Peter Stanford - Bronwen Astor - Her Life and Times

Despite their new-found prosperity, Dr Pugh never forgot where he had come from and had a reputation for treating those who, in pre-National Health Service days, could not pay. And at home the family spoke Welsh, though Alun’s knowledge of what he came to regard as his native tongue remained inadequate until he settled down to study it as an adult.

The Pughs’ attachment to Wales had its limits, not least in their decision to settle in Brighton and not back in Cardiganshire. They were part nostalgic exiles but part also assimilators, embracing their new world and choosing, when it came to education for young Alun, the very English minor public school Brighton College.

He was both a keen sportsman and a talented student who won a scholarship to read history at Queen’s College, Oxford – not Jesus, bastion of the Welsh. His best friend at both Brighton College and Queen’s was Kenneth Goodyear, the son of a wealthy accountant from Bromley in Kent. As their friendship developed Goodyear introduced young Alun Pugh to his sister Kathleen, a strikingly tall, fair, blue-eyed but shy beauty. They fell in love.

There was some disquiet from T. Edward Goodyear, Kathleen’s father and a man with ambitions to be Lord Mayor of London, about Alun Pugh’s relatively humble forebears, but in spite of such reservations the couple married in Brighton in 1915 when both were twenty-one. Alun Pugh-he was throughout his adult life always referred to by both names, even by junior members of his staff, with the result that the ‘Alun’ and the ‘Pugh’ were linked by an imaginary hyphen – had been admitted to the Inner Temple as a pupil in April the previous year, but the First World War was underway and soon after their marriage, in July 1915, like nearly every young man of his generation, he joined up. He went to Bovington Green Camp at Marlow in Buckinghamshire, close to Cliveden, home of the Astors. He chose the Welsh Guards. Kathleen volunteered as a nurse.

In August 1915 Kenneth Goodyear, who was a conscientious objector, was killed in France behind the lines after serving in Gallipoli as a stretcher-bearer. The effect on his parents was devastating and their attention was ever more focused onto Kathleen, their one surviving child. Second Lieutenant Alun Pugh went out with the Prince of Wales Company of the Welsh Guards to join the British forces in France in February 1916. Seven months later, on 10 September, having already seen many of his colleagues killed in the stalemate of trench warfare, he was badly injured in the knee by a sniper’s bullet at Ginchy during the battle of the Somme. It left him in pain and with a slight limp for the rest of his life, but he owed his survival to his sergeant who, after Alun Pugh had fallen back into the trench, bent double as he carried him on his shoulders to the first aid post. Another officer, wounded at the same time, had been passed back along the trench, but his injured body had appeared above the parapet and was riddled with bullets.

A lengthy convalescence with his young wife and grieving in-laws at Rothesay, their home in Bromley, saw Alun Pugh soon on the mend, but the psychological damage caused by his injury was long-lasting, according to his daughter Bronwen, and affected his whole family: ‘My father felt very fortunate still to be alive, but also guilty too. So many of his friends had been wiped out.’ It gave him – and by association his children – a determination to do what seemed right, to live their lives to the full, regardless of the restrictions of convention, class or social mores.

Today Alun Pugh would have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but in the aftermath of a world war ex-soldiers simply had to get on with rebuilding their lives. The trenches did, however, remain a painful and sensitive memory for him. While his eldest and most direct daughter Ann questioned him about his experiences, drawing him out on the subject, Bronwen felt inhibited about raising what she saw as a taboo. ‘I’ve always been bad about asking people important questions. I wait to be told. I knew there was something but it went unmentioned. I grew up thinking that the silence meant it had been so terrible that there must have been fighting in the street or something.’

His wartime trauma left Alun Pugh with a profound distrust of anything German. He would not, for instance, have Christmas trees, which he saw as a German custom, imported via Prince Albert. There would be one at the Goodyear house in Kent, where the Pughs spent 25 December, but it was only when Bronwen went to live at Cliveden that, reluctantly, having inherited her father’s prejudice in this as in many things, she had to put up with a tree.

That wartime experience also made Alun and Kathleen Pugh – like many others of their generation-determined in the aftermath of the conflict to re-evaluate the assumptions they had made before its outbreak. They already had one child – David born in 1917 – and Kathleen had lost a baby the previous year. While the couple, following Kenneth’s death, would eventually come into the Good-years’ substantial fortune, there was the question of finding a job and financing a home. Alun Pugh resumed his career in the law and was called to the Bar in June 1918, eventually specialising from chambers in Harcourt Buildings in Inner Temple in workman’s compensation claims.

He found a house in Heathhurst Road in Hampstead, just off the wide-open spaces of the Heath and in the shadow of the house of the poet John Keats – his last London home before he left for Italy and a premature death. Hampstead, then as now, was a favourite place for writers, artists, academics and free-thinkers, though in the 1920s, with its villagey atmosphere, it had acquired little of the smart, expensive image of more recent times.

However, as a place where the normal constraints of the strict class system then prevalent elsewhere did not apply so rigidly, it suited the Pughs. ‘I think my parents decided to live in Hampstead,’ says their daughter Ann, ‘as a gesture of defiance because then it was a rather way out sort of place. Certainly my mother’s parents would have regarded it as an odd choice.’ In that period of post-war optimism, Alun Pugh was searching for an identity that tied together his life before the conflict and his experiences on the battlefield. Increasingly he hit upon Wales as the linking thread, having used his convalescence to brush up on his sketchy knowledge of the Welsh language.

Perhaps the comradeship he had felt in his Welsh Guards battalion, which lost an estimated 5,000 men in France, gave Alun Pugh a sense of belonging to something – the Welsh nation – that had in his parents’ home seemed of little more than sentimental importance. Perhaps also it was a reaction to the death of his father and mother who, having struggled so hard to find prosperity and happiness, died comparatively young within months of each other in 1916 without being able to enjoy the fruit of their efforts. In one sense, though, their deaths may have allowed Alun Pugh to explore roots that had, during their lifetime, been regarded with ambiguity.

It was undeniably a romantic quest. His parents had travelled far – socially, geographically and economically – from Cardiganshire. They had bought their son an English education and his knowledge of Wales was limited to holidays, relatives and family folklore. A public school educated, Oxford graduate had little in common with the relatives who remained in Cardiganshire. Yet Alun Pugh was also a practical man. He did not seek merely to wallow in nostalgia for his parents’ homeland, he wanted to do something of substance that would establish his own bond with it.

In his work as a barrister Alun Pugh developed a reputation for working on Welsh cases, especially those involving coalminers. Bronwen recalls frequent visits to Paddington Station to wave him off on, and greet him from, the train to Cardiff, Swansea and beyond. He sought out the company of other Welsh exiles where he practised in Inner Temple-it had and has a sizeable contingent-and he became a member of the Reform Club, bastion of Welsh Liberalism and favourite haunt of its epitome, David Lloyd George. He was also a pillar of the London Welsh Association.