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overview
chronology
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overview
This
profile considers the Astors, a departed media dynasty.
It covers -
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 Murray Smith (1824-1901)
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; she is profiled in The Last Mrs. Astor: A New
York Story (New York: Norton 2007) by Frances Kiernan.
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.
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chronology)
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