Astor differed from all other Fleet Street editors by also being the owner of his paper, Britain’s oldest Sunday, bought for £5,000 from Lord Northcliffe in 1911 by his grandfather, William Waldorf Astor, the American hotel and property magnate who settled in Britain in 1890. On his death, control of the paper passed to his son Waldorf, David’s father, who passed his quiet decency and liberal values on to his son. David’s mother was the redoubtable Nancy Astor, the first woman MP, a devout Christian Scientist and hectoring parliamentary campaigner for all manner of liberal causes. David’s love-hate relationship with her was to dominate his life: occasionally suicidal as a young man, often suffering from severe depression, he finally found solace in daily psycho-analysis with Anna Freud before work. Indeed, he became a keen advocate of analysis, urging it on many of his journalists, an eccentric, eclectic and bibulous band, often with good reason.
For all his anxieties and uncertainties, Lewis correctly notes, Astor had a core of steel, as he showed when helping his father topple the long-time editor J.L. Garvin in 1942. However, he did not take up the editorship (and ownership) for another six years, but once he did, he moved decisively to transform the paper. Tours of Germany before the war had convinced him of Hitler’s menace, and his greatest friend, from Oxford, was Adam von Trott, a key figure in the 1944 officers’ plot to assassinate Hitler, who was executed after its failure. The result was a lifelong devotion to the cause of European unity. His own paper was a mini-European Union of its own: he was always more interested in foreign affairs than domestic issues and he recruited a number of distinguished refugees and exiles, such as Sebastian Haffner, Isaac Deutscher, Arthur Koestler and Rix Lowenthal, along with home-grown experts like Edward Crankshaw, who provided unrivalled articles and columns about Cold War trends and the future of the continent.
Others, like Colin Legum, a South African of Lithuanian origin, wrote authoritatively about Astor’s other obsession, Africa (although he did not visit the continent until after his retirement), giving rise to Malcolm Muggeridge’s description of Astor’s Observer as “Central Europeans writing about Central Africans”. Astor, Legum and Anthony Sampson, a hugely influential figure on the paper, were of course strongly anti-apartheid and squarely behind African independence, which incidentally provoked Nancy to the sort of racist abuse of her son which sounds incredible to contemporary ears. Astor introduced Nelson Mandela to the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and other key figures when he visited London in the mid-1950s, and was a loyal supporter throughout Mandela’s long imprisonment, sending him the law books to enable him to finish his legal studies among many other personal kindnesses. (Doing good by stealth was a key element in Astor’s make-up and continued after his retirement in 1975 until shortly before his death in 2001 at the age of 89.)
For all his anxieties and uncertainties, Lewis correctly notes, Astor had a core of steel, as he showed when helping his father topple the long-time editor J.L. Garvin in 1942. However, he did not take up the editorship (and ownership) for another six years, but once he did, he moved decisively to transform the paper. Tours of Germany before the war had convinced him of Hitler’s menace, and his greatest friend, from Oxford, was Adam von Trott, a key figure in the 1944 officers’ plot to assassinate Hitler, who was executed after its failure. The result was a lifelong devotion to the cause of European unity. His own paper was a mini-European Union of its own: he was always more interested in foreign affairs than domestic issues and he recruited a number of distinguished refugees and exiles, such as Sebastian Haffner, Isaac Deutscher, Arthur Koestler and Rix Lowenthal, along with home-grown experts like Edward Crankshaw, who provided unrivalled articles and columns about Cold War trends and the future of the continent.
Others, like Colin Legum, a South African of Lithuanian origin, wrote authoritatively about Astor’s other obsession, Africa (although he did not visit the continent until after his retirement), giving rise to Malcolm Muggeridge’s description of Astor’s Observer as “Central Europeans writing about Central Africans”. Astor, Legum and Anthony Sampson, a hugely influential figure on the paper, were of course strongly anti-apartheid and squarely behind African independence, which incidentally provoked Nancy to the sort of racist abuse of her son which sounds incredible to contemporary ears. Astor introduced Nelson Mandela to the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and other key figures when he visited London in the mid-1950s, and was a loyal supporter throughout Mandela’s long imprisonment, sending him the law books to enable him to finish his legal studies among many other personal kindnesses. (Doing good by stealth was a key element in Astor’s make-up and continued after his retirement in 1975 until shortly before his death in 2001 at the age of 89.)
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