Peter Stanford - Bronwen Astor - Her Life and Times

According to Bronwen they were relaxed but qualified any support with the hope that she wouldn’t come to regret her decision. Her future brother-in-law, Ron Barry, soon to marry Gwyneth, felt it went further: ‘I think that they regarded Bron as a bit of a mad-hatter after she turned to modelling. They didn’t understand what made her want to do it, but eventually they were very proud of her. Their only concern, and this was mainly later when her name was in every newspaper, was about all the people who were going mad about her and the endless partying. It was an entirely foreign world to them. They were still doing the quiet Hampstead life.’

Gwyneth was the most enthusiastic, applauding her younger sister’s nerve and, with an instinctive understanding of Bronwen, suspecting the real cause of her crusade. Very tall and skinny, with none of Bronwen’s new-found poise and self-confidence, Gwyneth suffered from poor eyesight and generally bad health as an adult, caused by heart problems; she wore heavy glasses and came to see her own body as a burden. The prospect of her extrovert little sister celebrating hers prompted her to express unselfish pride and encouragement. Gwyneth, her older sister Ann says, had already settled into a pattern where ‘she lived much more of an inward life. Bronwen was a much more open, outgoing sort of person.’ As a judgement from within the family, it shows the extent to which Bronwen kept that other side of her, the inward-looking, contemplative and, she believes, Celtic-influenced melancholy, well-hidden.

Too much can be made of the point since Ann was, of course, overseas with her new husband when she learned of Bronwen’s career change. ‘When I heard, I just laughed. I found it terribly hard to imagine why anyone would want to be a model.’ The oldest and youngest of the Pughs’ daughters had by this stage recognised that they were, despite a strong physical similarity, chalk and cheese. ‘I never felt Ann was envious of me, or me of her. We had both simply chosen very different lines of work and she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do something so unacademic as modelling.’ If her goal since arriving at Dr Williams’ had been to follow a radically different path from her sisters, then Bronwen had finally and flamboyantly succeeded.

The only member of the Pugh clan to express outright disapproval of her boldness was her Goodyear grandmother down in Kent. To this Edwardian matriarch, the whole business of modelling seemed tawdry and she would have preferred her grand-daughter to give it a wide berth. A strict teetotaller, she once remarked to Ann of Bronwen’s career as a model girl: ‘I know that she lives on gin and sandwiches.’ However, she had little influence in such matters, even if it was partly a legacy from her late husband, given to each of his grand-daughters at twenty-one, that was allowing Bronwen to pay for the surgery on her eye and Pat Larthe’s course of lessons as well as to support herself until the hoped-for job offers came rolling in.

At first, on her return from Dorset, Bronwen shared a rented flat at 44 Harley Street with Diana de Wilton. Later she moved into her own place, first a small mews flat, and later in nearby Hyde Park Square, her home until her marriage. ‘I remember noticing,’ Diana de Wilton says, ‘not out of jealousy but curiosity how my room was always tidy and I would emerge from it looking plain. But Bron’s looked like a bomb had hit it, and then she would emerge looking lovely, immaculately dressed.’ She was developing her own style and her own, individual look, emphasising her Celtic eyes with her choice of colours and making the most of the aristocratic bearing her height, poise and strong facial bone structure gave her.

Eventually Bronwen persuaded the agent Peter Hope-Lumley to take her on his books. He was not quite so daunted by her height as Pat Larthe. And he was more successful at persuading his clients to take a chance on this unusual model girl than Jean Bell, the severe headmistress-type who had represented Bronwen for six months but failed to find her a single job. She had suffered numerous rejections; she was either too tall, too inexperienced, too unphotogenic, or not thin enough. ‘She just stood out,’ Hope-Lumley now says. ‘She was very exceptional. It was not only that she was much taller than the other models and had this air of distinction. There was something different in the way she walked. She was very good-looking rather than pretty.’ It is an observation reinforced by the interior designer Nicholas Haslam, then a youngster working on Vogue. ‘When you saw Bron, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, what a pretty girl,” you’d just say, “Wow!”’

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