Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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Morris Eight – and later to move out into her own flat, a radical departure in the early 1950s for a young, attractive, unmarried woman of her class. Usually flying the nest only took place when the parental home was being exchanged for the marital one, but the Pughs, anxious as ever that their daughters should be independent, raised no objections. Bronwen may not have moved in the same world or same league as her contemporaries among the blue-blooded debutantes who were still being presented at court, but she led a cushioned, privileged and in many senses thoroughly modern life.
For her student days and beyond, though, Pilgrims Lane remained home. She would take the tube in each morning and return every evening. Relations with her mother, never close, became at least more relaxed. Kathleen Pugh had been appointed a magistrate on the local bench. Whatever frustrations she had felt in the pre-war years at her own lack of a career were thereby assuaged and she began to resent her youngest daughter a little less. Gwyneth, working as a journalist for a farming magazine after completing her degree at Oxford, continued to be close to Bronwen, but after a short career as a sub-editor, in 1949 Ann married Reginald Hibbert, her boyfriend from Oxford, and followed this bright, high-flying diplomat overseas on a Foreign Office career that culminated in his appointment as British ambassador in Paris in 1979 and a knighthood. constantly abroad, Ann was largely absent from her younger sister’s life in the decades ahead.
In 1950, when Bronwen was just twenty, tragedy struck when David Pugh died of cancer at the age of thirty-three. He had served in the ranks in Germany during the war, but as ever his record had disappointed his parents, who would have liked to see him an officer. His marriage – to a Welsh girl on St David’s Day 1943 – should have pleased his father. It was by all accounts a happy union, but again the Pughs harboured reservations, suspecting that Marion Pugh was chasing what she supposed to be her in-laws’ wealth. After his demobilisation, David Pugh was dogged by ill-health and in 1949 cancer was diagnosed in his groin. Further tests revealed that it had already spread all around his body and within a couple of months he was dead. ‘It shattered my parents,’ says Bronwen. ‘He had never been the son they wanted. He had an unusual mind. He had perfect recall, could remember telephone numbers, facts and figures, but he could never pass exams. He was weak, sickly and highly strung. When he died there was such remorse, especially when they realised the reasons for his illness.’
A post-mortem revealed that David Pugh had a small foetus inside his ribs. During her pregnancy Kathleen Pugh, doctors suggested, had originally been carrying twins, but the fertilised ovum had not divided into two as it usually does. Instead David had absorbed his twin. It is a very rare, but recognised medical condition, though usually it is discovered soon after the surviving twin is born.* The Pughs believed that it could have explained David’s ill-health and physical weakness. It also cast an interesting psychological light on his insistence, even into his late teens, on having a place set at table for his imaginary friend ‘Fern’.
For Alun and Kathleen Pugh, the tragedy of their son’s premature death left a lasting scar. Ann Hibbert remains convinced that the grief her mother felt damaged her health and eventually contributed to the stroke she suffered many years later. For Bronwen, though, David’s death, while regretted and mourned, was something she could recover from. The age difference between them had meant that the two had never been close. However, the loss of her brother may have had one lasting effect on her life. Alun Pugh had made no secret of his ambitions for his children. His son had not satisfied him. His eldest daughter had chosen marriage and a supporting role over a career of her own. Gwyneth was happy taking a back seat. Bronwen’s natural ambition-apparent but carefully reined in as she went to Central – may have been sparked by the desire, in some way, to make good her beloved father’s disappointment.
Bronwen soon fell in with a crowd at Central. She made up a foursome with fellow students Diana de Wilton, Erica Pickard and Joan Murray. They were an oddly symmetrical quartet – two tall, two short, two fair, two dark. While they all came from middle-class backgrounds and shared a similar sense of humour and a youthful determination to be frivolous whatever the gloomy national outlook, the four had contrasting but complementary characters. Diana de Wilton was a reserved, unconfident, convent-educated Irish Catholic from Tunbridge Wells, brought up by adoptive parents, while Joan Murray, small, witty and outgoing, had a Scottish father and French Jewish mother. It was Erica Pickard, however, who was the pivot of the group. The other three all regarded her as their special friend. Bronwen Pugh, even as a student, still lived in the shadow of others – her sisters, the glamorous Virginia McKenna and, within her own circle, Erica.
In Erica – as with Joan Tuker – Bronwen was again drawn to the third of three daughters, though this time there was no hint of romance in their friendship. And like Bronwen, Erica was trying to break the family mould. Her two elder sisters had become doctors. She was determined not to follow in their footsteps. There was, friends remember, something compelling and unusual about Erica. For a start, her family lived in Geneva, where her father taught at the university. She had spent the war years in America and that experience also contributed to her standing out from her peers.
‘She arrived with this American preppy look,’ Diana de Wilton remembers, ‘skirts and jumpers and blouses with little collars. We were all still in twin set and pearls, though under Erica’s influence we soon changed. And she was freer in thought, much more adult. I’d been to a convent where there was no freedom of thought, but Erica would take me to Quaker meetings “to broaden my mind”. I used to worry that I was committing a sin.’ Erica also had a more mature attitude to men than her three friends – all of them straight out of protective all-girl schools. ‘She was freer in her thoughts about boys and sex and those things,’ says Diana de Wilton. ‘Not that any of us were in any way experienced, but she was just less buttoned up. We tried to follow her lead.’ While the other three all lived at home, Erica enjoyed the freedom of her own flat in Golders Green, shared with one of her sisters.
All four – with the possible exception of Erica Pickard – were naive and unworldly in their dealings with men. For Bronwen there would be great romantic crushes that faded before the man in question even realised she was interested. If he then made a move, she would already have passed on to another equally unrequited passion. Men, in general, were regarded as desirable but optional and often little more than a subject of amusement. Alun Pugh’s efforts to introduce his daughter to eminently suitable but sensible young barristers across the dining table at Pilgrims Lane therefore failed to move her. ‘They would always be saying, “Well, what about so-and-so, there’s nothing wrong with him?” One of their candidates became known to us all as “poor Smith” because he was always wanting to take me out and I wasn’t interested. It wasn’t that I didn’t want romance, but I had no wish for anything serious, let alone thoughts of marriage.’
Despite being a young eighteen in many ways, she had a clear and unfashionable view that life had to be about more than marriage and settling down. ‘We had men friends, but they were never intense partnerships at all. We’d often swap boyfriends between the four of us. And then we’d drop them really just because we felt like it. It was all very innocent and casual. We were far too inhibited for it to be anything more serious. There was no pill so you didn’t have sex. Nice girls like us didn’t do it for fear of what might happen. If you did then it would be the person you intended marrying and I wasn’t thinking about marriage at all.’ Only later did her father tell her that she had left a trail of broken hearts in the Inns of Court.
Outside hours, the four young women would head off to the coffee bars and salad counters that were just starting to open up in the capital. There they would bury their heads in fashion magazines, planning what dizzy dress-making heights they would aspire to over the weekend with whatever they could get on coupons, though Bronwen now recalls that she invariably looked tatty. In the evenings they frequented the West End theatres – half a crown in the gods and then a long walk home. Laurence Olivier was a particular favourite of all four, while the link with Christopher Fry through Central got them into the first night of his celebrated verse play Ring Round the Moon at the Globe in 1950.
Otherwise there were parties, though Bronwen was twenty before she stayed out all night – at a sleepover at Joan Murray’s. ‘My parents were never strict, but