Editor’s Note
This article details the recent auction of a historic Cartier tiara once owned by Nancy Astor, the first woman to serve as a British MP. The piece, a testament to her trailblazing legacy, fetched nearly £900,000.
‘People will stare. Make it worth their while.’
So said Harry Winston, the famed jeweller. Nancy Astor took the advice seriously. The viscountess, born in 1879, and the first woman to sit as an MP, was the proud owner of a turquoise and diamond tiara. The exceptionally rare Cartier piece went up for auction with Bonhams on June 5 as part of their London Jewels sale. It sold for £889,400, significantly exceeding its estimated value of £250,000-£350,000. No-one said style didn’t come at a price.
Featuring on Country Life’s Frontispiece in 1913, she was born Nancy Witcher Langhorne and moved from her place of birth in Danville, Virginia, to England in 1905. Waldorf Astor, the viscount, was her second husband. They wed in 1906 and lived at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire.
After a career as a hostess and member of the social elite, she entered Parliament in 1919, winning her husband’s former seat, Plymouth Sutton, when he succeeded his peerage and entered the House of Lords. As a member of the Unionist Party, she advocated for educational reform and women’s rights, among other issues. However, although diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, unfortunate controversial views are not — and these ended Astor’s political career in 1945.
In 1931, she wore the tiara to the premiere of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights at the Dominion Theatre in London. Her sister, Phyllis Langhorne Brand, borrowed it for a court presentation at Buckingham Palace in the early 1930s. Inspired by this, her husband, the Hon. Robert Henry Brand, commissioned Cartier to produce a similar tiara in 1935. This is on display until November 2025 at the V&A museum’s Cartier exhibition, which has an entire room dedicated to tiaras.
Set throughout with brilliant, old single and rose-cut diamonds, Lady Astor’s tiara comprised a lot of bling, especially for an MP.
However, if tiaras aren’t your thing, worry not. Along with Astor’s tiara, there was another significant piece of fashion history sold recently, a piece which was once worn by a woman with a life that was equally interwoven with glamour and scandal. Vintage Van Cleef & Arpels pieces, once owned by Ann Fleming, went under the hammer in Dreweatts’s Fine Jewellery sale on June 12. The sapphire and diamond brooch and earring set sold for £32,000 and belonged to Ian Fleming’s only wife. Not so Ann — she had more of a Bond-type approach to romance (Fleming was her third husband).
The jewels were not gifted to Ann by Fleming, they were a present from her first husband, Lord O’Neill of Shanes Castle, in 1938, during a now-infamous trip to Paris. At the time, à la Bond, she was also having an affair with Esmond Harmsworth, later Viscount Rothermere, who would become her second husband. The story goes that when she learned that her husband, Lord O’Neill, had planned a weekend in Paris with his lover Maureen, Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, she decided to follow them. She convinced her then-lover, Harmsworth, to take her to Paris, where she purchased the Van Cleef & Arpels set with money he provided.