With his forty acres, nestling beneath the royal forest of Brechfa which covered the Llanybydder mountains in a green expanse of oak and ash, D.J.’s grandfather William Thomas should have made a decent living. But the 1830s were a decade of material hardship and political struggle, culminating in the Rebecca riots of 1843. His son, also William, born in 1834 and later known throughout Wales as the radical preacher and bard Gwilym Marles, was forced to leave his parents and live nearby with a devout uncle Simon Lewis, who was a cobbler. (The Marles – or Marlais – was a stream which joined the Cothi two miles up the valley.) As soon as they were able, he and his two brothers, Thomas and Evan (D.J.’s father), made a hasty exit from these economically depressed hills.
William’s (or Gwilym Marles’s) career was the most interesting, with parallels to his great-nephew Dylan’s. He was brought up an Independent Congregationalist, one of several Nonconformist branches which had taken root in Wales. By dint of hard work, he gained a place at the influential Presbyterian College in Carmarthen. There he discovered Unitarianism, an intellectual strain of religious dissent which denied the Trinity and advocated social reform. Although known (and frowned upon) for his heavy drinking and love of theatre, he won a scholarship to Glasgow University (Oxford and Cambridge still being restricted to Anglicans). While there between 1856 and 1860, he wrote widely, including a novel, book of verse and several tracts. One long winter holiday he acted as tutor to another William Thomas – no relation, but a greater poet, under the bardic name Islwyn.
Quite when Gwilym Marles adopted his own bardic name is not clear. In 1860 he became minister of three Unitarian chapels in southern Cardiganshire, just over the mountains from his birthplace in Brechfa. At his house in Llandysul, he set up a small school which took in boarders from as far away as London. After studying the teachings of the fiery American Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker, his own views became increasingly radical as he battled for the rights of tenant farmers and landless labourers. Welsh country folk were supposed to vote according to the wishes of their landlords. But in the 1868 general election, they defied convention and, when the Liberals gained a famous victory, local Tory squires hit back by evicting tenants from their farms.
As District Secretary for the Liberals, Gwilym Marles became a prominent advocate of the secret ballot – a political battle won in 1871. But this laid him open to retaliation: since owners no longer knew how tenants voted, they targeted their ministers instead. In 1876 an absentee landlord refused to renew the lease at Gwilym Marles’s main chapel at Llwynrhydowen without a clause which prevented the incumbent from preaching there. The congregation stood firm and was duly evicted with its minister – an abuse of the rights of free speech which led to widespread protest meetings and drew financial support from liberal-minded people throughout Britain. However the strain took its toll on Gwilym Marles who died three years later, aged only forty-five.
His life was characterised by an unstable mixture of emotional exuberance and deep depression. He enthusiastically supported the Union in the American Civil War (‘there is a vein of unmitigated barbarism in the South,’ he wrote) and his respect for the United States was evident in the names he gave two of his ten children – Mary Emerson (after the poet) and Theodore (in honour of his preaching mentor). He translated Tennyson, Browning and Pope into Welsh (one obituary commented on his ‘fine’ rendering of Tennyson’s ‘Oh, yet we trust that somehow good may be the perfect goal of ill’), and read Socrates, Spinoza and Heine. He loved cricket and theatre, and holidayed in Europe. Yet from college days he suffered from severe headaches, a complaint known locally as dic talarw (thought to be a corruption of the French tic douleureux). In June 1877, he told a friend, ‘I have been pursued by neuralgia for rather more than a twelvemonth, with hardly any respite, and latterly it has got to be so acute and distracting that I have been obliged to think something must be done.’ A couple of years later, in one of his last letters, he implored this friend to ‘find for me a good brain doctor in London: I also inquire, but first of all I presume I have a brain.’
Of Gwilym Marles’s brothers, Thomas made his way to London where he became manager of the National Provincial Bank, Aldersgate Street and where, in 1879, he was trying to get the minister’s wayward son Willie a berth on a merchant vessel. (Willie had by then run through a number of careers, including pharmacy, ironmongery, ‘business’, the army and the navy.) Meanwhile Evan, D.J.’s father, joined the railways, probably in 1852 when he was twenty and the South Wales Railway first reached Carmarthen. In the 1860s, after he married, he lived in Swansea, where his first three children, Jane, Lizzie and Willie, were born. Jane attended the Queen Street British School there. But in 1872 the Evan Thomases moved back to Carmarthen, where they acquired a green-flecked cottage called The Poplars in Johnstown, a hamlet favoured by railway workers on the outskirts of the main town.
At the time Carmarthen was on the verge of a railway boom. Both the South Wales and the Carmarthen and Cardigan (C&C) Railways had just been converted to narrow gauge. The C&C, which employed Evan as a guard, had ambitions to link the industrial heartland of South Wales with a deep-water port in Cardigan and with Manchester and the English north-west. However its line north from Carmarthen never reached further than Gwilym Marles’s home town of Llandysul: useful, no doubt, for transporting boarders to his school. The C&C might have succeeded, but for a troubled financial history. It closed temporarily in 1860 – a possible date for Evan the guard’s initial move to Swansea. Four years later it called in the receivers, having run up liabilities of £1 million. Nevertheless, traffic was buoyant and, helped by conversion to narrow gauge in 1872, it soldiered on until 1888 when, like the South Wales before it, it was absorbed into the much more powerful Great Western Railway.
D.J. Thomas was born in Johnstown in April 1876. Despite both his parents now being well into their forties, he was followed four years later by a younger brother, Arthur. But although this latest arrival took the same educational route as his older brother and sisters, attending the National School in Johnstown, D.J. did not. As a bright child, D.J. probably went to the school run by his aunt, Mary Marles Thomas (widow of Gwilym Marles) in Quay Street, Carmarthen. From there he moved not to the ancient Grammar School (his parents could not afford the fees), but to the National and Practising School in Catherine Street, a charity institution like the British School his sister Jane had attended in Swansea. It was run by the Anglican church, marking an early step in the Thomases’ transition from their Welsh Nonconformist origins. At this establishment (subsequently known as the Model School) from 1891 to 1895, D.J. enjoyed the status of pupil teacher, paying for the latter stages of his secondary education (and earning a small wage) by instructing the younger boys. Significantly, on 14 September 1892, he was absent, suffering from the family complaint of neuralgia.
Two years earlier, his father Evan was earning twenty-three shillings a week. (This is known because he asked for a rise to twenty-five shillings, the pay of a colleague.) As a guard he followed a two-week rota. One week he came to work at 4.30 in the morning, taking the early train up to Llandysul, where he arrived at 6.50, returning to Carmarthen at 10.20. After a similar journey in the afternoon, he finished at 6.15 p.m. The second week he started at 8.30 a.m., working through until 10.30 at night. Replying to a query from head office in Swansea, his local supervisor commented, ‘You will see by the above the hours are not excessive.’
Evan doubtless thought differently and encouraged his elder son to adopt an alternative career and become a teacher. D.J. was initially reluctant until forced to step into the shoes of the National School headmaster who was ill. As a result, he stayed longer than expected and was awarded a Queen’s Scholarship which took him to the new University College of Wales at Aberystwyth. His undergraduate career was steady but undistinguished. The only extra-curricular field in which he made a mark was music, acting as secretary of the Musical Society in 1897–8 and leading a male voice party which sang a glee a
t a soirée given by the Celtic Society in February 1898. Like his Uncle William, he wrote verse and contributed to student magazines. Otherwise he concentrated on a variety of arts subjects, which he combined with teacher training. His crowning achievement came in 1899 when he received the only first class degree in English to be awarded by any of the three University Colleges of Wales.
According to his future wife Florrie, he was then offered a fellowship at Aberystwyth. She said he was invited to ‘go abroad, go here, to anywhere he could go. But he’d got tired, I think. He’d worked so hard for those four years [at the university] that he felt, “Get out of it.” He was sorry afterwards of course.’ There is no record of the university’s offer, which may have been for a research post. But it established a sense of thwarted ambition, which became a pattern in D.J.’s life. Later a myth developed that he applied for a lectureship in English at the University College in Swansea, but was turned down. There is no evidence for this either; he never even applied.
He did however see himself as a gentlemanly man of letters, holding down an academic post which would have enabled him to write his own essays and poems. Instead he turned back to schoolmastering, an idea that had arisen more from his father than out of any great enthusiasm on his own part. At least he would be able to pursue his great love of English literature, particularly of Shakespeare. But he realised that, to teach it properly, he would have to adopt its whole cultural infrastructure, down to its English-orientated secondary education system, complete with the petty bureaucracy of the staff common-room. Any literary ambitions of his own would have to be set aside.
So it was an already disappointed man who became a teacher, first (briefly) in Swansea, then for a year or so at Pontypridd County School, before returning in 1901 to Swansea Grammar School where he remained for the rest of his working life. By early 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, he was committed to his new profession. For on 31 March, a week before Easter, he was staying at his father’s house in Johnstown, Carmarthen, when the census was taken, and he described himself as a schoolmaster. Evan the guard and his wife Ann were in a hospitable, if not festive, mood. They had acted as guardian to their granddaughter Minnie when she attended the local National School in the previous decade. (She was the daughter of their daughter Jane who was twelve years older than Jack.) Staying with them in March 1901, along with D.J., was Minnie’s younger sister Lizzie, as well as Evan’s own unmarried sister Hannah who hailed, like him, from Brechfa.
D.J. may well have met his wife over this Easter holiday. It has become part of the accepted history of this opaque man that he first came across Florrie at a fair in Johnstown. Although her immediate family was ensconced in St Thomas, they regularly travelled down to visit their many relations dotted around the farms and cottages of lower Carmarthenshire. That Palm Sunday Florrie’s older sister Polly was staying at Pentowyn, overlooking the Taf estuary near Llanstephan, where another sister Annie was married to a farmer called Jim Jones. Eighteen-year-old Florrie – playful, round-faced and petite – was working as a seamstress in a Swansea drapery store and may well have come down to join her sisters for the long Easter weekend.
Details of her courtship with D.J. are tantalisingly scarce – perhaps because he was preoccupied with settling into his new job at Swansea Grammar School. The couple were married in Castle Street Congregational church in Swansea on 30 December 1903, nine days after Florrie’s older (and richer) brother John had taken the same plunge at the ripe age of thirty-nine. D.J. was a witness at John’s wedding at the Paraclete chapel in Newton, a neat village on the edge of the Gower peninsula, and charge of Florrie’s brother-in-law David Rees since leaving the Canaan chapel in St Thomas five years earlier.
Why did D.J. and Florrie not follow suit at the same ‘family’ chapel? There is a persistent rumour that she was already pregnant. This was not unknown around Llanstephan, where her aunt Amy had an illegitimate daughter Ann, who was close to Florrie. In a world where people’s Christian and family names tend to be confusingly similar, this bastard Ann was often mistaken for Florrie’s much older sister Annie, whose sister-in-law Rachel Jones also had a child born out of wedlock, a son called Albert. But the Swansea hinterland had a more rigid code of values. Blessing the marriage of a woman in this parturient state would have been anathema to the prickly David Rees. So twenty-seven-year-old D.J. and Florrie, just twenty-one, had to go to the main Congregational church (later the site of the Kardomah café) in the centre of the town, where neither of them had obvious connections. This would have annoyed D.J. and hastened his passage to the scepticism he had adopted from favourite authors such as Carlyle and T. H. Huxley. As near to being an atheist as possible in such a strongly Nonconformist environment, he would have been confirmed in his distaste for the outward hypocrisies of organised religion.
At the time D.J. retained his love of singing. One of his surviving personal effects is a copy of an arrangement by Victor Novello of Handel’s Oratorio. But Florrie’s likely miscarriage started a process of withdrawal from social activity. He began to plough his energies into his job at the Grammar School, while his wife, with little else to do, perfected the art of keeping house for which she was later celebrated. Towards the end of 1905 it was clear her father was fatally ill (with tuberculosis, she later liked to say), so her presence was required around the family in Delhi Street. But she had her own preoccupations. Once again she had conceived and in September 1906, less than a year after George Williams died, she gave birth to a daughter called Nancy Marlees (sic).
Like many schoolmasters who mixed with other people’s children during their working lives, D.J. had difficulty showing his affection for his own offspring, later reportedly declining even to acknowledge them if he met them in the street. Raising a baby daughter in a series of rented houses only accentuated the gap between this bookish man, growing stiffly middle-aged, and his much more vivacious wife, who liked to meet people and entertain, but who had no intellectual interests of any kind. Florrie had to wait eight more fretful years before she was pregnant again. When her second child was born, D.J. looked again to his bardic uncle for one of their new son’s names, Marlais. For the other, more surprisingly, he ransacked a classic text of the Welsh literature he normally affected to disdain. ‘Dylan’ was a minor character in The Mabinogion, one of the great mythical prose dramas in the Welsh language. The work (a series of books) had been rediscovered during the romantic revival of the country’s Celtic past a century or so earlier, and had enjoyed wider success when translated into English by Lady Charlotte Guest, the scholarly wife of a Welsh iron magnate, in 1849. In the drama, Dylan was a golden-haired baby who, as soon as he was born, made for the sea: ‘he partook of its nature, and he swam as fast as the swiftest fish. And for that reason he was called Dylan Eil Ton, Sea Son of the Wave.’ ‘Dylan’ in other words means ‘sea’ or ‘ocean’.
By coincidence Dylan’s story had been turned into an opera by Joseph Holbrook, from a libretto by the wealthy North Wales aristocrat Lord Howard de Walden, writing as T. E. Ellis (his birth name). Howard de Walden was obsessed with Welsh myths, to the point of owning a yacht called Rhiannon and a speedboat Dylan II. As recently as July 1914, the opera Dylan had been staged at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, under the baton of Thomas Beecham. A decade later, when unemployment hit the coal-mining valleys of South Wales, Howard de Walden would pay Beecham to bring his orchestra to give concerts there.
D.J.’s undergraduate love of music carried over at least this far into his married life. Not that Dylan had golden locks at birth: his nurse Addie Drew remembered dark hair, though this quickly changed to angelic yellow curls, like his sister’s. The name was supposed to be evocative, a throw-back to the time when D.J. secretly nursed his own ambitions to be a storyteller – perhaps in poetry, like his uncle. Yet it all seemed rather incongruous, settled in genteel Cwmdonkin Drive looking out over the generous curve of Swansea Bay. The infant Dylan was confronted by mixed messages: on the one hand, the
pressing reality of Anglo-orientated suburbia; on the other, the liberating potential of Welsh myth (and, to complicate matters, his name was pronounced ‘Dillon’, as an Englishman might say it, rather than ‘Dullan’, in the Welsh style). Yet, out of such contradictory circumstances, artists are fledged, and Dylan Thomas was to make the most of them.
TWO
A PRECOCIOUS CHILDHOOD
It was not medieval romance that captured Dylan’s imagination at an early age but modern battle. The First World War with Germany was twelve weeks old when he was born. On 27 October, the local South Wales Daily Post sought to generate an upbeat mood with a front page report on a local battalion of the Welsh Regiment leaving Swansea to join the British Expeditionary Force. The sombre tone of the main headline ‘A Desperate Advance’ could not be denied, even if the underlying article looked for the good news of the ‘British Hacking Their Way Through’. The reality was that Allied troops had already become bogged down on the Ypres salient in the first great bloody stalemate of the war.
This accident of birth left a life-long impression on the young Dylan. Florrie used to tell how, returning from shopping, she would sometimes inform D.J. in her artless manner: ‘Do you know who’s gone to the front now?’ And Dylan, who was just four when the war ended, would show concern and go to the lobby at the front of the house, in a fruitless search for the person his mother had mentioned. ‘I could not understand how so many people never returned from there,’ he later recalled.
He was not even a teenager when he started publishing poems about the Great War in his Grammar School magazine. He felt the conflict personally. A bit later, when he began to find his own voice and subject matter, he could look back on the moment of his birth in his first published book, 18 Poems (1934), and see it in military terms, with all the horror of the battlefield:
Dylan Thomas: A New Life Page 3