 His mother was a wealthy American heiress, born Margaret Laura Astor Carey (1853–1911), a granddaughter of William Backhouse Astor, Sr. and Margaret Rebecca Armstrong of the prominent Astor family.She had been Madame de Stuers before her divorce and marriage in 1892 to Eliot Zborowski.After the death of his father in 1903, in 1910 his mother bought the Higham Park estate at Bridge near Canterbury in Kent.