The Great Silence (27 page)

At a campaign rally on 19 November she had not for a moment been put off her stride by a cynical question hurled at her from the audience, wondering whether there was a shortage of work for an American woman in America. Nor had she been thrown by an editorial in the
Sketch
full of potentially unsettling sarcasm: ‘Lady Astor, I am sure, must have some definite reason for all this expenditure of energy other than the desire to be the first person to sit in Parliament. She would not waste her time and her own money on such a silly little motive.’

The
Saturday Review
of 15 November, however, had been openly hostile to the proposed candidate, accusing her of treating her candidacy as a ‘nursery romp’. ‘If we must have women in Parliament,’ the journal expostulated in shrill tones, ‘let them at least be Englishwomen who have the peculiar knowledge of English habits and life and wants that comes only to those who are to the manor born.’ Challenging Nancy’s marital status, the magazine continued to table-thump. ‘We deny that she has any qualification for the duty of representing Plymouth, particularly its women. Perhaps there is no subject more interesting to the female voters than the law of divorce. We are surprised that no elector has elicited Lady Astor’s view on the question.’ The journal accused the constituency of Plymouth of being the most frivolous and corrupt constituency in the country and called for its disenfranchisement.

A year earlier in the Coupon election, Countess Markievicz, beautiful, Irish and friend of the poet W B. Yeats, had been the first woman to win a place in Parliament. However, after refusing to take the oath of allegiance, she had not taken up her seat in the House and now became one of Nancy Astor’s fiercest critics, calling her ‘upper class and out of touch’. In some ways the Countess was right. Nancy was poorly qualified to stand as a Member of Parliament. She was largely uninformed about the dominant political issues of the day and her charitable work was driven by a strong Protestant and fiercely anti-Catholic commitment and an unbending moral certainty. In her firm but musical voice she had denounced France as ‘just one big brothel’. Her position as a Christian Scientist had
become well known during the war as she made clear her belief that God was responsible for the good in the world, and that mankind must take the blame for evil.

But Nancy was a spirited and forthright woman and her political campaign had revealed her energy and her willingness to take on the hecklers, to stand firm, to visit the poorest parts of the constituency, even while wearing her best pearls and white gloves, her hands on hips as she stood to address them. Oswald Mosley, the youthful Conservative MP for Harrow who had his own ambitions for high office, was one of Nancy’s campaign organisers and he marvelled at her electioneering technique. ‘She had, of course, unlimited effrontery,’ he observed. ‘She was less shy than any woman - or any man - one has ever known. She’d address the audience and then she’d go across to some old woman scowling in a neighbouring doorway, who simply hated her, take both her hands and kiss her on the cheek.’

The people of Plymouth also admired her for her outspoken manner. She was not afraid to confront the disparaging comments that she knew were being whispered behind her back. And they simply loved her jokes. ‘And now, my dears,’ she would cry from her electioneering carriage, her silk-hatted coachman guiding the red, white and blue-ribboned reins of his horses through the Plymouth crowd. ‘I’m going back to one of my beautiful palaces to sit down in my tiara and do nothing and when I roll out in my car I will splash you all with mud and look the other way.’ The self-denigrating wit was hard to resist.

The election was held on Friday 28 November 1919, a cold winter day with ice on the ground, but the warmth that the people of Plymouth felt towards this dynamic American was undeniable. The result was announced that evening. Nancy had won the seat with a majority of 5,000 votes. Her son Bill, aged 12, made a touching little speech to the constituents. ‘I have seen you elect Daddy,’ he said in an impressively steady voice, ‘and now I have seen you elect Mother. I thank you very much for it.’

Women were ecstatic at the unprecedented notion that they would have their own champion in the House. One of her campaign slogans had been ‘Vote for Lady Astor and your children will weigh more’.
But tears welled even in the eyes of the most uncompromising of men who stood in the crowd on that extraordinary day.

The following Saturday morning readers of
The Times
were informed of Lady Astor’s triumph. In the same edition of the paper the news was announced that the four magnificent classical bronze horses had been taken out of wartime storage and restored to their old place above the entrance to St Mark’s basilica in Venice. The world was beginning to settle.

There had been some speculation as to what sort of hat, if any, Lady Astor would wear on her first day in the new job. On
I
December the new Member for Plymouth entered the tightly packed Chamber, until that moment an exclusively male preserve for over six hundred years. Nancy was wearing a black tailor-made costume with a long jacket and white collar designed by herself, set off by a velvet toque and polished, neatly laced black brogues. A hearty cheer went up. Eyebrow’s only rose when members noticed the strange sight of two women reporters high up in the press gallery, an area more conservative than the floor of the Chamber itself. Typewriters, for goodness’ sake, had only been granted admittance into the precincts a few months earlier! Winston Churchill, the Minister for War, glowered perceptibly, having compared the arrival of a woman in Parliament to the experience of being spied upon by a member of the opposite sex while sitting in the bath with nothing more to protect oneself than a sponge. Never much of an advocate of female suffrage and irritated by Nancy’s irreverence, Churchill, a daily devotee of Pol Roger champagne and more besides, could not bring himself to support a woman who was a vociferous advocate of teetotalism. ‘One reason I don’t drink’, she explained, ‘is that I want to know when I am having a good time.’

However, watched with an encouraging smile by her husband from his place above the Chamber in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery, the new member responded to the welcoming words of Speaker Lowther addressed to ‘members desirous of taking their seats’. She walked towards the Speaker flanked by her obligatory two introducers both wearing frock coats, the current Prime Minister on her left and a former prime minister, Arthur Balfour, on her right. Despite
their differences, one married but nicknamed among close colleagues the ‘Welsh goat’ for his duplicitous attraction to women, the other an ascetic, unmarried Scotsman, they were affected by a similar nervousness on this particular occasion. As they processed towards the table at the top of the Chamber, Nancy had to hold out both her arms to try and restrict the undignified speed of their approach. Reaching the table all three were required to bow three times, but in his excitement Lloyd George forgot, so the choreography was at first spoiled. In the words of the sketch writer of
The Times
, the two elderly men ‘behaved with the ingenuous shyness of boys at their first dance’.

After taking the oath and reading her declaration, there was another difficult moment when the elderly and short-sighted Clerk of the House failed to find the correct page on which Nancy was to sign the New Membership documents, and while he shuffled and fluttered the papers, Nancy was unable, even at such a solemn moment, to restrain her naturally garrulous nature, and turned to chat with a few of her Cliveden weekend guests on the front bench. Eyebrows were once again raised. Next it looked as if the only space left for Lady Astor was on the front bench itself, but she managed to squeeze into a corner that was still vacant near the gangway. Shortly afterwards, during a convenient lull in proceedings, she discreetly left the Chamber.

The following week the
Lady
summed up Lady Astor’s arrival in Parliament as less that of a constituency representative than of ‘a symbol of the patriotic self-denial, endurance and courage that, shown in times of national peril, made women the true comrades of men’, and it saluted her presence as a signal that ‘the right to help govern the land they helped to save is one that few can now deny’. Lady Astor’s undeniable femininity encouraged women of all classes to expect their own professional ambitions to develop without any need to deny the characteristics of their sex.

During the war thousands of women had learned something of the role of men and even in the smallest ways attitudes had begun to shift. In his family’s corner shop in Salford near Manchester, Robert Roberts noticed a new self-confidence among women. Wives no
longer referred to their husbands as ‘my boss’ or ‘my master’. Having grown accustomed to earning their own wage they went out into the cities, exploring a world of opportunities previously unknown to them.

Many widows had of necessity continued to assume the role of head of the household, although the incentive of a year’s dowry awarded by the Government to all those who chose to remarry was attractive enough for 38,664 women to have found new husbands by December 1919. Even so, with a shortage of men from whom to choose, there were some who preferred to find a new and man-less way of life. One woman, who had found the greyness of the preceding years more than wearying, was determined to find light and sunshine and used the personal columns of
The Times
to enquire:

Would a lady wintering in a sunny climate who delights in giving pleasure to others take as companion a war widow who has done four years strenuous VAD war work. Now aches for sun and warmth.

Added as an afterthought and by way of qualification for this plum position were the words: ‘four bridge player and golfer’.

But with the passage of the wide-ranging Sex Disqualification Act in December 1919 professional opportunities were opened up to single women in countless areas of work from which women had previously been barred, including banking, accountancy, engineering, law and Parliament itself. The war itself had forced through these changes. Only the priesthood and the floor of the Stock Exchange remained officially male preserves, although the Civil Service continued to exclude women from high office and several London teaching hospitals refused training for women doctors. Marriage remained a barrier to most of these jobs, the assumption being that managing a home and bringing up children still took priority for a woman over a remunerated occupation. Many were driven to conceal their marital status.

Votes for women had been part of a less specific but far-reaching rebellion against the traditional role that women were expected to follow. In January 1918, the 22-year-old Robert Graves had married the 18-year-old sister of the painter William Nicholson in the light, airy space of Sir Christopher Wren’s church, St James, Piccadilly. The
marriage vows so enraged Nancy Nicholson that her husband was taken aback to hear the quiet savagery with which she managed to mutter them, while at the same time appearing so feminine in her blue checked silk wedding dress. He of course undertook to cherish her till death did them part in a tone of formality that he had learned on the parade ground. She seethed against the world, and against the chauvinistic society that told her that women had a duty to maintain the diminished population. She persuaded her husband to join the Constructive Birth Control Society. And then she became pregnant.

Honesty, release and the expectation of a new freedom were all embodied in the philosophy behind the new designs for women’s clothes pioneered by one French couturier. In November 1919 pictures of Gabrielle Chanel’s chemise dress had filled the pages of
Vogue:
‘A gown that swathes the figure in straight soft folds, falling at the sides in little cascades’. The editorial commended Chanel’s reliance on an uncluttered natural beauty, with a dress that showed only a slender pair of shoulder straps holding it up. The subsequent single-page spread devoted to Madame Lucille’s chiffons and to Poiret’s plumes seemed to be included simply out of respect for the old masters and appeared fearfully outdated. Poiret considered the Chanel look to encourage ‘cardboard women, with hollow silhouettes, regular shoulders and flat breasts’. Once the matchless pace setter of individuality in fashion, Poiret snorted that her clothes resembled ‘Cages lacking birds. Hives lacking bees.’

One other French designer, Madeleine Vionnet, managed to survive the transition through the war years and become part of the revolution in fashion. Vionnet cleverly amalgamated a still lingering desire for femininity with the wish to dress without the restricting discomfort of corsetry. Her bias-cut clothes were exquisitely desirable. But it was the androgyny promoted by Chanel that dominated women’s fashion in Europe in 1919.

Chanel had been abandoned in childhood by her widowed father, a travelling salesman for ladies’ corsets, to the care of several French aunts who threatened to sell her to the gypsies when she misbehaved. Her existence, she felt, was coloured black. Her hair was as black as
a horse’s mane, her eyebrows the colour of chimney sweeps’ eyebrows, her skin dark like lava and she felt her character to be as black ‘as the core of a land that has never capitulated’.

Chanel had spent several years in an orphanage at Aubazine where she learned to sew although not with great dexterity, never discovering how to avoid pricking her fingers. Rebellion undercut her childhood, before it established itself in her love affairs and her design for clothes. She was ‘naughty, bad-tempered, thieving, hypocritical and eavesdropping’. She was, she said, ‘a true Lucifer’. She dreamed of becoming a cabaret singer and started to appear in nightclubs, performing the two songs she knew best, ‘Ko Ko Ri Ko’ and ‘Qui a Vu Coco dans leTrocadéro’, which were so popular that the audience would simply clamour for ‘Coco’. Her nickname was established.

Just before the war, at the age of 29, she had become the owner of a couple of shops where she specialised in selling hats which she made herself. Arthur Capel, an English mine and coalship owner of immense good looks, wealth and charm, financed the shops. Chanel loved him single-mindedly and he adored her in return. Despite his tendency to be unfaithful, he was no more capable of ending their relationship, he said, than of agreeing to ‘chop off a leg’. Accompanying the slim, blond and beautiful polo-playing Boy Capel (as everyone called him) to the races, Chanel was appalled by the ill-fitting ‘loaves’ she saw on female racegoers’ heads. The neat, austere head-hugging hats she designed in response were immediately coveted for their simplicity.