On a blazingly hot summer’s day in 1961, Nancy Astor stepped off the train at Didcot, into the back of a waiting taxi. It was a regular arrangement that the old lady should take the fast train from London, and the slightly longer drive to her magnificent country seat, Cliveden, rather than taking the stopping train to Taplow. Nancy Astor, who had been born in Danville, Virginia, in 1879, had married, aged eighteen, an alcoholic named Robert Shaw. Six years later, she divorced, and married William Waldorf Astor. (‘I married beneath me–all women do.’) Her extreme puritanism (she was an eager convert to Christian Science), her driving ambition, her old-fashioned American tendency to take a matriarchal view of the world, all made her the ideal candidate for that historic role–the first woman to sit as a British Member of Parliament (Conservative) at Westminster. The Astor millions helped, too. She had children, remarkably enough, given her repugnance for the human body and its functions. Bobbie Shaw, the son of the first marriage, grew up to be something of a liability, a homosexual alcoholic who was obliged to leave the Royal Horse Guards for being drunk on duty. Two years later, in 1931, he had been arrested for importuning and imprisoned for four months. It was with some alarm that one of her Astor sons heard that the old lady was writing her memoirs. It would, he blurted out, be too horrifying to tell the truth. In her Edwardian-Virginian voice, Nancy asked, ‘What do you mean–horrifyin’?’ ‘Because you are so possessive. That’s why we are all cases of arrested development; though I admit that Bobbie is the only one of us actually to have been arrested.’
Nancy Astor’s husband, the second Viscount, died in 1952 and was succeeded by their son William (born 1907), a much-married Conservative MP. He inherited not only the 1916-created (purchased from the newly created Prime Minister Lloyd George) peerage, but also Cliveden, one of the most beautiful Victorian houses in England. Sir Charles Barry designed it in 1850, on the perfectly sited ruins of a seventeenth-century ducal residence. From the balustrades (which survive from that Duke of Buckingham’s house) the eye looks down the thickly wooded banks of the Thames. In the foreground a perfect Italianate garden has been made, with flat lawns and parterres divided from one another by stone steps as each swoops downwards to the lush valley below. On the level of the house is a magnificent pavilion, and behind one of the garden walls, in what must have been a kitchen garden, is a swimming pool which even in the English climate makes a sun trap of Italianate degree.
To this beautiful place, on a beautiful summer’s day, the Dowager Viscountess returned, since, of course, she had ignored the convention that Dowagers move out of the big house when their husbands die. She was still in residence at Cliveden, arresting her sons’ development, just as she had been since she ‘married beneath her’. To this place she had returned after winning her Commons seat–Plymouth–for refreshment and repose. Here, as the 1930s unfolded, and the Conservatives failed to address any of the issues which worried her–poor housing, poverty, drunkenness, bad education–she had uttered her despondent cry, ‘I sometimes wonder whether I joined the right party.’ (After the 1929 election, she had tried to get the fourteen other women MPs to join a Women’s Party–under her leadership, naturally.) Here, too, as the 1930s passed by, she entertained those who came to be known by the contemptuous nickname (it was Evelyn Waugh’s cousin, the communist Claud Cockburn, who coined it) ‘The Cliveden Set’. Cockburn’s idea had been that in the beautiful setting of Cliveden, upper class and rich politicians, journalists and men of influence met to plan the policy of appeasing Hitler–even of subverting the processes of democracy to bring in a government which positively favoured the European dictatorships. All sorts of politicians fetched up at her dinner table. One night, in 1930, a young Conservative called Frank Pakenham found himself seated beside the firebrand Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Labour), Oswald Mosley. Mosley expounded the view that cometh the hour, cometh the man. He said that after the dullness of such-and-such had emerged Gladstone; after the tedium of Lord Derby’s ‘Who? Who?’ Cabinet had sprung the dynamic Disraeli…‘And,’ added Mosley, his eyes agleam, ‘after Ramsay MacDonald…’
Pakenham thought the ambition of this young–thirty-five-year-old–politician touching; could Mosley not see, what was obvious to Pakenham–that no political party would risk choosing as Prime Minister a man of such promiscuous sexual habits?
Did the household gods of the Astors remember this conversation thirty years later when Cliveden once more attracted the public attention? And do its three twentieth-century incarnations make Cliveden an emblem of how the country changed? In the thirties, the supposed scene of appeasement and sell-out; in the 1950s and early 1960s, the famous backdrop to scenes of Dionysian orgies; and in the 1980s and 1990s, a ‘luxury hotel’, a place for yuppies to burn off some of their excess money with elaborately cooked cuisine minceur, with individualised bath-robes, chocolates on the pillow and the peculiar air of unreality which such ‘luxury’ always superimposes?
But we have left Nancy Astor and the taxi driver, in the broiling sun of that afternoon in 1961. The driver crossed the gravel with her suitcase, entered the house by the front door–not something he would have done in one of the older houses in England–and into the large, dark, cool hall, an experience not unlike stepping into the scenes of one of the later novels of Henry James, where the tastes of Old Europe–heavy tapestry, polished ancient oak and cool stone floors–are sustained by American money. Nancy Astor thanked the man and drifted towards her apartments, but, before doing so, she told the man that he must go in search of refreshment.
‘Do not drive home without drinkin’ somethin’. If you want tea, go through that door–the green baize door in the corner, you’ll come to a kinda back door. Walk along–you’ll find the kitchen, say I sent you. Ask for a cup of tea, and you can take it out to the back and drink it in the garden.’
The man did as he was told, but he found the kitchen deserted and the back door open. There was, nevertheless, a teapot on the table, and so he helped himself to a cup, and, as instructed, he went out to the back of the house to find a bench to sit upon. Turning a corner by what looked like an outhouse or greenhouse, he found himself beside the swimming pool. He was not alone. Sitting around in the sunshine were about a dozen people, six young women of beauty, and six men. As he stared, and looked away, and stared again, the man felt a stab of incredulous horror. He crept away with his tea, and found a bench nearer the kitchen door. As he sat down he pondered what he had seen. Was it possible? Not only was it possible, it was unmistakable. He had just seen, sitting naked beside the pool in the company of what appeared to be a selection of tarts, a group of public men–a Cabinet Minister, a member of the Royal Family, and others–whom he had previously regarded as honourable figures, leaders, his social and political superiors.