The original Astor fortune was built by William Waldorf’s great grandfather John Jacob Astor I, an impoverished German immigrant to the US. The audacity that took him from butcher’s apprentice in 1779, when settlement beyond the Appalachians barely existed and Manhattan had a population of 23,000, to global trader by 1810 is extraordinary in its single-mindedness. John Jacob should be considered alongside a peer group of extraordinary and exploitative colonial adventurers who would change the world to this day. To consider him alongside Cecil Rhodes and Robert Clive seems appropriate: men who sought control of entire continents, acted beyond the purview of their supposed political masters and were inventive and nimble opportunists. The impact of John Jacob’s missions, where disease became a conscious weapon of colonisation and unbalanced trade alongside modern weapons, even has parallels with the Conquistadores.

William Waldorf’s American upbringing and heritage was not forgotten but, as ever with William Waldorf, it is romanticised. The six carved oak capitals surmounting the ebony columns (themselves the product of colonial extraction) are statues by Thomas Nicholls of characters from three American novels. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is represented by the unfortunate Hester Prynne and the sensitive Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Hester Prynne is seen with the scarlet ‘A’ embroidered on her breast, which the God-fearing pioneers of New England required her to wear, by way of penance for her sin with Dimmesdale. The two further characters are Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and his daughter (Irving was commissioned by John Jacob Astor I to write the very biased history of his Astoria colonial disaster, blaming all but Astor himself). Two of the figures are from the ‘Leatherstocking Novels’ by Fenimore Cooper, Uncas and The Pathfinder, one of the names given to Leatherstocking (Natty Bumpo). These two figures were subsequently taken by Lord Astor as the supporters of his Coat of Arms, possibly because in the intrepid Leatherstocking he saw his great grandfather who built the family fortune from fur trapping. The grandest colonial symbol of all is the caravel style ship used by Colombus and other early colonialists in the gilded weathervane that is so striking when Two Temple Place is viewed from the Embankment. Those caravels also adorn the lamps at the main entrance.

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