Bronwen Astor: Her Life and Times. Peter Stanford
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his young wife and grieving in-laws at Rothesay, their home in Bromley, saw Alun Pugh soon on the mend, but the psychological damage caused by his injury was long-lasting, according to his daughter Bronwen, and affected his whole family: ‘My father felt very fortunate still to be alive, but also guilty too. So many of his friends had been wiped out.’ It gave him – and by association his children – a determination to do what seemed right, to live their lives to the full, regardless of the restrictions of convention, class or social mores.
Today Alun Pugh would have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but in the aftermath of a world war ex-soldiers simply had to get on with rebuilding their lives. The trenches did, however, remain a painful and sensitive memory for him. While his eldest and most direct daughter Ann questioned him about his experiences, drawing him out on the subject, Bronwen felt inhibited about raising what she saw as a taboo. ‘I’ve always been bad about asking people important questions. I wait to be told. I knew there was something but it went unmentioned. I grew up thinking that the silence meant it had been so terrible that there must have been fighting in the street or something.’
His wartime trauma left Alun Pugh with a profound distrust of anything German. He would not, for instance, have Christmas trees, which he saw as a German custom, imported via Prince Albert. There would be one at the Goodyear house in Kent, where the Pughs spent 25 December, but it was only when Bronwen went to live at Cliveden that, reluctantly, having inherited her father’s prejudice in this as in many things, she had to put up with a tree.
That wartime experience also made Alun and Kathleen Pugh – like many others of their generation-determined in the aftermath of the conflict to re-evaluate the assumptions they had made before its outbreak. They already had one child – David born in 1917 – and Kathleen had lost a baby the previous year. While the couple, following Kenneth’s death, would eventually come into the Good-years’ substantial fortune, there was the question of finding a job and financing a home. Alun Pugh resumed his career in the law and was called to the Bar in June 1918, eventually specialising from chambers in Harcourt Buildings in Inner Temple in workman’s compensation claims.
He found a house in Heathhurst Road in Hampstead, just off the wide-open spaces of the Heath and in the shadow of the house of the poet John Keats – his last London home before he left for Italy and a premature death. Hampstead, then as now, was a favourite place for writers, artists, academics and free-thinkers, though in the 1920s, with its villagey atmosphere, it had acquired little of the smart, expensive image of more recent times.
However, as a place where the normal constraints of the strict class system then prevalent elsewhere did not apply so rigidly, it suited the Pughs. ‘I think my parents decided to live in Hampstead,’ says their daughter Ann, ‘as a gesture of defiance because then it was a rather way out sort of place. Certainly my mother’s parents would have regarded it as an odd choice.’ In that period of post-war optimism, Alun Pugh was searching for an identity that tied together his life before the conflict and his experiences on the battlefield. Increasingly he hit upon Wales as the linking thread, having used his convalescence to brush up on his sketchy knowledge of the Welsh language.
Perhaps the comradeship he had felt in his Welsh Guards battalion, which lost an estimated 5,000 men in France, gave Alun Pugh a sense of belonging to something – the Welsh nation – that had in his parents’ home seemed of little more than sentimental importance. Perhaps also it was a reaction to the death of his father and mother who, having struggled so hard to find prosperity and happiness, died comparatively young within months of each other in 1916 without being able to enjoy the fruit of their efforts. In one sense, though, their deaths may have allowed Alun Pugh to explore roots that had, during their lifetime, been regarded with ambiguity.
It was undeniably a romantic quest. His parents had travelled far – socially, geographically and economically – from Cardiganshire. They had bought their son an English education and his knowledge of Wales was limited to holidays, relatives and family folklore. A public school educated, Oxford graduate had little in common with the relatives who remained in Cardiganshire. Yet Alun Pugh was also a practical man. He did not seek merely to wallow in nostalgia for his parents’ homeland, he wanted to do something of substance that would establish his own bond with it.
In his work as a barrister Alun Pugh developed a reputation for working on Welsh cases, especially those involving coalminers. Bronwen recalls frequent visits to Paddington Station to wave him off on, and greet him from, the train to Cardiff, Swansea and beyond. He sought out the company of other Welsh exiles where he practised in Inner Temple-it had and has a sizeable contingent-and he became a member of the Reform Club, bastion of Welsh Liberalism and favourite haunt of its epitome, David Lloyd George. He was also a pillar of the London Welsh Association.
These were little more than affordable gestures for a man whose career at the Bar was already taking off. At the dawn of the 1920s, however, he saw a more tangible, though risky, chance to make his mark by joining the largely academic and middle-class movement campaigning to protect and preserve the Welsh culture and language by all available means.
The most charismatic figure among Alun Pugh’s new-found friends was Saunders Lewis, like him a son of the Welsh diaspora, born of Welsh parents on Merseyside. Lewis was a visitor to the Pughs’ Hampstead home. Once when he stayed the night, Bronwen gave up her room and moved in with her sister. Her father, she recalls, told her that she should always be proud that Saunders Lewis had slept in her bed. She should ‘never forget’. Among the family’s most treasured possessions was a copy of Lewis’s Braslun 0 Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymreig – a history of Welsh literature, published in 1932. It had been inscribed by Lewis to his friend Alun Pugh in gratitude for his work on behalf of their people.
Lewis’s long-term contribution to the nationalist revival was huge, though often in his lifetime he suffered spells of disappointment and marginalisation. ‘The dominance of Lewis,’ writes D. Hywel Davies in his history of Welsh nationalism, ‘from 1926 to 1939 was such that his name and that of the nationalist movement had become almost interchangeable.’ A poet, dramatist, historian and teacher of the Welsh language, he was heavily influenced as a young man by Ireland’s political struggle to break free from Britain and the literary renaissance that ran in parallel. His political ideas – authoritarian and tinged with religion – owed much to the radical conservatism of Charles Maurras’s Action française.
Lewis was the most prominent member of Y Mudiad Cymreig, the Welsh Movement, a society founded in Penarth in January 1924, and the following year, at the National Eisteddfod, threw his lot in with Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, the National Party of Wales. The aim, Lewis said, was ‘to take away from the Welsh their sense of inferiority … to remove from our beloved country the mark and the shame of conquest’.
Alun Pugh endorsed this manifesto enthusiastically and would often provide legal help to the fledgling party. In 1930, for instance, he sat on a committee of London Welsh with the former Liberal MP John Edwards, which advocated that Plaid should campaign for Wales to be given dominion status within the British empire – treated as if it were equal, free and self-governing like Canada or Australia. Five years later Alun Pugh was again called on to advise whether teachers who took part in the pro-Welsh protests organised by Lewis could face disciplinary action by their employers. There could be, he concluded in July 1935, ‘no martyrdom with safety’. It was a message that was to become increasingly relevant to his own involvement with Plaid.
Those living in Wales able to speak Welsh were in steep decline. Their numbers fell in the decade to 1931 by over 5 per cent, to just 35 per cent of the population. Only 98,000-out of a total population of 2.7 million – used Welsh as their first language at that time. If Plaid successfully but slowly began a reversal in this trend-pressing for the Welsh language to be given more prominence in schools and the new broadcast media – in the political field the party was for many years a failure.
In part this was because it insisted on members breaking all links with existing political parties, including Lloyd George’s Liberals, still dominant in rural Wales, and Labour, now controlling the southern valleys, and with the Westminster Parliament. Hence it had no effective environment in which to operate and gain influence. In part too it was brought about by the extreme political