Social INFLUENCERS

If taste could be inherited, Jane Churchill, one of London’s most prominent interior designers for more than four decades, was born with a fortune. Nancy Astor was her great-great aunt and grandmother of Emily Astor, and Nancy Lancaster was also Jane’s great-aunt. Both women were renowned hostesses of their time and are still revered as icons of style to this day.

‘The Two Nancys’, as they were sometimes referred to, were actually American, born in Virginia and raised near Charlottesville, at Mirador, the country seat of the family patriarch, Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, a railroads and tobacco tycoon. Langhorne and his wife, Nanaire Keene, had five daughters, celebrated as the Langhorne Sisters for their beauty and Southern belle charm. The eldest, Lizzie, married Thomas Moncure Perkins, a Richmond cotton broker. Nancy Lancaster was their daughter, as was Jane Churchill’s grandmother, Alice Perkins Winn. “My grandmother and her sister Nancy Lancaster were very close,” Jane notes. “They fought like cats and dogs, but adored one another. Both lived till they were 97. Strong American women – that’s where my blood comes from.”

If anyone fits that description, it’s Nancy Astor. In 1906, she married Waldorf Astor, the second Viscount Astor, and the unbelievably rich heir to much of his famous American grandfather John Jacob Astor’s real estate, lumber and fur empire, which placed her at age 27 in the centre of Britain’s highest aristocratic and political circles. As a wedding present, Waldorf’s father, William Waldorf Astor, who had transplanted the family from New York to England, gave them Cliveden,