Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times

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

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.