Well, you can’t say he wasn’t warned. Swimming pools, Nancy Astor told her son, Bill, were ‘disgustin’. I don’t trust people in pools.’ If he wanted to swim he should take a dip in the River Thames, which flowed through the grounds. But when his horse won the Oaks, Bill Astor built his long-desired pool, and before long Christine Keeler was emerging naked from the water and Cliveden was branded a den of iniquity.
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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £22 Tel: 08430 600033. Frances Wilson is the author of The Courtesan’s Revenge and Literary Seductions.
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