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.
The gulf in age, class and experience between Bill Astor and Bronwen Pugh in 1945 could not have been greater. For her part, she did not even register from her campsite the existence of Cliveden, the stately home that fifteen years later was to become her home.
* She always used the Welsh form of ‘My father’ in letters.
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
