Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times

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

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,* 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.’