigue, joining, later that year, in the plot to remove Nancy’s old friend H. H. Asquith from power. Asquith’s prosecution of the war—the “Wait and See” policy—was leading to disaster and military defeat as the slaughter in the trenches rose to unimagined levels. The Empire was now under threat and the Moot wanted a new leader to win the war. Some small part of the conspiracy took place at Cliveden and St. James’s Square, where every Monday night a “Ginger Group” met to lay plans. Its core was the Round Table, led by Alfred Milner, Leo Amery, Geoffrey Dawson, Waldorf, Philip Kerr, with Sir Edward Carson (the Ulster MP), and J. L. Garvin. Neither Asquith nor, evidently, Margot had any idea of the forces collecting against them, even after a hint from Nancy, who, declining an invitation to dinner, wrote, “Anyhow you would find us disagreeable company these days. The Wait and See Policy has turned me into a fighting woman.” Nancy had changed her tune since the days when she, like many other Tories, saw Lloyd George as a dangerous demon and radical, intent on scorching the capitalist class. He had charmed her, as he charmed almost everyone.
It was Waldorf who first put it to Lloyd George outright that he should make a move. His response was that he still didn’t want Asquith to go. But by December 4, 1916, when some particularly bad news had come from the front, he finally agreed. Dawson put out an editorial, written at Cliveden, with the headline “Weak Methods and Weak Men.” Asquith wrongly thought it the work of Lloyd George, who resigned on December 5, triggering a crisis and Asquith’s own resignation on the same day. He was succeeded as prime minister by Lloyd George two days later. Curzon and Balfour, whom Asquith thought of as his closest friends, were among the Tories to support Lloyd George and join his Cabinet. Most of the Moot now got jobs. Milner was given a place in the Cabinet, and in turn suggested Philip Kerr, who was appointed Lloyd George’s principal private secretary, where he remained as Lloyd George’s closest assistant for the rest of his prime ministership. Waldorf, who had worked with Lloyd George on the Insurance Bill, was rewarded, too, and made his parliamentary private secretary. It was a satisfactory business all around. They were known collectively as the Cabinet Intelligence Branch, or the “Garden Suburb,” after the offices Lloyd George had erected for them in the garden of 10 Downing Street. Lloyd George’s birthday party in January 1917 was held at St. James’s Square.
* * *
In the middle of these high politics, there was a little local difficulty with Nora, who had been working contritely with Nancy at Plymouth with the wounded soldiers, and then in the hospital at Cliveden for most of the war. By 1916, Paul Phipps, who had been a musketry instructor in a remote depot, was declared unfit for soldiering due to a persistent disability in his knee, and took a part-time job at the Admiralty in London. But most of the time he was at Cliveden, where he refused to help with the hospital and began to resent Nora’s long hours of work there. Apart from the Langhorne trust, which gave Nora $5,000 a year at roughly $4 to the pound, he and Nora were totally dependent on Nancy for money. He evidently believed that this was why Nora had to work so hard. “Paul like everyone who accepts feels a certain grievance against us,” wrote Nancy. “He is nearly driving Nora crazy always around and always complaining.” Nancy banned him from Cliveden during the week. “He’s certainly the weak end of the alliance,” she wrote to Phyllis, adding defensively, “Nora is devoted to him … I really think they suit each other wonderfully.” And in her Christian Science voice, she said, “I never saw anyone so improved.”
But Nancy was deceived. In Paul’s absences, Nora had taken up with more than one of the Guards officers who came and went from Cliveden. Her niece, Nancy Lancaster, put it more succinctly: “Nora went through the Guards like a knife through butter.” Nancy Astor saw only the surface evidence. “Poor Nora through kindheartedness has evidently got into great trouble at the hospital. She is too free and easy with everyone and I’ve warned her. I shall try to send her away for a week or so. I believe it would do great good but she really has v few friends. She has let people down so dreadfully … I’m trying to hold the right thought. It is the only thing that can help.”
Nora’s new ally was Nancy’s son Bobbie Shaw, who was eighteen in 1916. He had grown up to be extraordinarily good-looking, verbally sharp and funny, but Nancy’s doting possessiveness of him had never loosened as he grew into manhood and he was showing signs of trouble. His schoolboy “sassiness” had developed into a rebellious and difficult relationship with his mother, an ability to penetrate her defenses like nobody else, to be, uniquely, her equal in verbal attack. In 1917, he joined the Royal Horse Guards as a subaltern. He never saw action, but he discovered his métier in this mounted regiment. He had the right attributes: physical courage, excellence as a horseman, and popularity. But Bobbie had also developed a wicked streak and a love of danger. In his new alliance with Nora, he acted as her “chaper-one” and alibi; it amused him to watch Nora betraying her husband.
* * *
Phyllis crossed the Atlantic in January 1917, risks and all, bringing Winkie. Of Peter, left at school, she wrote, “I don’t like putting the ocean between us.” She had written ahead to Bob Brand, who was back in England working for the Ministry of Munitions, asking if they could “meet quite naturally and without constraint. My visit to England will be greatly marred if we could not do that.” She knew this was almost impossible for Bob; that he would propose again; that she would refuse and then apologize, and that despite this, they would not break off relations. In this, she was applying the Langhorne rule, first laid down by Irene, never to let a beau off the hook. What’s more, she had come over to England to get married. “I do value your friendship very much and should hate to have it step out of my life,” she wrote. “You see reserved people are usually lonely and need friends that understand them, as I think you do understand me.”
They met and he proposed. She said the difficulties were too great. This time, Bob said they should never meet again. Phyllis wrote in the middle of February, “I shan’t write to you again, but just let me say now how deeply it hurts me to give you pain, I only wish I could say all the things you would like to have me say. I know you would not want to hear them unless they were absolutely sincere.” She said she would quite understand if he would rather not see her, but then they went to a concert and on a few more outings. And one night, during a weekend at Cliveden toward the end of March 1917, as everyone was about to go to bed, Phyllis told Bob to come to her bedroom and, standing by the fireplace, she said she would marry him if he still wanted it. Bob thought his imagination was deceiving him. But she came to his office at the Ministry of Munitions the following Monday with her mind unchanged. “I knew then as I had always known,” he wrote later to his children, “that she had given me the greatest gift a man could have.”
There had been no preliminaries except for the fact that they had spent a great deal of time in each other’s company. Phyllis had decided, prompted by Nancy, that she couldn’t go back to Mirador and live alone again, that a deadline had come. Bob rightly surmised that Phyllis wasn’t in love with him and wasn’t certain of her happiness; that this was a tortured decision. All the unhappiness of the past years, she told him, had made her “gun shy.” “You ask if I can love you with all my heart and soul,” she wrote. “If I did not feel sure I could do that I shouldn’t for a moment contemplate marrying you. I believe it is best to have it come slowly but surely and percolate into one’s system—which is the way it seems to be doing with me.” She ended, “Bless you my darling.” She told Nancy that Bob Brand was “like a child in his gratefulness.”
Perhaps one of the “difficulties” that had held Phyllis back was Geoffrey Dawson, who, it seems, took the news badly and ungraciously. But somehow the main difficulty had been disregarded by Phyllis. Where would the new Brand family live if the children had to be educated in America? Phyllis had not consulted Reggie, nor, crucially, the England-shy Peter. Perhaps she calculated that Reggie would be nice about everything now that the divorce was over. But Phyllis had underestimated the contest of pride that the Brookses, especially Reggie’s mother, with her army of doctors and lawyers, were prepared to enter into, rallying their friends against the Langhornes. It was Nancy who tried to force Phyllis to go over and see Peter before she married, to get his approval and to secure his alliance. He was, she said, “at a curious and critical age.” It was a rare, possibly a unique, example of Nancy’s sensitivity when it came to children and their feelings. Perhaps she had learned something from the effect of her marriage to Waldorf on Bobbie, who had begun to refer to himself as “the foster,” turning his wit against himself to conceal his hurt at being displaced by his Astor siblings. But Bob did not agree that Phyllis should go over. From his point of view, it might reverse her decision. Peter had been written to and they would wait, instead, for his reply.
The draft of Phyllis’s letter to Reggie remains: “Just before I left New York you rang me up on the phone & spoke to me & I was touched when you said ‘if ever I can do anything for you let me know.’” There was something now that would make her life “far happier.” She intended to get married; she wanted the boys to be schooled in England. She had no desire to turn Winkie and Peter into Englishmen—“I have never liked expatriate Americans.” She also said that she would never give up Mirador and “hope to spend much time there in future.” (How this would tie in with settling with Bob Brand in England, she didn’t explain.) She couldn’t get married, she wrote, unless he agreed to this—otherwise it would mean constant journeys across the Atlantic. Her future happiness was in his hands.
Three weeks passed. Bob was sent by the Ministry of Munitions on a tour of the French battlefields. Phyllis wrote that she had heard nothing from Reggie, “but I do want Peter’s letter most of all.” It arrived on April 17. Peter had written:
When I received your letter about Mr. Brand I was very much surprised so much that I read your letter over about 4 times in the mean time I missed a recitation and got 15 demerits.
I am so glad you wrote to me first of all. Still further I am glad you are engaged to Mr. Brand above all people, for I think he is a very nice man and I consent without hesitation. You mentioned that I may not have realised Mr. Brand’s enthusiasm but there I beg to differ.
I am so glad that you will be happy at last after these 6 years of lonesomeness.
At first I must admit it kind o’ hit me hard! It was a large thing to realize.
I think Mr. Bob Brand is a very lucky man to have you.
When is the wedding coming off I wish I could see it though I know I would weep. Who is going to give you away? I can’t bare [sic] to think I shan’t see my little Mother married away. It is most bewildering though I am so glad you are going to have Mr. Brand and that you will be happy once and for all. It will be nice to once more have a partner who will share your woes. Please write me your plans. Lots of love from Pete.
How are you going to explain to Winks?
I am sad but so happy please write.
In her relief, Phyllis would have overlooked the ambiguities in the letter, focusing on his touching attempt to please her with adult, statesmanlike words. She wrote to Bob in France, “… I am as secure as a lock and very happy to see the way clearing for peace and happiness with you. The very thought makes the world seem the right place again…. Goodnight my darling Bob, I shall miss you and think of you very often this week—God has been very good in making you love me.”
News from Reggie finally came at the end of May, six weeks after Peter’s reply, via Irene. He refused out of hand. Irene had spoken to him by telephone. “He was adamant,” wrote Irene, “and as I said he would do, had talked to his friends and they all agreed he was right.” Irene added, “Poor Phyl, I am afraid this will alter all your plans, for of course I am afraid if you are separated from the children it will add zest to the B’s [Brookses] and they will become very attentive to the children and feel as if they owned them.”
Bob remembered walking over from Cliveden, on his return, to Greenwood cottage, where Phyllis was living with Winkie, to find her in tears as she tried to tell him that, owing to the children, until she was “right in her conscience” she knew he wouldn’t want her to marry him. But Bob wasn’t going to lose her now. America had just entered the war and he had been called to Washington as deputy chairman of the British Mission to look after the munitions for the British government. The questions about Peter and schooling could be postponed.
They were married ten days later at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, in June 1917. A letter came from Peter just before the ceremony. Clearly, he hadn’t been told that the marriage was to take place so suddenly: “I can’t tell you how lonesome I am. I wish this war would stop soon,” he wrote. “Hang it all it gives me a pain. I’ll die if I don’t see you soon. I honestly feel so lonely I don’t know what to do. Please let me know something about the matrimonial plans.”
Peter didn’t have long to wait, although the submarines delayed the Brands’ departure for a week. Winkie, aged seven, and soon to go to boarding school, was left once more at Cliveden, not knowing when he would see his mother again. She thought she would be away six months. In the event, it was ten months before she returned. The Brands spent their submarine-enforced honeymoon in the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, waiting for clearance—a hotel, then, of great elegance. The delay provided a crucial opportunity for privacy and intimacy “when all the barriers that stood between us were being broken down,” as Bob observed to Phyllis a year later. Given the work ahead, they would never have been alone otherwise, except in a cramped cabin on a fraught Atlantic crossing. Instead, they played golf at Hoylake every day, went to Southport beach, and read H. G. Wells’s new novel. Phyllis wrote to Nancy, “Bob is a darling thing & we laugh and chat together until the days seem to have flown by.” Bob Brand wrote in turn: “Phyllis tells me she is VERY happy & that you wd be jealous to see her so happy….” He added rapturous descriptions of Phyllis’s qualities, predictions of their future bliss, and enclosed a souvenir of Southport beach.
In April 1917, the month America entered the war, German submarines had sunk 196 vessels in the British war zone and on the Atlantic route. Boats left Liverpool accompanied now by destroyers. Passenger ships had guns mounted on their decks, firing continuously for the first thirty-six hours of sailing at suspected submarines. The few passengers on these boats were issued with waterproof suits and helmets that would enable them to float head up and feet down if they landed in the water.
Nancy had sent deck chairs ahead to the boat for the Brands’ comfort, but they had little chance to use them: it was to be an alarming ride. They spent the first two nights partially clothed and ready for the lifeboats. They had rough weather in the first days and Bob was ill, forcing himself on deck so as “not to take any chances” with Phyllis by being sick anywhere near her. Phyllis wrote delighted letters about him to Nancy, as if she had discovered him for the first time. He “always makes me laugh. I must say he is a delightful crittur and as good as gold to me and I am very happy with him…. It has been a happier week than I ever thought I could have.”
A month after their wedding, Bob Brand wrote to Phyllis, “I shall always love you as if I were on a honeymoon. I never knew before what it was really to love anyone. Isn’t it strange that something inside told me what the deepest want of my life was the very first time I met you? I didn’t change because it was right.” He added, “I shall certainly never forget the Adelphi Hotel. We must go back there someday.”