Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times

‘Bronwen found herself in a very strange environment in Fleetwood,’ says her sister Ann. ‘We were known by the locals as southerners because we spoke with a different accent. And we felt foreign. It wasn’t meant cruelly, and because I was older, I had a great time going to the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool. But because Bronwen was younger and my parents were so busy, I think she felt abandoned.’

A greater blow than the physical hardship was the loss of the security that had hitherto surrounded her childhood. During the summer before she went off to school her father took her on a bus trip around the centre of London, pointing out monuments and buildings ‘because they will probably be bombed and this will be your last chance to see them’. The effect of such a message, when combined with being sent off to a boarding school in a strange environment and losing your home, must have been profound. And because Alun Pugh’s income fell dramatically, his youngest daughter suddenly began to notice money. Until the war she had always taken for granted the fact that the family was well-off, able to afford all the things she needed. Now the budget was squeezed, so much so that Ann Pugh had to delay going up to Oxford.

‘I couldn’t imagine there were people who had more than us,’ Bronwen says. ‘Obviously there were – the Astors for instance – but I was totally ignorant of that. Then the war came and there was no money because my father had given up his career and lived on a tiny salary in digs and we had to go and eat where my mother worked – rice puddings and awful food. They were meant for the poor. And we had been dragged down to that. I felt it as a humiliation.’ Her reaction to new hardships emphasises how little she enjoyed or even comprehended the war period. Its privations came at a difficult time in her life. She was too old to be oblivious to the greater threat. Children under ten write of seeing the whole thing as one long adventure. Yet neither was she old enough to get caught up in the war spirit, the comradeship, the sense of doing your bit in a vast community effort. She had all the worry, without enough real insight to put it into any context, and none of the excitement of broadening horizons experienced, for example, by her sister Ann, who was conscripted.

Hitler’s strategy towards Britain was two-fold – to bomb it into submission from the air and to starve it into surrender at sea. Over half of all foodstuffs in the pre-war period had come into the country by ship. If the aerial policy made relatively little impact on Bronwen’s life, the maritime blockade drove her to despair as her empty stomach ached. Rationing was the order of the day: marrow or carrot jam spread on stale bread was sometimes all that was on offer for tea at Dr Williams’.

Sleepy and safe Dolgellau managed to work itself into a fever about the war. In June 1940 the girls from Dr Williams’ took part in an air-raid practice. ‘We had to go down into the basement in single file and in silence from our forms,’ the weekly letter home detailed, ‘and the Head said that we had got to get down in four minutes – the whole school of 300 girls. It was an awfully queer siren.’ Later there were air-raid practices for boarders in the middle of the night. The drills were a sensible precaution though predictably, given the town’s location, it entirely escaped the attention of German bombers. The nearest to a raid was when an American plane crashed several miles to the north.

Sometimes the elaborate preparations for eventualities that were extremely unlikely to befall Dolgellau left Bronwen and her contemporaries fearful but bemused. In October 1942 they all went to Sunday morning service wearing their gas masks. ‘What a sight we looked,’ twelve-year-old Bronwen reported home. ‘I wish I’d got a proper gas-mask case because I’ve still got that cardboard thing and it’s all come to pieces. You see it’s all very muddling, but I’m sure G[wyneth] will explain better than me about this gas attack. There are some people who are attacking some other people somewhere and some girl guides are running messages to somewhere from somewhere.’

As the war passed Dolgellau by, the pupils of Dr Williams’ were determined to do their bit, even if they had no clear idea of what war entailed, but their active service stretched no further than evenings of knitting scarves for ‘our lads’ in the army or watching Ministry of Information films about how to disarm a German. There were collections of spare toys for ‘bombed-out children’. When Bronwen played Nerissa in a school production of The Merchant of Venice, the townsfolk were given a rare invitation over to Dr Williams’, with their ticket money raising £5 for the RAF Benevolent Fund. Town and gown for once had common purpose.

The war did change Dolgellau’s landscape. Various schools were evacuated out there and a group of children from Birkenhead, a target for the bombers because its port worked hand in hand with neighbouring Liverpool, took up residence nearby. And there were American soldiers stationed in the area who paid particular attention to the teenage girls on their doorstep. In March 1943 Bronwen, showing the first signs of impending womanhood, wrote excitedly of one of the older girls at the school being greeted by a chorus of wolf-whisdes when a military truck overtook her on her bicycle.

North-west Wales was also considered a safe place to detain prisoners of war – far away from the continental coastline and any hopes of escape or liberation. In September of the same year Bronwen recorded an encounter with the enemy while on a school walking trip at nearby Bala Lake. Her oddly neutral tones reveal a lingering bemusement about the issues at stake in the war:

We saw a very nice-looking Italian prisoner, who was working in one of the fields. By the way we see tons of them round here. Anyway down we got and went to talk to this prisoner. We talked in very bad French, and he seemed to understand. Anyhow he answered. He had been captured in Tunisia and he liked Mussolini and Hitler, but hated Churchill. He was a fascist. He didn’t like Wales. He said in a very strong Italian accent ‘Wales, rain, rain, rain, but Italy sun, sun, sun!’

The mixture of childish mantras and glimpses of the conflict in the adult world is revealing. More wholeheartedly positive was her response to a British war hero and family friend who dropped in to take her to tea on his way to Barmouth. Major-General Sir Francis Tuker, a senior figure in the Gurkhas, had been at school with Alun Pugh and had visited the family home on several occasions. Thirteen-year-old Bronwen had developed something of a schoolgirl crush on him, which he played along with by calling on her at Dr Williams’ in 1943. ‘He came in a small army van, raised awfully high from the ground by big wheels,’ she told her parents. ‘There were three soldiers in the car with him, one driving.’ The link endured. In February 1946, towards the end of her time at Dr Williams’, he answered one of her letters. ‘He didn’t actually say much,’ she reported, ‘except that he would be stuck in Calcutta through the summer and that it was already “beastly hot”.’

Dr Williams’ itself certainly got caught up in the national mood of patriotism and swept Bronwen along. She described an armistice service in a letter home in November 1943. She was one of a number of guides there, but the head had refused to allow them to carry the Union Jack. ‘Everybody,’ Bronwen raged, ‘thinks it is disgusting. Not having a Union Jack on Armistice Sunday because “it isn’t done”, goodness. We all feel jolly hot about it.’

However, for Bronwen, the privations of a wartime childhood greatly outweighed any excitement. Her biggest problem was the absence of food. ‘For me the war was one long hell,’ she says. ‘It got worse and worse and worse because the food ran out, the clothes ran out, there were shortages of everything, then rationing. I was always hungry. I felt I never had enough to eat.’ And even when plates were full, it was ‘lucky dip’ or its equivalent that was on offer. ‘Dinner,’ she wrote to her parents in November 1940, ‘consisted of soup with bits of raw celery floating around and huge chunks of carrots also floating around like corks, then a pudding something like a terrible bright yellow blanc-mange with a few prunes also floating round, then two mingy little biscuits.’ The hunger pangs were so extreme at times that she felt moved to steal food from the school dining room. The headteacher caught her with her hand in the biscuit tin and stopped her sweet ration for a fortnight.

Hitler’s maritime cordon quickly affected the nation’s eating habits. Churchill’s Food Minister, Fred Marquis, later Lord Woolton, was by Christmas 1940 advocating a wholesale change in diet to meet the new circumstances. ‘It is the duty of all grown-up people to do with less milk this winter,’ he advised through the columns of the Daily Express, ‘so that children and nursing mothers can be sure of getting as much as they need. Oatmeal, one of the finest foods for giving warmth and energy, is a “must” for growing children.’ With a blithe ignorance of the eating likes and dislikes of youngsters, he continued, ‘they will probably like it as oatcakes. Encourage your children to eat baked potatoes, jacket and all. Carrots are an important protective food. Most children love carrot,’ he suggested hopefully, ‘when it has been washed, lightly scraped and grated raw into a salad or a sandwich.’

Children were encouraged to abandon their sweet tooth in favour of carrots by the example of night fighter ace, ‘Cat’s Eye’ Cunningham. His ability to dodge German anti-aircraft guns and repel the Luftwaffe’s 1940 blitz on London was put down in official propaganda to a rabbit-like love of carrots, which enabled him to see in the dark.

A taste for salad, Woolton ordered, must be inculcated at once. ‘Salads and vegetables are what [your child] needs almost more than anything else, so teach him to like them as early as you can. You will find that many children, when they can’t cope with a plateful of green salad, will enjoy it when it’s well chopped up between slices of wholemeal bread.’

With even adult rations pegged to tiny quantities – three ounces of bacon per week, two of cheese, two of tea, eight of sugar and four of chocolate and sweets – a spot of recycling was required, Woolton advised, to fill empty young tummies. Apple cores, his department proposed, could be turned into ‘delicious and very health-giving drinks’ by boiling them in water.

In this regime of bitter tastes and recycled waste, the chocolate that Bronwen and many other children craved became a rare treat. ‘For the duration of the war,’ the head of Dr Williams’ informed parents, ‘fruit and chocolate may be sent to individual girls but they must be handed in to the matron who will keep them and distribute them at the proper time. The school does still have regular, though limited, supplies of chocolate which the girls can buy, but no girl who has sweets or chocolate of her own may also buy school chocolate.’ When the pooled resources were shared out on high days and holidays, Bronwen’s joy knew no bounds. ‘It’s Freda’s birthday today,’ she wrote in February 1945. ‘We are all looking forward to this afternoon as she is having a DOUBLE birthday table with Maureen Oates. Yum, yum! We are going to stuff and stuff and stuff!!’

Sometimes she ended up caught between her patriotic duty and her rumbling stomach. In December of the same year she told her parents: ‘the head-girl of the Mount School, York, has written a letter to the head-girl of every other boarding school to ask if anybody would give up their 4 ounces of extra Christmas chocolate to send overseas to France etc. I think it is an excellent idea and everyone here who has got some is sending it.’ Goodness carries its own reward, but the following month her sacrifice of chocolate was repaid. ‘Have you had any bananas at home yet?’ she enquired in January 1946. ‘Some kids have brought a few back with them and so I have tasted them once again. It was a thrilling moment.’

If the food shortages got worse before they got better, there was some relief at the end of 1941, when the Pughs returned to London from Fleetwood. ‘What marvellous news,’ Bronwen wrote. ‘I jolly well hope that the war will be over by the Easter hols so that we can go to London.’ It wasn’t, of course, but at least holidays were once more in a familiar location, though the house in Pilgrims Lane now also provided shelter for refugees, who gave the increasingly adult Bronwen some idea of the realities of the war on the continent. ‘I remember in particular one Jewish woman, a Miss Seligman. She spent all her time in tears. And there were two Dutch refugees. They had survived on a diet of tulip bulbs.’

The return to London also brought her face to face with what war was about. ‘Later there were doodlebugs and it was horrendous. You would go up the High Street and these things would come flying over and you would be petrified. You would wait for the engines to cut out and just hope that they had passed you by. Everyone was so exhausted and bad-tempered that they got angry with you all the time.’ Hampstead is on a hill and from her bedroom window she would watch the East End of London being bombed – just the destruction that her father had predicted in 1939.

The contrast between north-west Wales, where war was experienced at second hand, and Hampstead was huge. It was as if Bronwen was dipping in and out of the conflict, almost an adult in London but still a child in the safety of Dr Williams’. She was back in Dolgellau for VE Day, 8 May 1945. The school worked itself up into a state of great excitement, with the head deciding on a special treat-two extra days’ holiday. ‘Isn’t that marvellous,’ she wrote home girlishly, adding with a note of regret, ‘anyone who can get home and back in a day is allowed. For the rest of us, she is going to try to provide something special, which will of course include the flicks.’ In the event, there was also a one-off trip to the circus.

Already by 1944 some aspects of life had begun to return to normal. Alun Pugh was appointed a county court judge of Norfolk in May. He was to prove popular with the barristers who appeared before him, a benign man with firm principles and old-fashioned values when it came to domestic disputes. In the Inns of Court they even put together a short verse to celebrate him:

Love, said His Honour Judge Pugh,

Should act on a couple like glue.

Making birds of a feather

Stay flocking together

Just as they do in the zoo.

If it restored the family’s material prosperity to pre-war standards, it did mean once again leaving the house in Pilgrims Lane so soon after returning to it. The Pughs kept it on, but made Norwich their main base. Bronwen was, however, full of delight. ‘Hurray! Congratulations! I haven’t seen it in the papers yet. We haven’t had The Times, only the Daily Telegraph, and I can’t find it in there. Anyway practically all the school knows and it was the topic of conversation wherever I went.’

In June 1945 she passed her basic school certificate – the equivalent of current GCSEs. Like her sisters before her, she stayed on at Dr Williams’ to study for her higher certificate – A levels – but her patience with constantly trailing in the wake of Ann and Gwyneth had reached breaking point. Like many younger children – particularly when their older siblings are of the same sex – she had long felt eclipsed. At Dr Williams’ was born her lifelong determination to chart her own course – if possible in the opposite direction to that chosen by Ann and Gwyneth. This meant that some of her natural abilities – in academic work, for instance – were cast aside, or at least marginalised, since they were shared strengths with her sisters, in favour of talents that she considered unique to her, notably her delight in performing.

Having passed her school certificate, she found herself at what, with hindsight, can be seen as a crossroads in her life, for much of what she did subsequently flowed naturally from her decision to reject the path already well-trodden by her sisters and enthusiastically advocated by her parents. ‘I think,’ she recalls, ‘they had in mind that I would go to Oxford and become a teacher. My father told me I would make a good headmistress.’

By 1947, however, she had set her heart firmly and finally against going up to Oxford. The additional term it would entail to prepare for the Oxbridge examination was not the real problem. She stayed on after her highers anyway because she was still a year younger than most of her class. In that extra year she was appointed head girl. It was meant to be for a whole year and, having said no to Oxbridge, she set about learning French and Latin but she became increasingly unhappy as her relationship with Miss Lickes broke down. The head-teacher, who had succeeded Miss Orford in September 1945, was obsessed with stamping out overly intimate friendships between girls and ordered Bronwen to devise a quasi-military campaign to achieve this end. Her head girl realised that it was a pointless exercise, doomed to failure, and that many of these illicit passions were in any case quite harmless. It was taking a sledge hammer to crack a nut.

Headteacher and head girl clashed again when Miss Lickes insisted that Bronwen sleep in the main school. All previous head girls had been allowed to sleep in the separate and more relaxed house on the hillside above Dr Williams’ with their fellow sixth formers and younger members of staff. Bronwen was outraged and lonely. After just two terms, she left.

‘If I don’t get Higher,’ she had written in January 1946, ‘and I don’t honestly see how I possibly can, with two languages at which I’m no good, I don’t think it’s much use going to Oxford because even if I got in, I would most probably be sent down or something awful.’ There is an obvious lack of self-confidence – especially since she later passed all the exams she predicted she would fail – but her reasoning was more complex. ‘It was probably a mistake,’ she now acknowledges, and she often mentions her lack of formal academic qualifications. ‘But I was so fed up with always being compared with my sisters. Although I did in the end get my Latin matric and I could have got a place, I decided to go to drama school instead.’

Towards the end of her school career Bronwen came under the influence of Margaret Braund, a young drama teacher who had just qualified from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. ‘She was a very gawky schoolgirl,’ Braund remembers, ‘very tall, quite uncoordinated and really not very attractive. She used to stoop to try and compensate for being so tall, she had pigtails, wore glasses and had a slight cast in her eye.’

Bronwen had done a great deal of singing at school, and had played Little Buttercup in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, but she had never thought seriously about drama as a career. After a while Braund realised that there was something about this awkward adolescent girl and decided to give her a chance by casting her as the lead in a school production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. ‘The rest of the staff all said I was mad, that she would make a fool of herself, but slowly she became less inhibited, began to move more easily and – although I only realised this later when she became more religious – brought out the spiritual side of Joan very well.’ Saint Joan was Bronwen’s proudest moment at Dr Williams’. It made her consider drama as a career. ‘I think before I arrived,’ says Margaret Braund, ‘that she had nurtured some ambitions to be a singer. She had this rather romantic idea of being a great opera diva, but her voice had been strained in one of the school musicals and that had taken away her confidence. And then along came acting and her success in Saint Joan and it made such a difference to her that I suggested she apply to Central.’

To Alun Pugh his youngest daughter’s new-found delight in acting was of secondary importance. ‘He came to see me in Saint Joan and when I asked him afterwards what he had thought of it and my performance, he told me that he was prouder of the speech I’d made as head girl at prize day.’ Yet despite his disappointment, and after talking to Margaret Braund, he gave way and agreed to pay her fees at Central if she got a place. At least she would be living back in the family home at Hampstead, where he could keep a watchful eye on her potential student excesses; his career had now moved on with his appointment in 1947 to Marylebone County Court. Having brought up his daughters to be independent and strong-minded, it would have been inappropriate and out of character now to try and force Bronwen’s hand.

It was not that, at this stage, she had a burning ambition to tread the boards, or emulate the film stars she had glimpsed during her occasional trips to Dolgellau’s tiny cinema. She had no strong vision of a career or what she wanted to do with her life. Her strongest motivation was largely negative – to break the mould of the trinity of Pugh sisters by doing something entirely different. And perhaps those feelings of not being the longed-for son – overlaid by the strains of a wartime childhood – had made her, in a more positive way, determined to strike out on her own. Her parents, after all, had responded to growing up during the First World War with a similar resolution to overturn conventions.

She had no blueprint, just an unbending conviction that she wanted to be left to her own devices. Planning has never been one of her strengths. subsequently she has come to recognise, in the various life-changing decisions that she made as if on a whim, the influence of what might be called a guiding spirit or guardian angel. She may not have seen it at the time, but she is sure with hindsight that it was there.

Formal religion had played little role in her life at Dr Williams’. In July 1940, when the whole school caught a bad bout of flu, she was writing, ‘we are all in quarantine. Three cheers there is no church tomorrow.’ As she grew towards adulthood, she rejected the conventional practice of Christianity. Yet separate from, and indeed unconnected to, church-going and the God who presided over lifeless recitals of prayer and hymns, there were, she recalls, glimpses of a spiritual dimension, removed from routine attendance in the pews.

After her first brush with something ‘other’ at a seven-year-old’s birthday party, she continued in her school years occasionally to have experiences for which she could find no rational explanation. ‘As a teenager, I was having these extraordinary experiences of nature. I’d be on a walk with my school friends and quite suddenly there was no one there. It is like an explosion. And it left me with this wonderful feeling of being at one with everything. You’re not looking at the sunset, you’re part of it. Something clears in your mind and you understand something of the reality of nature.’ Had she then consulted the literature of Christian mysticism, she would have found parallel accounts of an overwhelming sense of oneness with the natural world and divined a clue as to what she herself in a small way was experiencing. Yet there was no one who could point her in the right direction and such exotic and generally Catholic spiritual raptures had no place in the conventionally Protestant and pointedly practical world of Dr Williams’. ‘I tried making a remark about it, wondering if the others I was with felt the same things, but no one said anything. Up to then I’d assumed everyone was the same. When I realised they weren’t, I felt very isolated.’

In July 1945 fifteen-year-old Bronwen Pugh went with a group of girl guides from Dr Williams’ to spend a week camping at Maidenhead next to the Thames in Berkshire. A mile or so up river at Cliveden, a wedding had just been celebrated. William Waldorf Astor, the thirty-eight-year-old eldest son and heir of the second Viscount Astor and his formidable MP wife Nancy, had married the Honourable Sarah Norton, twelve years his junior, daughter of the sixth Baron Grantley and a descendant of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. While the girl guides cooked beans over a camp fire and got up to schoolgirl pranks, ‘Bill’ Astor was away in the States introducing his new bride to his wealthy American relatives before returning to set up home near Oxford and pursue his own political career.