IPA article on David Astor
Best remembered for his denunciation of the Eden Government at the time of Suez, and his tireless support for Nelson Mandela, David Astor (1912-2001) was perhaps the greatest newspaper editor of his day, persuading writers of the calibre of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Kenneth Tynan, Anthony Sampson and Michael Frayn to write for the Observer, and converting a rather frowsty, old-fashioned and conservative family newspaper into a non-party paper of the centre-left.
The Astors had made their money as Manhattan property owners, and in 1890 David Astor’s grandfather, William Waldorf Astor, left New York and settled in England; his acquisitions included Cliveden, the palatial country house overlooking the Thames in which David Astor grew up, and the Observer, which he bought from Lord Northcliffe in 1911. David Astor’s father, Waldorf, was a gentle, liberal minded man, who married the Virginia-born Nancy Langhorne, later to become the first female MP. David was the second of their four sons and, like his brothers, he was educated at Eton and Oxford. Nancy was witty, tactless, over-bearing and highly possessive, of David in particular; and during his teens and his twenties he fought long and often bitter battles to free himself from his domineering and intrusive mother. During his time at Oxford he suffered from the first bouts of the depression that was to dog him thereafter, and sought help from psychoanalysis, which provided him with what was to become an essential lifeline. Waldorf Astor had always seen his liberal-minded son as his heir-apparent as far as the Observer was concerned, but after leaving Oxford, and for most of the 1930s, Davis Astor seemed a lost soul, unable to settle down and drifting from one job to another. His involvement with his Oxford friend Adam von Trott, a German aristocrat later executed for his part in the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler’s life, provided him with a sense of purpose and a singlemindedness which – to Waldorf’s relief – he then brought to the Observer. After a spell as the paper’s foreign editor in the post-war years, he came into his inheritance in 1948, and edited the Observer until his retirement in 1975.
Jeremy Lewis’s David Astor: A Life in Print will be published on 3 March by Jonathan Cape at £25.