Recently, while looking for something else, I found a yellowing typescript at the bottom of an old box file. It was a transcript of an interview with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, made over 40 years ago for an almost instantly defunct magazine that closed before its second issue. For those who don’t know of him, Vaughan-Thomas was a distinguished World War II correspondent for the BBC, who died in 1987. He became an iconic voice of the corporation, covering events like the 1953 coronation with his mellifluous Welsh lilt. Along with much else, he was one of a triumvirate of Dylan Thomas’s literary executors.
And the subject of the interview? A Dylan Thomas poem. Not a great poem, nor even a good one. But nevertheless, a poem composed at least in part by a great poet. And one that carries the traces of a Swansea which, like Thomas, is long gone but not forgotten.
Bearing witness
I had found him standing at the far end of the bar, surrounded by a group of people he’d just made laugh. Small and white-haired, Vaughan-Thomas had the aura of an elderly elf on the lam. He was clearly having fun, telling how, incredibly, as war raged all around, he’d stumbled on Botticelli’s Primavera in a deserted castello in Tuscany. There, too, were dozens of other treasures from the Uffizi, concealed under dust sheets in a dimly lit room.
Then he went straight into another story, set at the beachhead of St Raphael during Operation Anvil. As the smoke and murk from the bombardment cleared, an immaculately dressed Frenchman emerged from one of the few Riviera villas still standing. He carried a tray of champagne and exclaimed, “Bienvenue, messieurs!” before adding in English, “ … even if you are a bit late.”
If Vaughan-Thomas’s war sounds rather jolly, it wasn’t always so. He delivered a powerful commentary from Belsen shortly after its liberation, and some said he became a gentler person after bearing witness to that inexplicable brutality. As a war correspondent, he was perhaps best-known for his broadcast Air Raid Over Berlin, which aired in September 1943 and made him a household name.
And on that same 1943 night, as Vaughan-Thomas recounted: “Suddenly the telephone rings as I was trying to put the bloody thing together, and he says, ‘Hello hero!’ ‘Who’s that?’ I said. He said, ‘It’s me, I’m in the last pub in the Kings Road … bring the money.’ I used to get these calls, I mean, we all did. ‘Right, I’ll get there straight away,’ I said. ‘You stay where you are.’ So I did my broadcast Air Raid Over Berlin and all the rest of it. I then get a BBC car, which was as rare as radium in those days. And they get me down there, to the last pub on the Kings Road.”
It was a good hour before Vaughan-Thomas could be there, by which time Dylan Thomas was in full flight in his role as a roaring boy from Wales, reciting a poem about the strange goings-on one Saturday night in New Quay, the small West Wales seaside town. Thomas had begun to set the poem down clearly enough, but as the beer flowed the manuscript became increasingly illegible.
“In the final lines you have to look at it sideways,” said Vaughan-Thomas. “It’s my rarest Dylan manuscript,” he continued. “You see the poet, not exactly at work, but getting tighter and tighter and tighter, until he decides not to work anymore.” As they left, Dylan Thomas stuffed the poem into Vaughan-Thomas’s pocket. And he thought he’d lost it in, as he put it, the “reeling King’s Road”.
That is, until many years later. When, coming across a bundle of notes from his broadcast at 20,000 feet, out fell the stained and crumpled poem in the unmistakeable schoolboy scrawl of Dylan Thomas. You can find Sooner than you can water milk or cry Amen in The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: Centenary Edition. This is not the long-lost poem. That’s to come.
A mad legacy
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas and Dylan Thomas had been friends since they both attended Swansea Grammar. My father Clive Gammon did too. When reviewing a documentary on Vaughan-Thomas for The Spectator in the 1970s, he described it as “an eccentric and lovable school where no one was made to do anything much if he didn’t feel like it.” This benign regime was driven by the headmaster, Trevor Lloyd. Spotting Vaughan-Thomas and Dylan Thomas ‘mitching off’ to play billiards when they should have been in class, he yelled out the window, “I hope you get caught, you wicked boys!”
Peter Williams, a Swansea lawyer who ran cross-country with Dylan Thomas at the school, remembered him as “a cherubic boy with black curly hair who, to everybody’s surprise, won the school mile when he was 12,” despite being incongruously frail and avoiding any form of physical training. It was a feat newsworthy enough to feature in the Cambria Daily Leader. The newspaper clipping was still in Thomas’s wallet when he died in New York in November 1953.
Another event was in keeping with Thomas’s later, famously transgressive persona. Williams recounted how their mutual friend, a boy called Glyn, visited Dylan Thomas’s house on the same afternoon that Mrs Thomas had invited a group of ladies over for tea. Seated at the table, Dylan Thomas turned to Glyn and said, “They talk so much, they don’t hear a word anyone else says. I’ll show you.” So the small boys sat quietly at the tea table as the women chatted away. Suddenly Dylan Thomas said, “Pass the f**king cake.” Without hesitation or a break in the conversation, Mrs Thomas passed them the cake. “Told you, didn’t I!” he said.
“[It’s] the interesting thing about the whole Dylan saga,” said Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. “I mean, you can’t pin down stories to fact, but the fact that the stories are there is fascinating. The whole of the business of Dylan hangs in the air. He left a mad legacy behind.”
Not least the dark comedy of the poet’s last night in Swansea, when Vaughan-Thomas received an urgent call late one evening. En route to America, Thomas had got drunk, disgraced himself in some way with his hosts, then passed out. They’d had enough. “Get him out of the house, and he can’t stay here again.” In Vaughan-Thomas’s words, ”This was about ten-thirty at night! There I had this poet – and Dylan, when he was drunk, wasn’t easy to cart around. It was all very well people taking great romantic views about it. I thought, what in God’s name do I do? As I drove around Swansea, I thought I’d get him into a hotel. So I went to the Mackworth, which was still open then, but they said, ‘No bloody fear!’”
Vaughan-Thomas had a car, which was unusual as 1953 Britain was still suffering post-war austerity. So he drove from hotel to hotel, but the reputation of Dylan Thomas ran on before him. The bald truth is that, during the great poet’s final night in Swansea town, no one would have him.
Vaughan-Thomas continued, “And then a brilliant idea struck me, so I drove to the station. I said to the stationmaster, ‘Have you got a warm train?’ And he said, ‘Well, Mr Thomas, there’s a train that goes off and wanders all over the bloody place, but I think it ends up in Darlington.’ I said, ‘I’ve got a man who wants to go there.’ So I bought a ticket, with another on to London, and I put some money in his pocket. I carried him past the stationmaster at the barrier and I said, ‘My friend’s very ill’. And he knew Dylan, so he said, ‘As always.’ So we put him in a corner of this train which disappeared off into the dark. And I feel … well, no, I did very well by him … I don’t feel guilty at all about it. I posted him to Darlington!”
The next time Vaughan-Thomas saw Dylan Thomas, he was with the Scottish poet Ruthven Todd in McLean’s Funeral Parlour in New York City. He recalled, “Of course, he’d been done up like ‘The Loved One’. And Ruthven looked down at the body and said, ‘God! Dylan wouldn’t be seen dead in a tie like that!’”
The macabre farce continued when they lost the poet’s body soon after it had crossed the Atlantic on the RMS Media. The undertaker, Phil ‘the Death’ Evans, had been dispatched from Laugharne to collect the remains from Southampton. And then he simply disappeared, along with the corpse. Panicky cables were telegraphed from the funeral director’s head office in Chepstow to all parts of the country, in search of the hearse. Eventually Mr Evans was ‘headed off’ in Taunton, as he doggedly ploughed on, westward towards Land’s End.
Vaughan-Thomas asked him, “Evans bach, what were you doing in Taunton?” “Well, Mr Thomas,” he said. “Did you know I’ve never ferried further east from Laugharne than Blaenau in my life, and nobody told me the bloody country forked!”
Then – and if this story didn’t happen, as Vaughan-Thomas put it, it should have — when at last the funeral could finally begin, Vernon Watkins, a poet, friend, and contemporary of Dylan Thomas, arrived at the church a little late. He carried in one hand a posy of Gower primroses he’d collected as a tribute from one Swansea poet to another. In his other hand was a small packet of sandwiches. Presumably absorbed in composing a few suitable lines, as speaker after speaker insisted on his turn, Watkins nodded off. So when the moment arrived, as the pallbearers made their way along the aisle, the mourners to his side had to whisper sharply, “Vernon! Vernon!” Watkins awoke with a start, moved forward and, with great reverence, placed the sandwiches on the coffin.
The immortal Dylan Thomas
The ghost of Dylan the younger consistently haunts Dylan the older. Thomas’s story Return Journey is strongly redolent of a lost pre-war Swansea, which is made all the more poignant because the town has just been blitzed. The narrator isn’t only searching through the rubble for the vanished town. He is also searching for his lost Swansea self, who variously,
“ … speaks rather fancy; truculent; plausible; a bit of a shower-off; plus-fours and no breakfast, you know; … worked on the Post and used to wear an overcoat sometimes with the check lining inside out so that you could play giant draughts on him. He wore a conscious woodbine, too … and a perched pork pie with a peacock feather …”
The self-portrait is well drawn, but it’s as if each characterisation is performative. It’s tempting to suppose this is because he was a keen actor as a schoolboy. But I suspect the instinct for both role play and transgression was purely a carapace, and that the roaring boy in some way cocooned the fragile Dylan the younger.
Peter Williams recalled that Dylan Thomas began to drink when he was, “I suppose about 16 or 17 … I remember to my amazement seeing Dylan one night in the billiard room of the YMCA and he was obviously plastered, and he told me that he’d been drinking whisky. But that was almost shocking — it really was, because in those days for schoolboys to drink was almost unheard of.”
“I only started to know Dylan seriously,” Vaughan-Thomas said, “When I came back from Oxford to Swansea. I was unemployed and trying to find a job, and met Dylan, the young man about Swansea, the reporter. And suddenly I said, ‘I remember you! We used to drink together in the pubs.’” That was the same pre-war period described in Return Journey, when Thomas was about 17, had just left school, and was working on the town’s paper, the Evening Post.
It was during one of those nights, perhaps a year or so later, in the Plough and Harrow in Murton, that the second lost poem was born. Dylan Thomas, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, Daniel Jones, and possibly the painter Fred Janes, had been enjoying themselves. Talk ran free and the conversation turned to the urinal in Pell Street, which had been – according to Vaughan-Thomas – “a splendid structure of complicated iron work” close to the Albert Hall cinema and the art school. It had been swept away, as he put it, “in an act of vandalism by the town council.”
The young men decided that a vampire should return to haunt the town councillors. So line by line, with Dylan Thomas orchestrating, pointing to each in turn, the poem was produced. And here it is for the first time since it was recited to me by the late Wynford Vaughan-Thomas at the Savile club in 1981.
At the corner of Pell Street a vampire appears
Singing garlic, sweet garlic, it’s sung there for years.
See it taps at the window of councillor Rees
And he sings as he taps a most sinister piece.
Councillor’s jugulars suck I with glee
Oh for the veins of a scrumptious JP
Tremble ye alderman! Town clerk beware!
As I hoover the veins of your succulent mare.
In the Guildhall bloodorium the council convened
The motion re. Pell Street and the blood-sucking fiend.
Proposer Rev Samuel, Labour, Llandor
Went WHOOP through the window, as the vampires roar
Singing, councillor’s jugulars suck I with glee
OOOOOH for the veins of a scrumptious JP
Tremble ye Aldermen! Town Clerk beware!
As I HOOOOver the blood of your succulent mare!
No doubt the drinkers would be pleased to discover that, 72 years later, the council came to regret that earlier act of hubris. In 2011, the Evening Post carried a short report:
A DESPERATE council has installed open air urinals to stop boozy locals relieving themselves … in Swansea city centre following escalating complaints about yob drinkers. A spokesman for the city authority said, “There is nothing more unsightly than irresponsible people urinating in public” … Mike Weaver, manager of the La Prensa tapas bar in Wind St, said: “My mother taught me to keep it in until I came to a toilet.”
