Shouting in the Street

by Donald Trelford

  I got to know Arianna later when we both appeared on Any Questions? She was what I called a great ball-carrier. When the chairman, David Jacobs, asked a tricky question, I would keep my head down in the hope that he wouldn’t call on me first to answer it. Arianna, however, would stride straight in and give it both barrels. She and her then paramour Bernard Levin once invited me to see Jonathan Pryce’s amazing Hamlet at the Royal Court in a party that included Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. When they came to the line in the play, ‘Observed of all observers’, the princess gave me a poke in the ribs.

  David’s obsession with the healing powers of psychotherapy stemmed from his own internal problems, which went back to his childhood. His lack of progress at school and university was usually put down to the struggle he had to cut himself off from Cliveden and the life of stupefying wealth in which had been brought up. His agonised letters home to his mother, the legendary Nancy Astor, from Eton and Balliol show how hard he found it to break with her overpowering influence, and also his determination, for the sake of his own sanity and individuality, to do so.

  It was no surprise to learn later that he had had therapy sessions almost every day of his life; with Anna Freud until she died in 1982 and with others afterwards. He would do this every morning before going to the office. No wonder his chauffeur, Jack, was heard to say: ‘For a rich man he doesn’t seem to have a very good time.’

  At David’s memorial service in 2002, his son Richard explained the importance of psychotherapy in his father’s life. He said that the mental problems rooted in his childhood had caused ‘acute internal difficulties’ in his youth. Richard believed it was no coincidence that his most celebrated years as an editor came after he began his daily sessions with Anna Freud.

  His formerly crippling self-doubt developed into constructive self-questioning, which led to unusually profound self-knowledge. Insights into his own mind gave him a clearer understanding of human nature, which sharpened his exceptionally good judgment of character and enhanced his ability to distinguish sense from nonsense in even the most controversial situations.

  Richard’s use of the word ‘nonsense’ reminded me of one of David’s most frequent quotes from Orwell: ‘The Observer must be the enemy of nonsense.’

  Richard concluded: ‘He learned to use the emotional strength and the moral courage he had built up by overcoming his internal difficulties, combined with his inherited advantages, to fight and win brave battles on behalf of people suffering every kind of misfortune.’

  David’s philosophy, insofar as he had one, began with people and their suffering and how it should be removed. It grew out of his natural kindness and the conviction impressed on him by his father, Waldorf Astor, that those blessed with riches had a special duty to serve the community as best they could.

  His great American friend Sam Beer, whom he had met at Oxford, said of him: ‘I have never known anyone who cared so much about being kind, from rescuing a donkey from a bad master, to helping battered women, to financing anti-apartheid efforts.’ As an Observer colleague pointed out, even his initials – F. D. L. A. – sounded like a freedom movement.

  When he left Oxford in 1934, David had virtually run away from home, visiting his family only at Christmas. He was so obsessed with bridging the gap between his privileged life and those of ‘ordinary people’ that he took a job in a Glasgow factory, working on a machine, and later led a pantomime troupe in Whitby. It was clearly a happy time in his life.

  It must have been during this period that he acquired some of his favourite slang phrases, such as ‘chums’, ‘hols’ and ‘okey-dokey’, which came oddly from the mouth of an aristocrat and an Eton and Balliol man. He had also acquired a remarkably powerful whistle, which he would use to call taxis. I was with him outside the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, once owned by his family, when he summoned a taxi with a whistle that not only brought the cab to his side immediately, but was marvelled at by anyone within hearing range. He told me that he had been taught to whistle by a shepherd on the Isle of Jura, where he spent his summer holidays.

  The Astors owned much of the island and took their own cow on their holiday in a special railway carriage and then by steamer. On one occasion when David was on holiday, I was working on a Saturday evening on the news desk when I took a call from a Glasgow hotel. The Astor cortege had apparently missed their rail connection from Glasgow to London after their holiday in Jura and were trying to put up at the hotel. Unfortunately, like the Queen, Astor carried no money – nor, being an unworldly man, did he even have a credit card. The hotel manager wanted me to vouch for him.

  And so it was that this grandson of two Durham coal miners had to reassure the hotelier that Mr Astor was one of the richest men in the country and he need not fear for his money. I admit to having had a brief, mischievous moment when I wondered what would happen if I’d said I’d never heard of him.

  Even though he had joined his parents and other notable figures, including George Bernard Shaw, on a jaunt to Soviet Russia in the 1930s, he was never one of ‘Stalin’s useful idiots’, as Communist apologists were labelled. Nor, having visited Germany himself in the 1930s and seen a Nuremburg rally at first hand, did he have any illusions about the nature of the Nazi regime. He distanced himself from friends and family who met at Cliveden and hoped to avert war by making peace with Hitler. He once defined the ethic of The Observer as ‘doing the opposite of what Hitler would have done’.

  Nevertheless, the Beaverbrook press, following the lead of Claud Cockburn and his Private Eye-style magazine The Week – which (it turned out later) was controlled by the Communist Party and funded from Moscow – used to brand David, along with all the Astors, as part of ‘the Cliveden set’, a phrase Cockburn had invented.

  But a letter David wrote to his mother before the war shows how far this charge was wide of the mark in his case: ‘I can’t help smiling at our bird-watching, trout-fishing, good kind Mr Chamberlain in his woollen underwear dealing with this womanishly deceptive, hysterical, homicidal coward Adolf.’ The letter also displays his gift for language, though he was always reluctant to write much himself in The Observer, possibly because he found it such hard labour.

  • • •

  I followed my opening line in that tribute to David at his memorial service – ‘David Astor was a great editor because he was a great man’ – like this:

  The two things do not always go together. There are highly successful editors who are not great men – and, if truth be told, are not very good men either. In David, the man and the journalist were of a piece. If The Observer stood for important values and convictions, these came from him – dug painfully out from his own mind, heart and conscience. If the paper was characterised by humour, idealism, a sense of justice and a wide-ranging curiosity about the world and the vagaries of human nature, which it was, those qualities had their source in David’s own complex and elusive personality.

  It is generally thought that a chief requirement in an editor is decisiveness, but as anyone who ever worked for David could testify, he often belied that belief – so much so that the phrase ‘the editor’s indecision is final’ was actually coined about him by Katharine Whitehorn after a notably unproductive editorial conference.

  This was not the case over major issues like Suez or apartheid, where he saw the truth with blazing moral clarity. But over lesser decisions he frequently tortured himself – and, it has to be said – tortured his subordinates too. I can still see KPO and the head printer, Dick Gale, wringing their hands in agony outside David’s office as he wrestled with a final page proof. He was a restless worrier about the paper. I still have pages of notes he would send me, outlining apparently insoluble staff problems or urging more coverage of complex social or international issues.

  David’s habitual indecisiveness was caused by two things, I believe. A kind of perfectionism rare in newspapers: a determination to say the right thing – above all, to avoid saying the wrong thing – no matter how lon
g it might take, because he believed that it matters what newspapers say and that they have a duty to be fair to people in public life. This was a result, I think, of the unkind way in which the press had sometimes treated his own family, especially his mother, but also his elder brother Bill, who inherited Cliveden and the title that went with it, and became embroiled in the Profumo scandal of the early 1960s.

  It was also because David didn’t like laying down the law. He operated in an oblique, rather feline way, prompting people towards a solution rather than imposing it on them. However, that habit of hesitation, that apparent diffidence, masked a steely determination. For all his deceptive air of befuddlement, he had a bold simplicity of mind. One of my senior colleagues remarked: ‘In all the time I’ve known David, I’ve never once heard him raise his voice.’ There are few, if any, other editors of whom that can be said – or people for that matter.

  Neal Ascherson said that his Observer colleagues were like ‘a brilliant dysfunctional family’ led by a man whose ‘enduring qualities were kindness and courage’. Neal went on: ‘David fed them, and his feeding hand was sometimes sharply bitten. It was a frightfully emotional paper.’

  David’s Observer was also rare among newspapers in that it made no claim to omniscience. There were no thumping certitudes on every subject under the sun. I once heard him say: ‘There are some problems in this life to which there are no answers. There are other problems to which there may be answers, but we don’t happen to know what they are.’ This attitude gave special authority to the paper’s opinions when it did express them.

  Astor was an exceptional talent-spotter, a prime function of any successful editor. Proof of this is shown by the sheer resonance of the writers and thinkers he gathered around him: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Alastair Buchan, Philip Toynbee, Kenneth Tynan, Edward Crankshaw, Patrick O’Donovan, Katharine Whitehorn, Gavin Young, Michael Frayn, Anthony Sampson, Andrew Shonfield, Sam Brittan, Hugh McIlvanney, Ascherson himself and many, many others. I was lucky to inherit about half of these writers from him.

  None of these were orthodox journalists and David did not find them in an orthodox way. He recruited Nigel Gosling, an old school friend who became a distinguished art and ballet critic, at a bus stop. Terry Kilmartin, translator of Proust and widely acknowledged as a great literary editor, even though he never went to university, jumped with David into France with SOE during the war and is said to have applied a field dressing to the wound he received.

  Clifford Makins, a brilliant though shambolic sports editor, was plucked from The Eagle, a children’s comic paper. Michael Davie was offered the job of diplomatic correspondent while still an Oxford undergraduate, on the basis of some letters he had written about his holidays. Sadly for journalism, these things couldn’t happen today.

  David always insisted that nobody was too important, or too unimportant, to write for a newspaper. He was always suspicious of socalled professional journalists, whom he referred to as ‘plumbers’. For him, a journalist was someone who had something to say or wanted something done in the world. A writer, he said, was more important than the sub-editor who marked up his copy for the printers.

  In my early days on the paper I was suddenly asked by Silverlight as I was giving him a late lift home: ‘People can’t make you out. Are you a plumber or a journalist?’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ said Silverlight, ‘are you here to help David save The Observer or to help him save the world?’

  ‘A bit of both, I suppose,’ I muttered unconvincingly.

  It is hard to think of any other newspaper, with the possible exception of The Guardian, where such a conversation could have taken place.

  David used to liken the running of a newspaper to being the conductor of an orchestra. Others have likened it to running a theatre – and of course David had done that at the seaside in the years before the war. John Heilpern, an Observer writer who went on to produce the definitive biography of John Osborne, said David’s habit of throwing his overcoat round his shoulders like a cloak was the gesture of an actor-manager.

  Pringle likened David’s way of running The Observer to ‘a Maoist commune’. Given some of the wild and eccentric characters he collected on the paper, it sometimes seemed to me that a more apt description might be circus master, with slow-moving elephants and a cage of naughty monkeys.

  • • •

  I owe a great deal in my life to David Astor. Before I ever knew him, I was educated by The Observer as a teenager in the 1950s, as were many people of my generation. The paper gave us a political and moral education that no school or university could match. Colin Legum introduced us to Africa; Cyril Dunn to India; Dennis Bloodworth to China; Edward Crankshaw to Russia; Patrick Seale to the Middle East; Anthony Sampson to the mysterious workings of the British establishment.

  The Observer taught several post-war generations how to think and feel about the great issues affecting Britain and the wider world. It became part of our conscience. David was at the heart of this process, not because he had a political message to deliver – he didn’t fit into any party mould – but because he puzzled things out for himself and, in so doing, helped others to think for themselves, unencumbered by class or ideology.

  It was the war, of course, that forced him to do this. I think he saw the problems of this island with greater clarity because he was half-American. It also helped that, as a child at Cliveden, he had mixed with the leading figures of the day and was far from overawed by those set above us. I remember him putting Harold Wilson in his place when the Prime Minister tried to bully him into getting rid of the paper’s terrier-like political correspondent, Nora Beloff.

  On another occasion, when the paper wanted to reproduce a New York Times report that demonstrated how badly the British Foreign Secretary, George Brown, had behaved on the Queen Mary, Wilson harangued Astor on the phone about the damage it would cause to the country’s interests. David listened patiently, then said, rather less patiently: ‘Mr Wilson, there have been six Prime Ministers while I have been editing The Observer and I sincerely hope there will be another six before I go. Good afternoon.’

  David taught me many things about editing, including the important principle that the paper should always be better than the editor. By this he meant that an editor who acted like a dictator and banned any opinions he didn’t agree with, and removed staff he didn’t agree with, could only produce a newspaper as good as himself. (Are the names of Andrew Neil and Paul Dacre going through readers’ minds at this point, I wonder? You may think so; I couldn’t possibly comment.)

  David insisted that the paper should always be better than him. As a result, he took risks with writers and ideas he wasn’t sure about, insisting only that they be ‘authentic’ – one of his favourite words. When I was writing an article to mark The Observer’s 200th anniversary, I asked David how he would describe himself. After a pause, he replied: ‘Quixotic and seemingly diffident.’

  Of the many things I owe him, apart from the main one of entrusting me with the continuation of his life’s work on The Observer, was the conviction he passed on that the simple questions in life are the most important and the most difficult – and that the job of a newspaper is to go on asking them.

  CHAPTER 5

  MICHAEL

  Astor made me deputy editor on April Fool’s Day 1969. I remember the date well, for three things happened on that same day: I started my new job, a second son, Paul, came into the world, and we moved house to Wimbledon.

  In promoting me, David honoured the promise he had made a year before when I turned down two outside job offers. Michael Davie, the incumbent, had disappeared from the office for weeks on end and nobody knew where he was. It turned out that he had gone to the United States and then to Australia because his office affair with

  Anne Chisholm, whom he went on to marry, had been discovered by his wife. Anne Chisholm was then working on the Pendennis diary column, a job she sha
red at one point with a young Polly Toynbee. They occupied a tiny cubicle with no natural light, just outside the newsroom. One morning, Anne called me on the telephone, even though I was only a few yards away, and asked if I would go in and see her. She sounded distraught, which surprised me, as she was usually calm and controlled.

  I found her clearing her desk and packing her files in a bag. She asked me if I would finish the diary column for that week as she had to go. I asked her where she was going in such a tearing hurry and she paused before replying, dramatically, in words I never forgot: ‘I’m eloping with the deputy editor.’ For a moment I thought we must both be characters in Compact, a popular BBC soap opera in the 1960s that was set in a magazine office. The mystery of Michael’s disappearance was finally solved.

  When I passed on the news about the elopement to KPO, he was amazed. Astor, it turned out, was not amazed, because he knew already. David and his wife Bridget were friends with Michael’s Australian-born wife, Robin, and had been comforting her. Later, when Michael finally returned home to pack his things and clear out of the marital home, he asked a couple of colleagues to help him. They were Nora Beloff and Gavin Young, a roving foreign reporter: it would be hard to think of two people less suited to dealing with the emotional and practical fallout from a distressing marital break-up. It wasn’t just that one of them was gay and the other an ageing spinster, but that they were temperamentally unfit for the task.

  They were upset after seeing Michael at his home in Little Venice and, already fairly inebriated, took a taxi to David’s splendid house in St John’s Wood, close to Lord’s and next door to Paul McCartney, turning up unannounced in the early evening. David was upstairs and appeared at the head of the staircase to find out what the noise was all about.