A good editor and a good man

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor and philanthropist David Astor, was too ‘saintly’ for a lively biography. As a publisher, she had worked on an earlier authorised tome, and thought she knew.

Lewis, and Astor, proved more resilient. There are always column inches in a well-connected plutocratic clan such as the Astors. And Astor’s mother, Virginia-born Nancy, was the gold-plated battle-axe who made Cliveden, the family house in Buckinghamshire, the centre of 1930s appeasement.

The story is really how Astor (born in 1912) took on his Christian Scientist mother, threw off the trappings of privilege, and became the owner and editor of the Observer during its mid-20th-century heyday. He was enough of a ditherer to spark Katherine Whitehorn’s (supposed) barb, ‘The editor’s indecision is final.’ But he was resolute in his opposition to all manifestations of injustice, particularly apartheid.

Astor’s upbringing may have been advantaged, but, with Nancy’s idiosyncracies, it was hardly conventional: when his family went on holiday to Jura, they hitched a special wagon to the train, and transported their own cow, so they could always have fresh milk.

Encouraged by ‘Red Robert’ Birley, his history teacher at Eton, Astor turned his back on ‘Schloss Cliveden’s’ ostentation and developed a social conscience, along with symptoms of clinical depression.

At Oxford, which he described as ‘vile’, he befriended Adam von Trott, a well-born Prussian who exerted a great influence on his life. The story of von Trott’s attempts to obtain British support against Nazism, and later for a putsch against Hitler, has often been told. He failed because too many people wrongly thought that he was a Nazi agent. But Astor believed in him and his anti-fascist ideals, and acted bravely on his behalf.