no future;There is only the past,
Brittle with relics
R. S. Thomas, Welsh Landscape (1955)
Exiles have curious and sometimes contradictory attitudes to their ‘fatherland’. Often the first generation to leave retains a strong emotional bond with all they have abandoned, but for some, depending on the reasons for their departure – adventure, economic necessity, education – return or even nostalgia is out of the question. They develop an antipathy to the past and determine to be assimilated into their new culture and society by virtue of rejecting the old. In succeeding generations, of course, such attitudes can be reversed: children or grandchildren of unsentimental or ambitious exiles may over-compensate for their parents’ or grandparents’ abandonment of the family ‘seat’ with romantic notions about their roots which also offer a means both of rebellion and of self-definition. A place with which their physical connection is tenuous becomes crucial to their psychological and spiritual identity.
Because of the bland image of the plain old English-repressed, over – polite and concerned only with what the neighbours will think – many of those born in England explore family links with Ireland, Wales and scotland in order to appear more exotic. In economic terms, they have, like as not, embraced the values and assumptions of their generally more prosperous English homeland, but in their more rhetorical moods they celebrate their Celtic and Gaelic roots in exiles’ clubs and sporting societies, harking back to something that has been irretrievably lost.
The Pughs fit loosely into this pattern in their attitude to Wales. They were and are proud to be Welsh. They regard it as a defining feature in their make-up. Yet by the time Janet Bronwen Alun Pugh was born in 1930, the family link back to Cardiganshire was wearing distinctly thin. It 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
