DYNAMIC LADY ASTOR

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20896, 27 November 1937, Page 11

DYNAMIC LADY ASTOR

SEVENTEEN TEARS IN PARLIAMENT Lady Astor has a new Parliamentary dignity. For seventeen years she has been famous as the first woman in history to cross the threshold of the House of Commons: she now has the added distinction of heading the largest “family party” in the House. There used to be three Astors in the House. Now there are four, the fourth being Lady Astor’s eldest son, William Waldorf Astor. Fathers and their sons have occasionally sat together in the Commons, but not until now have a mother and her son been M.P.’s together, writes Charles Pound for the “New York Times.” Including Lady Astor’s husband, who sits across the lobby in the House of Lords, there are now five Astors in the British Parliament. Members of the Astor family in the House,

in addition to Lady Astor and her son, are her brother-in-law, John Jacob Astor, and her son-in-law, Lord Willoughby de Eresby.

But they do not vote as a family. They are apt to have ideas of their own on political questions and to vote accordingly. Certainly nobody Is ever likely to regard Lady Astor as a Tory politician or even asa politician at all, at least not in the House of Commons sense. From whatever angle she is regarded, her position is unique. She has

I never had a predecessor in British politics and in the nature of things she can never have a successor. It was her destiny to blaze the women’s trail through the prejudices of a House whose green benches had been sacred to men for six hundred years. Such a thing can happen only once. Whirlwind Personality What Britain thinks of her and what she thinks of Britain are therefore questions of more than ordinary interest, for it was she and she alone who first put women on the map at Westminster. Outside the House millions of newly-enfranchised women watched her with anxious eyes. All over the Continent and the United States there were women whose hopes for their sex were pinned to Lady Astor. If she had been one of the militant suffragists of pre-war days it would have been easy for the House of Commons to make a joke of its first woman member. If she had had a more placid personality it would have been easy to ignore her. But she has not been a "militant” and she has never been a conventionally placid person. There are moments when she seems to be a whirlwind of impulsiveness and vivacity, but she fights like a terrier when she feels deeply. Thanks to her courage and determination, the women who came into the House after her found themselves neither Ignored nor a joke. "Commons Has Changed” She is still unique in the House. Nominally a Tory, she is apt at one moment to be shaking a minatory white-gloved finger at the Labour members and at the next moment to be on her feet assailing the Tory members, while the Labour benches cheer her wildly. Her political gods are the courageous women who led the suffrage movement to success. “Britain is the sanest country in the world,” she said recently. “That has Impressed me more than anything else I have learned in the House of Commons. There is a central stream of progressiveness which keeps flowing steadily and quietly through British politics. There are die-hards on both banks—Tories on the right bank and Reds on the left. But they don’t stop the central stream from flowing. Politics in Britain is always progressive. “You can imagine how the House of Commons has changed since I first knew it in 1919. Why, the House to-day is a Sunday school! Thirteen million women have been enfranchised since the war, and all the problems of particular interest to them have poured into the House—widows’ pensions, the legitimacy laws, temperance, educational policy, the raising of the school age, the sale of liquor to minors, and so on. i

“These things have made politics real to millions of people to whom it has never been real before. Do you know that in my constituency at Plymouth 77 per cent, of the electorate voted at the last election? That shows how political niterest has increased, and that is more or less typical of Britain as a whole. Britain is geopraphically a very small country—small and homogeneous. It has all the conditions which produce a sane and progressive political life.

"I can’t tell you how much I admire the British civil service. It attracts the highest type of Englishman and gets the most devoted kind of service from him despite the anonymity which it imposes on him. And it is disinterested service, for a civil servant is independent of politics. He has nothing to fear from any party that comes into office.”

Other M.P.’s get into action in the House at intervals frequent or infrequent, as the case may be. Lady Astor is rarely out of action. When she is not on her feet addressing the House, she is apt to be deftly puncturing some unusually solemn occasion with a mischievously audible whisper from her seat, or whiling away an odd moment by starting a little private war of her own with the parties in the House, preferably with all of them at once. Unconventional Speaker She has married into one of the wealthiest families in Britain, yet she is acutely sensitive to the hardships of poverty and precarious employment. She has fired hundreds of questions at

Ministers of Labour about the low wages in some of the transport and restaurant trades. She has blazed up in thousands of speeches, in the House and on women’s platforms all over the country. She has nothing in common with the conventional Parliamentary style of oratory (but she could do an entertaining burlesque of it if she wanted to). She is no debater and as a speaker she is uneven. At her best she has a dashing quality which makes her very impressive to listen to, whether her speech takes a gay or grave turn. At her worst she is scrappy.

In the British view, her place in history has the permanency of a milestone. The central fact in the immense and many-sided progress which British women have made since the war has been their enfranchisement on the same terms as men. Their war services won it for them, but it was not given to them until after the war, and then in two instalments. Women over 30 were given the vote in 1919, and ten years later it was extended to those over 21. The legal profession was opened to them in 1919. Oxford admitted them to full membership in 1920. The Cambridge Senate gave them the right to use their academic titles in 1921. and in the same year the higher ranks of the Civil Service were opened to them. The Cabinet and Privy Council opened to them in 1929 when Margaret Bondfield became the first woman Minister —and a few weeks ago hers was the first woman’s name ever attached to the proclamation of a new King. There are many leaders among women to-day, but there was only one Lady Astor to break the crust at Westminster in 1919. On the day she took the oath as the first woman M.P. she stepped into her permanent place in British history. Her Country Houses As befits a woman with a strong Puritan strain beneath her inexhaustible sparkle, she was a temperance advocate long before she entered the House of Commons. Her husband owns the “Observer,” one of the ablest of London’s Sunday newspapers, and temperance reform has always been one of the several causes of social progress which the "Observer” has advocated. In the woods of Cliveden, near Maidenhead she has one of the finest country places on the Thames—a vast Italianate palace. Its principal claim to popular remembrance is the fact that “Rule Britannia” was first sung during a masque held on its famous terraces in 1740. But it is with Plymouth that the Astors are most closely associated. With Viscount Astor in the House of Lords and Lady Astor in the Commons, the Sutton division of Plymouth has long regarded Itself as in permanent possession of two M.P.’s. Being a member of a dockyard constituency, Lady Astor knows the wide range of naval and dockyard interests as only an M.P. of apparently unlimited energies can know them. Her Plymouth house overlooks the Hoe where the Mayflower embarked the Pilgrims a: < where Drake is supposed to have finished his game of bowls while the Spanish Armada was approaching. But she is known everywhere in Plymouth, from the big houses like her own down to the dingy tenements in steep, narrow streets.

RINGS AS SYMBOLS Although it may be fashionable today to talk rather pityingly of the romantic glamour that surrounded the courting of earlier generations, the young woman who likes to be described as "modern” is still sentimental enough to attach very special importance to the selection of her engagement ring as a symbol of love and future happiness. In the past rings were made of many different substances, such as gold, silver, ivory and bone. Though the substances to-day may be very different the honour and sentiment attached to the ring have not changed. Through all the years the engagement ring of diamonds has been the most popular, and it would be difficult indeed to find a substitute for the pure scintillating beauty of these stones. The settings of the stones have changed considerably with the fashions, and whereas gold was once the traditional setting, to-day it is platinum or perhaps white gold, that is most popular. Solitaire Popular The arrangement of two, three, or four diamonds of the same size in a straight row was once thought the correct form of ring to choose for the engagement symbol, but nowadays the

jewellers say that there is little demand for this type. The most popular and almost universal choice is that of the solitaire diamond, set in platinum filigree work. The central stone may be square cut, oblong, or rounded, and cut with many facets to catch and reflect the light, or smoothly bevelled toward the centre. The "rose” setting is chosen by many. It may be made with a large central stone surrounded by smaller ones, or may be composed of stones of the same size. For the very romantically minded there is a ring composed of a central diamond surrounded by seven diamonds set in tiny platinum hearts! Another like this was made of two diamonds side by side in a heart-shaped setting. Sapphires for Blondes The demand for sapphires comes second to diamonds for engagement rings, according to many city jewellers, and after that emeralds, which are, of course, more expensive. The medium or “cornflower” blue sapphire, set amid tiny glistening diamonds, proves to be the most popular arrangement for this lovely stone. The liquid blue depths of the sapphire is much sought after by fair-haired and blue-eyed young women, while the vivid green of the emerald appeals to the brunette, who is able to wear stronger colours.