Peter Stanford - Bronwen Astor - Her Life and Times

That summer between school and college Bronwen had her first romance. It was a short-lived, shared but unspoken passion, more an early and tentative stepping stone in her own emotional development than any significant pointer to her orientation. She fell for a girl of her own age, the daughter of Major-General Sir Francis Tuker, the Gurkha chief who had inspired her as a schoolgirl with his visits to Dr Williams’, his letters from the front and his tales of bravery. Joan Tuker, the same age as Bronwen, lived on the family farm in Cornwall and the two met up several times that summer. Undoubtedly some of the awe with which Bronwen regarded Sir Francis was transferred on to Joan. ‘I put her on a pedestal and just gazed adoringly at her. She had wonderful eyes and blonde hair. I think it was the first time I realised what romance was, that I began to understand how love could develop between two people, that I had had those feelings for anyone. It lasted six months and was reciprocated, but then I think we simply grew apart, me with my life in London and she down on the farm in Cornwall. We had nothing in common really.’

Joan was, like Bronwen, a third daughter and the two shared similar frustrations about how they were simply expected to be like their successful older sisters. Bronwen compares their friendship to that of Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited , a stage both were going through on the road to adulthood. ‘By the end, I knew I wasn’t a lesbian. If anything it was like a practice before I entered a world where there would be men of my own age.’ They lost touch but, soon after leaving Central, Bronwen heard that Joan Tuker had died tragically young of a brain tumour.

Bronwen started at Central in September 1948. For the first term all three groups – actors, teachers and therapists – had classes together. The focus was on the voice, under the guidance of Cicely Berry, later head of voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘They’d tell us to come in in trousers and we would He down on the floor and relax with lots of oohs and aahs,’ recalls fellow student Diana de Wilton, ‘and then the teacher would say something like, “Think of a sunny day in the country,” and we’d all have to concentrate our minds on our feet and then work our way slowly up to our necks.’ On another occasion they went off to visit the mortuary at the old Royal Free Hospital in Islington to inspect the lungs of dead bodies so as to understand how to breathe and project the voice.

There were twenty students on the teaching course. It was predominandy female, with just three men. Among the acting fraternity, the star of the year was the young Virginia McKenna, later to appear in Born Free and A Town like Alice. It was the slight, elegant, conventional McKenna who was regarded as the great beauty of the set. Although the intake in 1948 was unusual in including some older students – recently demobbed from the forces, their education delayed by the war – the atmosphere at Central was less like a modern-day university and more an extension of school. The timetable was rigid, free time scarce and a well-ordered, disciplined and slightly parsimonious feel pervaded the whole institution, radiating out from Gwynneth Thurburn’s office. ‘It was always vital,’ she recalled of this early period of her principalship, ‘that if we were to keep going, we should not waste a pennyworth of electricity or a piece of paper, a habit that has become ingrained in me. If we had not kept to Queen Victoria’s remark – “We are not interested in the possibility of defeat” – we should probably not be here today.’

The controlled environment of Central was then for many of its younger students a transition point between the childish world of school and adult society rather than a straight transfer. There were, of course, new departures from school life, among them famous names on the teaching staff. The playwright Christopher Fry was a tutor, as was Stephen Joseph, later to be immortalised when Alan Ayckbourn helped fund a theatre named after him in Scarborough. One of the most distinguished voice coaches at Central was the poet and essayist L. A. G. Strong, by chance an old school friend of Alun Pugh. He would take each of his pupils to lunch on nearby Kensington High Street each term. He regarded them as adults and treated them accordingly.

Yet the freedoms now associated with student life barely existed for Bronwen and her colleagues. In part it was the prevailing social mores of the time. After the wartime blip, these had settled down into more traditional patterns. More influential was the precarious economic state of Britain. It was a grey and serious world, with only Labour’s initial radical fervour for a centralised, managed economy to set people aglow. When that ran out, along in August 1947 with the American loans that had shored up the British economy, rationing bit ever harder, shop shelves were empty and pessimism set in. The great winter crisis of 1947 was the prelude to Bronwen’s arrival at Central. It was one of the coldest on record, and the mines could not supply the power stations so electricity rationing was instituted. There were fines for switching on a light outside prescribed hours. The lack of housing – some half a million homes had been destroyed during the aerial bombardment of Britain – loomed large in many lives, with endless waiting lists even for temporary ‘prefabs’. Many despaired of ever reaching the top and between 1946 and 1949 1.25 million Britons emigrated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia.

Basic foodstuffs remained restricted until 1954 – one egg a week, three ounces of butter, one pound of meat. And clothes were bought by coupon until 1949. While Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’, launched in Paris in early 1947, captured the public imagination, its long skirts and flowing lines harking back to an earlier age of plenty, young women in Britain had to make do with dull and utilitarian garments purchased with coupons. Even Princess Elizabeth struggled to acquire the 300 coupons needed for the Norman Hartnell -wedding dress she wore when, on 20 November 1947, she married Philip Mountbatten in Westminster Abbey.

Bronwen, liberated at last from the green and blue ensemble of Dr Williams’, did not let the post-war restrictions constrain her from developing a style of her own. On a limited allowance from her father and faced by the absence of choice in shops, she turned to dress-making with the grey satin and pink lace she could scramble together. The boat neckline was in vogue, worn without sleeves. ‘It must have looked so drab, I’ve never had any idea about colours, but I thought it was the most marvellous thing in the world.’

In contrast to most, she was once again privileged – not only in her freedom to attend the decidedly un-utilitarian environment of a drama college, but also economically. The differentials that had been eroded in the Pughs’ life by war were restored. When she turned twenty-one in June 1951, her last month at Central, she received the then considerable sum of £1,000 as her part of her maternal grandfather’s will. It enabled her to buy her first car – a convertible Morris Eight – and later to move out into her own flat, a radical departure in the early 1950s for a young, attractive, unmarried woman of her class. Usually flying the nest only took place when the parental home was being exchanged for the marital one, but the Pughs, anxious as ever that their daughters should be independent, raised no objections. Bronwen may not have moved in the same world or same league as her contemporaries among the blue-blooded debutantes who were still being presented at court, but she led a cushioned, privileged and in many senses thoroughly modern life.