"Tweedland" The Gentlemen's club

Friday, 5 January 2018

Revisiting David Saxby at Old Hat on Fulham High Street. See next "post" also, below.

OLD HAT STOCKS GREAT KIT

Alexandra Henton October 28, 2014

http://www.thefield.co.uk/country-house/clothing/vintage-hunting-shooting-clothes-26106

“If I closed the vintage side of my business I’d be lynched,” laughs David Saxby of Old Hat on Fulham High Street, the go-to place for vintage kit in London for the past 25 years. He has been manufacturing his own “vintage” clothes for the past 10. “I don’t use new patterns, only vintage ones,” he says. “A single-breasted suit with a single button and a shawl-collared, double-breasted waistcoat, that is the David Saxby style. You wouldn’t look out of place today, in the Sixties or in the Twenties wearing it.” His caps (there are more than 2,000 in stock) are based on a Thirties’ original, deconstructed and used as a pattern; his waistcoats (£175 single breasted, £195 double breasted) boast a continuous neckband, “They stopped making them like this 20 years ago,” he says. Saxby is creating new vintage. “I took over the workforce of the old Phillips & Piper factory (also known as Lambourne) in Ipswich, when it closed down. It had been manufacturing riding jackets and hunt coats for all the best retailers for more than a hundred years. The British ‘Lambourne pattern’ is admired and respected all over the world.”

The vintage tweed suits sold at Old Hat (standard price £95) are popular for Good-wood. MFH found a Sixties Dunn & Co Border twist tweed that fitted. “It was a bit dated in style, definitely of the Sixties,” he says, “but a good weight and very acceptable price, although I’m keener on the new vintage caps and shooting suits.” [The Saxby shooting suits start from £670 for a two-piece: a Norfolk jacket and fishtail-back plus-fours.] After a timely reminder that we were on a £250 budget, we turned to the biggest-selling vintage line at Old Hat, the dinner jackets and suits in vintage barathea. A brilliant vintage buy, they start at £100 and there are more than 900 in stock.

Vintage hunting and shooting clothes

Alexandra Henton October 28, 2014

http://www.thefield.co.uk/country-house/clothing/vintage-hunting-shooting-clothes-26106

In vintage hunting and shooting clothes you can look at your best in the field, without spending a fortune

Vintage hunting and shooting clothes. Marquess of Zetland. The Marquess of Zetland photographed for The Field in 1948.

Vintage hunting and shooting clothes are found in most field reader’s dressing room. But if uncles and fathers happen not be the right size then there is much to be said for seeking out some vintage hunting and shooting clothes that will fit well. So that when you hop on to the best hunting horse you can find, take to the moor for some grouse shooting or the field for pheasant you can cut a dash. And remember to keep an eye out for the best evening wear too.

Correctly fitting vintage hunting and shooting clothes are a steal. And can add inches to your posture. They straighten the shoulders, adds vim to your vigour and may even encourage an ill-advised Roger Moore eyebrow lift, so be warned. Buying vintage hunting and shooting clothes is an imprecise art but there is nothing you can sport – certainly for under £250 – that delivers the same kick. The combination of quality and price are impos-sible to best on the high street or the Row, and the cost generally allows for a tailor to make small alterations if required.

CHASE DOWN VINTAGE HUNTING AND SHOOTING CLOTHES

And there is also the thrill of the chase. A London hatter will charge upwards of £1,500 for a capacious silk topper in best condition, so bagging one for under £100 at a provincial game fair still ranks high on my best-buys list. A legendary charity sale that yielded a cashmere overcoat for £5 and a vintage Cordings trilby for £10 showed the volume of great kit circulating, if you know where to look. Tops and tails are most difficult to track down, with shoes over a size 10 and hats larger than 7 emanding a scarcity premium.

THE FIELD’S CHALLENGE

The challenge: for a Field reader to run to earth, for less than £250 per outfit, good, vintage hunting and shooting clothes to fill those gaps in the wardrobe. The task fell to My Future Husband (MFH), who is not vintage sized by nature but is field standard. Charity sales and auction lots are unreliable so, for dependable sources, the internet was scoured and recommendations demanded from friends.

VINTAGE TO VOGUE

Vintage to Vogue in Bath has been run by John and Imren Lowin for the past six years. “The shop only sold women’s clothes when we arrived,” says Imren. “Men get bored so we wanted to give them something to look at in the shop and it grew from there.” Now the stock is divided evenly between the sexes and John has some interesting pieces on display. “There’s an antique fencing kit, Second World War motorcycle despatch rider’s boots and a leather fireman’s helmet; they were made from brass until the advent of electricity.”

John was initiated into the vintage world via shooting. “There used to be one of those old-school shooting shops in Bath called Crudgingtons. It closed down and the idea of selling shooting kit that didn’t look brand new and straight off the peg came about.”

The Thirties three-piece Harris tweed shooting suit with leather “football” button and Norfolk jacket (£250) is a classic piece. “It isn’t too heavy and is surprisingly easy to move in,” volunteered MFH as we snapped him (alongside a burgeoning crowd of tourists) at the Circus in Bath. “It is in very good nick, not at all worn or tatty – the sort of thing I imagine my great-grandfather wearing when he shot with the Prince of Wales.”

The Lowins also provided the rest of the kit for the photograph: a Thirties collarless cotton shirt (£48), a Sixties Tootal cotton paisley cravat (£30), a Fifties wool felt trilby with hat box (£58). These vintage pieces are sourced worldwide, with regular buying trips to New York and Berlin. “For variety and quality you have to go abroad,” says John. “Our most surprising find came while we were on holiday in Barbados. The contents of an old colonial plantation house were being disposed of at a local auction, and it was stuffed with shooting kit.”

Alongside their best-selling collection of tweed jackets they hold a stock of cartridge belts, cartridge bags and gunslips, including a Forties leather leg-of-mutton 12-bore case (£150). “I took a leather-stitching course as I couldn’t find anyone to repair the cartridge bags,” says John, “and I’ve started up-cycling vintage pieces into household objects.” Think charming lamps made from vintage boots.

BRIDESHEAD INSPIRATION

John Morgan’s passion for vintage struck during the Eighties’ series Brideshead Revisited. “I loved it, so started buying vintage pieces. My friends wanted them, too, so I started selling them.” The business has been thriving since 1984. “In the early Eighties I belted around in my MG Midget, buying old tweeds and dinner jackets, supplying Hackett, which used to sell second-hand clothes. Now I run Hogspear and John Morgan Hire Company.” The latter hires out vintage luggage and colonial leftovers to film sets; they have appeared in Harry Potter, Tomb Raider and, of course, Downton Abbey. The former sells vintage clothes and uniforms on eBay. “I started selling on eBay six years ago,” he says, “and we have just passed the 25,000 positive feedback mark.”

The museum, part of the complex of buildings at Muston’s Mews in Shaftesbury, Dorset, where Morgan is based, bursts with boy’s-own delights. Remnants of our colonial and sporting past are there alongside taxidermy, covetable leather goods, unusual apparatus (they turned out to be breeches trees), luggage, horns, horse bits, memorabilia and delightful hunt evening tails from the Peshawar Vale Hunt in India with French-grey facings.

“Vintage clothes have a life of their own,” Morgan enthuses. “I am not selling pristine costume, I’m selling great kit that was made to be worn, not shut away or treated with too much reverence. Yes, it’s great that each piece has a history, I love the tailor’s labels and the names inscribed on them, but I believe in making it your own, in wearing it.”

MFH takes home two great fieldcoats: one muted and relaxed with cuffed sleeves in soft herringbone tweed by Hawkes of Savile Row [ac-quired by Gieves in 1974] (£50); the other a 1962 structured, heavier-green tweed by Denman & Goddard of Piccadilly – by appointment to Georges V and VI (£50). “These are no-brainer buys,” opines MFH mid-twirl. “Everything about them, from the material to the cut and general feel, is great.” The eyebrow does start to rise.

The Henry Poole evening tails (£55-£60)are a stunning example of a great vintage find: heavy silk lapels, working cuffs, elegant buttons. “It really should be worn,” agrees MFH, “although it might be a little on the snug side.” The accompanying white tie, shirt, collar and waistcoat are reasonable to buy (£20), although many are rather too well worn, so look out for less-well-used examples. “Some-thing old gives the wearer a certain cachet,” says Morgan. “Buying from Hogspear gives you a unique piece from a private source. You won’t bump into anyone else wearing the same thing and you can create your own story with it. To wear vintage you need to appreciate the quality but also have some imagination.”

And the top vintage picks? “Smoking jackets, morning tails and evening tails,” Morgan confirms. “These are often claimed by relatives and are much harder to find. Also, good-quality English shoes.”

OLD HAT STOCKS GREAT KIT

THE VINTAGE TACKROOM

The Vintage Tack Room (formerly Field and Country Antiques) was taken over by Mia Woodford in January this year. Woodford, who hunts with the Chiddingfold, Leconfield and Cowdray, saw the opportunity it presented as an online business and has thrown herself into the venture with gusto. “For me, vintage is not about age – a new Bernard Weatherill coat is vintage. It is about a look, quality and being made in a traditional style,” she says, “although I do have a Cavalry officer who hunts in the shires and will buy nothing post-1950.”

Vintage hunting and shooting clothes. Hunting kit. Vintage hunting jackets were made to last

Vintage hunting jackets were made to last

Woodford is an enthusiastic consumer of vintage bargains. “I can spend hours Googling the names of past owners of a coat, finding out which hounds it has hunted to. Well-made things last; the 1927 swallowtail coat (£135) is a perfect example.” For MFH, the vintage breeches were resolute in their refusal to be pulled over his calves (there was a moment of terror when it seemed they might have to be cut off). “Even the newer Oliver Brown breeches have 15in calves,” says Woodfood. Be sure to check your leg measurements first. The hunting coat (£75) fitted well and was a good weight, perfect for a first foray following hounds, and the leather boots (£115) ticked the box. For anyone new to riding to hounds or a seasoned thruster looking for some dashing kit, The Vintage Tack Room can provide. “We run a hunt scheme,” says Woodford, “which is free for the hunts to join. Any hunt member receives a 5% discount and we donate 5% of the hunt member’s spend to the hunt. We also provide a hire service, as new items can often lead to accusations of ‘all the gear, no idea’.”

Vintage hunting and shooting clothes. Weatherill. A vintage Weatherill jacket is a great find

A vintage Weatherill jacket is a great find

Whether you are yomping through heather after grouse, standing in a line at a formal shoot, riding to hounds, racing at Cheltenham or throwing shapes at the hunt ball, the best vintage kit will ensure you cut a dash – and stay in the black.

The Ethos of a Chap

David Saxby Discusses Tailoring #1

David Saxby Discusses Tailoring #2

David Saxby. Vintage Hero. Gentleman's Tailor.

“I started in menswear and tailoring in the 1960's, the tail-end of the glory days of British tailoring When I produce a new garment, it has to be at least up to the high standards of manufacture and materials that marked those years.”

David Saxby

62 Fulham High Street London, SW6 3LQ,

Old Hat is the fruit of decades of dedication to vintage clothing by David Saxby. His expert eye focuses sharply on all aspects of gentlemanly attire and etiquette. Not only does Old Hat specialise in mens vintage clothing, but they also sell a selection of Edwardian and Victorian women's wear. In addition to this, accessories to compliment your chosen attire include bowler hats, short morning coats, double breasted waistcoats and ties.

Thursday, 4 January 2018

Nancy Astor and the Cliveden Set.

The Cliveden Set were a 1930s, upper class group of prominent individuals politically influential in pre-World War II Britain, who were in the circle of Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor. The name comes from Cliveden, the stately home in Buckinghamshire, which was then Astor's country residence.

The "Cliveden Set" tag was coined by Claud Cockburn in his journalism for the Communist newspaper The Week. It has long been widely accepted that this aristocratic Germanophile social network was in favour of friendly relations with Nazi Germany and helped create the policy of appeasement. John L. Spivak, writing in 1939, devotes a chapter to the Set. Norman Rose's 2000 account of the group proposes that, when gathered at Cliveden, it functioned more like a think-tank than a cabal. Ironically, according to Carroll Quigley, the Cliveden Set had been strongly anti-German before and during World War I. After the end of the war, the discovery of the Nazis' Black Book showed that the group's members were all to be arrested as soon as Britain was invaded; Lady Astor remarked, "It is the complete answer to the terrible lie that the so-called 'Cliveden Set' was pro-Fascist."

The actual beliefs and influence of the Cliveden Set are matters of some dispute, and in the late 20th century some historians of the period came to consider the Cliveden Set allegations to be exaggerated. For instance, Christopher Sykes, in a sympathetic 1972 biography of Nancy Astor, argues that the entire story about the Cliveden Set was an ideologically motivated fabrication by Claud Cockburn that came to be generally accepted by a public looking for scapegoats for British pre-war appeasement of Adolf Hitler. There are also academic arguments that while Cockburn's account may have not have been entirely accurate, his main allegations cannot be easily dismissed

In November 1937, Claud Cockburn, editor of The Week, wrote and published a damning report on what he saw as the pro-German activities of Waldorf Astor, his wife, the politician Vicountess Nancy Astor and their circle of friends. He alleged that the group, who where often hosted by the Astors at their country residence, Cliveden in Buckinghamshire, were using their close political connections and media power (Waldorf owned The Observer) to influence the British Government into a policy of appeasement with Nazi Germany. Cockburn's article, accusing the Astors and their circle, was published just as the tide of public feeling was turning against appeasement, consequently, the story was picked up and embellished by newspapers all over the world, with the phrase 'The Cliveden Set' coined by another British publication. There remains, however, no evidence that the group acted in any way to actively distort British foreign policy, although some did hold pro-appeasement values, and Cockburn's theories are generally disregarded today.

https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/group/1193/Cliveden%20set

Claud Cockburn

The Cliveden Set

http://spartacus-educational.com/SPcockburn.htm

Cockburn wrote a great deal in The Week about what became known as the Cliveden Set. The leaders of this group, Nancy Astor and her husband, Waldorf Astor, held regular weekend parties at their home Cliveden, a large estate in Buckinghamshire on the River Thames. Those who attended included Philip Henry Kerr (11th Marquess of Lothian), Edward Wood (1st Earl of Halifax), Geoffrey Dawson, Samuel Hoare, Lionel Curtis, Nevile Henderson, Robert Brand and Edward Algernon Fitzroy. Most members of the group were supporters of a close relationship with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. The group included several influential people. Astor owned The Observer, Dawson was editor of The Times, Hoare was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Lord Halifax was a minister of the government who would later become foreign secretary and Fitzroy was Speaker of the Commons.

In 1935 a Colonel Valentine Vivian, the head of counter-espionage at MI6, wrote to Captain Guy Liddell at MI5 saying he had sent MI6's man in Berlin to talk to Norman Ebbutt, who had worked with him at The Times in the 1920s. The agent reported the conversation: "Ebbutt has the highest opinion of Claud Cockburn's honesty and admires him for feeding on the crust of an idealist when he could obtain a fat appointment by being untrue to himself... Ebbutt says The Week has a large circulation among businessmen in the City. He gets his copy regularly. He very much regrets that Claud Cockburn has now completely fallen to the mad idea that all Imperialists dream of nothing but the destruction of Russia."

Norman Rose, the author of The Cliveden Set (2000) has pointed out: "Lothian, Dawson, Brand, Curtis and the Astors - formed a close-knit band, on intimate terms with each other for most of their adult life. Here indeed was a consortium of like-minded people, actively engaged in public life, close to the inner circles of power, intimate with Cabinet ministers, and who met periodically at Cliveden or at 4 St James Square (or occasionally at other venues). Nor can there be any doubt that, broadly speaking, they supported - with one notable exception - the government's attempts to reach an agreement with Hitler's Germany, or that their opinions, propagated with vigour, were condemned by many as embarrassingly pro-German."

On 17th June, 1936, Claud Cockburn, produced an article called "The Best People's Front" in his anti-fascist newsletter, The Week. He argued that a group that he called the Astor network, were having a strong influence over the foreign policies of the British government. He pointed out that members of this group controlled The Times and The Observer and had attained an "extraordinary position of concentrated power" and had become "one of the most important supports of German influence". Over the next year he continually reported on what was said at weekends at Cliveden.

Claud Cockburn later admitted in his autobiography, I Claud (1967) that most of his information came from Vladimir Poliakoff, the diplomatic correspondent of The Times. As his editor, Geoffrey Dawson, was a member of the Cliveden Set, and would obviously not allow it to be published in his own newspaper, he gave it to Cockburn instead. Cockburn also revealed that Poliakoff received much of his information from "anti-Nazi factions in the British and French Foreign Offices... and were thus first-rate, and the stories that came from them had that particular zip and zing which you get from official sources only when a savage intra-mural departmental fight is going on." He also admitted that Winston Churchill and his supporters were also providing him with "inside information".

On a visit to the United States Anthony Eden was amazed when he discovered the impact on public opinion of articles on the Cliveden Set in The Week was having in the country. A horrified Eden reported to Stanly Baldwin that "Nancy Astor and her Cliveden Set has done much damage, and 90 per cent of the US is firmly persuaded that you (Baldwin) and I are the only Tories who are not fascists in disguise."

28th March 1994

Intrigue and scandal behind the charm of Cliveden

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12678358.Intrigue_and_scandal_behind_the_charm_of_Cliveden/

THE Merchant-Ivory film The Remains of the Day is set partly in the

thirties in a country house which plays host to supporters of German

appeasement and whose setting bears a striking resemblance to Cliveden,

the Astors' country seat in Berkshire.

Cliveden (it rhymes with ''lived in'') has had a chequered history.

More than 30 years ago John Profumo met Christine Keeler there and began

the Tory sex scandal by with all others are judged.

Between the wars Nancy Astor gathered an exotic mix of English

aristocracy, politicians and celebrities. The Cliveden Set attracted,

among others, the German ambassador Von Ribbentrop, Lothian Lothian,

Charlie Chaplin, Lloyd George, George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling and

Lawrence of Arabia. Chaplin wrote in his autobiography: ''Lady Astor

would have made a wonderful actress.''

According to the writer Angela Lambert, the young people invited to

Cliveden were ''usually the most vivacious and intelligent of their age

group''. Some 30 household servants pampered the regular weekend guests

who would take out boats on the river, or play tennis.

In her entry for December 13, 1937, diarist Beatrice Webb wrote about

''the Cliveden Coterie'' describing members as ''die-hard pro-German''.

The New York Times said that the Cliveden Set was ''widely regarded as

the most influential of Germany's sympathisers''. According to David

Sinclair, in his book Dynasty: The Astors and their Time, the Set was

innocent of the charge of ''conniving in the rise of the Nazi's Reich.''

In the House of Commons, however, Nancy was once referred to as ''the

honourable member for Berlin''.

Nancy wrote to the papers denying that any sinister group met at

Cliveden ''in the interests of fascism or anything else'' although she

did admit to entertaining people of many religious and political creeds.

When Labour MP Tom Driberg made mention of the Set he was promptly

invited to lunch by Nancy Astor to be dissuaded of such a Set's

existence.

''There is no doubt that a Cliveden Set did exist in the sense that

the phrase represents a set of assumptions and presumptions to which the

Astors and their friends were amongst the most important subscribers,''

writes David Sinclair. According to Bernard Shaw's biographer, Michael

Holroyd, Nancy ''created a fantasy kingdom [at Cliveden] that

surrendered to reality only under extreme pressure''.

Nancy finally abandoned her stance on appeasement but she never saw

eye-to-eye with Winston Churchill. She once told him: ''If I was married

to you I would put poison in your coffee.'' Churchill's immortal reply

was: ''Nancy, if I was married to you I'd drink it!''

Nancy was a celebrated eccentric, a teetotaller, she converted to

Christian Science and visited the USSR in 1931. She was greatly

enamoured of the company of George Bernard Shaw who called Nancy ''a

volcano''. The daughter of a wealthy American family (her sister was

immortalised in popular cartoons as The Gibson Girl), Nancy married the

millionaire Waldorf Astor in 1906. In 1919 she became Britain's first

woman MP to take her seat.

THE Astors traced their name back to John Jacob Astor who once owned

almost all of Manhattan. The family moved on from property and

publishing to hotels. New Yorks' Waldorf Astoria was opened in 1893.

Among its innovations were breakfast in bed and the Waldorf Salad.

Nancy feared and hated war but she could do nothing to stop the Second

World War. After the war the Cliveden Set transmogrified. Bill Astor,

Nancy's son, loved to entertain at Cliveden although it was then owned

by the National Trust. His wife Bronwen was Balmain's principal model.

The hospitable Bill Astor had guests staying most weekends for house

parties.

Minister for War John Profumo was one such guest who met a naked

19-year-old model, Christine Keeler, at Cliveden's walled swimming pool

one hot June in 1961. It was a fateful meeting that was to put Profumo

and Keeler's names in the history books. The link came through Stephen

Ward, a society osteopath, who had a weekend cottage in the grounds.

Ward introduced Lord Astor and his friends to a variety of pretty girls.

In court Mandy Rice-Davies mentioned Lord Astor by name and when she

was asked if she knew that Astor had told the police that her

allegations about him were untrue she famously replied: ''He would,

wouldn't he!'' After the trial of Stephen Ward, Bill Astor was

criticised for not coming forward to defend his friend.

Nancy lived to see the family named dragged through the dirt. Bill

Astor's reputation was severely damaged in the scandal although he was

cleared of any wrongdoing. The sordid case took its toll and he died in

1966 of a heart attack. He was 58. His wife said that the Profumo Affair

NANCY ASTOR

“I am the kind of woman I would run from”: The Life of Nancy Astor

As a new biography makes clear, Nancy Astor was someone you'd want to read about. By Emma Garman

EMMA GARMAN

02.03.13 4:45 AM ET

https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-am-the-kind-of-woman-i-would-run-from-the-life-of-nancy-astor

One day in the halcyon era just before WWI, fate smiled on a “lady tramp” in the Buckinghamshire countryside. A young mother named Nancy Astor happened to be passing and, paying no heed to the indigent woman’s demurrals, took her home to the Astors’ imposing estate, Cliveden, where she was happily ensconced in a cottage for the rest of her life.

It’s a striking example of Lady Astor’s deeply felt, if haphazardly exercised, noblesse oblige. Against a backdrop of spectacular wealth and privilege—her Virginian father, Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, made a fortune on the railroads, and at the age of 26 she married Waldorf Astor, the England-transplanted scion of the richest family in America—the petite, passionate Southerner was driven by a mania to do her Christian duty, as she saw it. Combined with an addiction to the spotlight and a level of self-confidence that would make today’s celebutantes blush, this do-good desire assured her place in history when, in 1919, she became the first woman to take a seat in the British Parliament, as a Conservative representing Plymouth. She was 40 years old.

As Adrian Fort conveys in his engaging new biography, Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor, Nancy was ideally positioned to break into the historically all-male bastion. The Plymouth seat was previously held by her husband, Waldorf, but, to his eternal chagrin, he inherited a peerage on his father William’s death. As Viscount Astor II, he had no choice but to forego his place in the House of Commons, and so the Tory leadership was persuaded to let Nancy run instead.

Nancy’s lifestyle to date had prepared her well. One of the country’s most prolific society hostesses, since marrying Waldorf she had presided over a ceaseless stream of lavish parties, where political luminaries, diplomats, and royalty socialized with writers, artists, and actors—not simply for fun, Nancy would claim, but always “for special and particular purposes,” such as introducing influential Americans and Englishmen for transatlantic benefit. Suffice it to say that after verbal sparring with the likes of Churchill, as well as making public speeches on her husband’s behalf, the campaign trail held no fear. She whipped up crowds, deflected hecklers with her trademark sass (“Would I like to live on £2 a week? No, but would you work as hard as me if you had what I had?”), and cannily targeted the newly enfranchised female electorate. “I think that women had better put a woman in the House of Commons,” she told them. “Much as I love you, Gentlemen, you have made a terrible muddle of the world without us.”

Yet, as Nancy’s constituents and the wider public soon discovered, this beacon of progress was no permissive free-thinker: she was puritanical, dogmatic, and at times downright hypocritical. Grimly opposed to the nation’s favorite pastime of drinking, she made her maiden speech to Parliament on the immorality of the brewing trade, and declared her hope that Britain would join America in Prohibition. Her horror of drunkenness was rooted in a childhood marred by the alcoholic excesses of her father and brothers, and confirmed when her first husband, Robert Shaw II—the handsome son of a prominent Boston Brahmin family whom she married when she was just 18—turned out to be a heavy drinker. They were divorced after five years, a fact that didn’t deter Nancy from voting against relaxing the divorce laws in 1920.

This short first marriage produced one child, a boy named Bobbie whose very existence was seen as something of a miracle. According to Fort, before her wedding night Nancy had not “comprehended the facts of life,” and following a “brief, unproductive tumult” had extracted herself from the marriage bed and fled home to her parents in a state of shock. They persuaded her to give it another try, but Nancy’s report of waking up to see Bob brandishing a chloroform sponge, evidently determined to assert his conjugal rights, aptly illustrates why their relationship was doomed.

Nancy’s bedroom activity with Waldorf, a fellow teetotaler, was more successful, at least judging by its fecundity. The couple had five children: William (“Bill,” destined to be embroiled in the Profumo scandal in the ’60s), Phyllis (“Wissie”), David, Michael, and John Jacob VII (“Jakie”). Of course, Nancy’s hectic schedule of work, entertaining, and travel was unimpeded by child-rearing responsibilities, which were delegated to the woman she called “the backbone of my home,” the redoubtable Nanny Gibbons. Within this customarily upper-class arrangement, Nancy regarded her children with enormous affection, although they were not spared her acerbic wit. During a Commons debate on birth control, she said, “One of my sons told me recently that I had not taken enough interest in him before he was seven. My reply was that if I had known as much as I do now, I should not have had him at all.”

Waldorf, who suffered periodically from poor health, also sometimes felt sidelined by his wife’s political commitments, which far exceeded her official legislative duties. The linchpin of the “Cliveden Set,” as her powerful circle came to be known, she continued to host elaborate and agenda-led gatherings, such as when trade union leaders and employers were invited for a weekend at Cliveden following the Great Strike of 1926. Waldorf supported Nancy’s causes and was himself very much involved in politics, yet looked forward to enjoying more exclusive attention from her in their old age. “When I married Nancy,” he said in 1944, the year she would retire from Parliament, “I hitched my wagon to a star … In 1919 when she got into the House I found I had hitched my wagon to a sort of V2 rocket.”

Still, their marriage was consistently stable, albeit founded on mutual respect and emotional affinity rather than sexual passion. Nancy never stopped finding sex repellent, which conveniently fit with her Christian conviction that lust was a mortal sin. “Conceived without pleasure, born without pain” was how she referred to procreation, and when her sons were older, she inquired—much to their amusement—why they would bother cheating on their “perfectly good” wives. “It’s not as if it’s so wonderful: sex is just like going to the lavatory.”

Interestingly, Nancy came to accept the bisexuality of her favorite son, her firstborn, Bobbie, perhaps, Fort implies, because she was less threatened by his same-sex relationships than those with women. His lover Frank, she would remark, was “the prettiest of all my children’s girlfriends, the rest of them are overpainted hussies.” Bobbie suffered greatly for his attraction to men: forced to leave the army after being caught in a liaison, he was later arrested for a homosexual act and sent to prison in 1931. A noteworthy detail not mentioned by Fort, who dispenses with Bobbie’s experiences rather cursorily, was that David Astor, Bobbie’s younger half-brother and the longtime editor of The Observer, would become a generous donor to the Homosexual Law Reform Society, whose efforts led to the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality in England and Wales.

In the end, it was Bobbie’s tragic plight that finished Nancy off. In 1964 he attempted suicide, and she was taken to his bedside. Though her daughter, Wissie, claimed that he’d had a stroke, the sight of poor Bobbie lying unconscious, attached to wires and tubes, was too much. The following weekend Nancy herself suffered a stroke, and died a few weeks later, at the age of 85.

Her legacy is a complex one. Thanks to the inclusion of guests like Hitler’s “ambassador-at-large,” Joachim von Ribbentrop, at her legendary parties, not to mention her support of appeasement in the 1930s—she believed that Nazism would solve the “problems” of communism and the Jews—Lady Astor and her Cliveden Set will forever be associated with a certain strain of aristocratic fascism. Yet as Fort’s biography authoritatively establishes, no single label can be applied to this fearless, misguided, almost unfathomably dynamic whirlwind of a person who, for all her faults, didn’t entirely lack self-awareness: “My vigor, vitality, and cheek repel me,” was one of her famous aphorisms. “I am the kind of woman I would run from.”

Tuesday, 2 January 2018

Bronwen, Lady Astor obituary

Bronwen, Lady Astor obituary

Model and chatelaine of Cliveden caught up in the Profumo affair of the 1960s who went on to become a psychotherapist

Bronwen Astor in 1963. She was regarded as one of the leading fashion models of the 1950s, acting as muse to the Parisian couturier Pierre Balmain.

Peter Stanford

Mon 1 Jan ‘18 12.27 GMT Last modified on Mon 1 Jan ‘18 22.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/01/bronwen-lady-astor-obituary

Bronwen Astor, who has died aged 87, was the chatelaine of Cliveden, the estate where John Profumo met Christine Keeler, at the time of the scandal that rocked 1960s Britain. As a result, she found herself shunned by upper-class society and never quite shook off the stigma, despite reinventing herself as a psychotherapist and spiritual adviser.

When Bronwen Pugh, as she was, married into the Astor clan in 1960, she seemed to have the world at her feet. Her career had been one of public acclaim and professional success – as the most celebrated model of her generation, and as a BBC television presenter. She was muse to the Parisian couturier Pierre Balmain, who said she belonged, with Greta Garbo, Vivien Leigh and Marlene Dietrich, to the ultra-exclusive club of the world’s most beautiful women.

She retired from the catwalk after her marriage to Bill Astor – William Waldorf, the 3rd Viscount Astor – the millionaire son of Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in parliament, to concentrate on her role at Cliveden, the family mansion on the Thames in Buckinghamshire. It seemed to her many admirers – and she was a household name at the time – a blessed life.

Yet within three years of her marriage, Bronwen’s world was turned upside down by the Profumo affair. Cliveden, it was alleged, was at the centre of an international web of sexual debauchery and espionage that ultimately brought down the prime minister, Harold Macmillan. Bill Astor was accused in court of being a playboy, and Bronwen was dragged into the scandal, which centred on the relationships of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, and their friend, the society osteopath Stephen Ward.

When the scandal exploded, Rice-Davies alleged in court that she had slept with Bill Astor. Challenged over his denial of the affair (and Bronwen was always adamant that she was lying), Rice-Davies uttered the immortal line: “He would, wouldn’t he?” It won her a place in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and consigned the Astors to the status of social pariahs.

Their friends deserted them in droves. Bill, who had been an MP until succeeding as viscount in 1952, and was co-founder of what became the British Refugee Council, was cold-shouldered in public, while Bronwen was accused by some of their erstwhile acquaintances, and even Astor family members, of having inhabited the same world as Ward, Keeler and Rice-Davies, and therefore as having brought the whole catastrophe down on Bill. She was, it was said, just another of the girls trained by Ward to capture rich husbands. The truth was that she had got to know Ward only after her marriage to Bill, and took an instant dislike to him.

Bill never recovered from the scandal and died in 1966 following a heart attack. For Bronwen it was the start of a long, lonely but always eventful widowhood, struggling privately to make sense of the reversal of fortune that had befallen her at the same time as bringing up her two daughters and carving out a professional life for herself. There were highs and lows. The collapse in 1974 of an ecumenical religious community that she had co-founded at her home after Cliveden, Tuesley Manor, in Godalming, Surrey, was a great disappointment, but she bounced back, qualifying as a psychotherapist in 1986, running a respected practice for more than 20 years and finding herself regarded as something of an authority on the link between religious experience and the mind by such august bodies as the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford University, which she also chaired at one point. She had travelled a long way from her days on the catwalk.

The 1988 film Scandal, reviewing the fall of Profumo, caused her renewed pain by once again painting an unflattering portrait of her husband. She waited another 12 years, however, before finally telling her side of the story. Having refused any public comment for 37 years, she agreed to co-operate with my biography of her, giving access to papers and diaries, in an effort to set the record straight on her own past, that of her husband, and on the rather prim life they had lived at Clive- den. It convinced many to think again. After its publication, she moved back to London from her country retreat, saying she felt the question mark that had long hung over her reputation had been finally removed. But there remained, to her disappointment, a hard core who were determined to continue seeing the Astors in the blackest possible light in regard of the whole scandal.

Bronwen was born in London, the third daughter of a Welsh county court judge, Sir Alun Pugh, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Goodyear), and raised in Hampstead, north London. She attended Dr Williams’ school, Dolgellau, in north Wales, as a boarder, and then trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama as a teacher.

She and a fellow student, Erica Pickard, decided to try their hand at modelling, as an act of rebellion against becoming teachers. The death of Pickard in a freak accident in 1952 had the effect of redoubling Bronwen’s determination to make their dream a reality, and within a short space of time this tall, elegant woman was first a star of the London fashion scene, then, briefly, in 1954, a BBC announcer, filling in for Sylvia Peters when she was on maternity leave, and, finally, the toast of Paris.

One American critic, describing her as “that husky Welsh mannequin”, wrote that she “drags a coat down a runway as if she had just killed it and were taking it to her mate”. The British journalist Katharine Whitehorn dubbed Bronwen’s detached, almost scornful manner as a “dirt-beneath-my-feet style of modelling”. She represents, in the history of fashion photography, the transition point between such squeaky-clean early 1950s icons as Jean Dawnay and the emergence in the 60s of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. There was an understated sensuality about Bronwen’s style, but it was cloaked in an air of disdain.

Throughout her career on the catwalk and her marriage, she had been privately pursuing a spiritual search, after claiming to undergo a mystical experience of God in 1953, and became an admirer of the French Jesuit writer and mystic Teilhard de Chardin. It was her faith that sustained her after her husband’s death, she said. Bronwen became a Roman Catholic in 1970, and wrote and lectured on religion, cutting quite a figure in the often dowdy world of church organisations. She later ran a small retreat centre next to her Surrey home.

With her daughters happily married and grandchildren to look after, as well as professional satisfaction, she enjoyed the latter part of her life enormously. She had tremendous energy, heading off on fishing trips and wind-surfing expeditions into her 70s, working as a spiritual adviser at 78, and marking her 80th birthday with swimming lessons so as finally to master the crawl. She retained an appetite for fun, but the shadow of Profumo never wholly left her. Having been through what she regarded as a crucifixion-like experience in 1963, she was, she often used to remark, ever after in search of resurrection.

She is survived by her daughters, Janet and Pauline.

• Janet Bronwen Alun Astor, Lady Astor, model and psychotherapist, born 6 June 1930; died 28 December 2017