Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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accounted for just 50 per cent of their bloodline since their mother, Kathleen Goodyear, was solidly English. And even their father Alun – after whom, in a spirit which now seems oddly egotistical, Janet Bronwen Alun, her two elder sisters Eleanor Ann Alun and Gwyneth Mary Alun, and her brother David Goodyear Alun were all named – had been raised in Brighton, studied in Oxford and worked in London.
For the early and middle sections of his career as a barrister Alun Pugh, who had two native Welsh parents, defined himself as Welsh. Since this period coincided with the time of his most influential and hands-on involvement with his children, he passed this self-image on whole and undigested to them and it remains with his two surviving daughters to this day. Only towards the end of his working life, when his increasingly successful career as a judge offered an alternative means of defining himself, did his enthusiasm for all things Welsh mellow.
So when his youngest daughter was seven, Alun Pugh placed her on a stool and invited her to choose between her first two Christian names. Did she want to be called Janet, to the ear more English, though it was in fact chosen to mark a Welsh godmother, or the more unusual, Celtic Bronwen? Given her father’s predilection, her decision was inevitable. ‘I got the impression,’ recalls the family’s nanny, Bella Wells, ‘that Mrs Pugh wasn’t that happy about it, but Mr Pugh was delighted. She was always Bronwen after that.’
Though her formal links with Wales have since childhood been few and far between, Bronwen Pugh in her days at the BBC and later on the Paris catwalks was habitually referred to as the ‘Welsh presenter’, ‘Welsh beauty’ or ‘Welsh model girl’, as if she returned every evening to a mining cottage in the valleys. And outside perceptions reflected both what she had learnt as a child and, more significantly, since the two became inseparable, what she felt in her heart – that her Welsh roots had shaped her personality. ‘It’s made me a bit manic, I think,’ she says. ‘One minute you’re up a mountain and the next you’re in the valley. And romantic. The Welsh are great romantics. We have a tremendous feeling about everything. We’re moody, contemplative and passionate.’
This is, of course, a caricature of the Welsh, a snapshot of a national state of mind that ignores those who are cynical, outgoing and levelheaded; but in the same way that, with our deep-rooted prejudices, we ascribe a love of fair-play and propriety to the English and dourness and attachment to money to the Scottish, it is legitimate to draw the parallel.
Alun Pugh’s parents had both been born in Cardiganshire, two thirds of the way down the west coast of Wales, in the middle years of the nineteenth century. It was and remains a predominantly mountainous, rural, Welsh-speaking area, one of the few strongholds of the language outside the north. It was also very poor. On the eve of the First World War Welsh Outlook, a journal of social progress’, described Cardiganshire as ‘this shockingly backward county’, bottom or near bottom in every measurement of public health in terms of deaths of mothers during childbirth, stuttering, rotten teeth, ear defects, blindness and mental handicaps. A bastion of Nonconformity – in 1887 there were riots in the Tywi Valley against payment of the tithe to the established Anglican Church in Wales – it was also for much of the nineteenth century the victim of an unholy combination of a booming birthrate among poor families and some of the wont excesses of heavy-handed, absentee English landlords. The result was that Cardiganshire became a place from which exiles set off on newly built railways in search of work in the industrial valleys and port towns of South Wales or further afield in England, America and even, from the 1850s onwards, in Y Wladfa Gymreig, the Welsh colony in Patagonia in southern Argentina.
John Williamson Pugh came from the small port of Aberaeron. His family were poor and he left school in his early teens, was apprenticed to a local brewery, then worked on a sailing ship under his uncle, David Jones, and only began to follow the ambitions that led him away from Wales at the age of twenty-two, when he attended teacher training college in Bangor, in the north, becoming a schoolmaster at Ponterwyd in 1875. The classroom was in this era a means of escape from drudgery for many ambitious and bright young men of humble origins, but John Pugh found it too limiting. He aimed even higher and in his late twenties obtained a place to train as a doctor at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, qualifying in 1886 at the age of thirty-four. His first post was at Queen Adelaide Dispensary in Bethnal Green, in the heart of the poverty-stricken East End, but three years later he moved to Brighton, where he joined a prosperous general practice.
Pugh’s wife, Margaret Evans, came from Llanon, another port town, six miles north of Aberaeron. They did not meet in Wales, though their shared background must have attracted them to each other when their friendship blossomed at the London Hospital. Where John Pugh’s upbringing had been characterised by a struggle to get on, Margaret Evans’s was dominated by tragedy. Her family were more prosperous than the Pughs, but her mother died when she was just three and she was brought up, along with her sister Catherine, by her aunt Magdalen and her husband, Daniel Lewis Jones, a general merchant. When Magdalen also died young and her husband remarried, the two girls did not get on with their step-aunt and so packed their bags and headed for London. Catherine’s health soon broke down and she returned to Wales, where she died aged just twenty-one. Margaret stayed on alone, and eventually trained at the London Hospital as a nurse.
However, it was not until three years after John Williamson Pugh arrived in Brighton that the couple married. Their long courtship was a result no doubt of Pugh’s desire to establish himself, but it meant that his bride was already thirty-one when she gave birth to a son, John Alun, on 23 January 1894. He was always known by his second name. It was a difficult birth and the Pughs had no further children.
Despite their new-found prosperity, Dr Pugh never forgot where he had come from and had a reputation for treating those who, in pre-National Health Service days, could not pay. And at home the family spoke Welsh, though Alun’s knowledge of what he came to regard as his native tongue remained inadequate until he settled down to study it as an adult.
The Pughs’ attachment to Wales had its limits, not least in their decision to settle in Brighton and not back in Cardiganshire. They were part nostalgic exiles but part also assimilators, embracing their new world and choosing, when it came to education for young Alun, the very English minor public school Brighton College.
He was both a keen sportsman and a talented student who won a scholarship to read history at Queen’s College, Oxford – not Jesus, bastion of the Welsh. His best friend at both Brighton College and Queen’s was Kenneth Goodyear, the son of a wealthy accountant from Bromley in Kent. As their friendship developed Goodyear introduced young Alun Pugh to his sister Kathleen, a strikingly tall, fair, blue-eyed but shy beauty. They fell in love.
There was some disquiet from T. Edward Goodyear, Kathleen’s father and a man with ambitions to be Lord Mayor of London, about Alun Pugh’s relatively humble forebears, but in spite of such reservations the couple married in Brighton in 1915 when both were twenty-one. Alun Pugh-he was throughout his adult life always referred to by both names, even by junior members of his staff, with the result that the ‘Alun’ and the ‘Pugh’ were linked by an imaginary hyphen – had been admitted to the Inner Temple as a pupil in April the previous year, but the First World War was underway and soon after their marriage, in July 1915, like nearly every young man of his generation, he joined up. He went to Bovington Green Camp at Marlow in Buckinghamshire, close to Cliveden, home of the Astors. He chose the Welsh Guards. Kathleen volunteered as a nurse.
In August 1915 Kenneth Goodyear, who was a conscientious objector, was killed in France behind the lines after serving in Gallipoli as a stretcher-bearer. The effect on his parents was devastating and their attention was ever more focused onto Kathleen, their one surviving child. Second Lieutenant Alun Pugh went out with the Prince of Wales Company of the Welsh Guards to join the British forces in France in February 1916. Seven months later, on 10 September, having already seen many of his colleagues killed in the stalemate of trench warfare, he was badly injured in the knee by a sniper’s bullet at Ginchy during the battle of the Somme. It left him in pain and with a slight limp for the rest of his life, but he owed his survival to his sergeant who, after Alun Pugh had fallen back into the trench, bent double as he carried him on his shoulders to the first aid post. Another officer, wounded at the same time, had been passed back along the trench, but his injured body had appeared above the parapet and