In the latest of his (always engrossing) biographies, Jeremy Lewis brilliantly charts the life of the man who reinvigorated The (UK) Observer newspaper which he edited for 27 years.
David Astor (1912-2001) was born into the wealthy Astor family, whose family seat was at Cliveden, the palatial mansion on the Thames which his grandfather had bought after leaving New York. Sean O’Casey was a regular visitor at Cliveden, as were HG Wells and Hilaire Belloc, even Charlie Chaplin called in.
Astor’s years at Eton and Oxford were undistinguished. “On paper, of course, my Eton career has been dim in the extreme,” the young scholar told his mother. “I’m an oddish mixture. To the ordinary Etonian I’m very obscure and retiring.” He inherited his portion of the Astor millions at the age of 21, wealth originally accrued by his great-great-great-grandfather who had invested in a goodly slice of Manhattan real estate.
At 36, with only a year at the Yorkshire Post as journalistic experience on his CV, Astor became editor of The Observer. At that point, it was a High Tory paper, which had been purchased by his grandfather from Lord Northcliffe for £5,000 in 1911. In the case of the unlikely man for the job proving beyond expectations to be in fact the very man, throughout the 1950s and 60s, Astor transformed what was a staid newspaper into the liberal Sunday newspaper that it remains.
He favoured writers who were not professional journalists, and got the cream of the crop in terms of 'stars' of the time. Isaac Deutscher, Philip Toynbee, Kenneth Tynan, Arthur Koestler, EF Schumacher all wrote for the newspaper, as did Neal Ascherson, still one of the most perceptive analysts of the East European scene. Later contributors included Michael Frayn, soon to make his name as a brilliant comic novelist. Clive James - similarly blessed with the comic gift - entertained many readers with his acerbic wit and lightly-worn erudition in the 1970s.
Astor was bedevilled by depression all his life, and while he learned to cope - an hour of daily therapy with Anna Freud was the rehabilitative mainstay - he had run out of steam by the early 1970s. Constant battles with print unions and inability to attract advertising at a crucial period sapped the man's prodigious energy.
"He was never just a journalist," Winnie Madikizela-Mandela recently declared. "To me, when we were together, I was talking to a fellow freedom fighter. " Lewis's 338-page biography is an illuminating portrait of this tireless activist, not just against apartheid, but against totalitarianism of all kinds.
Paddy Kehoe
