Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times

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’.