CLIVEDEN AND THE SEEDS OF APPEASEMENT

This is an updated version of a blog I first wrote more than twelve years ago.

Cliveden is a large country house on the Thames near Maidenhead. Today it belongs to the National Trust and is leased as a luxury hotel. For me, however, it will always be associated with the years of appeasement in the 1930s and the political conversations that helped pave the way to the Munich Agreement of September 1938.

I have stayed at Cliveden twice in recent years to celebrate family events. The contrast between its present serenity and its turbulent political past is striking.

The Astors and Their Influence

In the inter-war years Cliveden was owned by Waldorf Astor, a naturalised American who also owned The Observer, the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper. The paper’s politics were firmly on the right, and one suspects Astor would be astonished by some of the views held by its later owners.

Waldorf’s wife Nancy Astor hosted lavish weekend parties at Cliveden. She was the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons, representing Plymouth Sutton from 1919 to 1945, having succeeded her husband when he entered the House of Lords as Viscount Astor. One of their sons, David Astor, later owned The Times. The Astors were a family with both wealth and reach.

The weekend gatherings at Cliveden were social and political showpieces. Invitations were prized; guests included senior politicians and opinion-formers. Winston Churchill, Home Secretary before the First World War and later the implacable enemy of appeasement, was an occasional visitor, though Nancy Astor developed a marked dislike of him which hardened in the 1930s. Anthony Eden, another future Prime Minister and a regular guest, was more welcome, not least because of his prowess on the tennis court.

Between games of tennis and croquet, guests ate cucumber sandwiches on the terrace and discussed politics. Out of these conversations, a shared worldview emerged.

The Cliveden Worldview

The core of what later became known as the “Cliveden Set” held a relatively consistent collection of beliefs:

• Strong Anglo–American ties were essential (both Astors were originally American).
• They were committed imperialists.
• They believed Germany had been treated too harshly at Versailles and that some former territories should be restored.
• They distrusted and disliked France, whom they blamed for the “punitive” peace settlement.
• Many (though not all) were anti-Semitic.
• They feared the Soviet Union above almost everything else.

Collectively, these people wielded enormous influence in politics, diplomacy and the press. So when Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937 and signalled his intention to seek agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, Lady Astor and her circle were ready to support him.

Among the core figures were:

• Viscount and Lady Astor
• Philip Kerr, former private secretary to Lloyd George (later Lord Lothian)
• Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times
• J. L. Garvin, editor of The Observer
• Sir Neville Henderson, British ambassador in Berlin
• Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, who replaced Anthony Eden when Chamberlain forced Eden’s resignation in February 1938

Chamberlain himself sometimes attended Cliveden, especially at moments of crisis. Another notable visitor was Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s ambassador to London and later Hitler’s Foreign Minister, who would eventually hang at Nuremberg.

Two Weekends That Shaped a Continent

In my appeasement thriller The Blue Pencil (2012), I focus on two critical Cliveden weekends:

• 22–23 October 1937 – when the Cliveden circle helped plan Lord Halifax’s secret meeting with Hitler. Publicly, Halifax was travelling to Germany to attend a hunting exhibition (he was Master of the Hounds); in reality, much more consequential conversations were on the agenda.

• 26 March 1938 – a weekend at which Neville Chamberlain himself was present and where the probable dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was discussed.

My fictional hero Roger Martin and his girlfriend Jane meet a member of Cliveden’s domestic staff in the Oak and Saw, a pub in the nearby village of Taplow. Over drinks, they begin to piece together what is really happening at the “big house” overlooking the Thames.

From Country House to Front Page

Many of the ideas discussed at Cliveden surfaced almost fully formed in the national press. In September 1938, The Times published an editorial suggesting the partition of Czechoslovakia as the obvious solution to the crisis — before Hitler had publicly proposed it.

In a country still traumatised by the First World War, appeasement had many supporters. Yet there were also loud and forceful critics. Churchill and Eden were the most prominent political opponents, warning that concessions to Hitler would only encourage further demands.

The wider public only gradually learned of the influence exerted by Cliveden’s weekends. The key figure in revealing it was Claud Cockburn, later famous as a stalwart of Private Eye. In the 1930s he produced an extraordinary weekly news-sheet called The Week, typed on buff paper in brown ink and posted to subscribers. At its height, it had a circulation of forty thousand.

In The Blue Pencil, Roger Martin works closely with Cockburn as they uncover the connections between Cliveden society, the press and government policy. Cockburn named the group; the term “the Cliveden set” itself was coined by Reynolds News, the Sunday paper of the Co-operative movement.

Researching Appeasement and Cliveden

In researching my novel I relied on a range of contemporary sources and later historical studies. Two books stand out:

• Twilight of Truth by Richard Cockett (1989)
• The Cliveden Set by Norman Rose (2001)

I also explored:

• The archive of The Times (now available online).
• A complete bound run of The Week held at the British Newspaper Library at St Pancras, London.
• The only full set of Reynolds News, preserved at Bradford University Library.

These sources helped me reconstruct the atmosphere of the 1930s: the smoky rooms, the anxious debates, and the way opinion at a country-house weekend could become policy a few days later.

From Appeasement to Profumo

The Second World War came and went, and for a time Cliveden slipped back into relative obscurity. Then, in the early 1960s, it returned to the front pages with another scandal: the Profumo affair.

John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, was revealed to be having an affair with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model who also had connections to a Soviet naval attaché. Part of their relationship played out against the backdrop of Cliveden’s pool and grounds. Once again the house became a symbol of elite misjudgement and national embarrassment.

Twice in one century, Cliveden was at the centre of stories that shook public confidence in those who governed them.

Cliveden in History and Fiction

Today, visitors to Cliveden admire its manicured gardens, river views and grand interiors, perhaps with little idea of the fraught conversations once held in its drawing rooms. For me, it remains a powerful symbol of the appeasement years — and a rich setting for fiction.

In The Blue Pencil, I use Cliveden and its surrounding landscape not merely as a backdrop but as an active presence, shaping events and choices. The Oak and Saw in Taplow, the long drive through the woods, the terrace looking down to the Thames: all of these helped me imagine how a group of influential men and women could, over canapés and cocktails, bend the course of history.

Cliveden: twice a house of infamy, now a beautiful house and gardens nestled above the Thames — and an enduring reminder of how private conversations in privileged places can have very public consequences.