The Dark Story of Britain's Most Scandalous Manor Part II: Cliveden and the Astor War

On the weekend of 23 and 24 October 1937, a private dinner was held in the panelled French Dining Room at Cliveden, the great Italianate mansion perched above the River Thames in Buckinghamshire. The guests included Joachim von Ribbentrop, then Hitler's ambassador to the Court of St James; Lord Halifax, the future Foreign Secretary; Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times; and the American ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, father of a future president of the United States. Their hostess was Nancy, Viscountess Astor, the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons, and a politician whose southern American manners disguised one of the sharpest political operators in interwar Britain. Within weeks of that gathering the radical journalist Claude Cockburn would coin a phrase for what he believed had taken place around that table. He called it the Cliveden Set. The accusation, rehearsed in his cyclostyled newsletter The Week and amplified across Fleet Street within months, was that a clique of aristocrats, editors and diplomats was steering British foreign policy towards appeasement of Nazi Germany from behind the gilded doors of a single country house. The men and women who polished the silver, ran the baths, drew the curtains, and arranged the flowers for those weekend parties have been almost entirely written out of the appeasement story, and yet the surviving private papers place them closer to the conversation than most cabinet ministers ever were. Edwin Lee, the butler at Cliveden from 1912 until his retirement in 1962, served Ribbentrop his soup and kept a working diary now held among the Astor papers at Reading University, a document that names the guests, fixes the dates, and quietly contradicts the family's later denials about who was in the house and when. Mrs Rose Harrison, Nancy Astor's lady's maid from 1928 until her mistress's death in 1964, dressed her for the Plymouth speech and later published the only frank insider account of the household, Rose: My Life in Service, in 1975, a book that should be read alongside the official biographies and that names the worst of Nancy's confidences. British Manors is the channel for viewers who want the documented, archive-grounded history of the country houses, castles and estates that shaped England, told without sensationalism and without flinching from what the families inside them actually did. Every episode is built from named primary sources, named scholarly biographies, and named institutional archives, and every claim made on screen is set out in the source list at the foot of this description so that interested viewers can follow our working into the same reading rooms and special collections that we used. Subscribe for more deep investigations into the hidden histories of Britain's great country houses, castles, and estates. Leave a comment below telling us which place we should investigate next. British Manors. The hidden history of the buildings that shaped England. Sources Adrian Fort, Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor, Jonathan Cape 2012 Christopher Sykes, Nancy: The Life of Lady Astor, Collins 1972 Anthony Masters, Nancy Astor: A Life, McGraw-Hill 1981 Norman Rose, The Cliveden Set: Portrait of an Exclusive Fraternity, Jonathan Cape 2000 Richard Cockett, Twilight of Truth: Chamberlain, Appeasement and the Manipulation of the Press, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1989 John Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1987 Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1991 Andrew Roberts, Holy Fox: The Life of Lord Halifax, Phoenix 1991 Stanley Morison and others, The History of The Times Volume IV 1912-1948, Times Books 1952 Rose Harrison, Rose: My Life in Service, Cassell 1975 James Fox, White Mischief, Jonathan Cape 1982 Claude Cockburn, In Time of Trouble, Hart-Davis 1956 John Grigg, Nancy Astor: Portrait of a Pioneer, Sidgwick and Jackson 1980 Lynne Olson, Troublesome Young Men: The English Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power, Bloomsbury 2007 National Trust, Cliveden Visitor Guidebook, National Trust 2023 edition Cliveden House Hotel, current operating company records, London and Taplow Edwin Lee, Cliveden Diary 1912-1962, Astor Papers, University of Reading Special Collections, MS 1416 Astor family papers, University of Reading Special Collections, MS 1066 The Week, 1933-1946, Claude Cockburn newsletter, Communist Party of Great Britain Archive, Marx Memorial Library, London Halifax Papers, Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York Geoffrey Dawson Papers, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Joseph P. Kennedy Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston The Times, leading article, 7 September 1938, News International Archive, London Hansard, House of Commons Debates, Nancy Astor speech, 4 December 1939, volume 355