Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times
Peter Stanford
When Bronwen Pugh married into the celebrated Astor clan in 1960, she seemed to have the world at her feet. She was a media darling, BBC television presenter, the most celebrated model of her generation, and, after her marriage to millionaire Bill Astor, mistress of Cliveden. Three years later her world was turned upside down by the Profumo scandal. Cliveden – with its famous guests, lavish parties and spectacular setting – was alleged to be at the centre of an international web of sexual debauchery and espionage which ultimately brought down Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.Bronwen lost everything in the scandal: husband, home, friends and her good name. Bill Astor was accused of being a louche playboy and an unfaithful husband, Bronwen as little better than Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, the two escort girls at the centre of the scandal. Bill Astor never recovered, and he died in 1966 of a broken heart.The reversal of fortune for Bronwen Astor was immense, and in charting her private agony behind the public disgrace, Peter Stanford has written a fascinating and moving story of a remarkable and resilient woman.
Bronwen Astor
HER LIFE AND TIMES
Peter Stanford
Dedication (#ulink_726543ec-1a59-59f8-ac7c-e1774e336178)
To Mary Catherine Stanford
1921–1998
whose love and nurturing is behind
everything in my life and whose loss
will always be unbearable
Plan of Cliveden (#ulink_9520bfe3-810f-5b7a-91d4-b1c84b073f30)
The Astrors (#ulink_c0924fec-9a77-5616-9c04-6defab32f7ab)
Contents
Cover (#ucc870cb8-e110-5fa4-9afe-83e905b98af4)
Title Page (#ucd777703-ea4a-55da-9a24-dab68156e0cc)
Dedication (#uff6b1ef9-88b5-546f-9208-55eb72e7dabc)
Plan of Cliveden (#u04b9eea8-e023-5e21-852c-4a5887604b26)
The Astrors (#u382452f2-e236-581f-beca-48770a9cec6e)
Prelude: Cliveden, Berkshire, 1999 (#ueb8b34e0-70ff-5aba-bedf-f4ba7bfeefe8)
Chapter One (#u705c6c91-398a-538b-8502-134eeb123b17)
Chapter Two (#u5cf49763-64b1-54e5-b35c-ebe0582a2c6f)
Chapter Three (#uc28e4415-fde4-5186-a137-da4a5cd2aa5e)
Chapter Four (#ue780bbca-9956-5c92-8be1-983ad79d8ccc)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Postscript: Tuesley Manor, Surrey, 1999 (#litres_trial_promo)
Source Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prelude (#ulink_e9bc7255-1a66-567f-81da-47b122ce076c)
Cliveden, Berkshire, 1999 (#ulink_e9bc7255-1a66-567f-81da-47b122ce076c)
‘Lady Astor’s back.’ In the silence of the main hall at Cliveden, now a hotel, this snippet of understairs gossip hangs for just a second in the air, then disappears before I can catch the intonation. Excited? Nervous? Indifferent? Puzzled? Simply reading the guest list for lunch? Does the cleaner, waitress or under-manager responsible for this sotto-voce broadcast even know which Lady Astor she is talking about?
Cliveden, this most famous – and twice this century notorious – of English stately homes, is today a shrine to its most celebrated inhabitant, Nancy, Lady Astor, the first woman to take her seat in the British Parliament. That was back in 1919, but in the timeless opulence of the wood-panelled hall decades and even centuries merge. In such a self-consciously impressive place, it is hardly a challenge to imagine the redoubtable Nancy sweeping in, all long skirts, fur collars and button boots, barking at her servants in the Virginian drawl that she never lost after almost a lifetime on the British side of the Atlantic, and greeting the houseguests assembled for one of the gatherings of what was mistakenly labelled the ‘Cliveden set’ of Nazi appeasers in the late 1930s.
Yet the Cliveden visitors’ book was far more eclectic than that. In the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s kings, prime ministers, world leaders and Hollywood stars came for the weekend to Cliveden to be entertained by this witty, sharp and unfailingly direct woman. Edward VII, Franklin Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin all fielded Nancy Astor’s barbs and bouquets over feasts in the ornate French dining room which once graced Madame de Pompadour’s chateau near Paris. Joseph Kennedy, American ambassador to London in the 1930s, brought his brood to stay at Cliveden, linking across decades and thousands of miles one Camelot with another.
As if on cue, Lady Astor arrives. Not Nancy but Bronwen, her successor as mistress of this Palladian mansion which peers down imperiously from its hilltop over the Thames. As she comes through the main doors, she hesitates for a beat before she meets my eyes and walks over to the plush but anonymous hotel settee near the open fire. Later, when more relaxed, she admits that she had stopped in a lay-by near the main entrance to collect her thoughts and pray so that she could walk calmly into her old home. ‘I always used to do it before I lived here and was visiting – as a preparation to face my future mother-in-law.’
Nancy and Bronwen, both Lady Astors, overlapped for less than four years. Bronwen arrived in October 1960 as the third wife of Nancy’s son and heir, Bill. Nancy died in May 1964. Theirs was neither a long-lived nor a close friendship. They could hardly even be described as friends. Bronwen sought to placate her mother-in-law, who was unfailingly critical of everything she did. In her declining years Nancy was not the force she had once been, her wit extinguished and replaced by a certain brutality. Living mainly in London in exile from Cliveden, which she only visited by invitation, she grew bitter and resentful.
Bronwen’s treatment was not unique. Nancy had never been keen on any of her daughters-in-law: she resented them for usurping her place in the lives of her five sons. Strangely, for one whom history acclaims as a female pioneer, she took a perverse delight in making the lives of the women close to her a misery and virtually driving many of them to divorce. And she was particularly cruel to the women Bill, the third Viscount Astor, chose as her successors as chatelaines of Cliveden – though she did once grudgingly admit to her biographer Maurice Collis that Bronwen was ‘the best of the bunch’.
None of the other guests lounging in deep armchairs and sofas scattered around near the carved stone fireplace could have guessed from Bronwen’s demeanour that Cliveden had once been her home. Yet for all her self-effacement in the simple navy blue trouser suit she is wearing, there is an undeniable something about Bronwen Astor. Even in her late sixties, she still turns heads just as surely as she did when, in the 1950s, after a spell as a BB C television presenter, she became the public face of one of the most distinguished Parisian fashion houses.
Bronwen Pugh – her maiden name – was the forerunner of today’s supermodels and in her time was just as much a headline-maker and a household name as Kate Moss, Elle MacPherson and Claudia Schiffer are now. She was muse to Pierre Balmain at the height of his fame. He couldn’t pronounce Bronwen so he called her Bella and told the world that she was one of the most beautiful women he had ever met.
Some faces only last a season. Time and fame take their toll. But Bronwen Astor still has it. ‘It’ is something to do with the combination of her height (just under six foot), her bearing (purposeful, haughty, distant) and a certain freedom from conventional restraints. There is, Balmain believed, a Garboesque quality about her. And then there are her eyes – greeny blue, piercing, wild and Celtic, set in a long, elegant, bony face, framed now by strong, wavy grey hair.
Our preconceptions of models today are of visually stunning but empty-headed women. The gloss was taken off Naomi Campbell’s attempt to write a novel when it was revealed that the text had been put together by a ghost-writer. In that sense, a vast gulf separates contemporary fashion superstars from Bronwen Pugh – or ‘our Bronwen’, as the press dubbed her, turning her into a mascot as potent as the Union Jack or the national football team. ‘Our Bronwen leaves them gasping’, the Daily Herald reported proudly from the Paris fashion shows in 1957.
Being a ‘model girl’, a phrase she prefers to the word model, which in her time carried a tawdry undertone, was never more than a distraction – ‘tremendous fun’, as she invariably puts it. By day she worked with Balmain – or a distinguished procession of designers from Charles Creed to Mary Quant who chart the transition from one fashion epoch to another. But in her spare time she was devouring spiritual and psychological writings like the Russian P. D. Ouspensky’s The Fourth Way (published in 1947), which explored new ways of thinking about consciousness, or the books of the French Jesuit and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who brought Christianity and science closer together than perhaps any other authority this century.
The contrast between Bronwen’s two worlds could not have been greater – one to do with a skin-deep worship of the body and the creations that cover it, the other probing deep and complex matters concerning the mind and the soul. It made for a curious and ultimately untenable double life. A career in the most material of worlds thrived while her mind was fixed on spiritual concerns. Perhaps that accounted for the distant look that Balmain recognised.
The inter-relation – indeed often competition – between these two elements dominates her life story. She loved her husband in a conventional way but also felt guided towards him by God. At Cliveden she was pulled in opposite directions, acting the chatelaine of a great house but unable for the most part to talk of her inner life even to her husband. Occasionally someone would reveal him- or herself to be on a similar wavelength. Alec Douglas-Home is one name she recalls, but usually she preferred to keep quiet. Only in more recent times has she found fulfilment as a practising psychotherapist and a devout, sacramental, if otherwise unconventional Catholic.
It is not until she settles down next to me on the sofa that Bronwen allows herself a proper look around the Cliveden hall. ‘The tapestries are still the same,’ she says, gesturing with those eyes at three great wall-hangings that face the main entrance. ‘But everything else is different. New.’ She strokes the sofa arm. Her tone is almost casual. Almost. ‘It was all sold, you see. Each of Bill’s brothers got to choose a picture and I took some things for my new home, but everything else was sold.’ Her life with Bill went under the hammer – 2,000 lots snapped up by eager collectors.
On Bill’s premature death in 1966 – from heart failure brought on by the strain of his public disgrace as, allegedly, a player in that landmark of the sixties, the Profumo scandal – the Astor trustees, acting on behalf of Bronwen’s stepson and Bill’s heir, then a minor, decided to relinquish the lease on Cliveden. They handed it back to the National Trust, to which Bill’s father had bequeathed it in 1942. In August 1966 Bronwen Astor and her two daughters, aged four and two, left Cliveden with unseemly haste. In the thirty-three years since, she has only been back inside twice.
When I was a small child I used to have a recurrent nightmare. My parents would move out of our family home and other children would take over the nooks and crannies, hiding holes and secret places in the garden that were properly mine. I would be hiding behind the hawthorn hedge watching them play on my lawn, put their toys in my cupboards, climb the narrow stairs to my playroom, take my cup and saucer out of my special cupboard in the kitchen. They would spot me and ask me to join them. I didn’t know how to respond. I always woke up at that stage.
The dream was never realised, but it took me years to recognise that memories are more than bricks and mortar. For Bronwen Astor, the scale is increased tenfold – she was an adult; this was her marital home where she spent five and a half years with the man who was the love of her life; and Cliveden is considerably grander than my suburban house.
After Bill’s death she had hoped to stay on for at least part of the year, so that her children and her stepson, who had lived with them at Cliveden, could remain together as a family; but she was informed by the trustees that she had to leave. It was a traumatic time. ‘For many years,’ she says, ‘I couldn’t bear to come here, but now it is like looking in on another person’s life.’
Again there is that ability to withdraw to another level of consciousness. I sense she is watching herself disinterestedly as she did on the catwalk as she wanders around the grand entertaining rooms that lead off the hall – rooms where once she played hostess to Bill’s friends from the worlds of politics, international charity work, racing and society. ‘I trod a tightrope,’ she recalls. ‘I tried to live a life among people who came from a different class to me but also to remain who I was. The class system was much stronger then. There was a distaste – always in the background. I was not upper class. My husband’ – and her laugh banishes a darker memory – ‘didn’t like the way I said “round”. He used to try to teach me to say “rauwnd”.’
Her diction, though, is perfect. As a young woman she trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama as a teacher. However much she makes herself sound like Eliza Doolittle, her upbringing was solidly middle class, the privately educated daughter of a Welsh county court judge. Indeed, Lord Longford, an old friend of both Bill and Bronwen Astor, is fond of remarking that, such was her poise when greeting him at Cliveden, his practised eye always took her for the daughter of a duke.
The wool-panelling of the library has been treated, she notices, to make it lighter. She stands close and sniffs it. Amid the formality of a smart hotel it is a curiously relaxed gesture, as if this is still home. Yet one of the smells that she associates with Cliveden has gone.
Outside the window of what was once her drawing room – now the hotel’s dining room – she points out the metal cups set in the balustrade around the terrace that looks out, in Cliveden’s most celebrated view, onto the Thames as it meanders down to London. ‘We used to put an awning up there and eat out in the summer.’
It must, I suggest, have been like living in a huge museum cum art gallery. Even the balustrade had been brought by Bill’s grandfather from the Villa Borghese in Rome. ‘My first impression, I think, was that it was all very cosy. It sounds strange now, but all the rooms lead off the hall and off each other and Bill had a flair for making them, well, cosy.’
Bronwen took on not only Nancy Astor’s tide but her study too. Nancy, a southern belle, had called it her ‘boudoir’. As Bronwen leads the way in, she is halfway through a sentence when she notices a group of hotel guests talking and sipping coffee in there. She pulls up short and turns to leave but one woman calls out in a proprietorial way: ‘Do come back, dear. There’s a wonderful view you should see.’ For a moment Bronwen looks ill at ease. She knows the view only too well. She smiles nervously, as if a fly is about to land on her face. It is the closest she comes to any display of emotion.
Upstairs a footman shows us into her old bedroom – again inherited from her mother-in-law. ‘THE LADY ASTOR ROOM’ the plaque on the door announces. A copy of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of a youthful Nancy on the wall makes plain which Lady Astor is being commemorated. Bronwen Astor, for all the fame that surrounded her when she arrived at Cliveden, does not merit a mention. Her period here, you feel, is regarded as something best forgotten.
Yet on the day of her marriage to Bill a press pack every bit as large and insistent as that which hounded Diana, Princess of Wales, had camped out at the pub that faces the gates of Cliveden in the hope of getting a glimpse of its heart-throb, ‘our Bronwen’, as she married her lord. The previous night, tipped off that a ceremony was in the offing, they had chased her, her mother and father across London in a taxi until the cabbie had somehow given them the slip. It was another of those headline-grabbing matches – supermodel marries one of the richest men in the world, even though he was old enough to be her father.
‘When I arrived here, I didn’t change a thing,’ Bronwen says, walking past the chambermaids, who are making the bed. ‘It was the way Bill wanted it. It was like Rebecca and I was the second Mrs de Winter. I literally didn’t move an ashtray – apart from here and in the boudoir. And even then it was a friend of Bill’s – John Fowler – who helped me.’ She says the name as if I should recognise it. When I stare back blankly, she adds: ‘You know, Colefax and Fowler. Wallpaper.’
I was two when the Profumo scandal that destroyed Bill and Bronwen Astor’s life hit the headlines in July 1963. ‘Steamrollered’ is the word Bill’s younger brother David, celebrated editor and owner of the Observer, uses to describe their experience at the hands of the popular press, society gossips and erstwhile establishment friends. It all began in Cliveden’s swimming pool on a hot weekend in July 1961, when War Secretary Jack Profumo and Soviet official Yevgeny Ivanov frolicked with Christine Keeler, watched by her mentor Stephen Ward. During the Cold War a British minister sharing a girl of ill-repute with a Russian agent had major security implications.
When it leaked out, the sex and spy scandal cost Ward his life, Profumo his career and heralded the end of Harold Macmillan’s government. To the list of victims should also be added Bill and Bronwen Astor. Advised by his lawyers to maintain a dignified silence as allegations of orgies at Cliveden abounded, Bill saw his health was destroyed and he died of a broken heart in March 1966, his reputation in tatters. He is one of the forgotten victims of Profumo. He was labelled a seedy playboy, an adulterer, a coward who abandoned Ward in his hour of need in court, and a fool. He became the symbol, however mistakenly, of a world of lascivious ministers and aristocrats with double standards, who, in the mock-Edwardian Macmillan era, had lectured the public on morals while in private hosting poolside romps and attending sado-masochistic parties.
When Keeler’s sidekick, Mandy Rice-Davies, was told in court during Ward’s trial for living off immoral earnings that Lord Astor denied ever having been sexually involved with her, she chirped up: ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ It earned her immortality and damned him for ever. It has been Bill Astor’s most enduring public legacy, though Rice-Davies’s own detailed account of the assignation soon unravels.
In May 1999 the Independent newspaper, in a profile of one of the ‘accidental heroes of the 20th century’, described Christine Keeler as having been ‘procured for Lord Astor’s Cliveden set’. There was no ‘set’ and Bill Astor was not a man to procure women. Yet the myth is apparently set in stone.
John Profumo redeemed himself by good works among the needy of the East End of London. For Bill Astor, whose philanthropy was on a vast but almost invariably ‘no publicity’ basis and who played a central role in the founding of such inspirational international bodies as the British Refugee Council and the Disasters’ Emergency Committee, there was no such redemption.
Though cleared of any guilt by Lord Denning’s subsequent enquiry into the affair, Bill Astor died feeling himself a social leper. Almost four decades on, it is hard to understand what he and Bronwen were meant to have done wrong, what crime it was that brought such vilification on their heads. The most that can be said about them was that they were too indulgent of Stephen Ward, allowing him to live in a cottage on the Cliveden estate and thereby giving him some kind of respectability. ‘I warned Bill about Stephen,’ Bronwen recalls. ‘From the first time Bill introduced us, I didn’t want him at my dinner table.’ Bill agreed to that but, tragically, did not recognise the deeper unease behind his new wife’s demand and so continued to see Ward elsewhere.
For a man who believed the best of most people, it was a small sin. However, those who had been happy to accept Bill and Bronwen’s lavish hospitality before they heard the rumours of high jinks at Cliveden decided that there was no smoke without fire and shunned them. Bronwen recalls being cut dead at parties and grand gatherings at race tracks, while the writer Maurice Collis, a regular guest at Cliveden, recorded in his diary after a weekend there in 1965: ‘The house was completely empty, the great hall without a soul and nobody coming or going. The silence and emptiness were somehow ominous.’
Unlike most political scandals, the Profumo affair has outlasted the avalanche of headlines, the court case and the ministerial resignations. It has even outlasted most of its principal players. And it lives on in the public imagination as a watershed in the 1960s, the turning point between the stuffy, buttoned-up and sometimes hypocritical post-war world and the more liberated age of the Beatles, the King’s Road and the pill. In 1988 the film Scandal brought the whole business to a younger audience. Visitors to Cliveden today still make for the swimming pool rather than the classical treasures that adorn the house and grounds.
Part of that enduring Profumo myth has been to degrade Bronwen Astor. To the list of victims of the affair should also be added her name, as well as those of Bill Astor’s four children, the youngest just two when her father died.
In the film Bronwen is all pouts and shopping trips funded by Bill, an upmarket version of Keeler. ‘Keeler used to call herself a model,’ Bronwen says, ‘and I think at the time some people, some of our friends even, didn’t know the difference between a model and a model girl. And Stephen [Ward] at the very end, when he was desperate, started telling people that he had introduced Bill to me even though I had never met him until I came to Cliveden.’
It is a slur that still riles Bronwen. In July 1963 Paris Soir published her photograph alongside Keeler’s as one of the women Ward was supposed to have trained to secure rich husbands. Once implanted in the public consciousness that idea has refused to go away, despite the evidence. In Honeytrap, a 1988 best-seller by Anthony Summers weaving a Cold War espionage drama into the Profumo scandal, Bill Astor is described as having been introduced to Bronwen through Ward’s good offices.
After lunch we wander through the grounds. Though it was many years before she could face coming back to the house itself, Bronwen used to return occasionally to see Frank Copcutt, the head gardener who stayed on when first Stanford University and later the hotel took on the lease of Cliveden from the National Trust. And there was her husband’s grave – next to those of his mother, father and grandfather in the Cliveden chapel, an octagonal temple, lavishly decorated with mosaics, set away from the house. ‘I used to come back there regularly on anniversaries, but I don’t feel the need now. Bill’s spirit isn’t there. It’s …’ And she gestures as if to mean everywhere.
‘I think I’d like to be buried in Jerusalem. It’s at the centre.’ Her remark comes out of the blue. Initially I’m not entirely sure what it means but Bronwen Astor, I begin to realise, sometimes moves on a different plane from the rest of us. For one thing she talks unembarrassedly about God in everyday conversation. And then every now and then she throws down a line and you have to seize it. I struggle to take my chance – Jerusalem is more a state of mind than a city. For 5,000 years the Old City has had a legitimate claim to be at the centre of the world. The Islamic Dome of the Rock sits on the spot where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, where Muhammad ascended to heaven on a white horse, where the Jews built their Temple, and where Christ died and rose from the dead.
Bronwen has made me think, stretched me. I like that, her capacity to say startling things, her involvement in exploring the frontiers between body, mind and spirit. She is an adventurer who attracts others on to her treks. She has come a long way since her days at Balmain.
After Bill’s death she moved with her two young daughters to a eleventh-century manor house in what feels like a hidden valley outside Godalming. It has not been a conventional widowhood. Free to live her life on her own terms, she converted to Catholicism in 1970 – ‘it was an odd thing for an Astor to do because my mother-in-law hated Catholics’. For four years she ran a charismatic Christian community at her home, open to all comers. Few of her friends and acquaintances had realised that while working as a model or welcoming friends to Cliveden she had been on a secret spiritual journey – ‘most people would look puzzled if you mentioned God’ – so they were horrified to discover that Bronwen had suddenly ‘got God’. They tried to warn her and feared that, in her grief, she was being sucked into what to them had all the signs of a cult.
The community had its crazier moments, she now realises, and its collapse perhaps saved her from further exploitation. Her fellow members had wanted her to give up the remaining trappings of her former life – like the chauffeur or the housekeeper. ‘They meant nothing to me, but I was determined that I was going to bring my girls up as Bill would have wanted, as Astors.’ The spiritual and material once again clashed.
Yet for Bronwen the whole community experience was a great liberation, the first of several subsequent attempts which ultimately gave her life a coherence. After the community was wound down, her spiritual exploration became less public – though she did, in one grand theatrical gesture, hire the Royal Albert Hall in 1983 for a prayer meeting.
Later she trained as a psychotherapist and has achieved a distinction in her chosen field that has attracted eminent academic institutions like the Religious Experience Research Centre at Oxford University. Her appointment as chairman of its support body emphasises how far she has travelled since her days on the Paris catwalk.
Her own spiritual life is now at the heart of each and every day. She prays for half an hour in her private chapel, reads the scriptures and attends communion as often as possible. She is permanently aware of the presence of God, feels close to Him and guided by Him, and she carries with her a spiritual air. She is shy of the word usually employed to describe such people – mystics. In the Christian tradition mystics are the great and the good of the church – John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich. Bronwen is not in their league. In secular terms the word ‘mystic’ carries with it overtones of ‘Mystic Meg’, stargazers and fraudulent eccentrics on Brighton Pier.
If mysticism is stripped of its trappings and seen as something unusual but not unheard of in everyday Christians, the mark of those who have had some direct revelation from God, then she is undeniably a mystic. No priest or religious who has come into contact with her has ever doubted her sincerity.
Yet in spite of these spiritual blessings, that sense of injustice, for herself and for her late husband and his children, has never gone away. With her daughters married, she has finally decided to talk about her own part in the scandal of the century in a final effort to set the record straight.
Our walk round the garden at Cliveden is almost over. The door to the swimming pool hasn’t changed, she remarks as we go through. The pool, however, is smaller than it was on that fateful weekend in July 1961 when Profumo, Ivanov and Keeler met. The reduction is somehow appropriate since the pivotal event of the Profumo scandal was scarcely, for any of the participants, of earth-shattering importance. Only later was it blown out of all proportion as a result, Bronwen now believes, of a complex and profoundly evil conspiracy.
Her own memories of the weekend are mundane. ‘It was very hot and we came over from the house on the Saturday night with the guests and found Stephen Ward and some of his friends here. It was nothing. And then on the Sunday, some of the other guests – Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan, was here and Lord Mountbatten – wanted to go down to the stud and I remember looking in on the pool, seeing Jack and Bill and thinking, “Oh well, they’re all enjoying themselves, that’s fine, I can go.”’
Two years later this ‘weekend took on serious political implications. The papers were alleging that all manner of odd and perverse activities were going on, while the Astors’ friends took care to avoid the pool and Cliveden itself. Teams of photographers in helicopters were flying over the house at all times of the day to try and snatch that visual shot that would prove that Bronwen was running a house of ill-repute. Trapped inside with her child and her ailing husband, she was under siege.
‘You only have to look to see it couldn’t have been true,’ Bronwen says, a note of indignation in her voice as she points to a row of windows overlooking the pool. ‘Taylor the groom and Washington the butler lived there with their families. Nothing could have gone on with them so close.’ Her tone is one of bemusement. After all these years she is still puzzled as to how the whole affair got so out of hand.
We head back to her car. When she lived here, a chauffeur was forever at her beck and call. Guests’ vehicles would be taken off to Cliveden’s own garage, valeted, polished and filled with petrol, ready for the journey back to London. Bill’s fortune and generosity with it meant that Cliveden operated in a style and on a scale that had not been seen in other grand country houses in England since 1939. With his disgrace that life came to an end. Bronwen’s Cliveden was almost the last in the line of the great stately homes.
She is suddenly and unexpectedly overtaken by an air of sadness as she prepares to leave, but I sense it’s not for the house or the lifestyle. After so long, it is not even to do with the unhappy memories attached to the second half of her period here. It is for the things she lost in those years – her husband, her reputation. ‘It seems like another life now,’ she sighs, adding, almost with relief, ‘finally.’ And with that Lady Astor takes her leave.
Chapter One (#ulink_a1e5d505-a011-5d6c-adf1-562898cd1c64)
There is no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics
R. S. Thomas, Welsh Landscape (1955)
Exiles have curious and sometimes contradictory attitudes to their ‘fatherland’. Often the first generation to leave retains a strong emotional bond with all they have abandoned, but for some, depending on the reasons for their departure – adventure, economic necessity, education – return or even nostalgia is out of the question. They develop an antipathy to the past and determine to be assimilated into their new culture and society by virtue of rejecting the old. In succeeding generations, of course, such attitudes can be reversed: children or grandchildren of unsentimental or ambitious exiles may over-compensate for their parents’ or grandparents’ abandonment of the family ‘seat’ with romantic notions about their roots which also offer a means both of rebellion and of self-definition. A place with which their physical connection is tenuous becomes crucial to their psychological and spiritual identity.
Because of the bland image of the plain old English-repressed, over – polite and concerned only with what the neighbours will think – many of those born in England explore family links with Ireland, Wales and scotland in order to appear more exotic. In economic terms, they have, like as not, embraced the values and assumptions of their generally more prosperous English homeland, but in their more rhetorical moods they celebrate their Celtic and Gaelic roots in exiles’ clubs and sporting societies, harking back to something that has been irretrievably lost.
The Pughs fit loosely into this pattern in their attitude to Wales. They were and are proud to be Welsh. They regard it as a defining feature in their make-up. Yet by the time Janet Bronwen Alun Pugh was born in 1930, the family link back to Cardiganshire was wearing distinctly thin. It accounted for just 50 per cent of their bloodline since their mother, Kathleen Goodyear, was solidly English. And even their father Alun – after whom, in a spirit which now seems oddly egotistical, Janet Bronwen Alun, her two elder sisters Eleanor Ann Alun and Gwyneth Mary Alun, and her brother David Goodyear Alun were all named – had been raised in Brighton, studied in Oxford and worked in London.
For the early and middle sections of his career as a barrister Alun Pugh, who had two native Welsh parents, defined himself as Welsh. Since this period coincided with the time of his most influential and hands-on involvement with his children, he passed this self-image on whole and undigested to them and it remains with his two surviving daughters to this day. Only towards the end of his working life, when his increasingly successful career as a judge offered an alternative means of defining himself, did his enthusiasm for all things Welsh mellow.
So when his youngest daughter was seven, Alun Pugh placed her on a stool and invited her to choose between her first two Christian names. Did she want to be called Janet, to the ear more English, though it was in fact chosen to mark a Welsh godmother, or the more unusual, Celtic Bronwen? Given her father’s predilection, her decision was inevitable. ‘I got the impression,’ recalls the family’s nanny, Bella Wells, ‘that Mrs Pugh wasn’t that happy about it, but Mr Pugh was delighted. She was always Bronwen after that.’
Though her formal links with Wales have since childhood been few and far between, Bronwen Pugh in her days at the BBC and later on the Paris catwalks was habitually referred to as the ‘Welsh presenter’, ‘Welsh beauty’ or ‘Welsh model girl’, as if she returned every evening to a mining cottage in the valleys. And outside perceptions reflected both what she had learnt as a child and, more significantly, since the two became inseparable, what she felt in her heart – that her Welsh roots had shaped her personality. ‘It’s made me a bit manic, I think,’ she says. ‘One minute you’re up a mountain and the next you’re in the valley. And romantic. The Welsh are great romantics. We have a tremendous feeling about everything. We’re moody, contemplative and passionate.’
This is, of course, a caricature of the Welsh, a snapshot of a national state of mind that ignores those who are cynical, outgoing and levelheaded; but in the same way that, with our deep-rooted prejudices, we ascribe a love of fair-play and propriety to the English and dourness and attachment to money to the Scottish, it is legitimate to draw the parallel.
Alun Pugh’s parents had both been born in Cardiganshire, two thirds of the way down the west coast of Wales, in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It was and remains a predominantly mountainous, rural, Welsh-speaking area, one of the few strongholds of the language outside the north. It was also very poor. On the eve of the First World War Welsh Outlook, a journal of social progress’, described Cardiganshire as ‘this shockingly backward county’, bottom or near bottom in every measurement of public health in terms of deaths of mothers during childbirth, stuttering, rotten teeth, ear defects, blindness and mental handicaps. A bastion of Nonconformity – in 1887 there were riots in the Tywi Valley against payment of the tithe to the established Anglican Church in Wales – it was also for much of the nineteenth century the victim of an unholy combination of a booming birthrate among poor families and some of the wont excesses of heavy-handed, absentee English landlords. The result was that Cardiganshire became a place from which exiles set off on newly built railways in search of work in the industrial valleys and port towns of South Wales or further afield in England, America and even, from the 1850s onwards, in Y Wladfa Gymreig, the Welsh colony in Patagonia in southern Argentina.
John Williamson Pugh came from the small port of Aberaeron. His family were poor and he left school in his early teens, was apprenticed to a local brewery, then worked on a sailing ship under his uncle, David Jones, and only began to follow the ambitions that led him away from Wales at the age of twenty-two, when he attended teacher training college in Bangor, in the north, becoming a schoolmaster at Ponterwyd in 1875. The classroom was in this era a means of escape from drudgery for many ambitious and bright young men of humble origins, but John Pugh found it too limiting. He aimed even higher and in his late twenties obtained a place to train as a doctor at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, qualifying in 1886 at the age of thirty-four. His first post was at Queen Adelaide Dispensary in Bethnal Green, in the heart of the poverty-stricken East End, but three years later he moved to Brighton, where he joined a prosperous general practice.
Pugh’s wife, Margaret Evans, came from Llanon, another port town, six miles north of Aberaeron. They did not meet in Wales, though their shared background must have attracted them to each other when their friendship blossomed at the London Hospital. Where John Pugh’s upbringing had been characterised by a struggle to get on, Margaret Evans’s was dominated by tragedy. Her family were more prosperous than the Pughs, but her mother died when she was just three and she was brought up, along with her sister Catherine, by her aunt Magdalen and her husband, Daniel Lewis Jones, a general merchant. When Magdalen also died young and her husband remarried, the two girls did not get on with their step-aunt and so packed their bags and headed for London. Catherine’s health soon broke down and she returned to Wales, where she died aged just twenty-one. Margaret stayed on alone, and eventually trained at the London Hospital as a nurse.
However, it was not until three years after John Williamson Pugh arrived in Brighton that the couple married. Their long courtship was a result no doubt of Pugh’s desire to establish himself, but it meant that his bride was already thirty-one when she gave birth to a son, John Alun, on 23 January 1894. He was always known by his second name. It was a difficult birth and the Pughs had no further children.
Despite their new-found prosperity, Dr Pugh never forgot where he had come from and had a reputation for treating those who, in pre-National Health Service days, could not pay. And at home the family spoke Welsh, though Alun’s knowledge of what he came to regard as his native tongue remained inadequate until he settled down to study it as an adult.
The Pughs’ attachment to Wales had its limits, not least in their decision to settle in Brighton and not back in Cardiganshire. They were part nostalgic exiles but part also assimilators, embracing their new world and choosing, when it came to education for young Alun, the very English minor public school Brighton College.
He was both a keen sportsman and a talented student who won a scholarship to read history at Queen’s College, Oxford – not Jesus, bastion of the Welsh. His best friend at both Brighton College and Queen’s was Kenneth Goodyear, the son of a wealthy accountant from Bromley in Kent. As their friendship developed Goodyear introduced young Alun Pugh to his sister Kathleen, a strikingly tall, fair, blue-eyed but shy beauty. They fell in love.
There was some disquiet from T. Edward Goodyear, Kathleen’s father and a man with ambitions to be Lord Mayor of London, about Alun Pugh’s relatively humble forebears, but in spite of such reservations the couple married in Brighton in 1915 when both were twenty-one. Alun Pugh-he was throughout his adult life always referred to by both names, even by junior members of his staff, with the result that the ‘Alun’ and the ‘Pugh’ were linked by an imaginary hyphen – had been admitted to the Inner Temple as a pupil in April the previous year, but the First World War was underway and soon after their marriage, in July 1915, like nearly every young man of his generation, he joined up. He went to Bovington Green Camp at Marlow in Buckinghamshire, close to Cliveden, home of the Astors. He chose the Welsh Guards. Kathleen volunteered as a nurse.
In August 1915 Kenneth Goodyear, who was a conscientious objector, was killed in France behind the lines after serving in Gallipoli as a stretcher-bearer. The effect on his parents was devastating and their attention was ever more focused onto Kathleen, their one surviving child. Second Lieutenant Alun Pugh went out with the Prince of Wales Company of the Welsh Guards to join the British forces in France in February 1916. Seven months later, on 10 September, having already seen many of his colleagues killed in the stalemate of trench warfare, he was badly injured in the knee by a sniper’s bullet at Ginchy during the battle of the Somme. It left him in pain and with a slight limp for the rest of his life, but he owed his survival to his sergeant who, after Alun Pugh had fallen back into the trench, bent double as he carried him on his shoulders to the first aid post. Another officer, wounded at the same time, had been passed back along the trench, but his injured body had appeared above the parapet and was riddled with bullets.
A lengthy convalescence with his young wife and grieving in-laws at Rothesay, their home in Bromley, saw Alun Pugh soon on the mend, but the psychological damage caused by his injury was long-lasting, according to his daughter Bronwen, and affected his whole family: ‘My father felt very fortunate still to be alive, but also guilty too. So many of his friends had been wiped out.’ It gave him – and by association his children – a determination to do what seemed right, to live their lives to the full, regardless of the restrictions of convention, class or social mores.
Today Alun Pugh would have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but in the aftermath of a world war ex-soldiers simply had to get on with rebuilding their lives. The trenches did, however, remain a painful and sensitive memory for him. While his eldest and most direct daughter Ann questioned him about his experiences, drawing him out on the subject, Bronwen felt inhibited about raising what she saw as a taboo. ‘I’ve always been bad about asking people important questions. I wait to be told. I knew there was something but it went unmentioned. I grew up thinking that the silence meant it had been so terrible that there must have been fighting in the street or something.’
His wartime trauma left Alun Pugh with a profound distrust of anything German. He would not, for instance, have Christmas trees, which he saw as a German custom, imported via Prince Albert. There would be one at the Goodyear house in Kent, where the Pughs spent 25 December, but it was only when Bronwen went to live at Cliveden that, reluctantly, having inherited her father’s prejudice in this as in many things, she had to put up with a tree.
That wartime experience also made Alun and Kathleen Pugh – like many others of their generation-determined in the aftermath of the conflict to re-evaluate the assumptions they had made before its outbreak. They already had one child – David born in 1917 – and Kathleen had lost a baby the previous year. While the couple, following Kenneth’s death, would eventually come into the Good-years’ substantial fortune, there was the question of finding a job and financing a home. Alun Pugh resumed his career in the law and was called to the Bar in June 1918, eventually specialising from chambers in Harcourt Buildings in Inner Temple in workman’s compensation claims.
He found a house in Heathhurst Road in Hampstead, just off the wide-open spaces of the Heath and in the shadow of the house of the poet John Keats – his last London home before he left for Italy and a premature death. Hampstead, then as now, was a favourite place for writers, artists, academics and free-thinkers, though in the 1920s, with its villagey atmosphere, it had acquired little of the smart, expensive image of more recent times.
However, as a place where the normal constraints of the strict class system then prevalent elsewhere did not apply so rigidly, it suited the Pughs. ‘I think my parents decided to live in Hampstead,’ says their daughter Ann, ‘as a gesture of defiance because then it was a rather way out sort of place. Certainly my mother’s parents would have regarded it as an odd choice.’ In that period of post-war optimism, Alun Pugh was searching for an identity that tied together his life before the conflict and his experiences on the battlefield. Increasingly he hit upon Wales as the linking thread, having used his convalescence to brush up on his sketchy knowledge of the Welsh language.
Perhaps the comradeship he had felt in his Welsh Guards battalion, which lost an estimated 5,000 men in France, gave Alun Pugh a sense of belonging to something – the Welsh nation – that had in his parents’ home seemed of little more than sentimental importance. Perhaps also it was a reaction to the death of his father and mother who, having struggled so hard to find prosperity and happiness, died comparatively young within months of each other in 1916 without being able to enjoy the fruit of their efforts. In one sense, though, their deaths may have allowed Alun Pugh to explore roots that had, during their lifetime, been regarded with ambiguity.
It was undeniably a romantic quest. His parents had travelled far – socially, geographically and economically – from Cardiganshire. They had bought their son an English education and his knowledge of Wales was limited to holidays, relatives and family folklore. A public school educated, Oxford graduate had little in common with the relatives who remained in Cardiganshire. Yet Alun Pugh was also a practical man. He did not seek merely to wallow in nostalgia for his parents’ homeland, he wanted to do something of substance that would establish his own bond with it.
In his work as a barrister Alun Pugh developed a reputation for working on Welsh cases, especially those involving coalminers. Bronwen recalls frequent visits to Paddington Station to wave him off on, and greet him from, the train to Cardiff, Swansea and beyond. He sought out the company of other Welsh exiles where he practised in Inner Temple-it had and has a sizeable contingent-and he became a member of the Reform Club, bastion of Welsh Liberalism and favourite haunt of its epitome, David Lloyd George. He was also a pillar of the London Welsh Association.
These were little more than affordable gestures for a man whose career at the Bar was already taking off. At the dawn of the 1920s, however, he saw a more tangible, though risky, chance to make his mark by joining the largely academic and middle-class movement campaigning to protect and preserve the Welsh culture and language by all available means.
The most charismatic figure among Alun Pugh’s new-found friends was Saunders Lewis, like him a son of the Welsh diaspora, born of Welsh parents on Merseyside. Lewis was a visitor to the Pughs’ Hampstead home. Once when he stayed the night, Bronwen gave up her room and moved in with her sister. Her father, she recalls, told her that she should always be proud that Saunders Lewis had slept in her bed. She should ‘never forget’. Among the family’s most treasured possessions was a copy of Lewis’s Braslun 0 Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymreig – a history of Welsh literature, published in 1932. It had been inscribed by Lewis to his friend Alun Pugh in gratitude for his work on behalf of their people.
Lewis’s long-term contribution to the nationalist revival was huge, though often in his lifetime he suffered spells of disappointment and marginalisation. ‘The dominance of Lewis,’ writes D. Hywel Davies in his history of Welsh nationalism, ‘from 1926 to 1939 was such that his name and that of the nationalist movement had become almost interchangeable.’ A poet, dramatist, historian and teacher of the Welsh language, he was heavily influenced as a young man by Ireland’s political struggle to break free from Britain and the literary renaissance that ran in parallel. His political ideas – authoritarian and tinged with religion – owed much to the radical conservatism of Charles Maurras’s Action française.
Lewis was the most prominent member of Y Mudiad Cymreig, the Welsh Movement, a society founded in Penarth in January 1924, and the following year, at the National Eisteddfod, threw his lot in with Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, the National Party of Wales. The aim, Lewis said, was ‘to take away from the Welsh their sense of inferiority … to remove from our beloved country the mark and the shame of conquest’.
Alun Pugh endorsed this manifesto enthusiastically and would often provide legal help to the fledgling party. In 1930, for instance, he sat on a committee of London Welsh with the former Liberal MP John Edwards, which advocated that Plaid should campaign for Wales to be given dominion status within the British empire – treated as if it were equal, free and self-governing like Canada or Australia. Five years later Alun Pugh was again called on to advise whether teachers who took part in the pro-Welsh protests organised by Lewis could face disciplinary action by their employers. There could be, he concluded in July 1935, ‘no martyrdom with safety’. It was a message that was to become increasingly relevant to his own involvement with Plaid.
Those living in Wales able to speak Welsh were in steep decline. Their numbers fell in the decade to 1931 by over 5 per cent, to just 35 per cent of the population. Only 98,000-out of a total population of 2.7 million – used Welsh as their first language at that time. If Plaid successfully but slowly began a reversal in this trend-pressing for the Welsh language to be given more prominence in schools and the new broadcast media – in the political field the party was for many years a failure.
In part this was because it insisted on members breaking all links with existing political parties, including Lloyd George’s Liberals, still dominant in rural Wales, and Labour, now controlling the southern valleys, and with the Westminster Parliament. Hence it had no effective environment in which to operate and gain influence. In part too it was brought about by the extreme political philosophy that Lewis mapped out as Plaid’s president between 1926 and 1939. The Welsh, he argued, echoing other inter-war Utopian schemes like Eric Gill’s distributist guild, had to reject both the capitalism that was destroying the valleys and towns of the south and the socialism offered by the growing Labour Party. Lewis’s own third way-what he called perchentyaeth – dreamt of’distributing property among the mass of the members of the nation’.
The president’s own unpredictable personality also weakened the movement he headed. His decision to become a Catholic in 1932 alienated many in Plaid’s naturally Nonconformist constituency. Yet it was a typically bold Lewis gesture that won Plaid international attention in 1936 and put Alun Pugh’s devotion to the cause to the test. Lewis’s firebomb attack on an RAF training base near Pwllheli on the Lleyn peninsula caused outrage. The ‘bombing school’, as Lewis dubbed it, represented for him British military imperialism in Wales.
For Alun Pugh this was a crucial moment. As a member of the Bar, he could not but deplore breaking the law. Yet as historian Dafydd Glyn Jones has argued, the fire was ‘the first time in five centuries that Wales had struck back at England with a measure of violence … to the Welsh people, who had long ceased to believe that they had it in them, it was a profound shock.’ Such an awakening was what Alun Pugh had been yearning for.
Already before the ‘bombing-school’ episode, the strain between the different elements in Alun Pugh’s life had emerged in his letters to J. E. Jones, a London-based teacher and Plaid’s secretary. ‘The time has come,’ he acknowledged in March 1933, ‘for us to have secret societies to work for Wales – two sorts of societies – one of rich supporters to give advice to us without coming into the open, and the other of more adventurous people willing to destroy English advertisements that are put up by local authorities.’ For all his bravado and implied association with the second group, Alun Pugh’s role was largely confined to the first, as a later letter to Jones in June 1934 testifies when he offers to make a loan to the party.
In the following month he sent some legal advice to Jones but insisted that, if it were used, ‘don’t put my name to it’. In March 1936 he was urging Jones or ‘someone else’ to write a letter to The Times on ‘some other burning issue’, but was obviously unwilling to do so himself. The possibility of compromising his position at the Bar was already exercising his mind. Yet in the same month he told Jones that he was lobbying Lloyd George, through a contact of Kathleen Pugh’s, to give public support to Lewis, who had already embarked on his fire-bombing campaign.
In responding to Lewis’s arrest and trial after the attack on the bombing school, Alun Pugh took a big risk. He gave the defendant legal advice-the case against him and two co-conspirators was transferred from a Welsh court, where the jury could not reach a decision, to the Old Bailey, where the three were sentenced to nine months. ‘Thank you very much,’ wrote J. E. Jones to Alun Pugh in September 1936, ‘for your work in defending the three that burnt the bombing school.’ Alun Pugh clung to the fact that Lewis was advocating violence against public installations, not individuals or private property, but it was a difficult circle to square, his heart ruling his head and potentially posing a threat to his career. His solution was, it seemed, to put different parts of his life into boxes – Wales, the law and, separate from both, his family.
‘As a small child,’ recalls his daughter Ann, ‘I used to be terrified that we would have a knock on the door at three o’clock in the morning and it would be the police coming for my father because he was part of it. There was an attack on a reservoir in the north that supplied Liverpool. The Welsh nationalists were indignant that Welsh water was being piped to England.’
Alun Pugh’s relationship with Lewis underwent further strains with the coming of the Second World War. Lewis’s insistence that it was an English war and nothing to do with the Welsh offended Alun Pugh’s sense of patriotism and ran counter to his own determination to contribute as fully as his injury allowed to the war effort. The detachment of Alun Pugh from active involvement in the Welsh cause gathered pace in the post-war years: his appointment as a judge reduced his freedom for manoeuvre and also crucially provided him with an alternative source for self-definition to his Welsh roots. Yet a link endured through Lewis’s two decades in the wilderness following his defeat by a Welsh-speaking Liberal in a by-election for the only Welsh university seat in 1943, subsequent splits in Plaid about tactics, and on to the great nationalist and Welsh language surge of the 1960s.
However, in the early days there was a strong contrast between Alun Pugh’s middle-class enthusiasm in London and the custom, in many primary schools in the valleys in the 1920s and 1930s, of placing the ‘Welsh knot’ – a rope equivalent of the dunce’s hat – over the head of any child caught speaking Welsh. Practical as many of Alun Pugh’s concerns were for Wales, they were tinged with idealism. He could afford his principles and time off to attend Plaid’s most successful innovation of the period – summer schools. Others, at a time of record unemployment, could not.
The reality of events on the ground is demonstrated by the fate of Ty Newydd (New Cottage), the house in Llanon where Alun Pugh’s mother had grown up with her aunt and uncle. It was bequeathed to him some time after the First World War and later he in turn gave it to Plaid Cymru on condition that it was used only by Welsh-speakers to further the cause. Within a short period of time it was being used, according to Ann, by ‘all and sundry’. The fact that he gave a valuable property to the cause – and not to his family – is evidence, she feels, of the extent to which he could separate his obligations to one or the other in his head and discard the conventional route of leaving such an asset to his children. Yet there were deep ambiguities in Alun Pugh’s attitude: he insisted that a plaque commemorating his son David, who had by that time died, had to be erected in the house before it could be handed over to Plaid.
If he placed each of his responsibilities into separate categories, Alun Pugh never failed to convey the importance of their Welsh roots to his children. ‘We were always very conscious that we were different from most people,’ Bronwen recalls. ‘Primarily it was because we were Welsh, but other things led from that. We were taught to be classless, apart from the class system, and our parents encouraged us to look at things differently. The general atmosphere in our family was not rebellion but revolution. It’s a subtle difference. Outwardly you conform, but all the time you are doing things and thinking things in a different way from others.’ When later she found herself in the class-ridden world of Cliveden, this alternative side of her upbringing gave her the resilience to withstand those who would judge her on the basis of her parents’ income and social standing.
At home Alun Pugh’s conversation over breakfast every morning was always in Welsh. The children became adept at remembering the right word for bread or butter or milk. Sunday worship would often be in the Welsh chapel, though later the Pugh became more solidly and conventionally Church of England. And when it came to schooling, Alun Pugh decided – despite his wife’s reluctance – to send their daughters to boarding school in Wales.
The Pugh children fell into two distinct duos, based on age and emphasised by their names, one pair solidly English, the other ringingly Welsh. David and Ann, thirteen and ten respectively when Bronwen was born, formed one unit, while their new sister and five-year-old Gwyneth were another. In 1926, with the help of Kathleen’s parents, the Pughs had purchased an empty plot of land in Pilgrims Lane two streets away in Hampstead and built a larger house. Number 12 still stands to this day, a suburban version of a gabled country house in Sussex vernacular style, with leaded windows and a formal garden sweeping round the house and down the hill towards the Heath.
Alun and Kathleen Pugh had intended to have no more than three children. Bronwen was not planned. Her parents decided the baby was going to be a boy. They even chose a name – Roderick. Two girls, two boys would have made for a neat symmetry, but there was a more particular reason. David, already away at boarding school, was proving a sickly child, undistinguished in his academic work, poor in exams, unable to participate in sport, underdeveloped physically, mentally and emotionally. At the age of sixteen, Bronwen recalls, he was still insisting that a place be set at the dining table for his imaginary friend, Fern. The contrast with Ann, three years his junior and a robust, practical, natural achiever, could not have been greater. Even if it had not been their original intention, circumstances meant that the Pughs, unusually for the time, made no distinction between their treatment of their son and his sisters. All three girls were encouraged to be independent and to think about careers.
Janet Bronwen Alun was born on 6 June 1930, delivered by caesarean by the family GP in the Catholic hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in London’s St John’s Wood. Her early years were dominated by Frederic Truby King, the New Zealand-born Dr Spock of the 1920s and 30s. Kathleen Pugh followed the methods he advocated in books like The Feeding and Care of Your Baby. Baby Bronwen was on a strict regime of four-hourly feeds, with nothing in between. Picking up the child and cuddling it was not recommended by Truby King in case it encouraged spoiling or over-attachment. ‘A Truby King baby,’ the master wrote of his own methods, ‘has as much fresh air and sunshine as possible. The mother of such a baby is not overworked or worried, simply because she knows that by following the laws of nature, combined with common sense, baby will not do otherwise than thrive.’
Kathleen Pugh was certainly not overworked since the bulk of practical child care fell on the family’s nanny. In spite of their progressive ideas, the Pughs – in line with the middle-class norms of the age – maintained a full complement of domestic help: a maid, a nursery nanny, a cleaner and a part-time gardener. When Bronwen was three, Bella Wells was taken on to look after her, leaving Kathleen Pugh free for most of the day.
Bronwen was not, her sister Ann recalls, a particularly attractive child. ‘She was all eyes, teeth and pigtails. When she was about four, she went off on her bicycle with my mother and when they came back my mother was very upset. Bronwen had had a bad fall. She had managed to pull the muscle at the side of her eye. It left her with a squint which later had to be corrected by surgery, but she still wore glasses.’ There were as yet few signs of her future career on the catwalks. She had to wear a patch over one lens of her glasses to strengthen her eye muscles and later she wore braces to pull her protruding teeth back into line.
She was also, Ann remembers, infuriating. ‘She was always very lively. She’d hide behind the door in the dining room and then when you went in for lunch leap out and say boo! Or else she’d be crawling under the table tickling your feet. She was always on the move, dressing up, play-acting, getting over-excited.’ Bella Wells’s memory is of a very determined three-year-old. ‘On the first day I arrived I took her out in her pram and she just kept saying, “Now can I get out? Now can I get out?” She wanted things her own way.’ One of Bronwen’s greatest delights as a small child was to watch the fire engines going down Hampstead High Street, bells ringing and lights flashing. Her earliest ambition was to be a fireman. It appealed to the theatrical side of her nature. ‘There was the drama of it all, I suppose, and that thing of rescuing people. It must always have been a part of my psyche.’
While Bella Wells was devoted to her charge, mother and daughter had from the start a difficult relationship. Kathleen Pugh’s regret at not having a boy was explicit and was overlaid by personal frustration. She had wanted to find something challenging to do outside the home but Bronwen’s arrival delayed the day when she could seek once again the sense of self-worth that she had enjoyed as a volunteer nurse during the war. She was an intelligent woman: to her husband’s breakfast-table lessons in Welsh she would add her own questions to the children on mental arithmetic. They all learnt early how to keep accounts of how they had spent their pocket money.
Kathleen had finished school at sixteen and, with her staff leaving her with too little to occupy her time in the Hampstead house, she grew bored and occasionally, Ann remembers, impatient with her youngest daughter. Though she had forward-thinking ideas about women’s choices – she had her own car at a time when two vehicles in the family was unusual – Kathleen was by nature a reserved and private person. She mixed with neighbours but had few close friends among them; she found some of the more academic residents of Pilgrims Lane intimidating. She warned her youngest daughter against Dr Donald Winnicott, an eminent child psychiatrist (and the greatest critic of the Truby King method of child-rearing) who lived in the same road, for fear, Bronwen suspects, ‘that he might carry out some strange experiments on us’.
Rather than her reserve throwing her back on her role as a mother, however, it appeared only to exacerbate Kathleen Pugh’s restlessness. Sometimes she could be fun. She taught her youngest daughter to fish – a hobby Bronwen pursues with gusto to this day in the salmon rivers of the Scottish borders. ‘We started off one holiday in Suffolk with a simple piece of string and a weight. You threw it in and waited to see if you caught anything. I must have been six when I caught an eel and I was so pleased.’
Another treat was to raid the dressing-up box with Kathleen or put on a play in the drawing room. Again there was a theatrical element. Their mother was a woman, her daughters recall, who liked, indeed expected, to be entertained by her children; she could grow exasperated if they failed to perform. Yet any frivolous side to her character was strictly rationed. She had an unusual and occasionally cutting sense of humour and for the most part, despite all the Pugh’s progressive ideas, was for Bronwen a rather Victorian figure, distant and dour. She had had a strict Nonconformist upbringing and passed aspects of it on to her children. She would remind them of phrases like ‘the Devil makes work for idle hands’ and circumscribed their lives and her own with peculiar self-denying ordinance like never reading a novel before lunch. Her favourite children’s book was Struwwelpeter, a collection of often brutal, gloomy moral tales about such character as ‘poor Harriet’, who was punished for her wrong-doing by being ‘burnt to a crisp’.
‘My mother was, I now realise, not very child-orientated,’ says Bronwen. ‘I found being with her agony. There was one terrible time when Gwyneth and my father were both away and I had to be with my mother on my own for two weeks. I can only have been six or seven at the time, but once I realised what was happening, I went into a catatonic state. She had to call the doctor. I just sat unable to move for three hours. I was in such a state of shock at the prospect of two weeks on our own. Now it sounds like nothing but then it was a lifetime.’
Siblings experience their parents in different ways and while Bronwen found her mother a cold, distant figure, Ann remembers an entirely separate person with great affection. ‘My mother was not a cuddly sort of person but she was kind and caring.’ Such a divergence of views is not uncommon in brothers and sisters, depending on their temperament and their position in the family. Parents who are strict with their older children, perhaps daunted by the serious business of forming young minds and possibly, at an early stage in their careen, anxious over material matters, become indulgent, relaxed mentors to their younger children, self-confident in then-behaviour and sometimes cushioned by greater financial resources. In Bronwen’s case there was certainly more money around when she was a child and Ann retains the distinct memory that her youngest sister was spoilt and indulged. Yet Bronwen was also aware of a new anxiety in Kathleen Pugh – her desire to break out of the confines of being a stay-at-home parent, which contributed to the temperamental clash between mother and daughter.
Kathleen’s difficult relationship with her youngest and most independent daughter reflected her tense dealings with her own mother, Lizzie Goodyear, who lived on in her Bromley house to the age of ninety-one, surviving her husband by twenty-two years. ‘My mother was scared of my grandmother,’ says Bronwen. ‘I used to be taken to tea when she had to go and visit her mother as a kind of distraction. Out would come the silver and the maid and the cucumber sandwiches-the complete opposite of the way my mother ran our house. So it was wonderful for me but I sensed my mother was terrified.’
Bronwen’s picture of the house in Pilgrims Lane as one that was lacking in warmth is also qualified by Bella Wells, the nanny. ‘There was no hugging or kissing or anything like that. But then not many people would do that then.’ Much later, in an academic paper she wrote ‘Of Psychological Aspects of Motherhood’, Bronwen reflected obliquely on her own experiences: ‘Assuming the child is wanted from the moment of conception – and many of us are not – and is the right gender – again, many of us are not’, the mother’s love, attitude and behaviour are ‘more fundamental to the child’s early formation than that of the father’.
Her perceptions of the absence of that love from her own mother left a deep scar. ‘I could entertain her – go shopping with her, do the crossword – but she made me feel like a thorough nuisance. I’m still always apologising for being a nuisance. I try to stop now that I know. I had my handwriting analysed recently. “Oh, but you’re still running away from your mother,” the graphologist told me. Even now!’
What love she felt – and therefore returned – was all to do with her father. As she grew up, Bronwen knew from an early age that she did not want to be like her mother. ‘I remember deciding, when I was quite young, that I was going to be more graceful than my mother. She never made the best of herself. She never wore make-up and her hair was cut in an Eton crop like a boy.’
Alun Pugh, by contrast, was his daughter’s hero – indeed the hero of all his daughters. ‘We were all devoted to our father,’ says Ann. ‘I can remember as a girl walking down the High Street in Hampstead with him and saying, “What would you do if the house caught fire? Who would you save?” and being heart-broken when he said, “Your mother, of course.”’ He was, she recollects, a charmer, but part of that charm lay in the fact that he was so seldom at home; his work often took him away and he was unpredictable in his hours. He brought an excitement but also an uncertainty to the home with his eccentricity and sense of adventure. He would have great enthusiasms that were utterly impractical. At one stage he decided it would be fun to keep silk-worms and make their own clothes. So Gwyneth and Bronwen made cocoons out of old newspaper and hung them from the ceiling, but when the worms began to produce silk the little hand-spinner their father had made could not cope with the output. ‘It had closed-in ends, so you couldn’t get anything off it,’ says Bronwen. ‘It was typical of my father, this do-it-yourself-and-have-fun-doing-it mentality, but then never to finish it off. He had lots of imagination and was terrific fun. When he emerged from his study at home, the atmosphere would change at once. But he was totally impractical.’
When he was a student, Alun Pugh had made a jelly in a teapot, thinking it would make an interesting shape, but then he couldn’t get it out. It is a useful symbol for most of his schemes. When he imported hives of bees into the garden, he eventually had to abort the project because his wife grew allergic to their sting, though he did manage to make some mead and plenty of honey.
Like Kathleen, Alun Pugh didn’t go in much for hugging and kissing, but as a substitute he took a keen, almost zealous, interest in his children’s progress, forever pushing them to do better and be the best. When Bronwen was twelve she was taken to see Roy Henderson, then a celebrated voice coach. He said she had a pleasant voice and good pitch, and suggested lessons, but when he made it clear she would never sing solo in the great concert halls of the world, Alun Pugh decided against. ‘You do something to get to the top or you don’t bother at all,’ is how his youngest daughter sums up the prevailing attitude.
Singing had been something Alun Pugh associated with his mother, who reputedly had a beautiful voice and played the harp, with her son accompanying her on the piano. Bronwen was also told that physically she resembled her paternal grandmother and this may have contributed to a special closeness between father and daughter that compensated for the alienation between mother and daughter.
With Ann and David away at school, Bronwen and Gwyneth developed an enduring bond. The two would get up to all sorts of mischief and it was Gwyneth who was Bronwen’s chief source of fun in the house. ‘She was always inventing things,’ Bronwen remembers. ‘Once when she was ill in bed, she spent hours building this elaborate system of pulleys and string so that we could send each other messages from bedroom to bedroom. Or she would devise complicated games where she would be the captain and I would be the boatswain. I was always saying, “Ay, ay, captain,” to her. She was in charge.’
The five-year age-gap with Gwyneth meant that the youngest Pugh sibling often had to while away many hours on her own or with her nanny. There were friends in the neighbourhood and cycle rides around the carefree streets of Hampstead, but going to school just before her fifth birthday came as something of a blessing. St Christopher’s was a Church of England primary on the way down Rosslyn Hill from Hampstead into central London. Though the Pughs retained their links to the Welsh chapel, their ordinary practice of religion had become increasingly Anglican. (When he joined up with the Welsh Guards in 1915, Alun Pugh had claimed to have no religious affiliations at all.)
Bronwen’s reports suggest a model pupil, with hints at future interests. From her earliest days she did well at recitation, and was praised in April 1936 as ‘a useful leader of the class’. She joined a percussion band that same year and the only blot on the landscape was her problems with an unusual addition to the otherwise standard curriculum, Swedish drill, where she ‘sometimes lacks control’. At the end of summer term 1937, aged seven, she was put up two classes – into a group where the average age was fourteen months above hers-on account of her excellent progress. She made the transition effortlessly, save for occasional blips in arithmetic – ‘must try to be more accurate’ – and painting – ‘is inclined to use too pale colours’ (both spring term 1939). By the time of her final report from St Christopher’s, her card was Uttered with ‘very goods’ and adjectives like ‘appreciative’, ‘careful’, ‘neat’ and ‘musical’.
She did not return to the local school that autumn. War had broken out in September and her parents decided to send her early to join her sister Gwyneth at boarding school in Wales. The two older Pugh girls had gone at the age of twelve, but in view of the anticipated threat to London by German bombers and Alun Pugh’s own ambitions to join the war effort, it seemed sensible to pack Bronwen off to the comparative safety of north-west Wales and close up the house in Hampstead. It appeared to Bronwen Astor at the time like an awfully big adventure, but later she came to see 1939 as a pivotal moment in her childhood, the end of an age of innocence and plenty and the start of a period when she was continually without the things and people she needed to sustain her.
At the age of seven Bronwen had been invited by a school friend to a birthday party in Bishops Avenue, a leafy street of very large houses in Hampstead, known today as ‘Millionaires’ Row’. ‘Until then I had thought that our house was big, but this was so much bigger than anything I had seen,’ she recalls. ‘It even had a swimming pool, all the things you were supposed to want. Immediately I felt very uncomfortable there. It seemed so cold and unwelcoming.’
She joined in with a game of hide and seek in the garden but ‘I was suddenly aware that I was standing totally alone. Everyone had disappeared and a voice spoke to me and said, “None of this matters. None of these things. Only love matters.”’ It was, as she now describes it, ‘a flash of understanding, that the beautiful house, the lovely garden were not as important as what I had experienced, love. There was a tension in this family that I had felt. It was not a happy home.’
She did not mention the experience to anyone. ‘I knew it was God because it was said with such authority. My father would say prayers at night and I think he probably had a mystical streak. We would go to church on Sundays, where my mother would enjoy singing the hymns, but it never occurred to me to mention it to either of them. I thought it was something that happened to everyone. I wasn’t frightened, but reassured. It highlighted love for me as the most important thing, as my lodestar.’
Sixty plus years on, without any independent confirmation, it is impossible to verify the details of this incident. However, its broader significance is all too clear. Though she didn’t know it at the time, this was the start of what Bronwen later came to map as her spiritual journey and the first glimpse, however fleeting, of a capacity within her to experience and react to feelings, tensions, fears or pain in a physical way.
Chapter Two (#ulink_63ca0a4b-47f3-5089-b3c6-4d2ca4132baf)
The land of my fathers? My fathers can keep it.
Attributed to Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
The old Dr Williams’ School building has the look of a neglected North Country nunnery, its wide gables sagging down over grey stone walls blackened with age, its windows positioned high off the ground to shut out the prying eyes of the world. Next to the road out of Dolgellau to Barmouth and the North, it is now part of a local sixth-form college, but a weather-beaten plaque over the main entrance recalls its history. ENDOWED OUT OF THE FUNDS OF THE TRUST FOUNDED IN I716 BY THE REVD DANIEL WILLIAMS DD, ERECTED BY PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION IN 1878.Williams, a wealthy Welsh Presbyterian minister, had wanted to promote primary education in Wales, but once the state took over such provision in the early 1870s, his trustees had redirected their funds to secondary education and established Dr Williams’ School.
Today there may be new tenants and the Welsh Dolgellau has replaced the Anglicised Dolgelley (or Doll-jelly, as the boarders here in the 1930s and 1940s called their host town), but the bleak backdrop to Dr Williams’ has altered little over the centuries. The Wnion river flows into the Mawddach, which widens as it leaves its mountainous hinterland and sweeps out towards the Irish Sea and the sandy beaches of Barmouth and Fairbourne. On both sides of the estuary are rolling hills dotted with isolated farms. Towering above everything else is the vast, bleak, greyish-green lump of Cader Idris, its peak shaped like a horse’s saddle.
For some, notably the eighteenth-century painter Richard Wilson, this was a lyrical and romantic landscape to be celebrated, but after the familiar, crowded, urban environment of Hampstead, with its trees, buses and tamed Heath, north-west Wales must have seemed an alien territory to nine-year-old Bronwen Pugh. This empty and usually rain-swept wilderness was a day’s journey by train from London. A specially designated coach for Dr Williams’ girls took her, chaperoned by her older sister Gwyneth, now one of the seniors at the school, plus other boarders, from the capital up to Ruabon Junction, over the border from Shrewsbury, where they changed on to a now abandoned branch line which snaked through the mountains before descending to the coast via Dolgellau. At the station – now a second-hand clothes shop – they were met and then marched uphill the mile or so to the school building. Trunks had been sent on ahead. Each girl brought only a small overnight bag. It was a spartan start to a spartan life.
The Pughs were remarkably relaxed about their young daughters undertaking what to any parent today would seem an epic and dangerous voyage. At least Bronwen had an older sister with her who knew the ropes. When Ann first went to the school, her mother accompanied her for just half the journey and then left her in the care of the guard. Independence was learnt at an early age. Parental visits to the school were permitted just once a-term and often only their mother came. During the war years, even these dried up. Though Kathleen Pugh had initially put up some opposition to shipping her daughters off to north-west Wales – she would have preferred a more standard girls’ boarding school at Felixstowe – she bowed to her husband’s wishes and the couple, as ever, presented a united front.
The distance from London was so great that any term-time trips back to the capital were out of the question. During the war years Wales was Bronwen’s principal home. Though her father had drilled her Welsh roots into her, young Bronwen had little other experience of the country than that gleaned over a Hampstead breakfast table. Family holidays, in deference to her mother’s wishes, had been taken on farms in Suffolk or at Bognor with Bella Wells.
To describe Dr Williams’ as ‘home’ would be to create a false impression of comfort. It was cold, often damp and the food was no better than adequate. Wartime shortages meant a restricted and meagre diet in the communal dining room. ‘On Fridays, the cook would always produce something the girls called “lucky dip”,’ recalls Margaret Braund, a member of staff from 1944 to 1948. ‘It was basically bread and butter pudding but with whatever else was left over and lying round the kitchen – bits of sandwich, sausages, even a nail once, I think. They hated it and it was truly awful.’
Each day pupils changed seats and eventually table to a predetermined pattern to ensure that they all mixed, under strict supervision. ‘It was regimented,’ Ann recalls, ‘but for me at least it afforded a sense of confidence because you always knew what was going to happen.’ Boarders slept in six- or seven-girl dormitories-or ‘dorm-ies’ – and were again regularly moved round to prevent schoolgirl crushes. Some of the seniors were housed off site in Pen-y-Coed, a building halfway up the hill that faces the school. It was also home to the younger members of staff and therefore had a more relaxed atmosphere.
Sickness was dealt with robustly – a good gargle of Dettol was regarded as enough to put most ailments right. Morning bell rang at seven. There was a quick wash in cold water, with baths strictly by rota once a week. And then on with the uniform. For summer there was a navy tunic, a green and white striped blazer, with green poplin blouse and straw hat; for winter, the same blazer but a green viyella blouse and navy blue velour hat. (The straw hats reputedly were excellent for sifting for gold in the streams around Dolgellau, home then to one of Britain’s few gold mines.) At the weekend it was a thick velvet or shantung green dress, depending on the season.
The Pughs were all put in Cader house, one of the six groupings into which the 300 or so pupils were divided. There were rules, with order marks for good behaviour contributing to honours for one’s house. And there was little indulgence. ‘No magazines or comic papers are to be sent to girls at school,’ stipulated a set of rules sent to the Pughs in 1939, ‘with the exception of the Girl’s Own paper and Riding and Zoo. Permission must be obtained from the headmistress for any other magazine which parents may think suitable.’ The handbook went on to specify that only fawn socks would be allowed, no heels, no garters and no fur trimmings on coats, which must be navy gabardine, lined and waterproof, in deference to the prevailing climate.
The school stands apart from the town. Today it is simply an accident of geography, but in Bronwen’s day the distance had a symbolic value. Town and gown were separate. Dolgellau has long been a bastion of the Welsh culture and Nonconformity. With its winding, narrow streets and grey local stone houses, it was one of the first constituencies to return a Plaid Cymru MP in 1974. Even back in 1939 it was represented by one of the rump of self-consciously Welsh Liberal MPs who followed Lloyd George to the bitter end. The neo-classical Salem Chapel of the Presbyterian Church of Wales, high on the hill above the tiny shopping centre, is still larger and better attended than the squat Anglican church of St Mary’s.
It was to St Mary’s, however, that the English boarders from Dr Williams’ trooped each Sunday for morning service. Alun Pugh may have wanted a Welsh education for his daughters, but despite being in Wales, endowed by a Welsh benefactor and including Welsh language lessons on the curriculum plus a Welsh hymn and an offering on the harp once a week at assembly, Dr Williams’ was effectively a little bit of England in exile. ‘In those days it was as Welsh as any suitable school for us could have got,’ estimates Ann, ‘but that wasn’t saying a great deal.’
In line with its charitable purposes, in addition to its boarders like the Pughs, Dr Williams’ admitted a number of local day girls – around 20 per cent of the total – but these locals remained marginal to the ethos of the school. They were mainly Welsh-speakers – several from hill farms high above Dolgellau – and outside of lessons tended to stick together. Displays of Welsh patriotism were rare enough to merit a special mention. When Bronwen enrolled as a girl guide in November 1942, she told her father: ‘I hope this will console you N’had,* (#ulink_4a9ba51e-1e9a-5756-b86c-f2542119e62d) we are having a Welsh dragon on our shoulders to show that we are Welsh guides and not English.’
Most of the teachers and boarders came from across the border, the majority of the latter from well-to-do Midlands families, attracted by the school’s reputation as quietly progressive. If it was not particularly Welsh, Dr Williams’ did have a name for enlightened attitudes. When Bronwen arrived, its character had been moulded for many years by headteacher Constance Nightingale, who was herself drawn to Quaker ideas and who had established a regime with no corporal punishment and none of the decorum, deportment and decorating lessons that dominated many girls’ boarding schools at this time. She aimed to turn out young women with self-confidence and self-awareness, not debutantes. Persuasion rather than force ensured the smooth running of Dr Williams’ and the pupils, in an age when marriage and children were still regarded as the pinnacle of female ambitions, were encouraged to excel in whatever field attracted them – academic work, sports or, if they wanted, domestic science. The atmosphere was not competitive. There was, for example, no attempt to draw up ‘class positions’ at the end of term to denote the cleverest in the form and to encourage competition.
The curriculum was comprehensive, from scripture to science, Welsh to gardening. What time was left over between prep and lights out at nine was filled with uplifting talks by local worthies and travellers, occasional plays and, on special occasions, gatherings in the. headmistress’s private quarters to listen to the wireless. At weekends it was sports – Dr Williams’, in another progressive gesture, spurned lacrosse in favour of cricket, but embraced the more traditionally female netball, hockey and tennis – guide camps, accompanied walks or bicycle rides along the river from Dolgellau out towards the sea at Barmouth and Tywyn, or up to Cader Idris, and finally, on Sunday evenings, letter-writing to reassure anxious parents.
Bronwen’s first letter home was short, stiff and bland. ‘We’ve arrived. Here is a picture of our dormy. I can’t think of anything else to say but I’ll write soon.’ Looking back now, with her psychotherapist’s training and the benefits of hindsight, she believes she was in shock at the alien world that had greeted her. Gwyneth Pugh revealed how the staff allowed her to break her young sister gently into school life by putting them in the same ‘dormy’ for the first few nights. Then they were separated and Bronwen put with girls nearer her own age, though she was the youngest in her form by two years. ‘I was told that Bronwen was to go to Trem [the junior school],’ Gwyneth wrote home, ‘so I packed all her things and she went off. So although Bronwen is at school, she is quite OK.’
Big sister was still hovering in the background the following February, mentioning to her parents that she had been doing Bronwen’s knitting for her. The same letter displayed a touch of exasperation: ‘Bronwen told me the other day that she had lost David’s Christmas present. So I went up to her dormy, opened the drawer at the top and there it was. “Oh, I never looked in there” was the bright remark.’ She was forever losing things.
Gwyneth’s ‘big sister’ attitude is emblazoned on the page of a letter Bronwen wrote home in November 1942. ‘G is in sick-wing. In fact she has been since Monday. It’s her heart again and she’s been working too hard,’ the youngest Pugh reported. ‘I don’t know what she means by this. She’s a bit potty,’ her older sibling scrawled across the offending section. Yet, heart trouble afflicted Gwyneth for most of her adult life and precipitated her early death.
Realising that leaving home and going off to boarding school at such a tender age could be an emotional wrench the Pughs attempted to provide their last-born with other companions – Thomas and Doreen, two rabbits, substitutes for the family cat, Lancelot, who had been left behind. Both survived only a few short weeks in Dolgellau, but it wasn’t entirely down to the inclement weather. ‘This is, I think, the reason for Doreen’s dying,’ nine-year-old Bronwen told her parents. ‘Last weekend it was absolutely pouring with rain and I hadn’t got an umbrella, so I didn’t go to feed them. And on Monday at break when I went to see Thomas and Doreen, she was dead.’ Thomas followed soon afterwards.
Though having Gwyneth around was a comfort and deepened the lifelong bond between the two, being the third Pugh girl to pass through Dr Williams’ had its drawbacks. ‘I was always compared with my older sisters and found wanting,’ Bronwen remembers. ‘We were all three head girls. I was made to feel that I was made head girl simply because my sisters had been before me. My father came to give away the prizes when I was head girl and I remember him saying, “All my three daughters have been head girl here. Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” That last one is the category I came into and I felt put down again. My sisters were better at everything.’
Being seen as part of a package, not as an individual, was part of the reason that Bronwen – or ‘Pug’ as she was known to her form-mates – came to feel trapped within the walls of Dr Williams’. She could never wait to get away from its confines. Her letters suddenly became upbeat and almost frenzied as the end of term approached and were full of references to the landmarks in the build-up to departure – One Glove Sunday, Cock-Hat Sunday, Kick-Pew Sunday. When the weekly countdown was almost complete, it turned into a daily task of crossing off days by means of the name Jack Robinson. It worked like an Advent Calendar. On each of the final twelve days, he lost one letter.
Another source of unhappiness was finding herself in a form of much older girls. In July 1942 the head wrote to the Pughs to suggest that Bronwen be kept down a year. ‘I cannot put it down entirely to her work which reaches a fair average, but she is the youngest in the form and in many ways is much more immature than the others … She is very childish still in her outlook and frequently in her behaviour.’ The transfer went ahead, but even then she was still a year younger than most of her classmates. In retrospect, Bronwen believes there was more to the head’s verdict than academic concerns. ‘I don’t think my temperament fitted in at the school. Yes, there was certainly immaturity. The others were all older. But I think what she was also getting at was that I had this sense of enjoyment and fun – still have it – this ageless enjoyment that people can find very disconcerting.’
Staying down a year did, however, bring about an immediate improvement in her academic performance, though still teachers felt that she was falling short of full effort and dedication. ‘An able pupil who can do really well when she wants to,’ her English mistress commented in the summer of 1943. ‘Bronwen can do very good work but at times is too easily distracted,’ echoed her arithmetic teacher in autumn of the same year. ‘Must try to be tidier and less noisy,’ the head summed up in autumn 1944. Towards the end of her career at Dr Williams’, however, her marks and the accompanying appraisals changed. ‘She is acquiring dignity and a sense of responsibility,’ the head concluded at the end of 1945.
Reading Bronwen’s letters home, all carefully dated and preserved by her father, it is hard to imagine that she was anything but uproariously happy at Dr Williams’. They are full of stiff upper Up, sporting triumphs (she was in every team and captain of hockey), gusto and good cheer. ‘We were all trained not to complain,’ she says now. ‘Remember I was a Truby King baby. I was trained from the start to be self-contained and self-controlled. If you complained you were told to go away and not bother people. There was no giving up and so you repressed it and cried yourself to sleep.’ Subsequent research on the effects of Frederic Truby King’s methods bean out her memory. In a paper in the British Journal of Psychotherapy Gertrud Mander identifies ‘a grin and bear it ethos’, ‘a deep sense of being unacceptable and unlovable’ and even ‘an on-going depressive undercurrent’ as the hallmarks of a Truby King baby. By encouraging mothers to subject their children to a rigid regime and concentrating in a Victorian way on physical well-being, Mander writes, Truby King’s ‘own fateful contribution to infant care’ was erroneously to assume that in a healthy body mental and emotional equilibrium would naturally follow.
Dr Williams’ was not, however, a universally bleak experience. Occasionally something excited Bronwen’s interest. In October 1941, little suspecting her future fame, she told her parents: ‘Yesterday there was a lecture about clothes and the person was called Miss Haig and the head chose twelve manekins [sic] from the sixth form and dressed them up in various costumes and in different centuries. There were lanterns slides as well, and we started from the time when people began to wear clothes to 1939. It was very good and some of the manekins looked frightfully funny.’
The school was in the process of change in Bronwen’s first years there. The benign and enlightened Miss Nightingale retired and was replaced by Miss Orford, a thirty-five-year-old ex-civil servant from England.
There’s no nonsense about her [Gwyneth wrote home in May 1940]. She knows what she wants and she’s getting it. She scares me stiff. She comes into prayers in the morning and swooshes round the door so that her gown, which she wean all day, flies right out. Then she strides across the stage and stares round and everyone feels sure that she is going to pounce on them for something. At last she says ‘Good-morning’. With a question mark at the end and everyone sort of breathes a sigh of relief.
Margaret Braund confirms the aura of authority that surrounded Miss Orford. ‘She was very shy and could therefore appear cold. I remember she used to slip in and sit at the back of my drama classes and even if I hadn’t seen her or heard her come in, I’d know she was there. The girls’ behaviour would change completely. They would freeze.’
Once Bronwen fell foul of Miss Orford and it nearly cost her her school career. A typically impulsive midnight feast on the hillside next to the school, consisting only of a couple of oranges and a biscuit, became a major incident when the escapees were caught in the act by a monitor. Miss Orford wrote to the Pughs saying that Bronwen was lucky not to be expelled. ‘Please don’t be too cross,’ the culprit wrote home in November 1943, ‘as this is the first hot water that I have really been in, and one has to do it sometime during school life or else you will be thought an awful Prig.’
Alun Pugh’s reaction, though, was not a standard parental rebuke and reveals much of the attitudes he passed on to his daughter. If you’re going to do this sort of thing, he warned her, make sure you don’t get caught. Such advice might equally have applied to his own links with law-breaking extremists at the same time as continuing his career at the Bar. Moreover, he went on, why weren’t you the ringleader? ‘I found this marvellously liberating,’ she says. ‘I remember it so clearly. It had never occurred to me before to be the ringleader. I was the youngest and I just followed.’ The rebel in Alun Pugh’s heart was reaching out to his youngest daughter.
It was not ultimately Miss Orford – or her sporty successor, the cricket-playing Miss Lickes – who turned Dr Williams’ from confinement into a nightmare. It was the war. Bronwen’s childhood and adolescence were dominated by the Second World War. Cut off from her parents, denied the only familiar surroundings she had known when her father and mother went off to work in Lancashire and shut up the family home in London, she felt herself virtually cut adrift.
Her father’s knee injury meant that active service was out of the question for him, but he was still young enough in theory to qualify for call-up, which in 1941 was extended to men up to fifty-one. He was determined to serve King and Country. In a national emergency his particular loyalties to Wales, Plaid Cymru and Saunders Lewis were forgotten. Lewis urged the Welsh not to fight, saying the conflict had nothing to do with them. Alun Pugh, however, was ready to take up his rifle, or its non-military equivalent. Early in the war he obtained a post as legal adviser to the Ministry of Pensions in the port of Fleetwood in Lancashire. He could not bear to be a barrister while everybody else of his age was fighting and so accepted the substantial pay cut involved and moved north.
Kathleen Pugh also found an oudet for her frustrated energies. In the first war she had been a volunteer nurse. In Fleetwood she managed the Ministry of Pensions’ canteen, one of thousands of egalitarian oudets set up by the authorities to provide cheap, nutritious food at a time of shortages. In place of the house in Pilgrims Lane, which was left empty, the couple moved around from one set of unsatisfactory digs to another. When Bronwen came home in the school holidays, it was initially to the Lancashire coast.
The journey from Dolgellau to Fleetwood on trains crowded with men and women in uniform, through stations prepared for air raids, scared her. ‘I think my greatest nightmare of the war was getting lost because they removed all the signs from the stations. At first I had Gwyneth with me, but there were journeys I made on my own, changing two or three times, with no signs, clutching my gas mask and lots of smog. I was petrified of getting lost and never being found again.’ When she arrived, there was title to celebrate. ‘Fleetwood was a ghastly place,’ she remembers. ‘I have terrible memories of it. They celebrated something called Wakes Week and we were put out of our digs to make way for holiday-makers. We were literally on the pavement with nowhere to go. We ended up staying in a hotel until we could find other digs. As usual it was up a dark, dank staircase, two or three rooms at the top of a house. It was such a come-down. I remember dreaming of a big house with lots of space.’
‘Bronwen found herself in a very strange environment in Fleetwood,’ says her sister Ann. ‘We were known by the locals as southerners because we spoke with a different accent. And we felt foreign. It wasn’t meant cruelly, and because I was older, I had a great time going to the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool. But because Bronwen was younger and my parents were so busy, I think she felt abandoned.’
A greater blow than the physical hardship was the loss of the security that had hitherto surrounded her childhood. During the summer before she went off to school her father took her on a bus trip around the centre of London, pointing out monuments and buildings ‘because they will probably be bombed and this will be your last chance to see them’. The effect of such a message, when combined with being sent off to a boarding school in a strange environment and losing your home, must have been profound. And because Alun Pugh’s income fell dramatically, his youngest daughter suddenly began to notice money. Until the war she had always taken for granted the fact that the family was well-off, able to afford all the things she needed. Now the budget was squeezed, so much so that Ann Pugh had to delay going up to Oxford.
‘I couldn’t imagine there were people who had more than us,’ Bronwen says. ‘Obviously there were – the Astors for instance – but I was totally ignorant of that. Then the war came and there was no money because my father had given up his career and lived on a tiny salary in digs and we had to go and eat where my mother worked – rice puddings and awful food. They were meant for the poor. And we had been dragged down to that. I felt it as a humiliation.’ Her reaction to new hardships emphasises how little she enjoyed or even comprehended the war period. Its privations came at a difficult time in her life. She was too old to be oblivious to the greater threat. Children under ten write of seeing the whole thing as one long adventure. Yet neither was she old enough to get caught up in the war spirit, the comradeship, the sense of doing your bit in a vast community effort. She had all the worry, without enough real insight to put it into any context, and none of the excitement of broadening horizons experienced, for example, by her sister Ann, who was conscripted.
Hitler’s strategy towards Britain was two-fold – to bomb it into submission from the air and to starve it into surrender at sea. Over half of all foodstuffs in the pre-war period had come into the country by ship. If the aerial policy made relatively little impact on Bronwen’s life, the maritime blockade drove her to despair as her empty stomach ached. Rationing was the order of the day: marrow or carrot jam spread on stale bread was sometimes all that was on offer for tea at Dr Williams’.
Sleepy and safe Dolgellau managed to work itself into a fever about the war. In June 1940 the girls from Dr Williams’ took part in an air-raid practice. ‘We had to go down into the basement in single file and in silence from our forms,’ the weekly letter home detailed, ‘and the Head said that we had got to get down in four minutes – the whole school of 300 girls. It was an awfully queer siren.’ Later there were air-raid practices for boarders in the middle of the night. The drills were a sensible precaution though predictably, given the town’s location, it entirely escaped the attention of German bombers. The nearest to a raid was when an American plane crashed several miles to the north.
Sometimes the elaborate preparations for eventualities that were extremely unlikely to befall Dolgellau left Bronwen and her contemporaries fearful but bemused. In October 1942 they all went to Sunday morning service wearing their gas masks. ‘What a sight we looked,’ twelve-year-old Bronwen reported home. ‘I wish I’d got a proper gas-mask case because I’ve still got that cardboard thing and it’s all come to pieces. You see it’s all very muddling, but I’m sure G[wyneth] will explain better than me about this gas attack. There are some people who are attacking some other people somewhere and some girl guides are running messages to somewhere from somewhere.’
As the war passed Dolgellau by, the pupils of Dr Williams’ were determined to do their bit, even if they had no clear idea of what war entailed, but their active service stretched no further than evenings of knitting scarves for ‘our lads’ in the army or watching Ministry of Information films about how to disarm a German. There were collections of spare toys for ‘bombed-out children’. When Bronwen played Nerissa in a school production of The Merchant of Venice, the townsfolk were given a rare invitation over to Dr Williams’, with their ticket money raising £5 for the RAF Benevolent Fund. Town and gown for once had common purpose.
The war did change Dolgellau’s landscape. Various schools were evacuated out there and a group of children from Birkenhead, a target for the bombers because its port worked hand in hand with neighbouring Liverpool, took up residence nearby. And there were American soldiers stationed in the area who paid particular attention to the teenage girls on their doorstep. In March 1943 Bronwen, showing the first signs of impending womanhood, wrote excitedly of one of the older girls at the school being greeted by a chorus of wolf-whisdes when a military truck overtook her on her bicycle.
North-west Wales was also considered a safe place to detain prisoners of war – far away from the continental coastline and any hopes of escape or liberation. In September of the same year Bronwen recorded an encounter with the enemy while on a school walking trip at nearby Bala Lake. Her oddly neutral tones reveal a lingering bemusement about the issues at stake in the war:
We saw a very nice-looking Italian prisoner, who was working in one of the fields. By the way we see tons of them round here. Anyway down we got and went to talk to this prisoner. We talked in very bad French, and he seemed to understand. Anyhow he answered. He had been captured in Tunisia and he liked Mussolini and Hitler, but hated Churchill. He was a fascist. He didn’t like Wales. He said in a very strong Italian accent ‘Wales, rain, rain, rain, but Italy sun, sun, sun!’
The mixture of childish mantras and glimpses of the conflict in the adult world is revealing. More wholeheartedly positive was her response to a British war hero and family friend who dropped in to take her to tea on his way to Barmouth. Major-General Sir Francis Tuker, a senior figure in the Gurkhas, had been at school with Alun Pugh and had visited the family home on several occasions. Thirteen-year-old Bronwen had developed something of a schoolgirl crush on him, which he played along with by calling on her at Dr Williams’ in 1943. ‘He came in a small army van, raised awfully high from the ground by big wheels,’ she told her parents. ‘There were three soldiers in the car with him, one driving.’ The link endured. In February 1946, towards the end of her time at Dr Williams’, he answered one of her letters. ‘He didn’t actually say much,’ she reported, ‘except that he would be stuck in Calcutta through the summer and that it was already “beastly hot”.’
Dr Williams’ itself certainly got caught up in the national mood of patriotism and swept Bronwen along. She described an armistice service in a letter home in November 1943. She was one of a number of guides there, but the head had refused to allow them to carry the Union Jack. ‘Everybody,’ Bronwen raged, ‘thinks it is disgusting. Not having a Union Jack on Armistice Sunday because “it isn’t done”, goodness. We all feel jolly hot about it.’
However, for Bronwen, the privations of a wartime childhood greatly outweighed any excitement. Her biggest problem was the absence of food. ‘For me the war was one long hell,’ she says. ‘It got worse and worse and worse because the food ran out, the clothes ran out, there were shortages of everything, then rationing. I was always hungry. I felt I never had enough to eat.’ And even when plates were full, it was ‘lucky dip’ or its equivalent that was on offer. ‘Dinner,’ she wrote to her parents in November 1940, ‘consisted of soup with bits of raw celery floating around and huge chunks of carrots also floating around like corks, then a pudding something like a terrible bright yellow blanc-mange with a few prunes also floating round, then two mingy little biscuits.’ The hunger pangs were so extreme at times that she felt moved to steal food from the school dining room. The headteacher caught her with her hand in the biscuit tin and stopped her sweet ration for a fortnight.
Hitler’s maritime cordon quickly affected the nation’s eating habits. Churchill’s Food Minister, Fred Marquis, later Lord Woolton, was by Christmas 1940 advocating a wholesale change in diet to meet the new circumstances. ‘It is the duty of all grown-up people to do with less milk this winter,’ he advised through the columns of the Daily Express, ‘so that children and nursing mothers can be sure of getting as much as they need. Oatmeal, one of the finest foods for giving warmth and energy, is a “must” for growing children.’ With a blithe ignorance of the eating likes and dislikes of youngsters, he continued, ‘they will probably like it as oatcakes. Encourage your children to eat baked potatoes, jacket and all. Carrots are an important protective food. Most children love carrot,’ he suggested hopefully, ‘when it has been washed, lightly scraped and grated raw into a salad or a sandwich.’
Children were encouraged to abandon their sweet tooth in favour of carrots by the example of night fighter ace, ‘Cat’s Eye’ Cunningham. His ability to dodge German anti-aircraft guns and repel the Luftwaffe’s 1940 blitz on London was put down in official propaganda to a rabbit-like love of carrots, which enabled him to see in the dark.
A taste for salad, Woolton ordered, must be inculcated at once. ‘Salads and vegetables are what [your child] needs almost more than anything else, so teach him to like them as early as you can. You will find that many children, when they can’t cope with a plateful of green salad, will enjoy it when it’s well chopped up between slices of wholemeal bread.’
With even adult rations pegged to tiny quantities – three ounces of bacon per week, two of cheese, two of tea, eight of sugar and four of chocolate and sweets – a spot of recycling was required, Woolton advised, to fill empty young tummies. Apple cores, his department proposed, could be turned into ‘delicious and very health-giving drinks’ by boiling them in water.
In this regime of bitter tastes and recycled waste, the chocolate that Bronwen and many other children craved became a rare treat. ‘For the duration of the war,’ the head of Dr Williams’ informed parents, ‘fruit and chocolate may be sent to individual girls but they must be handed in to the matron who will keep them and distribute them at the proper time. The school does still have regular, though limited, supplies of chocolate which the girls can buy, but no girl who has sweets or chocolate of her own may also buy school chocolate.’ When the pooled resources were shared out on high days and holidays, Bronwen’s joy knew no bounds. ‘It’s Freda’s birthday today,’ she wrote in February 1945. ‘We are all looking forward to this afternoon as she is having a DOUBLE birthday table with Maureen Oates. Yum, yum! We are going to stuff and stuff and stuff!!’
Sometimes she ended up caught between her patriotic duty and her rumbling stomach. In December of the same year she told her parents: ‘the head-girl of the Mount School, York, has written a letter to the head-girl of every other boarding school to ask if anybody would give up their 4 ounces of extra Christmas chocolate to send overseas to France etc. I think it is an excellent idea and everyone here who has got some is sending it.’ Goodness carries its own reward, but the following month her sacrifice of chocolate was repaid. ‘Have you had any bananas at home yet?’ she enquired in January 1946. ‘Some kids have brought a few back with them and so I have tasted them once again. It was a thrilling moment.’
If the food shortages got worse before they got better, there was some relief at the end of 1941, when the Pughs returned to London from Fleetwood. ‘What marvellous news,’ Bronwen wrote. ‘I jolly well hope that the war will be over by the Easter hols so that we can go to London.’ It wasn’t, of course, but at least holidays were once more in a familiar location, though the house in Pilgrims Lane now also provided shelter for refugees, who gave the increasingly adult Bronwen some idea of the realities of the war on the continent. ‘I remember in particular one Jewish woman, a Miss Seligman. She spent all her time in tears. And there were two Dutch refugees. They had survived on a diet of tulip bulbs.’
The return to London also brought her face to face with what war was about. ‘Later there were doodlebugs and it was horrendous. You would go up the High Street and these things would come flying over and you would be petrified. You would wait for the engines to cut out and just hope that they had passed you by. Everyone was so exhausted and bad-tempered that they got angry with you all the time.’ Hampstead is on a hill and from her bedroom window she would watch the East End of London being bombed – just the destruction that her father had predicted in 1939.
The contrast between north-west Wales, where war was experienced at second hand, and Hampstead was huge. It was as if Bronwen was dipping in and out of the conflict, almost an adult in London but still a child in the safety of Dr Williams’. She was back in Dolgellau for VE Day, 8 May 1945. The school worked itself up into a state of great excitement, with the head deciding on a special treat-two extra days’ holiday. ‘Isn’t that marvellous,’ she wrote home girlishly, adding with a note of regret, ‘anyone who can get home and back in a day is allowed. For the rest of us, she is going to try to provide something special, which will of course include the flicks.’ In the event, there was also a one-off trip to the circus.
Already by 1944 some aspects of life had begun to return to normal. Alun Pugh was appointed a county court judge of Norfolk in May. He was to prove popular with the barristers who appeared before him, a benign man with firm principles and old-fashioned values when it came to domestic disputes. In the Inns of Court they even put together a short verse to celebrate him:
Love, said His Honour Judge Pugh,
Should act on a couple like glue.
Making birds of a feather
Stay flocking together
Just as they do in the zoo.
If it restored the family’s material prosperity to pre-war standards, it did mean once again leaving the house in Pilgrims Lane so soon after returning to it. The Pughs kept it on, but made Norwich their main base. Bronwen was, however, full of delight. ‘Hurray! Congratulations! I haven’t seen it in the papers yet. We haven’t had The Times, only the Daily Telegraph, and I can’t find it in there. Anyway practically all the school knows and it was the topic of conversation wherever I went.’
In June 1945 she passed her basic school certificate – the equivalent of current GCSEs. Like her sisters before her, she stayed on at Dr Williams’ to study for her higher certificate – A levels – but her patience with constantly trailing in the wake of Ann and Gwyneth had reached breaking point. Like many younger children – particularly when their older siblings are of the same sex – she had long felt eclipsed. At Dr Williams’ was born her lifelong determination to chart her own course – if possible in the opposite direction to that chosen by Ann and Gwyneth. This meant that some of her natural abilities – in academic work, for instance – were cast aside, or at least marginalised, since they were shared strengths with her sisters, in favour of talents that she considered unique to her, notably her delight in performing.
Having passed her school certificate, she found herself at what, with hindsight, can be seen as a crossroads in her life, for much of what she did subsequently flowed naturally from her decision to reject the path already well-trodden by her sisters and enthusiastically advocated by her parents. ‘I think,’ she recalls, ‘they had in mind that I would go to Oxford and become a teacher. My father told me I would make a good headmistress.’
By 1947, however, she had set her heart firmly and finally against going up to Oxford. The additional term it would entail to prepare for the Oxbridge examination was not the real problem. She stayed on after her highers anyway because she was still a year younger than most of her class. In that extra year she was appointed head girl. It was meant to be for a whole year and, having said no to Oxbridge, she set about learning French and Latin but she became increasingly unhappy as her relationship with Miss Lickes broke down. The head-teacher, who had succeeded Miss Orford in September 1945, was obsessed with stamping out overly intimate friendships between girls and ordered Bronwen to devise a quasi-military campaign to achieve this end. Her head girl realised that it was a pointless exercise, doomed to failure, and that many of these illicit passions were in any case quite harmless. It was taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut.
Headteacher and head girl clashed again when Miss Lickes insisted that Bronwen sleep in the main school. All previous head girls had been allowed to sleep in the separate and more relaxed house on the hillside above Dr Williams’ with their fellow sixth formers and younger members of staff. Bronwen was outraged and lonely. After just two terms, she left.
‘If I don’t get Higher,’ she had written in January 1946, ‘and I don’t honestly see how I possibly can, with two languages at which I’m no good, I don’t think it’s much use going to Oxford because even if I got in, I would most probably be sent down or something awful.’ There is an obvious lack of self-confidence – especially since she later passed all the exams she predicted she would fail – but her reasoning was more complex. ‘It was probably a mistake,’ she now acknowledges, and she often mentions her lack of formal academic qualifications. ‘But I was so fed up with always being compared with my sisters. Although I did in the end get my Latin matric and I could have got a place, I decided to go to drama school instead.’
Towards the end of her school career Bronwen came under the influence of Margaret Braund, a young drama teacher who had just qualified from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. ‘She was a very gawky schoolgirl,’ Braund remembers, ‘very tall, quite uncoordinated and really not very attractive. She used to stoop to try and compensate for being so tall, she had pigtails, wore glasses and had a slight cast in her eye.’
Bronwen had done a great deal of singing at school, and had played Little Buttercup in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, but she had never thought seriously about drama as a career. After a while Braund realised that there was something about this awkward adolescent girl and decided to give her a chance by casting her as the lead in a school production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. ‘The rest of the staff all said I was mad, that she would make a fool of herself, but slowly she became less inhibited, began to move more easily and – although I only realised this later when she became more religious – brought out the spiritual side of Joan very well.’ Saint Joan was Bronwen’s proudest moment at Dr Williams’. It made her consider drama as a career. ‘I think before I arrived,’ says Margaret Braund, ‘that she had nurtured some ambitions to be a singer. She had this rather romantic idea of being a great opera diva, but her voice had been strained in one of the school musicals and that had taken away her confidence. And then along came acting and her success in Saint Joan and it made such a difference to her that I suggested she apply to Central.’
To Alun Pugh his youngest daughter’s new-found delight in acting was of secondary importance. ‘He came to see me in Saint Joan and when I asked him afterwards what he had thought of it and my performance, he told me that he was prouder of the speech I’d made as head girl at prize day.’ Yet despite his disappointment, and after talking to Margaret Braund, he gave way and agreed to pay her fees at Central if she got a place. At least she would be living back in the family home at Hampstead, where he could keep a watchful eye on her potential student excesses; his career had now moved on with his appointment in 1947 to Marylebone County Court. Having brought up his daughters to be independent and strong-minded, it would have been inappropriate and out of character now to try and force Bronwen’s hand.
It was not that, at this stage, she had a burning ambition to tread the boards, or emulate the film stars she had glimpsed during her occasional trips to Dolgellau’s tiny cinema. She had no strong vision of a career or what she wanted to do with her life. Her strongest motivation was largely negative – to break the mould of the trinity of Pugh sisters by doing something entirely different. And perhaps those feelings of not being the longed-for son – overlaid by the strains of a wartime childhood – had made her, in a more positive way, determined to strike out on her own. Her parents, after all, had responded to growing up during the First World War with a similar resolution to overturn conventions.
She had no blueprint, just an unbending conviction that she wanted to be left to her own devices. Planning has never been one of her strengths. subsequently she has come to recognise, in the various life-changing decisions that she made as if on a whim, the influence of what might be called a guiding spirit or guardian angel. She may not have seen it at the time, but she is sure with hindsight that it was there.
Formal religion had played little role in her life at Dr Williams’. In July 1940, when the whole school caught a bad bout of flu, she was writing, ‘we are all in quarantine. Three cheers there is no church tomorrow.’ As she grew towards adulthood, she rejected the conventional practice of Christianity. Yet separate from, and indeed unconnected to, church-going and the God who presided over lifeless recitals of prayer and hymns, there were, she recalls, glimpses of a spiritual dimension, removed from routine attendance in the pews.
After her first brush with something ‘other’ at a seven-year-old’s birthday party, she continued in her school years occasionally to have experiences for which she could find no rational explanation. ‘As a teenager, I was having these extraordinary experiences of nature. I’d be on a walk with my school friends and quite suddenly there was no one there. It is like an explosion. And it left me with this wonderful feeling of being at one with everything. You’re not looking at the sunset, you’re part of it. Something clears in your mind and you understand something of the reality of nature.’ Had she then consulted the literature of Christian mysticism, she would have found parallel accounts of an overwhelming sense of oneness with the natural world and divined a clue as to what she herself in a small way was experiencing. Yet there was no one who could point her in the right direction and such exotic and generally Catholic spiritual raptures had no place in the conventionally Protestant and pointedly practical world of Dr Williams’. ‘I tried making a remark about it, wondering if the others I was with felt the same things, but no one said anything. Up to then I’d assumed everyone was the same. When I realised they weren’t, I felt very isolated.’
In July 1945 fifteen-year-old Bronwen Pugh went with a group of girl guides from Dr Williams’ to spend a week camping at Maidenhead next to the Thames in Berkshire. A mile or so up river at Cliveden, a wedding had just been celebrated. William Waldorf Astor, the thirty-eight-year-old eldest son and heir of the second Viscount Astor and his formidable MP wife Nancy, had married the Honourable Sarah Norton, twelve years his junior, daughter of the sixth Baron Grantley and a descendant of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. While the girl guides cooked beans over a camp fire and got up to schoolgirl pranks, ‘Bill’ Astor was away in the States introducing his new bride to his wealthy American relatives before returning to set up home near Oxford and pursue his own political career.
The gulf in age, class and experience between Bill Astor and Bronwen Pugh in 1945 could not have been greater. For her part, she did not even register from her campsite the existence of Cliveden, the stately home that fifteen years later was to become her home.
* (#ulink_18963ecf-1caa-5003-8c4b-1d1d26eb4ed9) She always used the Welsh form of ‘My father’ in letters.
Chapter Three (#ulink_277f4d2f-e4a6-5e98-85f8-04cb71124b6f)
It is vital to realise that we have come through difficult years and to get through them will require no less effort, no less unselfishness and no less work than was needed to bring us through the war.
Clement Attlee, broadcast (1945)
The Central School of Speech and Drama boasted an impressive London address – the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences on Kensington Gore. This circular, red-brick and terracotta landmark, with a capacity of 10,000, had since its opening in 1871 doubled as a giant concert hall and a conference centre. This dual purpose suited Central well, for the school not only had use of various conference rooms and a mini-theatre back stage but also had access to the main auditorium at various times during the day.
As a stage from which to learn voice projection, the vast arena was unparalleled. It was also, past pupils recall, a baptism of fire. The infamous Albert Hall echo thwarted many of their best efforts and was only cured much later in 1968, when the decorated calico ceiling was replaced by the giant suspended mushroom diffusers that still hover incongruously over the auditorium today.
Most of Central’s stage work, however, took place in a small theatre housed above one of the four great porticos that lead into the Albert Hall. There were other movement rooms and a lecture theatre, with the school’s canteen and additional teaching rooms housed down the road on Kensington High Street. Being part of the life of the Albert Hall had many fringe benefits for the students, not the least of which was the chance, outside hours (and occasionally, playing truant, when they should have been in lectures), to relax in the stalls and watch and learn as a procession of musical and theatrical stars rehearsed for their evening performances. When the habit became too popular and threatened to interrupt lessons, the principal, Gwynneth Thurburn, would send a note to the absentees in the stalls, telling them that any classes skipped would have to be made up out of hours. It usually prompted an exodus, for Miss Thurburn’s word went unchallenged at Central.
She had taken over in 1942 from the founder, Elsie Fogerty, and it was her dynamism during her long reign until 1967 which transformed Central into an internationally renowned drama school and ultimately saw it move away in 1957 from the Royal Albert Hall to bespoke premises in the old Embassy Theatre at Swiss Cottage. Admittance was by interview and audition with ‘Thurby’, as she was known to staff and pupils. She could appear very stern, recalls Margaret Braund, Bronwen’s drama teacher at Dr Williams’, a graduate of Central and later a tutor there, ‘but she was also very kind, very understanding and knew in a minute what students were or weren’t capable of achieving.’ As well as a stage course, Central also offered three-year diploma courses for speech and drama teachers and for speech therapists. Thurburn believed all three to be of equal merit. ‘There is something,’ she once wrote, ‘uniting everybody in this school – actors, teachers, speech therapists. For me it certainly is the voice, being the centre of all communication.’
Though the recommendation from Miss Braund may have helped Bronwen in her interview, she would not have got in unless Gwynneth Thurburn had spotted some talent in her. With hindsight, Margaret Braund believes it may have been Bronwen’s voice. ‘Her voice had a very pleasing quality, and it was very flexible. She had grown quickly into a good actress but it is her voice that stands out in my memory.’ All three courses at Central were officially on a par, but it was the actors’ diploma which carried most glamour. The eighteen-year-old Bronwen Pugh nursed ambitions to be on the stage, but she applied instead for the teachers’ course.
Part of it was a lack of confidence. She may have shone in the small pond of Dr Williams’ school productions, but was unsure how her credits from rural Wales would fare when placed alongside a string of leading roles in cosmopolitan youth theatres. Though physically now an adult, there was still a legacy of immaturity from her sheltered school years and her treatment as the baby of the family. And there was also a vulnerability about her that at this stage of her life was linked to that immaturity, but which remained ever after, even when she had learnt about the world in sometimes the cruellest ways. Fear of rejection, of being among people who do not want her there, has been one of the strong emotions in her life, a practical weakness set against and sometimes curtailing another of her enduring qualities, her willingness to strike out on bold, unexpected and often criticised paths with an unshakeable belief that she is somehow being guided from above on a predetermined spiritual journey.
Many of her rivals for one of the coveted places on the Central actors’ course, she believed, would have been living and breathing the dream of treading the boards from the cradle, while she had come late and not entirely wholeheartedly to the idea. It was for her less a vocation, more a cross between an alternative to Oxford, something to do, a gesture of defiance and a way to be different from her sisters. Moreover, she lacked the firm parental support that might have given her, at an impressionable age, the confidence to opt for acting. Alun Pugh, whom she looked up to above all others, who taught her that if you do anything you must be the best at it, may have agreed to pay the two pounds, six shillings per term, but there was little of the instinctive sympathy for his daughter’s choice that would have greeted a decision to apply to Oxford. He had his youngest daughter down to succeed as a headmistress, so the teachers’ course was at least a compromise between her option and his.
There was a further complicating factor – one that was to haunt Bronwen throughout her professional life. The Goodyear genes made for tall women and all the Pugh girls were giants. Gwyneth was just over six foot, her mother and two sisters just under. So Bronwen was deemed by the standards of the day too tall to be a successful actress. Even in later, more tolerant times tall actresses like Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver have struggled to find female leads (she was sidelined into science fiction), but back in the 1940s anyone over five foot six faced a bleak future. Leading men had to gaze masculinely down on their petite feminine charges – women like Celia Johnson, Olivia de Havilland and Audrey Hepburn. Actresses approaching six foot would find it impossible to persuade casting directors of their merits. Of Bronwen’s generation, only the well-connected and extraordinarily talented Vanessa Redgrave – for whom she was once mistaken while on a plane – became a star despite her height.
And the slight cast in her eye, corrected by surgery in childhood but set to return at various stages of her life, also counted against her in the theatrical world of the 1940s and 1950s. Though today actresses like Imogen Stubbs have won acclaim despite having a squint, four decades ago it was considered an insurmountable obstacle to success on the stage.
Bronwen was unusually realistic for an eighteen-year-old about her own talent – or lack of it. It was as if simply being at Central – rather than Oxford – was enough for her. ‘I think that great actresses succeed because they can let go of themselves and become totally someone else. I think that even at that stage I knew myself well enough to know that I couldn’t do that. Obviously later there was an element of letting go in being a model girl, but then it was not about taking on another character. It was simply letting go. I could go half the way, but I was too self-conscious to be an actress.’
Perhaps the final deciding factor was the encouragement of her mentor, Margaret Braund, who was also pushing her towards the teachers’ course. ‘It was not that I didn’t believe in her as an actress. It was rather that I knew she was an intelligent girl and one who would need academic stimulus. You got more of that in the third year of the teachers’ course. For the first two it was virtually the same as the stage course, but in the third year the teachers did subjects like psychology and phonetics. And I also thought that she would make a good teacher. She had imagination and ideas and she could inspire others if she wanted to. Though at this stage she was still quite young for her years, she was quite mature in her dealings with others.’
After decamping from Dolgellau a term early, she spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Hampstead – part of it acting as housekeeper to her father while her mother packed up their home in Norfolk. Alun Pugh and his youngest daughter also went off together for a motoring holiday in Europe. The stated reason was so that Bronwen could practise her skills as a driver there. She was at the wheel most of the time and although driving on the opposite side of the road might not be considered as the best preparation for the British test, she nevertheless passed with flying colours on her return. ‘We were always taught that getting your driving test was as important, if not more important, than getting your highers. It made you mobile and therefore independent. Being independent was the big thing.’
The real purpose of the trip to the continent, however, was to revisit some of the battlegrounds where Alun Pugh had served in the First World War. Father and daughter did not get as far as the trenches or the graveyards. When it came to that point, he couldn’t go on. ‘He wanted to try, but he couldn’t face it. He didn’t talk about it at all. I was just there.’ The silence that seemed to encase the details of her father’s wartime trauma persisted, but Bronwen became even more acutely aware of the pain it continued to cause him. Perhaps Alun Pugh chose his youngest daughter as his companion on this trip precisely because he knew that she – unlike her more assertive older sisters – would not press him to discuss topics that were difficult for him. She was content simply to let him be.
That summer between school and college Bronwen had her first romance. It was a short-lived, shared but unspoken passion, more an early and tentative stepping stone in her own emotional development than any significant pointer to her orientation. She fell for a girl of her own age, the daughter of Major-General Sir Francis Tuker, the Gurkha chief who had inspired her as a schoolgirl with his visits to Dr Williams’, his letters from the front and his tales of bravery. Joan Tuker, the same age as Bronwen, lived on the family farm in Cornwall and the two met up several times that summer. Undoubtedly some of the awe with which Bronwen regarded Sir Francis was transferred on to Joan. ‘I put her on a pedestal and just gazed adoringly at her. She had wonderful eyes and blonde hair. I think it was the first time I realised what romance was, that I began to understand how love could develop between two people, that I had had those feelings for anyone. It lasted six months and was reciprocated, but then I think we simply grew apart, me with my life in London and she down on the farm in Cornwall. We had nothing in common really.’
Joan was, like Bronwen, a third daughter and the two shared similar frustrations about how they were simply expected to be like their successful older sisters. Bronwen compares their friendship to that of Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a stage both were going through on the road to adulthood. ‘By the end, I knew I wasn’t a lesbian. If anything it was like a practice before I entered a world where there would be men of my own age.’ They lost touch but, soon after leaving Central, Bronwen heard that Joan Tuker had died tragically young of a brain tumour.
Bronwen started at Central in September 1948. For the first term all three groups – actors, teachers and therapists – had classes together. The focus was on the voice, under the guidance of Cicely Berry, later head of voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘They’d tell us to come in in trousers and we would He down on the floor and relax with lots of oohs and aahs,’ recalls fellow student Diana de Wilton, ‘and then the teacher would say something like, “Think of a sunny day in the country,” and we’d all have to concentrate our minds on our feet and then work our way slowly up to our necks.’ On another occasion they went off to visit the mortuary at the old Royal Free Hospital in Islington to inspect the lungs of dead bodies so as to understand how to breathe and project the voice.
There were twenty students on the teaching course. It was predominandy female, with just three men. Among the acting fraternity, the star of the year was the young Virginia McKenna, later to appear in Born Free and A Town like Alice. It was the slight, elegant, conventional McKenna who was regarded as the great beauty of the set. Although the intake in 1948 was unusual in including some older students – recently demobbed from the forces, their education delayed by the war – the atmosphere at Central was less like a modern-day university and more an extension of school. The timetable was rigid, free time scarce and a well-ordered, disciplined and slightly parsimonious feel pervaded the whole institution, radiating out from Gwynneth Thurburn’s office. ‘It was always vital,’ she recalled of this early period of her principalship, ‘that if we were to keep going, we should not waste a pennyworth of electricity or a piece of paper, a habit that has become ingrained in me. If we had not kept to Queen Victoria’s remark – “We are not interested in the possibility of defeat” – we should probably not be here today.’
The controlled environment of Central was then for many of its younger students a transition point between the childish world of school and adult society rather than a straight transfer. There were, of course, new departures from school life, among them famous names on the teaching staff. The playwright Christopher Fry was a tutor, as was Stephen Joseph, later to be immortalised when Alan Ayckbourn helped fund a theatre named after him in Scarborough. One of the most distinguished voice coaches at Central was the poet and essayist L. A. G. Strong, by chance an old school friend of Alun Pugh. He would take each of his pupils to lunch on nearby Kensington High Street each term. He regarded them as adults and treated them accordingly.
Yet the freedoms now associated with student life barely existed for Bronwen and her colleagues. In part it was the prevailing social mores of the time. After the wartime blip, these had settled down into more traditional patterns. More influential was the precarious economic state of Britain. It was a grey and serious world, with only Labour’s initial radical fervour for a centralised, managed economy to set people aglow. When that ran out, along in August 1947 with the American loans that had shored up the British economy, rationing bit ever harder, shop shelves were empty and pessimism set in. The great winter crisis of 1947 was the prelude to Bronwen’s arrival at Central. It was one of the coldest on record, and the mines could not supply the power stations so electricity rationing was instituted. There were fines for switching on a light outside prescribed hours. The lack of housing – some half a million homes had been destroyed during the aerial bombardment of Britain – loomed large in many lives, with endless waiting lists even for temporary ‘prefabs’. Many despaired of ever reaching the top and between 1946 and 1949 1.25 million Britons emigrated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia.
Basic foodstuffs remained restricted until 1954 – one egg a week, three ounces of butter, one pound of meat. And clothes were bought by coupon until 1949. While Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’, launched in Paris in early 1947, captured the public imagination, its long skirts and flowing lines harking back to an earlier age of plenty, young women in Britain had to make do with dull and utilitarian garments purchased with coupons. Even Princess Elizabeth struggled to acquire the 300 coupons needed for the Norman Hartnell -wedding dress she wore when, on 20 November 1947, she married Philip Mountbatten in Westminster Abbey.
Bronwen, liberated at last from the green and blue ensemble of Dr Williams’, did not let the post-war restrictions constrain her from developing a style of her own. On a limited allowance from her father and faced by the absence of choice in shops, she turned to dress-making with the grey satin and pink lace she could scramble together. The boat neckline was in vogue, worn without sleeves. ‘It must have looked so drab, I’ve never had any idea about colours, but I thought it was the most marvellous thing in the world.’
In contrast to most, she was once again privileged – not only in her freedom to attend the decidedly un-utilitarian environment of a drama college, but also economically. The differentials that had been eroded in the Pughs’ life by war were restored. When she turned twenty-one in June 1951, her last month at Central, she received the then considerable sum of £1,000 as her part of her maternal grandfather’s will. It enabled her to buy her first car – a convertible Morris Eight – and later to move out into her own flat, a radical departure in the early 1950s for a young, attractive, unmarried woman of her class. Usually flying the nest only took place when the parental home was being exchanged for the marital one, but the Pughs, anxious as ever that their daughters should be independent, raised no objections. Bronwen may not have moved in the same world or same league as her contemporaries among the blue-blooded debutantes who were still being presented at court, but she led a cushioned, privileged and in many senses thoroughly modern life.
For her student days and beyond, though, Pilgrims Lane remained home. She would take the tube in each morning and return every evening. Relations with her mother, never close, became at least more relaxed. Kathleen Pugh had been appointed a magistrate on the local bench. Whatever frustrations she had felt in the pre-war years at her own lack of a career were thereby assuaged and she began to resent her youngest daughter a little less. Gwyneth, working as a journalist for a farming magazine after completing her degree at Oxford, continued to be close to Bronwen, but after a short career as a sub-editor, in 1949 Ann married Reginald Hibbert, her boyfriend from Oxford, and followed this bright, high-flying diplomat overseas on a Foreign Office career that culminated in his appointment as British ambassador in Paris in 1979 and a knighthood. constantly abroad, Ann was largely absent from her younger sister’s life in the decades ahead.
In 1950, when Bronwen was just twenty, tragedy struck when David Pugh died of cancer at the age of thirty-three. He had served in the ranks in Germany during the war, but as ever his record had disappointed his parents, who would have liked to see him an officer. His marriage – to a Welsh girl on St David’s Day 1943 – should have pleased his father. It was by all accounts a happy union, but again the Pughs harboured reservations, suspecting that Marion Pugh was chasing what she supposed to be her in-laws’ wealth. After his demobilisation, David Pugh was dogged by ill-health and in 1949 cancer was diagnosed in his groin. Further tests revealed that it had already spread all around his body and within a couple of months he was dead. ‘It shattered my parents,’ says Bronwen. ‘He had never been the son they wanted. He had an unusual mind. He had perfect recall, could remember telephone numbers, facts and figures, but he could never pass exams. He was weak, sickly and highly strung. When he died there was such remorse, especially when they realised the reasons for his illness.’
A post-mortem revealed that David Pugh had a small foetus inside his ribs. During her pregnancy Kathleen Pugh, doctors suggested, had originally been carrying twins, but the fertilised ovum had not divided into two as it usually does. Instead David had absorbed his twin. It is a very rare, but recognised medical condition, though usually it is discovered soon after the surviving twin is born.* (#ulink_b80b348c-12ea-51bb-8e1b-098df7b24f59) The Pughs believed that it could have explained David’s ill-health and physical weakness. It also cast an interesting psychological light on his insistence, even into his late teens, on having a place set at table for his imaginary friend ‘Fern’.
For Alun and Kathleen Pugh, the tragedy of their son’s premature death left a lasting scar. Ann Hibbert remains convinced that the grief her mother felt damaged her health and eventually contributed to the stroke she suffered many years later. For Bronwen, though, David’s death, while regretted and mourned, was something she could recover from. The age difference between them had meant that the two had never been close. However, the loss of her brother may have had one lasting effect on her life. Alun Pugh had made no secret of his ambitions for his children. His son had not satisfied him. His eldest daughter had chosen marriage and a supporting role over a career of her own. Gwyneth was happy taking a back seat. Bronwen’s natural ambition-apparent but carefully reined in as she went to Central – may have been sparked by the desire, in some way, to make good her beloved father’s disappointment.
Bronwen soon fell in with a crowd at Central. She made up a foursome with fellow students Diana de Wilton, Erica Pickard and Joan Murray. They were an oddly symmetrical quartet – two tall, two short, two fair, two dark. While they all came from middle-class backgrounds and shared a similar sense of humour and a youthful determination to be frivolous whatever the gloomy national outlook, the four had contrasting but complementary characters. Diana de Wilton was a reserved, unconfident, convent-educated Irish Catholic from Tunbridge Wells, brought up by adoptive parents, while Joan Murray, small, witty and outgoing, had a Scottish father and French Jewish mother. It was Erica Pickard, however, who was the pivot of the group. The other three all regarded her as their special friend. Bronwen Pugh, even as a student, still lived in the shadow of others – her sisters, the glamorous Virginia McKenna and, within her own circle, Erica.
In Erica – as with Joan Tuker – Bronwen was again drawn to the third of three daughters, though this time there was no hint of romance in their friendship. And like Bronwen, Erica was trying to break the family mould. Her two elder sisters had become doctors. She was determined not to follow in their footsteps. There was, friends remember, something compelling and unusual about Erica. For a start, her family lived in Geneva, where her father taught at the university. She had spent the war years in America and that experience also contributed to her standing out from her peers.
‘She arrived with this American preppy look,’ Diana de Wilton remembers, ‘skirts and jumpers and blouses with little collars. We were all still in twin set and pearls, though under Erica’s influence we soon changed. And she was freer in thought, much more adult. I’d been to a convent where there was no freedom of thought, but Erica would take me to Quaker meetings “to broaden my mind”. I used to worry that I was committing a sin.’ Erica also had a more mature attitude to men than her three friends – all of them straight out of protective all-girl schools. ‘She was freer in her thoughts about boys and sex and those things,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘Not that any of us were in any way experienced, but she was just less buttoned up. We tried to follow her lead.’ While the other three all lived at home, Erica enjoyed the freedom of her own flat in Golders Green, shared with one of her sisters.
All four – with the possible exception of Erica Pickard – were naive and unworldly in their dealings with men. For Bronwen there would be great romantic crushes that faded before the man in question even realised she was interested. If he then made a move, she would already have passed on to another equally unrequited passion. Men, in general, were regarded as desirable but optional and often little more than a subject of amusement. Alun Pugh’s efforts to introduce his daughter to eminently suitable but sensible young barristers across the dining table at Pilgrims Lane therefore failed to move her. ‘They would always be saying, “Well, what about so-and-so, there’s nothing wrong with him?” One of their candidates became known to us all as “poor Smith” because he was always wanting to take me out and I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that I didn’t want romance, but I had no wish for anything serious, let alone thoughts of marriage.’
Despite being a young eighteen in many ways, she had a clear and unfashionable view that life had to be about more than marriage and settling down. ‘We had men friends, but they were never intense partnerships at all. We’d often swap boyfriends between the four of us. And then we’d drop them really just because we felt like it. It was all very innocent and casual. We were far too inhibited for it to be anything more serious. There was no pill so you didn’t have sex. Nice girls like us didn’t do it for fear of what might happen. If you did then it would be the person you intended marrying and I wasn’t thinking about marriage at all.’ Only later did her father tell her that she had left a trail of broken hearts in the Inns of Court.
Outside hours, the four young women would head off to the coffee bars and salad counters that were just starting to open up in the capital. There they would bury their heads in fashion magazines, planning what dizzy dress-making heights they would aspire to over the weekend with whatever they could get on coupons, though Bronwen now recalls that she invariably looked tatty. In the evenings they frequented the West End theatres – half a crown in the gods and then a long walk home. Laurence Olivier was a particular favourite of all four, while the link with Christopher Fry through Central got them into the first night of his celebrated verse play Ring Round the Moon at the Globe in 1950.
Otherwise there were parties, though Bronwen was twenty before she stayed out all night – at a sleepover at Joan Murray’s. ‘My parents were never strict, but if I was going to be late I’d tell them where I was, whom I was with and when I would get back. I always made sure that I was there on time.’ She began smoking, more because it was the done thing than through any overwhelming addiction, and enjoyed the occasional drink, though seldom to excess. Though she had ambitions to be a free spirit and mould-breaker, the Pughs’ youngest daughter gave her parents few sleepless nights.
The four young friends would often congregate at Pilgrim’s Lane. On one occasion Alun Pugh took his youngest daughter and her friends to court for the day. ‘We had asked him something about the law,’ says Diana de Wilton, ‘and he had then decided we should see what goes on at first hand. He was a very kind man, and charming too, but he could still be a little bit frightening. I remember him asking me what books I liked to read. I was only nineteen and shy and said, “Rebecca”. “Oh,” he said, “can’t you think of anything better than that?” I felt so ashamed.’
The unspoken assumption all through the course at Central was that it would lead to a career in teaching. Towards the end of the final term there was a tour of Home Counties’ schools, with the students producing and performing Companion to a Lady, The Harlequinade and the obscure Second Shepherd’s Play. Bronwen’s role was mostly on the production side.
After passing her final examinations and getting her diploma in June 1951, she turned her mind to finding a job. A selection of vacancies was displayed on the school noticeboard and she got the first post she applied for – at Croft House School, Shillingstone, in Dorset. That enduring lack of planning again played a part in her life for, had she made any preliminary enquiries, she would have realised it was a place to be avoided. Croft House was an odd set-up, run in their home by an eccentric, elderly couple, the Torkingtons, known to their disgruntled staff (for reasons that are now obscure) as Caesar and Pop. Miss Pugh’s classroom was in a greenhouse.
The pupils were all girls and had originally come to Croft House to keep the Torkingtons’ own daughter company as she was educated at home. It had subsequently grown in size but lacked any strong guiding principle beyond keeping its young ladies occupied during the school term. It was certainly not an outstandingly academic environment. When any girl passed her school certificate, it was announced at assembly and everyone clapped in surprise and awe. Such an achievement was something out of the ordinary. More often than not, a pony club rosette was all a girl had to show for five years at Croft House.
To her surprise, Bronwen found she enjoyed teaching. Or she enjoyed working with individual pupils. In front of a class full of disgruntled and unmotivated girls, however, she soon realised that her father’s ambitions for her to be a headmistress were misplaced. ‘My classes ended up uproarious, with me laughing almost as much as the girls. Since as well as teaching drama and voice, I was also their form teacher, I was summoned by the owners and asked to explain my behaviour. They asked how I was going to punish my class. When I suggested one idea, they countered with another. On my plate at the next meal time was my notice.’
Bronwen had lasted a year, by which stage she had become one of the longest-serving teachers. The Torkingtons had a habit of falling out with their staff over money, discipline or their unorthodox but dogmatic approach. Throughout the year she had managed to keep one foot in Dorset and one back in London, shuttling between the two in her car. Though Joan Murray had married the future television and film director Christopher Morahan straight after leaving Central, Bronwen, Erica and Diana would head off in search of adventure.
Once they motored up to Oxford to visit Nigel Buxton, an undergraduate there who had previously been lodging at the house in Pilgrims Lane. Through Buxton, later a successful journalist and travel writer, they were able to taste a little of the Oxford social scene that Bronwen had rejected as part of her decision to go to Central. It led to invitations to summer balls next to the Cherwell and even to Bronwen making such good friends at Oxford that in the summer of 1952 she joined some of them for a holiday in Europe.
When he had been lodging at Pilgrims Lane, Buxton had caught Bronwen’s eye and she had developed quite a crush on him, but by the time she visited him at Oxford her romantic thoughts had, as ever and girlishly, moved on. He, however, was now keen on her, as he confided to Diana de Wilton, but the object of his ardour was now unobtainable. ‘It was typical of me at the time,’ Bronwen now says. ‘I was so very impatient.’
Bronwen spent the Christmas of 1951 in Geneva with the Pickards. She and Erica both admitted to each other that they were disappointed by teaching and feared that they had drifted, unthinkingly, into a career that held little enjoyment for them. So, together, they dreamt up a route to adventure. With their heads buried in fashion magazines, the solution was obvious – be a model girl. It is now a standard teenage fantasy, but in the early 1950s it was an ambitious plan because the status of the model girl was still somewhat dubious. When, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the first mannequins had appeared in Paris, they were little more than glorified shop girls. Certainly it was not a career any bourgeois family would consider suitable for its daughters. ‘At the beginning of the century,’ the designer Pierre Balmain wrote, ‘mannequins were not accepted in society … they were often girls of easy virtue who dined in private rooms at Maxim’s and were slow to take umbrage if followed in the Rue de la Paix.’
Later, however, in the early years of the twentieth century, the advent of the Gibson girls added a new veneer of respectability to the profession. Named after the society artist Charles Dana Gibson, these big-busted, pinch-waisted young women, all with classical hour-glass figures, first featured in his work and later achieved national celebrity as the epitome of feminine beauty. The original Gibson girl – and the artist’s wife – was Irene Langhorne, whose younger sister Nancy was Lady Astor and who therefore became Bronwen’s aunt by marriage. Through Gibson, Irene Langhorne turned the archetypal southern belle into the icon of young American women for almost two decades.
Until the Second World War a slightly seedy pall had continued to hang over the whole business of modelling, especially in Europe, with many of its practitioners rumoured also to be dispensing sexual favours. Only in the late forties and fifties did it become a desirable thing for a well-bred girl to do. This was first and foremost a commercial development. Those selling couture clothes realised that their customers were well-to-do and respectable women who would respond to seeing the garments they were about to purchase shown off by a young woman of the same class and background as themselves.
So Bronwen and Erica were among the first generation of young women able to read in fashion magazines of the glamorous but squeaky-clean lives of well-born and thoroughly upright models like British-born Jean Dawnay or the Americans Dorian Leigh and Suzy Parker, both immortalised by the celebrated fashion photographer Richard Avedon. These women were feted as stars and role models in the Hollywood mould. As Dawnay herself put it, in Paris in this period modelling ‘became an accepted profession, whereas before it was looked down upon as something into which men put their mistresses’. Dawnay, a household name in the early 1950s, set the seal on the new-found respectability of modelling when she married into the European aristocracy and became Princess George Galitzine.
In Erica Pickard’s case there was sufficient charisma and conventional good looks to make a career in modelling more than a pipe dream. ‘She had a lovely face, wonderful features and she was always slim,’ Bronwen remembers. ‘The only thing that marred her was her teeth. They crossed over slightly but we decided they could be sorted out.’ In Bronwen’s case, though, aspiring to be a model was a radical departure. She certainly had a theatrical side that liked performing, but only three years earlier she had lacked the confidence even to try for the actors’ course at Central. And up to this point there had been no hint that either she or anyone in her family regarded her as a great beauty.
Quite the opposite, her former nanny Bella Wells remembers. The orthodox line in the Pugh family remained that Ann was the beauty and Gwyneth the clever one, with Bronwen lost in a no man’s land between the two. Yet there was an obvious appeal in modelling for a young woman who had grown up feeling herself unwanted and who had therefore spent a good deal of energy in encouraging, cajoling and forcing her parents to ‘look at me’. This was attention-seeking turned into an adult profession.
Erica’s encouragement was crucial. According to Bronwen, ‘We never thought it would work, but we would look at the model girls in the magazines, look at ourselves and I would say, “You could do that,” to Erica, and then she would say to me, “And you could too.” It was a game, but slightly more than that – a challenge.’ Erica made Bronwen believe that her wild eyes and strong bone structure could be assets for a model girl, but the same problem that had blocked her path as an actress-her height-also made it seem unlikely that she would succeed in a world where short women were the most highly prized. (Dawnay, for example, was a petite, curvaceous blond.) And there was also the issue of her squint.
Diana de Wilton was another who could see beyond such eventually minor details to glimpse an unconventional beauty in Bronwen. De Wilton in particular was struck by her mannerisms. ‘She had this way of standing and walking. She had poise. When I look at our student photographs she had a way of placing her hands and turning her head that I now see made her a natural for modelling.’
Back in London after the Christmas break, Erica and Bronwen might well have forgotten their dream had they not read of a competition for budding model girls in Vogue. It was a diversion, but, bored by their everyday lives, they went at it wholeheartedly and had their portfolios made up by a high street photographer in Kensington. It was, they knew, a million-to-one shot, and their number did not come up. Modelling was put to one side and there it might have remained but for a tragic accident which changed the course of Bronwen’s life.
Soon after Easter 1952 Erica Pickard was standing on the open platform of a London bus when it swung round a corner. She was reaching over to press the stop bell and lost her grip. She fell out on to the pavement, cracking her skull against the curb as she tumbled. She was rushed to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in a coma. Her friends and family kept up a vigil at her bedside, but three days later she died at the age of just twenty-two.
‘It had a devastating effect on all of us,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘I can only liken its effect on our group to the effect of Princess Diana’s death on the whole nation. We were used to older people dying, but when someone young, someone you know dies, then you realise your own mortality for the first time.’ For Bronwen it went further. It thrust her overnight into adulthood and precipitated a complete re-evaluation of her life and beliefs.
She was distraught. Of the four friends, she and Erica had grown the closest in the year after leaving Central. ‘I went to the funeral at Golden Green crematorium. When the coffin disappeared behind the screen, I heard this unearthly scream. It took a while for me to realise that it had come from me. I had to go back to school to teach straight away afterwards. One day, six weeks later, at tea I saw this piece of cake on my plate and couldn’t remember taking it. That’s when I realised I had been on auto-pilot. It was as if I had suddenly come round from concussion.’
Physically it may only have taken her six weeks to get over the shock, but the mental turmoil caused by Erica’s death was to remain with her for many years, pushing her ever more in on herself as she struggled to work out what the tragedy had meant. ‘I hadn’t realised that death could be so sudden. I’d lived through the war. I knew that people died. Yet Erica’s death changed everything.’
In coping with her grief, Bronwen turned naturally to the Pickard family. They clutched her to their bosom and tried to persuade her to take over Erica’s London flat in Golders Green and to apply for Erica’s job as a way of escaping the horrors of Dorset. She was reluctant, unwilling to step into the dead girl’s shoes at this vulnerable moment. She had fallen out with the Torkingtons and, if she was to stay in teaching, would need to start looking for another job. Yet she wasn’t sure teaching was for her. She liked one-to-one encounters but hated the classroom. And at least at Croft House School the timetable had been relaxed. Elsewhere the very sides of teaching she disliked the most – the discipline, the regimentation – would loom larger.
More broadly, Erica’s death focused her attention on the monotony of her day-to-day life. Was this how she wanted to spend her time here, however long or short? If she died tomorrow, would she feel fulfilled? Or was she in danger of falling in, after a brief period of rebellion, with the plan mapped out for her by her own family?
She knew she had to make a decision but was unsure which way to turn. The catalyst came from an unexpected quarter. She was invited to dinner by her old tutor from Central, L. A. G. Strong. ‘I said the usual thing, “Why this, why Erica, what now?” And he said, “Why did she choose you as her best friend?” And it was as if a light was turned on. As we talked I mentioned our idea of being model girls. I began to realise that one way to cope with Erica’s death was to follow that dream. She had given me the courage and confidence to try it, she had made me think it was possible. It wasn’t so much that over dinner I thought, “Oh yes, I can be a model girl”; it was that he set me thinking about what inner qualities she had recognised in me and what I should now do with them.’
Much later she was to realise that living out their daydream was a form of grief therapy, a way of blocking out the unanswerable questions that had suddenly descended on her after Erica’s death. Ultimately it was those questions that initiated Bronwen’s conscious spiritual journey, for the loss of her friend touched directly – as no event in her hitherto short life had – on the spiritual dimension that she had long been aware of, but which she had kept carefully hidden away and separated from her student friends and her family. ‘I think my father realised, though we never talked about it. And Gwyneth. But my mother and Ann had no inkling and even if they did, they would have had no sympathy.’ To this day Ann remains resolutely sceptical about Bronwen’s religious experiences.
Bronwen had taken tentative steps to reveal this inner dimension to her friends, knowing that she could no longer keep it bottled up. Leading a double life was, she came to see, unsatisfying. Some of her crowd had been unreceptive. Others had noticed but could not follow it up. Diana de Wilton, for instance, vaguely noted Bronwen’s tendency, whenever performing a passage for voice-training at Central, to choose something spiritual, like a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. Yet she was never taken into Bronwen’s confidence.
On the surface there were few other clues. As a student Bronwen drifted away from any sort of formal church attendance. What she had experienced, she convinced herself, had little to do with organised religion. But with Erica it was different. ‘From the very start, all my insights into this parallel world had been about love – ‘Only love matters” is what I had heard that first time at the birthday party when I was seven. And it was so painful when Erica died, that I thought I had to stop loving. But equally I knew I couldn’t harden my heart. For a while I just shut down. That was my way of coping.’
And she might have remained ‘shut down’, closed to this other world, perhaps for ever, had not her meeting with L. A. G. Strong prompted her to follow her heart. Having a go at modelling became a small part of what was ultimately a wider liberation and discarding of conventional restraints that helped to form her later self. It was the outward sign that something had changed within her, but she did not know quite what for another eight years. Modelling gave her the space to find out.
Although hitherto she had had little inclination for books, after Erica’s death Bronwen became an uninhibited and often daring reader, working her way through a constant stream of sometimes enlightening and some disappointing texts – history, fiction, science, religion, psychology. Occasionally in the course of her life she has come across a book that has changed the way she thinks or opened up another perspective. Having, by her own choice, missed out on a university education, she has taught herself through books.
She was introduced to the writings of Georgei Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1874–1949) and his sometime disciple Peter Demianovitch Ouspensky (1879–1947). Both had died recently and she was directed to them, casually, by someone she met at a party. ‘You can imagine what I was like at parties then, very intense, always wanting to talk about ideas and only interested in people if they had something interesting to say.’
In the late 1940s and early 1950s among a younger generation of readers reacting, it has subsequently been suggested, to the recent world war with an abnormal degree of introspection and an over-eager and sometimes naive search for alternative paths, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky achieved the sort of cult status later enjoyed by Indian mystics in the sixties. They were, for Bronwen and many others in that period, a revelation and a first introduction to psychology.
Both were Russian, though Gurdjieff had Greek parents. Both were fascinated by the occult and experiments to prove that magic had an objective worth. But their enduring influence – certainly in Bronwen’s life – was their emphasis on the need for each individual to develop psychological insights in order to grow into a new state of higher consciousness. Such insights, she came to believe, could bridge the gap between her everyday world and the spiritual world she had glimpsed.
About Gurdjieff himself opinions were divided, even in his lifetime. His supporters – who included the New Zealand-born short-story writer, Katherine Mansfield – regarded him as a prophet and philosopher without equal. Kenneth Walker, a writer who was one of many who were drawn to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainbleau, described its leader as ‘the arch disturber of self-complacency’, but the press at the time and historians subsequently have judged Gurdjieff less kindly. R. B. Woodings, the distinguished chronicler of twentieth-century thought, sums him up thus: ‘His ideas are not original, his sources can be readily traced and the movement he stimulated was obviously part of reawakening of interest in the occult in the earlier part of this century.’ However, Woodings is in no doubt about the impact of Gurdjieff. ‘Whether charlatan, mystic, scoundrel or “master”, he exercised remarkable authority charismatically over his disciples and by reputation over much wider American and European circles.’
Ouspensky – for nine years until 1924 Gurdjieff’s self-appointed ‘aposde’ – was no less popular and now enjoys a little more academic credibility. Again he inspired a cult-like following, based on his estate at Virginia Water in Surrey, but he had a sounder grasp of philosophy than Gurdjieff and had studied both mathematics and Nietzsche before dabbling in the occult and theosophy, the belief system promoted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by his fellow Russian Helena Blavatsky and her American associate, Henry Steele Olcott, which embraced Hindu ideas of karma and reincarnation.
And it was Ouspensky who made the greater impact on Bronwen. His The Fourth Way, published soon after his death in 1947, brought together many of the ideas he had relentlessly explored in his lifetime. It introduced Bronwen to eastern thought, which she found considerably more attractive than Christianity, and it described in detail his ‘system’ for greater self-knowledge and enlightenment. ‘The chief idea of this system,’ he wrote, ‘was that we do not use even a small part of our powers and forces. We have in us, a very big and very fine organisation, only we do not know how to use it.’ The idea, then, was to study oneself, following Ouspensky’s guidance.
This ranged from the mundane to the enlightening to the foolish. ‘We are divided,’ he claimed, ‘into hundreds and thousands of different “I”s. At one moment when I say “I”, one part of me is speaking, at another moment when I say “I” it is quite another “I” speaking. We do not know that we have not one “I”, but many different “I”s connected with our feelings and desires and have no controlling “I”. These “I”s change all the time; one suppresses another, one replaces another, and all this struggle makes up our inner life.’
To a young, impressionable woman who felt herself torn between the material and spiritual parts of her life, such ideas appeared attractive. She had already realised that she had two apparently contradictory impulses pushing her forward. One was the outgoing, fun-loving, meet-any-challenge, sporty side that was now drawing her to modelling. The other – a legacy, she was sure, from her Welsh ancestors – was driven by a solitary, contemplative, inward-looking instinct that made her want to run away from the world, curl up in a ball and search through books and thought for an answer to why Erica had died in such a tragic way. Ouspensky helped her at least to recognise these two faces within herself and gave her clues as to their origins.
When later he talked about the ‘negative emotions’ bequeathed by childhood and parents and the need to confront these in order to move to a higher level of consciousness, Ouspensky was speaking directly to Bronwen’s own experience, but it would be a mistake to imagine that she became any sort of convert to his cult. She was enthusiastic about her introduction to psychology and to discussions of levels of consciousness – Ouspensky declared there were four – and she was heartened to know that others too were struggling with the sort of questions she had hitherto tackled in secret and largely alone, but Ouspensky was simply a starting point.
In the light of her subsequent determination to combine psychological insights with organised religion – though of course at this time she was a lapsed Anglican – Ouspensky’s antipathy to belief should be noted. Despite borrowing from eastern and western religious creeds, Ouspensky boasted that his system ‘teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything that you see, hear or feel.’ And some of the conclusions to which he took initially attractive ideas appeared ridiculous, even to one as inexperienced and naive as Bronwen at that stage. His theories about the effect of earthly vibrations on the mind and his peculiar mathematical tangle, ‘the ray of Creation’, ascribing numerically quantified ‘forces’ to a series of worlds (which themselves were listed from one to ninety-six) must have been difficult for even the most avid follower to swallow.
Yet Ouspensky and Gurdjieff initiated a search for a complementary psychological and spiritual framework that has since dominated Bronwen’s life. In her student days and as she took her first faltering steps into the adult world of work, the two principal elements within her and hence in her story began to unravel – the spiritual and the material. At the same time as she was setting her sights on the flimsy, fun and throwaway world of model girls, with their jetset lifestyles, headline-grabbing antics and aristocratic suitors, she embarked on a lonely and often painful journey to understand her own psyche and soul.
* (#ulink_9c82eef9-d487-519b-8da3-ad53f8799bb7) In a recent similar case in Egypt, reported in British medical journals, a sixteen-year-old builder went to see his doctor with severe stomach pains. An X-ray revealed a swollen sac pressing against his kidneys and containing his unborn twin, a seven-inch long foetus, weighing more than four pounds. It had a head, an arm, a tongue and teeth. Like an incubus it had been surviving inside the sixteen-year-old, feeding off him.
Chapter Four (#ulink_4c13623a-2a64-53c0-baa0-b93e93f98d4c)
One of the many reasons why it is difficult to make a start as a model is that, although the photographers and fashion houses are crying out for new faces, when it comes to the point none of them want to take the risk of trying out a new girl while she is still green.
Jean Dawnay, Model Girl (1956)
The fashion world recovered more quickly than most industries from the dislocation of the war. In Paris in February 1947 Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ thrilled critics, buyers and public alike. ‘It’s quite a revolution, dear Christian,’ remarked Carmel Snow, reporting for Harper’s Bazaar, at the unveiling of Dior’s dramatic, narrow-waisted, low-cut, very feminine and distinctly nostalgic collection, harking back, some experts said, to the hour-glass silhouette of the 1890s. ‘Your dresses have such a new look. They’re quite wonderful.’
Snow had coined a phrase to emphasise Dior’s break with the drab, austere and utilitarian style of the war years, symbolised by his abundant use of material after a period in which it had been severely rationed. Dior, Snow claimed with some truth, had done more, however, than simply create a style. ‘He has saved Paris as Paris was saved in the Battle of the Marne.’
For there had been doubts expressed about the French capital’s ability to regain its pre-war dominance of the fashion industry, notably with American buyers. Certainly during the war years Paris had lost its crown when Hollywood brought together fashion and film to make New York’s Seventh Avenue the place to be, but the transatlantic clamour that followed the launch of the New Look – Olivia de Havilland and Rita Hayworth were amongst the Hollywood stars who rushed to place orders – ensured that Paris was back at the top of the tree. Pierre Balmain, Jacques Fath and Cristobal Balenciaga all contributed to this pre-eminence; by 1950 they had been joined by Pierre Cardin, two years later by Hubert de Givenchy. But it was Dior who reigned supreme.
In so far as Paris entertained any European rivals, they were Rome and Florence, where designers like Capucci, Pucci, Simonetta, Fabiani and Galitzine were admired, if not held in quite such global high esteem as Dior and his near neighbours. In the fashion industry, London remained something of an enigma. It considered itself as good as, if not better than, Paris and certainly looked down on the Italians. Throughout the 1950s the universal penchant amongst Europe’s designers for classically English tailored evening dresses and tweed suits as part of an exaggeratedly aristocratic look contributed to London’s self-assuredness. But the irony was that the driving force behind this English look was Paris, which took the safe lines coming out of London – ‘knights’ wives clothes’, as they were sometimes unkindly labelled – and turned them into something special.
The traffic was, in reality, two-way. London had been touched by the shock waves that issued forth from Paris with the New Look. Like the rest of the fashion world, it followed Dior’s lead. Yet it did so in moderation, sticking to its own particular style and developing its own innovations – like coloured furs. Jean Dawnay, who worked with the top designers on both sides of the English Channel before she retired as a model girl in 1956, sums up the subleties of the battle with an anecdote. While working at Dior, she was sent as one of a small team to show some of the house’s latest designs at the French embassy in London. The clothes had a strongly English look. To acknowledge his design debt to his hosts, Dior decided that his designs should be made up in British tweeds and worsteds. According to Dawnay, the gesture backfired when the flowing dresses she had worn in Paris overnight became stiff and ungainly when made from home-spun cloth. They did not move with her body but stood out in counterpoint to it. Only the most formal suits and evening dresses translated well. ‘The English designers catered almost exclusively for the smart English families,’ says Dawnay. ‘If they were having a ball or a coming-out party, they would go to Hardy Amies for a dress and so on. It was very insular, had its own standards and was rather dismissive of anywhere else.’
The global commercial reality, as Bronwen Pugh embarked on her career as a model girl in 1952, was that London, for all its pride and introspective one-upmanship, remained very much a stopping-off point for American buyers on their way to the main market, Paris. It wasn’t until several years later that Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Greene launched their Bazaar shop on Chelsea’s King’s Road and revolutionised London’s standing. As yet their particular new look was nothing more than the dream of fashion college students.
For a decade and a half after the war the London market was dominated by twelve names who joined forces in the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers. Worth, Norman Hartnell, Charles Creed, Neil ‘Bunny’ Roger, John Cavanagh, Digby Morton, Ronald Patterson and Hardy Amies were among the best – known stars in this galaxy, each putting on two shows a year – in January and July – where they unveiled their couture collections. Below them was a layer of younger designers, the Model House Group, who made their living by adapting last year’s couture house creations from Paris. And then there were the ready-to-wear houses, from smart names like Jaeger through to high street chains like Richards Shops. The days of the big names doing anything other than making individual items to order for a wealthy, predominantly older clientele had not yet dawned.
The timeless, upper-crust English quality of the designs of Amies or Hartnell, their appeal for a female audience looking for sensible suits for a weekend’s shooting in the country or a frock for a presentation at court, chimed well with the era. After the grey years of Labour centralisation of the economy, the election of a Conservative government in 1951 heralded both an end to rationing and a welcome return to some of the pleasures of pre-war days. London was loosening up. Taking their lead from the young Queen Elizabeth II on her accession in 1952, women who followed fashion aspired to a classical simplicity that mirrored the dress codes of the landed classes at play.
This was what the satirist and social historian Christopher Booker has described as ‘the strange Conservative interlude of the fifties’:
By the summer of 1953, the glittering coronation of a new young queen, marked in a suitably imperial gesture by the conquest of Everest, was a symbol that during the years of hardship the old traditions had been merely sleeping. People were once again dressing for dinner and for Ascot … Debutantes once again danced away June nights on the river, to the strains of Tommy Kinsman and the splash of champagne bottles thrown by their braying escorts. Unmistakably British society seemed to be returning from a long dark night to sunnier and more normal times.
It was a time when government and electors alike convinced themselves that Britain was back where it had been in 1939. ‘It’s just like pre-war’ was the phrase on everyone’s lips – before Suez, economic reverses, angry young men, the Lady Chatterley trial and finally the Profumo scandal destroyed the illusion and ushered in the new, brutal and classless world of the 1960s. In this interval a particular sort of upper-class conduct, confidence and style were the dominating social and cultural goals. Harold Macmillan’s governments, containing such a heavy contingent of peers that on paper they seemed like pre-1914 administrations, contributed to the process. The look that Bronwen Pugh came to embody – aristocratic, detached, elegant – reflected the general mood and had an emblematic quality.
The London fashion world did have one up on Paris in that it had adopted the American system of agents for model girls. In the States Eileen Ford, the godmother of model agents, had built up her agency from scratch in 1946, representing two of the most important US models of the decade, Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh. In Paris such innovations were not allowed for fear that they would become little more than glorified escort agencies, but in London they advertised in the phone book and were run by outwardly frightening but often benign men and women who provided the respectability and parental-style security that ushered middle-class girls like first Jean Dawnay and later Bronwen into the profession.
With her teaching career behind her and her heart set on fulfilling the frivolous dream she had shared with Erica, Bronwen went about getting herself on one of the agency’s books. The first name she tried was Pat Larthe. Dawnay, trail-blazer in the new wave of post-war British models, provided an uncomfortable picture in her autobiography of Larthe’s working methods. At the dawn of her career, Dawnay, like Bronwen almost a decade after her, had nervously presented herself at Larthe’s office in London’s Covent Garden only to find ten other hopefuls in the waiting room, clutching their portfolios and fiddling with their hair.
When she was finally summoned into the inner sanctum she was greeted by a tough, theatrical woman, sheltering behind a vast telephone-laden desk. ‘The interview was short and humiliating. I showed Miss Larthe my pictures. She barely seemed to glance at them before telling me I was too ordinary, that modelling was the toughest, most soul-destroying profession in the world, and that girls who had far more than I in the way of looks and figure got nowhere.’ Dawnay was reduced to tears. That appeared to be Larthe’s intention, perhaps – to take the most charitable option – calculating that it was better if it was done by her now rather than by someone else further down the line. Having destroyed the younger woman’s self-confidence, she could then appear her protector. She took Dawnay under her wing, directed her first to favoured photographers, then got her bookings at the less glamorous end of the market – shows at Scarborough hotels – and finally helped her to make the leap to the top London houses.
Bronwen’s first impression of Larthe was equally unfavourable. ‘I just turned up in her office and said, “I want to be a model.” She looked at me and said bluntly, “You’re too tall and you squint.’” Most hopefuls would have turned and walked out. A few months previously so would Bronwen, but in the aftermath of Erica’s death she clung to the idea of modelling as her salvation. She could not afford such dramatic gestures when Larthe potentially held the key to success. ‘Then Pat asked me to walk across the room and I must have done something right. She said she wouldn’t put me on her books, but she’d teach me how to be a model.’
Bronwen accepted this less-than-overwhelming offer without a second thought. She and another hopeful would turn up after hours at Larthe’s office every evening for a week. First they were instructed on walking in the correct way. You had to place one foot exactly in front of the other and swing your hips – ‘but not all that sashaying they do today,’ says Bronwen. ‘We had to be “ladylike but exaggerated”.’ Then there was some good old-fashioned practice with books on the head to improve balance and poise.
Equally important was the correct form for the catwalk-not then usually a raised platform but simply a walkway between rows of chairs ending in what was and remains known as ‘the cheese’ or ‘le fromage’ because of its resemblance to a slab of Camembert. To succeed as models, according to Ginette Spanier, the great Parisian couture house directrice of the 1950s, girls had to ‘swish their bottoms and stretch their legs out straight in front like a race horse, pirouetting at corners as though dancing an old-fashioned waltz.’
Other evening sessions covered make-up – at which Bronwen was a novice. At that time model girls were expected to turn up with their own shoes and do their own hair and make-up. Then there were hints on showing clothes off to best advantage – ‘wearing a jacket off your shoulders, that sort of thing’. And finally, another taste of the outwardly more buttoned-up 1950s, there was the etiquette of taking off and putting on clothes quickly, discreetly and demurely.
As Pat Larthe had spotted, nature had given Bronwen a spectacular walk. The lessons may have given it a little more polish, but it remained highly individual and one of her most devastating assets, something that was to make critics, designers and men sit up and take notice of her. Eugenia Shepherd, fashion doyenne of the New York Herald Tribune, later described her as that ‘husky, Welsh mannequin’ who ‘drags a coat down a runway as if she had just killed it and were taking it to her mate’.
The same openness that had made her a quick learner when Margaret Braund had fashioned St Joan out of a gawky schoolgirl at Dr Williams’ helped her to digest Larthe’s lessons in double-quick time. Despite her progress, at the end of the week Bronwen still found the agent adamant that she would not take her on. Her squint and her height would make her too hard to place. The current vogue was for petite girls with the gamine ‘little boy look’ – Jean Dawnay, its epitome, was five foot five and a half – rather than lanky, bony, long-legged women like Bronwen, who came in at just under six foot.
Yet once again, Bronwen displayed a remarkable single-mindedness. She couldn’t do much about her height, but the squint was easily cured. Raiding her savings, buoyed up by financial assistance from her parents, she went back to the surgeon who had treated her as a child and he operated once more on the lazy muscles behind her left eye. After a couple of weeks’ recuperation she was out knocking on the agents’ doors once more. Her friends marvelled at her perseverance. ‘I remember being full of admiration for her confidence and more so her resilience,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘I just kept thinking I know I couldn’t have done that and that the very first time someone said no, I would have given up. But it was a new Bron. She wasn’t in the mood to be put off.’
Those same attributes also enabled her to ride out her family’s reaction to her decision to throw in teaching and try her hand at modelling. The Pughs were not frivolous people and the news that their daughter wanted to abandon her career in the classroom and spend her money on what must have seemed to them like a hopeless whim cannot have been easy to swallow. First she had refused Oxbridge. Then she had gone to drama school, but just when it finally looked as if she was back on the rails, working as a teacher, here she was giving it all up. They could not understand her motivation and she, still in shock over Erica, could not explain it-to them or even to herself. However, the Pughs were not so heavy-handed as to express their disappointment that she had abandoned what had been her anointed role. Indeed, whatever their misgivings, they helped her pay for her eye operation. They had taught their daughters independence, had deliberately avoided giving them either gender or class stereotypes, and realised that they were now reaping what they had sown. They may even have understood on some unspoken level, that modelling – like dressing-up and acting before it – fitted in with Bronwen’s penchant from earliest days for eye-catching gestures, the ‘look at me’ syndrome that she puts down to feeling insufficiently wanted as a child.
According to Bronwen they were relaxed but qualified any support with the hope that she wouldn’t come to regret her decision. Her future brother-in-law, Ron Barry, soon to marry Gwyneth, felt it went further: ‘I think that they regarded Bron as a bit of a mad-hatter after she turned to modelling. They didn’t understand what made her want to do it, but eventually they were very proud of her. Their only concern, and this was mainly later when her name was in every newspaper, was about all the people who were going mad about her and the endless partying. It was an entirely foreign world to them. They were still doing the quiet Hampstead life.’
Gwyneth was the most enthusiastic, applauding her younger sister’s nerve and, with an instinctive understanding of Bronwen, suspecting the real cause of her crusade. Very tall and skinny, with none of Bronwen’s new-found poise and self-confidence, Gwyneth suffered from poor eyesight and generally bad health as an adult, caused by heart problems; she wore heavy glasses and came to see her own body as a burden. The prospect of her extrovert little sister celebrating hers prompted her to express unselfish pride and encouragement. Gwyneth, her older sister Ann says, had already settled into a pattern where ‘she lived much more of an inward life. Bronwen was a much more open, outgoing sort of person.’ As a judgement from within the family, it shows the extent to which Bronwen kept that other side of her, the inward-looking, contemplative and, she believes, Celtic-influenced melancholy, well-hidden.
Too much can be made of the point since Ann was, of course, overseas with her new husband when she learned of Bronwen’s career change. ‘When I heard, I just laughed. I found it terribly hard to imagine why anyone would want to be a model.’ The oldest and youngest of the Pughs’ daughters had by this stage recognised that they were, despite a strong physical similarity, chalk and cheese. ‘I never felt Ann was envious of me, or me of her. We had both simply chosen very different lines of work and she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do something so unacademic as modelling.’ If her goal since arriving at Dr Williams’ had been to follow a radically different path from her sisters, then Bronwen had finally and flamboyantly succeeded.
The only member of the Pugh clan to express outright disapproval of her boldness was her Goodyear grandmother down in Kent. To this Edwardian matriarch, the whole business of modelling seemed tawdry and she would have preferred her grand-daughter to give it a wide berth. A strict teetotaller, she once remarked to Ann of Bronwen’s career as a model girl: ‘I know that she lives on gin and sandwiches.’ However, she had little influence in such matters, even if it was partly a legacy from her late husband, given to each of his grand-daughters at twenty-one, that was allowing Bronwen to pay for the surgery on her eye and Pat Larthe’s course of lessons as well as to support herself until the hoped-for job offers came rolling in.
At first, on her return from Dorset, Bronwen shared a rented flat at 44 Harley Street with Diana de Wilton. Later she moved into her own place, first a small mews flat, and later in nearby Hyde Park Square, her home until her marriage. ‘I remember noticing,’ Diana de Wilton says, ‘not out of jealousy but curiosity how my room was always tidy and I would emerge from it looking plain. But Bron’s looked like a bomb had hit it, and then she would emerge looking lovely, immaculately dressed.’ She was developing her own style and her own, individual look, emphasising her Celtic eyes with her choice of colours and making the most of the aristocratic bearing her height, poise and strong facial bone structure gave her.
Eventually Bronwen persuaded the agent Peter Hope-Lumley to take her on his books. He was not quite so daunted by her height as Pat Larthe. And he was more successful at persuading his clients to take a chance on this unusual model girl than Jean Bell, the severe headmistress-type who had represented Bronwen for six months but failed to find her a single job. She had suffered numerous rejections; she was either too tall, too inexperienced, too unphotogenic, or not thin enough. ‘She just stood out,’ Hope-Lumley now says. ‘She was very exceptional. It was not only that she was much taller than the other models and had this air of distinction. There was something different in the way she walked. She was very good-looking rather than pretty.’ It is an observation reinforced by the interior designer Nicholas Haslam, then a youngster working on Vogue. ‘When you saw Bron, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, what a pretty girl,” you’d just say, “Wow!”’
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