Lady Astor of Hever interviewed
Above: Lady Astor of Hever
Above: Lady Astor with daughter Olivia
Life must have felt as if it had finally changed for the better when Liz Astor met and married Lord Astor of Hever, a peer of the realm, in 1990 after seven years as a single mother-of-one.
The daughter of Viscount Macintosh of Halifax (“of the toffee fame”), she had lived from the age of six to 19 in Northumberland, following her mother’s re-marriage, before moving to London to take up a career in modelling.
However, by the time she was 20, Liz had decided what she really wanted to do was work with handicapped children – but it required too many years of exams and training and she did a year of Montessori teacher training course instead.
All change
Meanwhile, Liz’s first marriage was going through some difficulties and the couple split up when their daughter Natalya was just 22 months, leaving her alone in London’s West Hampstead with a very young baby.
“I spend most of my thirties as a divorced mother of one child and I had to change my job to fit in with her,” Liz recalls. “To begin with, I worked three days a week and she went to a childminder. We just about survived financially.
“When she went to nursery, I could wok longer hours and I was a secretary for a firm of consultant engineers in Dover Street, who were the nicest people I’ve ever worked for in my life.”
I went to Hever Castle as a paying customer two years before I met my husband and thought, oh, what a lovely place!
Liz then got involved in PR with an advertising agency, organising events and writing press releases – but it all got a bit tricky fitting everything in around the school holidays and Liz switched to head hunting, which she adored, especially as she could work from home. “I would hand my last brief in on the last day of term, then have a holiday and the minute she went back to school, run into the office and say, quick, give me work!” she recalls.
Liz first came to Kent with a very good friend of hers, Stephanie Berni, whose father owned Berni Inns, and their two daughters were close chums, too.
“Stephanie adored the opera and gardens and we used to drive around Kent together. I went to Hever Castle as a paying customer two years before I met my husband and thought, oh, what a lovely place!”
Liz had met Johnnie, the shadow minister for defence, through a mutual friend and they bonded over daughters of a similar age. “We started meeting on Saturdays to take the girls out, and after about nine months of this, he invited Natalya and I to his flat in France, where he’d been living – and that was the summer we fell in love,” she says.
A proposal swiftly followed and, after marriage, the couple set about transforming the house that Johnnie had just bought and that was to become the family home, just down the road from Westerham and Chartwell.
Life in the lens
And it as at this lovely house, part 12th century and part 1930s former ‘two up, two down’ cottage that I meet Lady Astor – or Liz, as everyone calls her. I like her at once. Skinny, blonde and elegant, the former model, 57, knows exactly how to behave in front of the camera and delights in showing the Kent Life photographer and I the many framed family groups that decorate her beamed and cosy lounge.
Family is hugely important to Liz, especially as she went from life with her eldest, Natalya, to a new family of six (Johnnie has three daughters from his first marriage and the couple also have two children, Charlie and Olivia), not to mention Sweep and Cassie, their spaniels, and various members of staff.
But it is her youngest child that brings me to the Westerham area. Now 15, Olivia was diagnosed at the age of four with autism and Lady Astor’s life changed for ever. “It was absolutely terrible, I knew nothing about autism at all, this came out of the blue and I didn’t know where to begin or what to do,” she confesses.
“It’s an extremely complex disorder and the more I leant, the more I found just how complex it is. I was devastated, frightened, lost, lonely, desperately sad – but then I went to visit Natalya at school in Canada and I spent half term with her. Wept and wept, but the children lifted me up out of myself and on the way back, I realised I needed to find out as much as I possibly could.”
I have embraced autism, and Olivia, she has completely changed my life and it’s got to be for the better
Liz bought her very first computer, started to research into autism – and the rest is history. “I eventually wrote my book, Loving Olivia, which explains how you gradually go through the seven stages of grief – from shock, denial and anger to, eventually, acceptance,” she explains.
“Acceptance is not a permanent state, there are times when it just deserts you and times when it comes back again. There are still moments of fear of the future, a realisation that what Olivia thinks she’s going to have – marriage and children – is probably not going to happen.
“And I have embraced autism, and Olivia, she has completely changed my life and it’s got to be for the better,” says this remarkable woman
That ‘embrace’ has seen Liz learning occupational therapy techniques, such as modifying her own language and learning to listen and not to interrupt Olivia – which she describes as “a vast learning curve that lasted years.”
She has also had to remind herself of her other duties. “I tried not to obsess too much and not leave out my other children and, indeed, my husband – we’d only been married a few years, after all,” says Liz. “He has been wonderfully supportive, he joined the All-Party Group on autism and got lots of spokespeople involved.”
Calming down
Lady Astor tells me she “started to calm down a bit in 1998”, began to read about the National Autistic Society and decided she wanted to get involved in fundraising. Not one to shirk a challenge, her first ever trip was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest ‘walkable’ mountain in the world, with one of her brothers and a step daughter – raising £80,000 for the NAS in the process.
“It was absolutely wonderful, it rejuvenated me and made me realise that I could do other things – that there was life outside of being a 24/7 carer,” she admits. “Having been a working single mum for so long, I was absolutely loving having a big family and a home, but those were Liz Astor’s legs that went up that mountain, those were her fingers on the keyboard, I wasn’t just being the wife of Lord Astor of Hever. I sort of grew up then.”
So began nearly a decade of fundraising – and not just for the NAS. Liz’s elder daughter, now 26 and successfully running her own advertising agency, has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and her mum has done a lot of fundraising work for the registered charity Attention Defecit Disorder Information Service (ADDISS).
Her last fundraising activity was in May 2007 for both ADDISS and NAS, a spectacular show at the Albert Hall called The Night of a Thousand Voices that raised more than £100,000. Since then, Liz has focused more and more on her writing.
“I first started writing books of verse for my children, but I couldn’t get them published until a friend introduced me to her agent, who suggested I write about Olivia. I found that I adored writing and realised that was what I wanted to do now,” she explains
Her current project is a novel set in the 1960s and 1970s and is about the huge social changes of that period seen through the eyes of a young girl, which she hopes to finish by the Easter holidays.
“I think about it all the time and work on it as much as I can, but I have a lot of calls on my time – I am not doing it to earn a living, but I am completely consumed by it when I am doing it, and I love it,” she tells me. “After nine years of fundraising, it’s time for somebody else, you can’t keep on asking the same people to help you over and over again.”
Save Our School
Liz is also absorbed in the battle to save Olivia’s beloved school, Broomhill Bank, near Tunbridge Wells, which she has attended since the age of nine. A single-sex Moderate Learning Difficulties (MLD) Special Needs School with a mix of residential and day pupils, it has been described by Ofsted as a ‘centre of excellence’ and accepts girls between the ages of eight to 19. It also has a dedicated 16+ unit that sees the girls into young adulthood.
“However, within six months of Olivia being there, Kent County Council said it was reviewing special needs in the county, so we have been fighting ever since she started to keep it as it is really,” says Liz.
The proposal is to introduce boys into the school and shut down the boarding unit
The proposal is to introduce boys into the school and shut down the boarding unit, but Liz, now a school governor, and her fellow parents, believe this would be a disastrous move. “A lot of the children are statemented, or extremely vulnerable, so to introduce boys is madness. It works very well as it is and it is the only special needs girls’ school in the county – so why close it?
She adds: “The girls need the protection and inclusion, they wouldn’t cope in mainstream schools and many, like Olivia, have tried and failed in the mainstream sector. Olivia is never going to live totally on her own in a community, she will always have to be semi-sheltered and taken care of.
“It is now going to an independent adjudicator and everyone is living on tenterhooks, but the stress whittles away at you over the years,” she admits. “Ofsted says this is a centre of excellence – but they have ignored it, it’s completely illogical. The girls, their brothers and sisters and parents will all suffer.”
But Liz is a fighter, and an extremely fit one – post- Kilimanjaro, she discovered a love of exercise and now trains twice a week with a personal trainer, runs and cycles – and I wouldn’t want to face her in a battle where her passions are so clearly roused.
So does she feel passion, too, for her adopted home? “I am completely in love with Kent – it is the most beautiful county and Westerham is a complete 21st-century Cranford, full of characters and delicious gossip,” she says with a smile.
“The countryside is wonderful and I cannot believe how fortunate I am to live within 23 miles of central London yet look out and see fields of rolling countryside and watch Kent emerge from the devastation of the 1987 hurricane and flourish again.
“I want to stay here, in this house and in Kent, until I leave in a coffin.”