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The Astors

Table of contents
  1. Overview
    1. Introduction
    2. The family
    3. The Times
    4. The Pall Mall Gazette and Magazine
    5. Studies

Overview

This profile considers the Astors, a departed media dynasty.

It covers -

  • introduction
  • the family
  • the Times
  • the Pall Mall Gazette and Magazine
  • studies

Introduction

Members of the Anglo-American Astor family, like many contemporaries in the period 1860-1960, used personal fortunes to fund influential but low-circulation newspapers and left the field when money ran short and pressures for increased professionalism proved too great.

Apart from specialists concerned with late-Victorian politics or episodes such as the Profumo Affair and Cliveden Set most recent attention has focussed on the family's lifestyle - for example William's Biltmore palazzo in North Carolina - or eccentricities, overshadowing their publishing activity

The family

The Astors made a fortune from fur-trading and property (at one stage they were reputed to be the largest slum landlords in the US). Like Beaverbrook and Roy Thomson, some members of the clan gravitated to the UK and gained a peerage for rescuing newspapers such as the Times (from the estate of Northcliffe, 'Napoleon of Fleet Street') and the Observer.

John Jacob Astor (1763-1848), born in Waldorf, Germany, migrated to the US at the age of 20. His American Fur Company made him the richest man in the country, with a fortune estimated at over US$20 million. He left US$400,000 to establish the Astor Library, now part of the New York Public Library, but his obituary in the New York Herald sniffed that he "exhibited at best but the ingenious powers of a self-invented money-making machine."

His son William Backhouse Astor, who died in 1875, came to be known as "the landlord of New York". That wealth fuelled the conspicuous consumption evident in works such as Eric Homberger's Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2002) and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. William's grandson, John Jacob Astor IV died in the sinking of the Titanic.

William Waldorf Astor (1848-1919) was more fussy about his transport, serving as US minister to Italy in 1882-85 before moving to the UK in 1890. He became a British subject in 1899. He bought the Pall Mall Gazette, established the Pall Mall Magazine - the Quadrant of its day - and funded the Liberal Party, being rewarded with a peerage as baron of Hever Castle in 1916 and viscount in 1917, the latter elevation reportedly having involved a £1 million donation to the Lloyd George slush fund.

His son Waldorf Astor (1879-1952), who died in 1952, served as private secretary to Prime Minister Lloyd George and as publisher of The Observer (acquired from the Harmsworths), both of which appear to have been less frightening than marriage to Nancy Astor.

In the US Vincent Astor (1891-1959) inherited an estimated US$100 million when his father went down with the Titanic. Vincent accelerated the family's move out of slum property. He was one of the publishers of Today, launched in 1933 and merged with Martyn's News-Week in 1937 as Newsweek (now part of the Washington Post group). Cousin John Armstrong Chanler - heir of John Jacob - survived both imprisonment by his brothers as a lunatic and marriage to Amelie Rives (later Princess Troubetzkoy) (1863-1945) - dismissed by a contemporary as

the intellectually igneous but auriferous Astors will have at least one person of brains in their select family fold.

In 1977 the Astors sold the ailing Observer to US oil giant Atlantic Richfield, which flogged it in 1981 to the unsavoury Lonrho under 'Tiny' Rowland. In 1993 The Guardian Media Group bought the paper to preempt a merger with the Independent on Sunday.

The Times

Waldorf's brother John Jacob Astor (1886-1971), first Baron Astor of Hever, became chief owner of the London Times in 1922, later acquired by Roy Thomson and Rupert Murdoch. After education at Eton and New College he was commissioned into the 1st Life Guards, served as aide-de-camp to Indian viceroy Lord Hardinge and served on the Western Front in 1914-18 where he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur but lost a leg. He became Conservative member of parliament for Dover in 1922, representing that constituency for 23 years.

Northcliffe's 1922 will decreed that John Walter IV, whose family had owned The Times from its foundation until 1908, should have first option to buy that paper. As Walter lacked the necessary £1.5 million, Astor came to the rescue, acquiring a 90% stake and becoming co-proprietor with Walter before reappointing editor Geoffrey Dawson (1874-1944). Dawson and successor Robert Barrington-Ward (1941-1948) later became leading exponents of appeasement.

Astor gained a peerage in 1956, becoming a tax exile in 1962 after the Macmillan government introduced new death duties on the overseas holdings of British residents. (Most of the family's income came from trust funds in the US and he had spent heavily restoring Hever after a major flood in 1958.) Control of the Times passed from son Gavin Astor (1918-1984) and John Walter V to Thomson in 1966.

The group at that time encompassed

  • The Times
  • The Times Literary Supplement
  • The Times Educational Supplement
  • The Times Book of New Issues of Public Companies
  • The Times Review of Industry/Technology
  • The Times Official Index
  • The Times Issuing House Year Book
  • International Insurance Intelligence Year Book
  • The Times Book Co. Ltd
  • Issuing House Year Book Ltd
  • St. Paul's Engineering Ltd
  • The Review (Insurance) Ltd
  • The Times Pension Trusts Ltd
  • The Gardeners' Chronicle Ltd (50% interest in the
  • Geographical Magazine Ltd)
  • 50% of Guildhall Publishing Co. Ltd

Astor's estate in England and Wales was recorded as £416,135; assets had previously been transferred to his children.

The Pall Mall Gazette and Magazine

The Astors acquired the Pall Mall Gazette after the peak of its influence under John Morley and WT Stead.

The Gazette - "written by gentlemen for gentlemen" - had been founded by editor Frederick Greenwood and publisher George Smith in 1865 as a London evening newspaper that would feature substantial items on social, political and economic questions. The Gazette and its offshoot the Pall Mall Magazine also featured reviews and journalism by George Bernard Shaw, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Huxley, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker.

After initial alignment with the Tory Party it moved to the left under editor John Morley (1838-1923) - later Lord Morley - from 1880 and gained greater circulation with appointment of William Stead (1849-1912) as editor in 1883 when Morley moved to the House of Commons.

Stead gained attention as a crusading - or merely exploitative and sensationalist - journalist, claiming a desire to

lead the leaders of our race in its upward striving, hearing new words of command in every cry of the sorrowing and goaded.

He is best remembered for the 1863 series of articles on child prostitution under the banner of 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', campaigns against homosexual activity (reminiscent of contemporary Maximilian Harden in Germany) and against 'white slavery', and criticism of the Boer War. Stead's 1885 'purchase' of a 13 year old girl attracted both attention and a three month prison sentence, along with the Criminal Law Amendment Act of that year which raised the age of consent to 16.

Stead left the Gazette in 1890 (after pushing its circulation to 12,000), founding the Review of Reviews in 1890, the Australasian Review of Reviews in 1892 and the Daily Paper in 1894. He spent his last years supporting causes such as Esperanto, clothing reform, spiritualism and global disarmament before going down with the Titanic, presumably something of a surprise given his claims to receive personal messages from God. The Gazette returned to a conservative orientation. It was acquired by Cyril Arthur Pearson (1866-1921) in 1916 and folded into the Evening Standard in 1923.

The monthly Pall Mall Magazine - apparently modelled on The Strand - was launched in 1893, merging with Nash's Magazine under the control of Hearst in 1914 and lingering until 1937 as Nash's Pall Mall Magazine. It was edited by Lord Frederic Hamilton to 1900, by George Halkett to 1905 and Charles Morley (1853-1916) until cessation. It featured stories and poetry by Edith Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Russell Wallace, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, HG Wells, EF Benson, Israel Zangwill, Jack London and financier William Waldorf Astor. A weekly selection from the Magazine was published as the Pall Mall Budget, featuring illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Aubrey Beardsley among other fin-de-siecle notables.

Studies

Richard Cockett's intelligent David Astor & The Observer (London: Deutsch 1992) complements his Twilight Of Truth: Chamberlain, Appeasement & The Manipulation of the Press (New York: St Martins 1989).

Stephen Koss's two volume The Rise & Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton 1984) is essential reading, ideally in conjunction with studies of status such as David Cannadine's The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1990) and Andrew Adonis's Making Aristocracy Work: The Peerage and the Political System in Britain, 1884-1914 (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1993).

Alfred Gollin's thoughtful The Observer & JL Garvin (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 1960) pictures that newspaper at its height. For the Pall Mall Gazette and Stead see John Scott's The Story of the Pall Mall Gazette, of its first editor Frederick Greenwood & of its Founder George Murray Smith (London: Oxford Uni Press 1950) and Raymond Schultz' Crusader in Babylon: WT Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette (Lincoln: Uni of Nebraska 1972).

Charles Wintour's The Rise & Fall of Fleet Street (Hutchinson: London 1989), Northcliffe's Legacy: Aspects of the British Popular Press 1896-1996 (New York: St Martins 2000), edited by Peter Catterall & Colin Seymour-Ure and The Market For Glory (London: Faber 1986) by Simon Jenkins offer perspectives on 'old media' in the UK during the height of the Astor empire.

The 'Astor Women' have perhaps been better served by biographers than the men. The creepy Nancy Astor appears in James Fox's The Langhorne Sisters (London: Granta 1999) and Nancy: The Life of Lady Astor (London: Deutsch 1972) by Christopher Sykes. Derek Marlowe's Nancy Astor, the Lady From Virginia (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1982) is better value.

Literary critic John Halperin's Eminent Georgians: The Lives of King George V, Elizabeth Bowen, St John Philby & Nancy Astor (New York: St Martins 1998) is clever but for us unconvincing.

The Sisters: Babe Mortimer Paley, Betsey Roosevelt Whitney & Minnie Astor Fosburgh: The Life & Times of the Fabulous Cushing Sisters (New York: Random 1992) by David Grafton provides a perspective on the US Astors, William Paley of CBS and Jock Whitney of the IHT. For the preceding generation see Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age (New York: Harmony 2006) by Donna Lucey, an account of the strange Amelie Rives, stranger John Armstrong Chanler and the extended Astor clan. Brooke Astor's Footprints (New York: Doubleday 1980) is an account by Vincent's wife.

Michael Astor's memoir Tribal Feeling (London: Murray 1963) is very much a period piece. Peter Stanford's Bronwen Astor: Her Life & Times (London: HarperCollins 2001) is overly respectful to the mystical experiences of a minor figure in the Profumo Affair, for which we recommend An Affair Of State: The Profumo Case & The Framing Of Stephen Ward (New York: Atheneum 1987), an incisive study by Phillip Knightley & Caroline Kennedy.

David Astor - humanitarian and friend of Orwell - has not yet received the biographer that he deserves. He features, somewhat ungenerously, in Richard Hall's My Life With Tiny (London: Faber 1987), primarily concerned with Lonrho's activities in Africa, and in Tom Bower's Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon (London: Heinemann 1993).

For the founding father Kenneth Porter's John Jacob Astor, Business Man (New York: Russell 1966) has been superseded by John Haeger's John Jacob Astor: Business and Finance in the Early Republic (Detroit: Wayne State Uni Press 1991).

Derek Wilson's Astors: Landscape With Millionaires (New York: St Martins 1993) is another respectful study, for us less engaging than Justin Kaplan's When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age (New York: Viking 2006). Norman Rose's The Cliveden Set (London: Cape 2000) is an academic study of the Astors, the elite and appeasement during the thirties.

For a more gossipy account see Lucy Kavaler's The Astors: A Family Chronicle of Pomp & Power (New York: Dodd Mead 1966), Virginia Cowles' The Astors (New York: Knopf 1979), David Sinclair's Dynasty: The Astors & Their Times (New York: Beaufort 1984) or Harvey O'Connor's The Astors (New York: Knopf 1941). Axel Madsen's John Jacob Astor: America's First Multimillionaire (New York: Wiley 2001) is more solid.

William Waldorf's Valentino: an Historical Romance of the Sixteenth Century in Italy (New York: Scribners 1885), Sforza: a Story of Milan (New York: Scribners 1889) and Pharaoh's Daughter (New York: Macmillan 1890) are deeply forgettable. Amelie Rives Chanler Troubetzkoy's The Quick or the Dead? a Study (Philadelphia: Lippincott 1888), 1893 Atholwold and 1908 The Golden Rose - fin-de-siecle bodice rippers with a dash of spiritualism and southern gothick - are merely, albeit unintentionally, funny.