The
Cliveden Set were a 1930s,
upper class group of prominent people, politically influential in pre-
World War II Britain, who were in the circle of
Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor. The name comes from
Cliveden, the
stately home in
Buckinghamshire, which was then Astor's country residence.
The "Cliveden Set" tag was
coined by
Claud Cockburn in his journalism for the
Communist newspaper
The Week. It has long been widely accepted that this
aristocratic Germanophile social network was in favour of friendly relations with
Nazi Germany and helped create the policy of
appeasement.
John L. Spivak, writing in 1939, devotes a chapter to the Set. Norman Rose's 2000 account of the group proposes that, when gathered at Cliveden, it functioned more like a
think-tank than a
cabal. According to
Carroll Quigley, the Cliveden Set had been strongly anti-German before and during
World War I. After the end of the war, the discovery of the
Nazis' Black Book showed that the
group's members were all to be arrested as soon as Britain was invaded; Lady Astor remarked, "It is the complete answer to the
terrible lie that the so-called 'Cliveden Set' was pro-Fascist."
The actual beliefs and influence of the Cliveden Set are matters of some dispute, and in the late 20th century some historians of the period came to consider the Cliveden Set allegations to be exaggerated. For instance,
Christopher Sykes, in a sympathetic 1972 biography of Nancy Astor, argues that the entire story about the Cliveden Set was an
ideologically motivated fabrication by Claud Cockburn that came to be generally accepted by a
public looking for scapegoats for British pre-war appeasement of Adolf Hitler. There are also academic arguments that while Cockburn's account may have not have been entirely accurate, his main allegations cannot be easily dismissed.
