David Astor, 89; British Editor, Apartheid Foe

David Astor, editor of Britain’s respected Observer newspaper for 27 years and a dedicated anti-apartheid campaigner for decades, has died. He was 89.

Astor died in his sleep Friday, the newspaper said Sunday. It did not give the cause of death.

Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, described Astor as “a loyal friend.”

“Under him, the Observer supported the African National Congress from the early years of apartheid, when we most needed it and when most newspapers ignored it,” Mandela said Saturday.

“I will always remember the generosity and loyalty of David, both as a friend and supporter of our movement and South African democracy,” Mandela said.

A Buckingham Palace official said Queen Elizabeth II was “deeply saddened” at the news of Astor’s death.

In its obituary, the Daily Telegraph said Astor “proved himself one of the outstanding editors of the postwar period, transforming his family’s newspaper . . . from a staid organ of the establishment into the leading forum of English liberalism.”

After Mandela’s 1964 trial and imprisonment, the Telegraph said, “the Observer was almost alone in keeping Mandela’s cause alive in Britain, while Astor sent law books and other reading material to Mandela in prison.”

W.F. Deedes, former editor of the Telegraph, wrote that Astor “became recognized as a marshal of postwar liberal opinion,” and was “a foremost critic of Britain’s colonial regime.”

A famous Observer editorial in 1956 denounced Prime Minister Anthony Eden over the invasion of the Suez Canal, in concert with French forces and an Israeli attack, after Egypt nationalized the vital waterway. The invasion provoked widespread denunciation, and the troops withdrew.

Francis David Langhorne Astor was born March 5, 1912, son of Waldorf Astor--a viscount and one of the country’s richest men--and the American Nancy Astor, who was the first woman in Britain to take her seat in the House of Commons.

In his childhood, David Astor met many of the leading political figures of the day at the Astors’ grand Cliveden estate. But he rejected the Conservative political ideas of his mother.

After his education at Eton and Oxford, he entered banking briefly before taking a newspaper job at the Yorkshire Post.

He joined the Royal Marines in 1940, and later began contributing to the Observer, which Waldorf Astor owned. David Astor became the weekly’s editor in 1948.

He hired intellectual friends, such as George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, and carefully assembled a staff of reporters and literary and arts reviewers.

In its obituary, The Times called Astor “an inspired and creative conductor of an unusually talented journalistic orchestra. . . . Not only did Astor have an instinct for finding good journalists; good journalists were keen to work for the Observer.

“The Observer he created was one of the better things of postwar life in this country,” the Times said.

The newspaper was very successful in the 1940s and 1950s, but lacked the money to compete with the other, expanding Sunday newspapers that added color magazines.

Astor stepped down as editor in 1975, and the newspaper was bought by Robert Anderson of Atlantic Richfield. He, in turn, sold it in 1981 to tycoon Roland Rowland. The Guardian Media Group bought the Observer in 1993.

He is survived by his second wife, Bridget; their two sons and three daughters; and a daughter from his first marriage.