Peter Stanford - Bronwen Astor - Her Life and Times

These were little more than affordable gestures for a man whose career at the Bar was already taking off. At the dawn of the 1920s, however, he saw a more tangible, though risky, chance to make his mark by joining the largely academic and middle-class movement campaigning to protect and preserve the Welsh culture and language by all available means.

The most charismatic figure among Alun Pugh’s new-found friends was Saunders Lewis, like him a son of the Welsh diaspora, born of Welsh parents on Merseyside. Lewis was a visitor to the Pughs’ Hampstead home. Once when he stayed the night, Bronwen gave up her room and moved in with her sister. Her father, she recalls, told her that she should always be proud that Saunders Lewis had slept in her bed. She should ‘never forget’. Among the family’s most treasured possessions was a copy of Lewis’s Braslun 0 Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymreig – a history of Welsh literature, published in 1932. It had been inscribed by Lewis to his friend Alun Pugh in gratitude for his work on behalf of their people.

Lewis’s long-term contribution to the nationalist revival was huge, though often in his lifetime he suffered spells of disappointment and marginalisation. ‘The dominance of Lewis,’ writes D. Hywel Davies in his history of Welsh nationalism, ‘from 1926 to 1939 was such that his name and that of the nationalist movement had become almost interchangeable.’ A poet, dramatist, historian and teacher of the Welsh language, he was heavily influenced as a young man by Ireland’s political struggle to break free from Britain and the literary renaissance that ran in parallel. His political ideas – authoritarian and tinged with religion – owed much to the radical conservatism of Charles Maurras’s Action française.

Lewis was the most prominent member of Y Mudiad Cymreig , the Welsh Movement, a society founded in Penarth in January 1924, and the following year, at the National Eisteddfod, threw his lot in with Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru , the National Party of Wales. The aim, Lewis said, was ‘to take away from the Welsh their sense of inferiority … to remove from our beloved country the mark and the shame of conquest’.

Alun Pugh endorsed this manifesto enthusiastically and would often provide legal help to the fledgling party. In 1930, for instance, he sat on a committee of London Welsh with the former Liberal MP John Edwards, which advocated that Plaid should campaign for Wales to be given dominion status within the British empire – treated as if it were equal, free and self-governing like Canada or Australia. Five years later Alun Pugh was again called on to advise whether teachers who took part in the pro-Welsh protests organised by Lewis could face disciplinary action by their employers. There could be, he concluded in July 1935, ‘no martyrdom with safety’. It was a message that was to become increasingly relevant to his own involvement with Plaid.

Those living in Wales able to speak Welsh were in steep decline. Their numbers fell in the decade to 1931 by over 5 per cent, to just 35 per cent of the population. Only 98,000-out of a total population of 2.7 million – used Welsh as their first language at that time. If Plaid successfully but slowly began a reversal in this trend-pressing for the Welsh language to be given more prominence in schools and the new broadcast media – in the political field the party was for many years a failure.

In part this was because it insisted on members breaking all links with existing political parties, including Lloyd George’s Liberals, still dominant in rural Wales, and Labour, now controlling the southern valleys, and with the Westminster Parliament. Hence it had no effective environment in which to operate and gain influence. In part too it was brought about by the extreme political philosophy that Lewis mapped out as Plaid’s president between 1926 and 1939. The Welsh, he argued, echoing other inter-war Utopian schemes like Eric Gill’s distributist guild, had to reject both the capitalism that was destroying the valleys and towns of the south and the socialism offered by the growing Labour Party. Lewis’s own third way-what he called perchentyaeth – dreamt of’distributing property among the mass of the members of the nation’.

The president’s own unpredictable personality also weakened the movement he headed. His decision to become a Catholic in 1932 alienated many in Plaid’s naturally Nonconformist constituency. Yet it was a typically bold Lewis gesture that won Plaid international attention in 1936 and put Alun Pugh’s devotion to the cause to the test. Lewis’s firebomb attack on an RAF training base near Pwllheli on the Lleyn peninsula caused outrage. The ‘bombing school’, as Lewis dubbed it, represented for him British military imperialism in Wales.

For Alun Pugh this was a crucial moment. As a member of the Bar, he could not but deplore breaking the law. Yet as historian Dafydd Glyn Jones has argued, the fire was ‘the first time in five centuries that Wales had struck back at England with a measure of violence … to the Welsh people, who had long ceased to believe that they had it in them, it was a profound shock.’ Such an awakening was what Alun Pugh had been yearning for.

Already before the ‘bombing-school’ episode, the strain between the different elements in Alun Pugh’s life had emerged in his letters to J. E. Jones, a London-based teacher and Plaid’s secretary. ‘The time has come,’ he acknowledged in March 1933, ‘for us to have secret societies to work for Wales – two sorts of societies – one of rich supporters to give advice to us without coming into the open, and the other of more adventurous people willing to destroy English advertisements that are put up by local authorities.’ For all his bravado and implied association with the second group, Alun Pugh’s role was largely confined to the first, as a later letter to Jones in June 1934 testifies when he offers to make a loan to the party.

In the following month he sent some legal advice to Jones but insisted that, if it were used, ‘don’t put my name to it’. In March 1936 he was urging Jones or ‘someone else’ to write a letter to The Times on ‘some other burning issue’, but was obviously unwilling to do so himself. The possibility of compromising his position at the Bar was already exercising his mind. Yet in the same month he told Jones that he was lobbying Lloyd George, through a contact of Kathleen Pugh’s, to give public support to Lewis, who had already embarked on his fire-bombing campaign.

In responding to Lewis’s arrest and trial after the attack on the bombing school, Alun Pugh took a big risk. He gave the defendant legal advice-the case against him and two co-conspirators was transferred from a Welsh court, where the jury could not reach a decision, to the Old Bailey, where the three were sentenced to nine months. ‘Thank you very much,’ wrote J. E. Jones to Alun Pugh in September 1936, ‘for your work in defending the three that burnt the bombing school.’ Alun Pugh clung to the fact that Lewis was advocating violence against public installations, not individuals or private property, but it was a difficult circle to square, his heart ruling his head and potentially posing a threat to his career. His solution was, it seemed, to put different parts of his life into boxes – Wales, the law and, separate from both, his family.

‘As a small child,’ recalls his daughter Ann, ‘I used to be terrified that we would have a knock on the door at three o’clock in the morning and it would be the police coming for my father because he was part of it. There was an attack on a reservoir in the north that supplied Liverpool. The Welsh nationalists were indignant that Welsh water was being piped to England.’