Chapter Three

      It is vital to realise that we have come through difficult years and to get through them will require no less effort, no less unselfishness and no less work than was needed to bring us through the war.

      Clement Attlee, broadcast (1945)

      The Central School of Speech and Drama boasted an impressive London address – the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences on Kensington Gore. This circular, red-brick and terracotta landmark, with a capacity of 10,000, had since its opening in 1871 doubled as a giant concert hall and a conference centre. This dual purpose suited Central well, for the school not only had use of various conference rooms and a mini-theatre back stage but also had access to the main auditorium at various times during the day.

      As a stage from which to learn voice projection, the vast arena was unparalleled. It was also, past pupils recall, a baptism of fire. The infamous Albert Hall echo thwarted many of their best efforts and was only cured much later in 1968, when the decorated calico ceiling was replaced by the giant suspended mushroom diffusers that still hover incongruously over the auditorium today.

      Most of Central’s stage work, however, took place in a small theatre housed above one of the four great porticos that lead into the Albert Hall. There were other movement rooms and a lecture theatre, with the school’s canteen and additional teaching rooms housed down the road on Kensington High Street. Being part of the life of the Albert Hall had many fringe benefits for the students, not the least of which was the chance, outside hours (and occasionally, playing truant, when they should have been in lectures), to relax in the stalls and watch and learn as a procession of musical and theatrical stars rehearsed for their evening performances. When the habit became too popular and threatened to interrupt lessons, the principal, Gwynneth Thurburn, would send a note to the absentees in the stalls, telling them that any classes skipped would have to be made up out of hours. It usually prompted an exodus, for Miss Thurburn’s word went unchallenged at Central.

      She had taken over in 1942 from the founder, Elsie Fogerty, and it was her dynamism during her long reign until 1967 which transformed Central into an internationally renowned drama school and ultimately saw it move away in 1957 from the Royal Albert Hall to bespoke premises in the old Embassy Theatre at Swiss Cottage. Admittance was by interview and audition with ‘Thurby’, as she was known to staff and pupils. She could appear very stern, recalls Margaret Braund, Bronwen’s drama teacher at Dr Williams’, a graduate of Central and later a tutor there, ‘but she was also very kind, very understanding and knew in a minute what students were or weren’t capable of achieving.’ As well as a stage course, Central also offered three-year diploma courses for speech and drama teachers and for speech therapists. Thurburn believed all three to be of equal merit. ‘There is something,’ she once wrote, ‘uniting everybody in this school – actors, teachers, speech therapists. For me it certainly is the voice, being the centre of all communication.’

      Though the recommendation from Miss Braund may have helped Bronwen in her interview, she would not have got in unless Gwynneth Thurburn had spotted some talent in her. With hindsight, Margaret Braund believes it may have been Bronwen’s voice. ‘Her voice had a very pleasing quality, and it was very flexible. She had grown quickly into a good actress but it is her voice that stands out in my memory.’ All three courses at Central were officially on a par, but it was the actors’ diploma which carried most glamour. The eighteen-year-old Bronwen Pugh nursed ambitions to be on the stage, but she applied instead for the teachers’ course.

      Part of it was a lack of confidence. She may have shone in the small pond of Dr Williams’ school productions, but was unsure how her credits from rural Wales would fare when placed alongside a string of leading roles in cosmopolitan youth theatres. Though physically now an adult, there was still a legacy of immaturity from her sheltered school years and her treatment as the baby of the family. And there was also a vulnerability about her that at this stage of her life was linked to that immaturity, but which remained ever after, even when she had learnt about the world in sometimes the cruellest ways. Fear of rejection, of being among people who do not want her there, has been one of the strong emotions in her life, a practical weakness set against and sometimes curtailing another of her enduring qualities, her willingness to strike out on bold, unexpected and often criticised paths with an unshakeable belief that she is somehow being guided from above on a predetermined spiritual journey.

      Many of her rivals for one of the coveted places on the Central actors’ course, she believed, would have been living and breathing the dream of treading the boards from the cradle, while she had come late and not entirely wholeheartedly to the idea. It was for her less a vocation, more a cross between an alternative to Oxford, something to do, a gesture of defiance and a way to be different from her sisters. Moreover, she lacked the firm parental support that might have given her, at an impressionable age, the confidence to opt for acting. Alun Pugh, whom she looked up to above all others, who taught her that if you do anything you must be the best at it, may have agreed to pay the two pounds, six shillings per term, but there was little of the instinctive sympathy for his daughter’s choice that would have greeted a decision to apply to Oxford. He had his youngest daughter down to succeed as a headmistress, so the teachers’ course was at least a compromise between her option and his.

      There was a further complicating factor – one that was to haunt Bronwen throughout her professional life. The Goodyear genes made for tall women and all the Pugh girls were giants. Gwyneth was just over six foot, her mother and two sisters just under. So Bronwen was deemed by the standards of the day too tall to be a successful actress. Even in later, more tolerant times tall actresses like Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver have struggled to find female leads (she was sidelined into science fiction), but back in the 1940s anyone over five foot six faced a bleak future. Leading men had to gaze masculinely down on their petite feminine charges – women like Celia Johnson, Olivia de Havilland and Audrey Hepburn. Actresses approaching six foot would find it impossible to persuade casting directors of their merits. Of Bronwen’s generation, only the well-connected and extraordinarily talented Vanessa Redgrave – for whom she was once mistaken while on a plane – became a star despite her height.

      And the slight cast in her eye, corrected by surgery in childhood but set to return at various stages of her life, also counted against her in the theatrical world of the 1940s and 1950s. Though today actresses like Imogen Stubbs have won acclaim despite having a squint, four decades ago it was considered an insurmountable obstacle to success on the stage.

      Bronwen was unusually realistic for an eighteen-year-old about her own talent – or lack of it. It was as if simply being at Central – rather than Oxford – was enough for her. ‘I think that great actresses succeed because they can let go of themselves and become totally someone else. I think that even at that stage I knew myself well enough to know that I couldn’t do that. Obviously later there was an element of letting go in being a model girl, but then it was not about taking on another character. It was simply letting go. I could go half the way, but I was too self-conscious to be an actress.’

      Perhaps the final deciding factor was the encouragement of her mentor, Margaret Braund, who was also pushing her towards the