Peter Stanford - Bronwen Astor - Her Life and Times

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.’