Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times

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.