>>Dr Jacqui Turner: Nancy Astor is a fascinating person. She was witty, she was charming, she
was intelligent.
>>Viscount Astor: And she had a tough upbringing. So, you know, she had to be tough to survive
and she was a very strong character, she was very forceful. She was a wonderful
grandmother.
>>Dr Mari Takayanagi: Nancy Astor was something of a rebel. She didn't always toe the party
line, she was elected as a Conservative but she didn't always vote
with the Conservatives.
>>Baroness Trumpington: She was not going to have anybody boss her around and there
were a hell of a lot of people who thought she had ideas above her station.
>>David Beamish: She was a woman of great convictions and great persuasiveness. She
was such a forceful personality that she got an awful lot done.
>>Baroness Trumpington: When she managed to marry a very mild Lord Astor, she was able
to do all kinds of things that women hadn't been able to do before. They had never
had the money and the power and she got both. She got newspapers and money.
>>Dr Mari Takayanagi: After the Parliament Qualification of Women Act was passed woman
candidates stood in the General Election in 1918 and one of them was actually elected.
This was Constance Markievicz who was elected for Sinn Fein in Ireland but because
she was a member of Sinn Fein she never took her seat.
>>Viscount Astor: She was a hardworking wife of a Member of Parliament so she knew the
constituency pretty well and they knew her and
that's why they asked her to stand. What drove her was a deep conviction that she had to
do something to help other people.
>>Nancy Astor: Because I wanted the world to get better and I knew it couldn't get better
if it was going to be ruled by men. As a fact I think it's amazing how well the men did
for two thousand years considering they tried to do it alone.
>>Dr Mari Takayanagi: And Nancy Astor said in her campaign leaflet that what was really
important to her was peace, progress and prosperity of the country. She was standing for Plymouth
Sutton, which was a port of course, and she made it quite clear that she wanted to work
for the soldiers and the sailors and their wives and children. And she said explicitly
that she thought she knew Plymouth better than
any of the other candidates, particularly the women and children and the social problems
they faced.
>>David Beamish: My mother had for years been trying to get me to apply to go on Mastermind
and I had never been able to think of a specialised subject. In 1982 I watched a BBC
dramatisation of Nancy's life and found it fascinating enough to get me to read a biography
of her. But I thought here's a great subject.
>>Mastermind 1988: Your name please? David Beamish.
Occupation? House of Lords Clerk.
Your chosen specialised subject? The life of Nancy Astor.
>>David Beamish: I think it must have been quite startling in a very male dominated environment
when a woman was on the floor of the House of Commons for the first time.
>>Dr Jacqui Turner: I research here at special collections at the University of Reading.
In the Nancy Astor papers we have a huge collection here, it's over two-thousand boxes. Nancy's
maiden speech again very much reflected who she was. It was her commitment to Christian
science, it was influenced absolutely by her abhorrence
to drink. The first bill ever introduced by a female MP was introduced by Nancy and again
it was about drink. It was the Intoxicating Liquor
Bill which is one of the reasons why we still have to wait until we're eighteen to drink
today.
>>Viscount Astor: There was two parts to her war work. The first was Cliveden where it
was turned into a Canadian hospital. Then, of course, the other
part was as MP for Plymouth. Plymouth was very badly bombed, it was blitzed a number
of times and she spent a lot of time there dealing with all
the casualties, the homeless, and people who been bombed out. And that brought her to national
prominence, I suppose, in a way that hadn't quite so much
before but she was always well known.
>>Dr Jacqui Turner: The Cliveden Visitors books are an outstanding record of the people
Nancy surrounded herself with. They were people who were politically
influential, they were her family and they were her close friends. You have Amy Johnson
here, who was the first woman to fly the Atlantic, Charlie Chaplin,
and of course her really great friend, George Bernard-Shaw.
>>Baroness Trumpington: I mean, you know, there's the famous quote of Churchill saying
'I don't want anything to do with that woman', you know. I mean there
were no other women at the time.
>>Dr Jacqui Turner: Nancy was aware, from the moment she took her seat in Parliament,
of her place in history. She was also incredible supportive of those early
female MPs who came immediately after her.
>>Baroness Trumpington: Nancy Astor was not especially interested in women's lives because
she was interested in whatever touched her. If it happened to coincide
with women's lives so be it. If it happened to coincide with men's lives so be it also.
>>Dr Mari Takayanagi: Nancy Astor was elected in 1919 and held her seat continuously until
1945. That's quite a parliamentary career by any standards, she never
lost an election in that time.
>>Viscount Astor: She found her vocation in Parliament. I suppose her real legacy is it
doesn't matter really where you come from, if you're determined to do something
you can get there.
>>Baroness Trumpintgon: There was plenty of opportunity for her to do a heck of a lot
of good which men had rather forgotten about.