For the past eight months I've been researching a biography of David Astor, the former editor and owner of the Observer. The idea of writing about him first crossed my mind some six years ago, shortly after I'd completed a life of Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books. It occurred to me that Lane's Penguins and Astor's Observer were the two great influences on liberal-minded readers who had grown up in the decades after the war; and when, in due course, the opportunity arose to write about him, I gratefully pushed ahead.
Various qualities became apparent as I read through his papers. Most obvious was his support for the underdog, which manifested itself, most controversially, in his long friendship with Myra Hindley: he never sought to justify her crimes, but he believed that she had become a reformed character, and detested the way in which she was demonised by the tabloids. He was tireless in his loyalty: he never let up in his campaign to win his great Oxford friend Adam von Trott – who was hanged for his part in the 20 July plot against Hitler – the respect and admiration he felt he deserved. Growing up in Cliveden, the Astors' mansion near Maidenhead, he knew Churchill and Bernard Shaw and Charlie Chaplin as visitors or family friends, and was unawed thereafter by the trappings of power. He suffered debilitating bouts of depression throughout his life, seeking help in psychoanalysis, and although he was famed at the Observer for not knowing what a mortgage involved, he was quick to offer help and advice to those whose lives were in turmoil.
I only met Astor once, and liked what I saw. I wanted to pick his brains about Cyril Connolly, whose biography I was then researching. The two men had an embattled relationship during the war – Connolly was so outraged when Astor diluted his post as arts editor that he stamped out of White's, leaving his guest to foot the bill. But Astor told me how he had modelled the Observer on Horizon, the literary magazine that Connolly edited for 10 years. He liked to combine well-wrought essays with reportage, employing writers as well as professional journalists, even if they had no obvious qualifications for the job – a policy that, in the 1970s, infuriated the National Union of Journalists, then trying to impose a closed shop.
Fritz Schumacher, celebrated in last week's Observer by Robert McCrum, was one of Astor's occasional contributors. Philip Toynbee, with no journalistic experience, was sent out to cover the Middle East before finding his niche as one of the paper's regular book reviewers. An instinctive talent-spotter, Astor offered Michael Davie a job after reading a letter he had written about his holidays in Kent, and took a punt on the equally inexperienced Gavin Young; poet Alan Ross reported on cricket, and Astor outraged his theatre critic, Ivor Brown, by making the enfant terrible Kenneth Tynan his successor.
Like many of the best editors, Astor had no literary ambitions himself. Before he joined the paper his journalistic experience had been limited to reports on hunting for the Yorkshire Post. But his father, Waldorf Astor, who owned the Observer, preferred him over his more conservative older brother; and when JL Garvin, who had edited the paper since 1908, finally retired in 1942, the 30-year-old Astor became the heir apparent. After a spell as foreign editor, Astor came into his inheritance in 1948, inaugurating what old Observer hands would look back on as a golden age.
Contributors tended to be hard-drinking, opinionated and high-minded; young meteors such as Katharine Whitehorn and Anthony Sampson rubbed shoulders with the empurpled Patrick O'Donovan and the melancholic John Gale, the author of that neglected masterpiece Clean Young Englishman.
Astor campaigned for a more liberal and tolerant society at home, and for European unity, transatlantic friendship and the end of empire. An early supporter of Nelson Mandela – he sent him books in prison – Astor abominated apartheid, supported the Nagas of north-east India, and famously denounced Anthony Eden over Suez in 1956.
Life began to lose its sparkle in the 1960s, as Sunday newspapers became larger, more competitive and more vulnerable to disruptive printing unions. Outsold and outwitted by Roy Thomson's Sunday Times, brilliantly edited by Harry Evans, Astor dutifully introduced a colour supplement, business pages and the rest; but although his editorial pencil remained as sharp as ever, his heart was not in it, nor were his pockets deep enough to subsidise the paper any longer. In 1975 he resigned as editor and he sold the Observer to an American oil company the following year, finally severing all connections when, to his horror, it was sold on to Tiny Rowland. But his campaigning career was far from over: beneficiaries of his support included Erin Pizzey, the Anna Freud Centre, Index on Censorship, the British-Irish Association, the SDP and the Koestler Awards.
An elegant, diffident figure with a thatch of fair hair and an engagingly lop-sided smile, Astor combined modesty, idealism and astonishing generosity with a steely determination. He was a brilliant editor and a good man, and I long to learn more about him from former friends and colleagues.
jeremy.lewis5@me.com
