Peter Stanford - Bronwen Astor - Her Life and Times

Alun Pugh’s relationship with Lewis underwent further strains with the coming of the Second World War. Lewis’s insistence that it was an English war and nothing to do with the Welsh offended Alun Pugh’s sense of patriotism and ran counter to his own determination to contribute as fully as his injury allowed to the war effort. The detachment of Alun Pugh from active involvement in the Welsh cause gathered pace in the post-war years: his appointment as a judge reduced his freedom for manoeuvre and also crucially provided him with an alternative source for self-definition to his Welsh roots. Yet a link endured through Lewis’s two decades in the wilderness following his defeat by a Welsh-speaking Liberal in a by-election for the only Welsh university seat in 1943, subsequent splits in Plaid about tactics, and on to the great nationalist and Welsh language surge of the 1960s.

However, in the early days there was a strong contrast between Alun Pugh’s middle-class enthusiasm in London and the custom, in many primary schools in the valleys in the 1920s and 1930s, of placing the ‘Welsh knot’ – a rope equivalent of the dunce’s hat – over the head of any child caught speaking Welsh. Practical as many of Alun Pugh’s concerns were for Wales, they were tinged with idealism. He could afford his principles and time off to attend Plaid’s most successful innovation of the period – summer schools. Others, at a time of record unemployment, could not.

The reality of events on the ground is demonstrated by the fate of Ty Newydd (New Cottage), the house in Llanon where Alun Pugh’s mother had grown up with her aunt and uncle. It was bequeathed to him some time after the First World War and later he in turn gave it to Plaid Cymru on condition that it was used only by Welsh-speakers to further the cause. Within a short period of time it was being used, according to Ann, by ‘all and sundry’. The fact that he gave a valuable property to the cause – and not to his family – is evidence, she feels, of the extent to which he could separate his obligations to one or the other in his head and discard the conventional route of leaving such an asset to his children. Yet there were deep ambiguities in Alun Pugh’s attitude: he insisted that a plaque commemorating his son David, who had by that time died, had to be erected in the house before it could be handed over to Plaid.

If he placed each of his responsibilities into separate categories, Alun Pugh never failed to convey the importance of their Welsh roots to his children. ‘We were always very conscious that we were different from most people,’ Bronwen recalls. ‘Primarily it was because we were Welsh, but other things led from that. We were taught to be classless, apart from the class system, and our parents encouraged us to look at things differently. The general atmosphere in our family was not rebellion but revolution. It’s a subtle difference. Outwardly you conform, but all the time you are doing things and thinking things in a different way from others.’ When later she found herself in the class-ridden world of Cliveden, this alternative side of her upbringing gave her the resilience to withstand those who would judge her on the basis of her parents’ income and social standing.

At home Alun Pugh’s conversation over breakfast every morning was always in Welsh. The children became adept at remembering the right word for bread or butter or milk. Sunday worship would often be in the Welsh chapel, though later the Pugh became more solidly and conventionally Church of England. And when it came to schooling, Alun Pugh decided – despite his wife’s reluctance – to send their daughters to boarding school in Wales.

The Pugh children fell into two distinct duos, based on age and emphasised by their names, one pair solidly English, the other ringingly Welsh. David and Ann, thirteen and ten respectively when Bronwen was born, formed one unit, while their new sister and five-year-old Gwyneth were another. In 1926, with the help of Kathleen’s parents, the Pughs had purchased an empty plot of land in Pilgrims Lane two streets away in Hampstead and built a larger house. Number 12 still stands to this day, a suburban version of a gabled country house in Sussex vernacular style, with leaded windows and a formal garden sweeping round the house and down the hill towards the Heath.

Alun and Kathleen Pugh had intended to have no more than three children. Bronwen was not planned. Her parents decided the baby was going to be a boy. They even chose a name – Roderick. Two girls, two boys would have made for a neat symmetry, but there was a more particular reason. David, already away at boarding school, was proving a sickly child, undistinguished in his academic work, poor in exams, unable to participate in sport, underdeveloped physically, mentally and emotionally. At the age of sixteen, Bronwen recalls, he was still insisting that a place be set at the dining table for his imaginary friend, Fern. The contrast with Ann, three years his junior and a robust, practical, natural achiever, could not have been greater. Even if it had not been their original intention, circumstances meant that the Pughs, unusually for the time, made no distinction between their treatment of their son and his sisters. All three girls were encouraged to be independent and to think about careers.

Janet Bronwen Alun was born on 6 June 1930, delivered by caesarean by the family GP in the Catholic hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in London’s St John’s Wood. Her early years were dominated by Frederic Truby King, the New Zealand-born Dr Spock of the 1920s and 30s. Kathleen Pugh followed the methods he advocated in books like The Feeding and Care of Your Baby. Baby Bronwen was on a strict regime of four-hourly feeds, with nothing in between. Picking up the child and cuddling it was not recommended by Truby King in case it encouraged spoiling or over-attachment. ‘A Truby King baby,’ the master wrote of his own methods, ‘has as much fresh air and sunshine as possible. The mother of such a baby is not overworked or worried, simply because she knows that by following the laws of nature, combined with common sense, baby will not do otherwise than thrive.’

Kathleen Pugh was certainly not overworked since the bulk of practical child care fell on the family’s nanny. In spite of their progressive ideas, the Pughs – in line with the middle-class norms of the age – maintained a full complement of domestic help: a maid, a nursery nanny, a cleaner and a part-time gardener. When Bronwen was three, Bella Wells was taken on to look after her, leaving Kathleen Pugh free for most of the day.

Bronwen was not, her sister Ann recalls, a particularly attractive child. ‘She was all eyes, teeth and pigtails. When she was about four, she went off on her bicycle with my mother and when they came back my mother was very upset. Bronwen had had a bad fall. She had managed to pull the muscle at the side of her eye. It left her with a squint which later had to be corrected by surgery, but she still wore glasses.’ There were as yet few signs of her future career on the catwalks. She had to wear a patch over one lens of her glasses to strengthen her eye muscles and later she wore braces to pull her protruding teeth back into line.

She was also, Ann remembers, infuriating. ‘She was always very lively. She’d hide behind the door in the dining room and then when you went in for lunch leap out and say boo! Or else she’d be crawling under the table tickling your feet. She was always on the move, dressing up, play-acting, getting over-excited.’ Bella Wells’s memory is of a very determined three-year-old. ‘On the first day I arrived I took her out in her pram and she just kept saying, “Now can I get out? Now can I get out?” She wanted things her own way.’ One of Bronwen’s greatest delights as a small child was to watch the fire engines going down Hampstead High Street, bells ringing and lights flashing. Her earliest ambition was to be a fireman. It appealed to the theatrical side of her nature. ‘There was the drama of it all, I suppose, and that thing of rescuing people. It must always have been a part of my psyche.’