Dylan Thomas: A Poet at War

100 years after his birth,

you'd think that we know Dylan Thomas pretty well by now,

but, somehow, his genius resists

being pushed into pigeon holes.

He was a brilliant poet, gifted writer of short stories

and a successful radio broadcaster.

He was a raconteur, bohemian, womaniser

and drinker of legendary excess.

But what did he do during the war?

He spent most of it scripting propaganda films

for the Ministry of Information!

So, how did a poet who once said

that poetry and politics should not mix,

end up more or less working for the Government?

And how was the work of Dylan, the poet,

influenced by his work as Dylan, the propagandist?

At the outbreak of the war, Dylan Thomas was 25 years old,

and had already published five volumes of poems and short stories.

He was also beginning to get occasional jobs

writing radio features for the BBC,

but he had no experience of writing for film.

What's not in doubt, however, was his love of the medium.

As a boy, he would frequent the cinema

here in the Uplands of Swansea.

There's a bank on the same spot now,

but Dylan immortalised the old cinema

in one of his short stories as the flea pit picture house where

he whooped for the scalping Indians and banged for the rustlers' guns.

As he grew older, his tastes in film grew more sophisticated.

And according to one Swansea friend from the period, the only time

he ever saw Dylan really annoyed,

was when somebody made a disparaging remark about Greta Garbo,

one of his favourite actresses.

At his home here in Cwmdonkin Drive, he began to fill notebooks

with the poems that would catapult him to literary prominence.

But one of the first things he ever published was

an article in his school magazine in 1930 on the history of film.

Aged only 15, he wrote a critical appraisal of cinema pioneer,

DW Griffith, that showed a precocious familiarity with

the techniques of film-making.

"Griffith," he wrote, "introduced the now familiar tricks

"of the close-up, the fade out and the cut back.

"He realised the importance of motion-pictures,

"not as freak exhibitions,

"but as works of art produced through an entirely new medium."

Small wonder then that the schoolboy who wrote these words,

would himself, within a few years, be producing work

within that new medium.

Between 1941 and 1945, Dylan Thomas scripted

or co-scripted at least 15 propaganda films for the Government.

In these dominions, their children are brought up in freedom

and for freedom.

A generation taught to value the best of the old world...

As Dylan strove to master this new medium,

for a time, his creative powers had to be focused on

giving voice not to his own ideas,

but to those of the Government.

The new nations of the Commonwealth, side by side at last with Russia,

China and the USA, making a new nations of the world.

United in a war to the death against the living death

of slavery under fascism...

But no-one at the beginning of the war would have expected

Dylan Thomas to become involved in propaganda films.

Dylan had a horror of killing, and he certainly didn't want to fight.

But he was also equally dismissive of anybody who was

involved in the war effort in less direct ways too.

Every literate or semi-literate party-goer in London is

stampeding the Ministry of Labour, willing to do

anything from licking stamps and bums to writing recruiting literature,

or broadcasting appeals for warm bodies to become cold.

Principle prevents us, I hope, from propaganding.

The fact that he could be so dismissive of propaganda

and recruiting, and yet end up doing just that a couple of years later,

implies a character somewhat at odds with himself.

In order to begin to understand this contradiction,

we need to look more closely at Dylan's politics.

One major influence on his political outlook

when he was growing up in Swansea in the 1930s,

was his friendship with the communist sympathiser, Bert Trick.

Dylan would often call at Bert's greengrocer shop

here in Brynmill in Swansea, and in the flat above the shop

they would plot the annihilation of the ruling classes,

as he put it, over blancmange and jelly supplied by Bert's wife.

Dylan described himself at the time as a socialist

but an unconventional one.

However, by the time of the outbreak of the war,

his politics, if anything, were even harder to define.

This is what he wrote to Bert Trick in September 1939.

I don't know how you feel about all this,

but I can't raise up any feeling about this war at all, and the demon

Hitlerism can go up its own bottom. I refuse to help it with a bayonet.

In May 1940, Dylan took his medical for the forces and was classed C3,

the last category of men who would be called up for active duty,

an outcome that would almost certainly have been a great relief to him.

I've come to meet Professor John Goodby who has published

numerous studies of Dylan Thomas, and I started by asking him

whether or not Dylan could be described as a pacifist.

I think he was and he wasn't, you know.

It's this chameleon quality again.

Constantine Fitzgibbon, his first biographer,

said that he'd read the stories about Dylan Thomas, he'd heard all

of the stories and they seemed to be stories told not of one man or even

two men, but of six or eight, and I think that's very much to the point.

Yes, he was a pacifist in certain ways.

He was a pacifist in the '30s like a lot of socialists,

they didn't want another war.

There's a very strong Welsh tradition of anti-Imperialist pacifism as well,

a very honourable and strong tradition of that

and he was part of that.

What would the alternatives have been for Dylan

at the beginning of the war?

The alternatives to writing film scripts would have been

working in a munitions factory,

having some kind of job with the military but which didn't involve

active combat, so on a defence battery or something like that.

He was very unwilling to work in a munitions factory,

he saw that as indirectly killing people, turning a cog,

turning a screw.

"Oh, no, I'd rather be a poet any day and drink beer, deary me."

But I think that within the remit of writing film scripts in the war,

was something else,

it wasn't just about propaganda for joining the forces.

There was also an element of social reconstruction,

and I think this was part of maybe what drew Dylan Thomas in.

The message of many of these films was

that there could be no return to the 1930s.

Lads shouldn't have to play in a place like this.

Kids shouldn't have to grow up in soot and muck.

It isn't right!

In 1942 the government's Beveridge Report was a bestseller,

with over 600,000 copies sold.

It set out a blueprint for the establishment

of a post-war welfare state.

Ah, now this is much better!

Aye. These flats are better than 'ouses that was 'ere.

Like most films that Dylan Thomas wrote during the war,

this was reviewed in the industry's own monthly magazine,

Documentary News Letter.

Propaganda value, very good for the home front,

particularly since the film makes it clear that plans for the future

are bound up with the war effort,

which we are all engaged in, here and now.

But who's going to make them come true?

They are!

You are! You're only folk that can make these plans come true.

Remember, it's your town.

If you think about it, Beveridge's plan talks about

looking after the citizen from the cradle to the grave.

Now Dylan Thomas's poetry is about first and last things.

It's about birth, it's about genesis and it's about death, you know,

and in a weird way,

the coordinates of his poetry line up in the early '40s

with the new coordinates of the state in the Beveridge Report.

And I think this, perhaps, is something that drew him in as well.

Dylan Thomas's first employers in the world of film-making were

Strand Films, at the time, one of the biggest

producers of documentary films in Britain.

During the War, their offices were in this building here in Soho,

where they worked under contract to the Ministry of Information

producing as many as 70 films each year.

Despite Dylan's initial reservations about "propaganding", as he put it,

working for Strand Films seemed to agree with him.

He even referred to it sometimes as his war work.

This is how he described the office here at No 1 Golden Square

in a letter to a friend.

I write to you in a ringing, clinging office

with repressed women all around punishing typewriters,

and queers in striped suits talking about cinema and,

just at this very moment, a man with a bloodhound's voice

and his cheeks, I'm sure, full of Mars Bars, rehearsing out loud

a radio talk on India and the Documentary Movement.

Despite the slightly sarcastic tone of that letter,

Dylan did enjoy his time at Strand Films.

He was on a salary of £8 a week, rising later to £10 a week.

And it was a convivial working environment -

production meetings were often informal affairs

held in the back bar of the Cafe Royal

or other nearby watering holes.

But despite Dylan's reputation as something of a drinker,

many of his colleagues from this time

have attested to his professionalism as a writer.

The fact of the matter is

he simply wouldn't have kept his job otherwise.

You've now arrived on your practice war site.

As you can see,

conditions are not likely to be particularly comfortable...

Despite its rather dull title, Balloon Site 568 was warmly received

by the reviewers at the Documentary News Letter.

After some weeks of training, the girls get familiar

with their floppy elephantine charges.

The weird flock of balloons going into bed makes a striking picture.

That review can be seen online here

and like every other review in the magazine

it ends with an assessment of the film's propaganda value.

"A job, which the film admits must at times be hard,

"even depressing, is shown to be an inviting one.

"The film should bring in recruits to the Service."

But just how effective were films like this

within the wider war effort?

To answer that question, I'm meeting up with Dr Jamie Medhurst

of Aberystwyth University,

who's an expert on the documentary films of this period.

The films were seen as an important part of the war effort.

The Ministry of Information recognised the importance of film.

I think it goes back to the post-World War One period,

certainly in the late '20s, 1930s, with the growth of the

British Documentary Movement under the leadership of John Grierson

who himself saw the cinema as a kind of pulpit to preach to the masses.

And I think this then flows into the war period and the recognition

that film can have an impact and can change people's minds.

And what kind of films were they making?

All kinds of films, to be honest. I think the range is quite extensive

and if you think of it in terms of a spectrum, then on one end

you have the films that were training...

essentially training films for prospective soldiers.

You have films that provided information,

factual information on the war effort.

Films that were a little bit more subtle

in terms of changing people's minds -

I don't know whether soft propaganda is the phrase here -

through to the harder end of propaganda,

which is perhaps more obvious, more direct...

-Attacking the enemy?

-Attacking the enemy,

and one of those films is Dylan Thomas's These Are The Men.

DRUM ROLL SOUNDS

These are the men

These are to blame...

One of the cleverest scripts that Dylan Thomas wrote

was for this film,

based on an imaginative re-use of Nazi propaganda.

Dylan took Leni Riefenstahl's famous 1934 film of a Nuremberg rally,

and superimposed satirical new "translations" in English,

in which Hitler and other Nazi leaders

apparently confessed their sins.

VOICEOVER: I was born of poor parents.

I grew into a discontented and neurotic child. My lungs were bad.

My mother spoilt me and secured my exemption from military service.

Consider my triumphant path to power!

Despite its sophisticated use of ridicule,

the film These Are The Men is still quite a direct piece of propaganda,

and as such, it's fairly untypical of the kind of thing

that the Ministry of Information was trying to do during the Second World War.

During the First World War,

propaganda had been far more blunt and jingoistic.

By the 1940s, the authorities realised that the British people

were too sophisticated and too sceptical

to accept such crude demonisations of the enemy.

Propaganda now refrained from stridency,

opting instead for a more restrained and more sincere tone.

Wartime propaganda films put far more emphasis on what was being

fought for rather than what was being fought against.

And so, in 1942 Dylan Thomas found himself

writing about a very familiar subject.

Morning is breaking over Wales at war

Not the long and faraway wild war

Of the mountain Welshmen and the English kings

But the terrible near war of England and Wales

And her brothers and sisters all over the Earth...

This was a film commissioned to complement similar pieces

that had featured Scotland and Northern Ireland.

According to the review in Documentary News Letter...

The main points are made by an imaginative use of music

and commentary the latter an impressive effort by Dylan Thomas,

with its simple verses about the slump and its aftermath.

Dragging through the squalor with their hearts like lead

Staring at the hunger and the shut pit head...

If the film critics were impressed with this simplicity

in Dylan Thomas's verse commentary, to what extent did this reflect

a new departure in his writing?

It would be simplistic to say, as some people have,

that he learned to write simpler because he had to write the films.

Good writers want to make readers work.

Good writers are interested in what they want to say that's original.

They're not interested in dumbing things down

to the level of journalism.

So, I think that the films helped Dylan

to explore a new lyrical vein and they helped him to devise

new structures for spreading meaning in deceptively simple forms.

Nothing in their pockets

Nothing home to eat

Lagging from the slag heap to the pinched, packed street...

According to one critic, "The film should please the Welsh

"and interest the English and the Scots."

However, it didn't please the censors,

with its pointed references to unemployment

and at one point there was talk of banning it even,

until it was eventually cleared for exhibition

by the Ministry of Information here in London.

Throughout the war, there was a certain amount of tension

between artist and bureaucrat.

Documentary makers claimed there was too much scrutiny,

with more and more people having to be consulted

before scripts could be agreed or rough-cuts approved.

Get this threaded up, will you?

They were heavily censored.

This is wartime, we have a Ministry of Information

working on part of the Government to ensure that the correct message,

the same message, was going out across in all media,

in newspapers, in radio and of course in film.

So tell us the convoluted method by which

Wales Green Mountain Black Mountain eventually passed for exhibition.

The British Council was unhappy with Green Mountain Black Mountain

because of the images of unemployment, particularly,

and referred it to the Wales Office of the Ministry of Information,

who took exception to the film on different grounds,

because they weren't convinced that Dylan Thomas was the right person

to be involved with this film.

He wasn't "a proper Welshman" as he lived in London.

This was referred then to the Ministry of Information in London

who took a different view and decided that, no,

Dylan Thomas was the right man and the film was passed.

But it's an interesting example, I think, of that censorship process,

of that interference, you could argue, from higher up the chain.

Dylan had lived in London for several short periods of his life

before he began work with Strand Films.

He met his wife in this pub in 1936.

He took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition the same year

and there's a surreal flavour to his critical description

of the English capital to his friend, Vernon Watkins.

"I've just come back from London, city of the restless dead.

"It really is an insane city and filled me with terror.

"Every pavement drills through your soles to your scalp,

"and out pops a lamp-post covered with hair.

"I'm not going to London again for years, its intelligentsia

"is so hurried in the head that nothing stays there.

"Its glamour smells of goat.

"There's no difference between good and bad."

But in his first years with Strand Films

he had to spend most of his time here in London

and in 1943, the Thomases came to live

in an artists' studio, long since demolished,

here on Manresa Road in Chelsea.

It wasn't very comfortable at the best of times,

but after the birth of their second child,

Caitlin and the children spent more and more time

with friends and relatives outside London.

Another major factor of course was the risk of air raids.

When Dylan came to meet Donald Taylor,

his prospective employer at Strand Films,

for the first time in 1940, he stayed here in Hammersmith.

Unfortunately his visit coincided

with the first night of the London Blitz.

And this is how his host,

Theodora Fitzgibbon, described the scene that evening.

"The planes flew up the Thames,

"which was lit up like a horrifying pantomime,

"dropping their deadly cargo indiscriminately."

AIR RAID SIREN SOUNDS

As he spent more time in London

and experienced the effects of the bombing,

the Blitz gripped his imagination,

as he confided to his friend Vernon Watkins.

The Hyde Park guns were booming.

Guns on the top of Selfridges.

A plane brought down in the Tottenham Court Road.

White-faced taxis still trembling through the streets,

and buses going, and even people being shaved.

Are you frightened these nights?

When I wake up out of burning birdman dreams

and hear the sound of bombs and gunfire only a little way away,

I'm so relieved I could laugh or cry.

Dylan used the same idea in this script for his film, Our Country.

Oh, walking through the streets in the morning

Would nearly make you want to sing

Though there were dead people under the stones

Or people not dead

Sing, because the world was alive again in the daytime

And I was alive and you were alive.

Air raids, and their terrible consequences,

were a theme to which he returned

time and time again in his own poetry too.

When the morning was waking over the war

He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died

The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide

He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone

And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor...

At the beginning of 1944, Donald Taylor formed a new company,

Gryphon Films, and he took Dylan on to work for him there too.

Dylan was increasingly asked to work on feature-length film scripts

about Robert Burns, about the Blasket Islands,

about the 19th-century Edinburgh murderers, Burke and Hare.

Although none of these projects went into production during Dylan's

lifetime, he really enjoyed this work and we detect occasional

notes of frustration creeping into his correspondence from this period

because he still had to work on the propaganda films too.

There is nothing but glibly naive insincerity

in this huge, tin-roofed box of tricks.

I do not care a bugger about the Problems of Wartime Transport.

But the propaganda films still had to be made

and sometimes the end product was just as rewarding, artistically,

as working on feature film scripts.

One of the highlights of his creative relationship

with Donald Taylor was the documentary Our Country.

And once again, Dylan turned to poetry for the commentary.

To begin with, a city

A fair, grey day

A day as lively and noisy as a close gossip of sparrows

As terribly impersonal as a sea cabin full of machines

When morning is driving down from the roofs of buildings

Into stone labyrinths and traffic webs

When each man is alone forever in the midst of the masses of men

And all the separate movements of the morning crowds

Are lost together in the heartbeats of the clocks...

The film was made in 1944

and premiered here at the Empire, Leicester Square.

According to the Spectator, it was,

"The most exciting and provocative film for many a long day."

According to the Documentary News Letter it was,

"The sole and successful experimental film of the war period.

"It says important things in a new way."

The film consists of a series of episodes bound together

by a merchant seaman on leave who wanders around "Our Country".

In Wales he chances upon a language lesson in school.

I wonder if you can say "Good morning, sailor" in Welsh.

CHILDREN: Bore da, forwr.

Dylan's correspondence with Donald Taylor whilst they were working

on this film reveals how willing he was to be a team player.

Despite his standing as one of Britain's leading poets,

he was not precious about his verse at all.

Dear Donald,

the cuts you made in the verse-commentary,

which from the point of view of the film were essential,

did destroy some of the continuity of the verse, as verse.

Written down, the verse looks a little chaotic -

as it's bound to be.

Heard spoken to a beautiful picture,

the words gain a sense and authority which the printed word denies them.

Going out, out over the racing rails

And the grumble of London leaving thunder

Over the maze track of metal through a wink and a spin

Of towns and signals and fields

Out to the edges of the explosive, the moon-moved

Man-indifferent capsizing sea...

But although Dylan was happy enough to bow creatively

to Donald Taylor's greater experience in the world of film,

continuing to write his own poems

was just as important to him as ever.

In November 1944 he complained to a literary friend that...

"I'm writing film scripts for a living,

"and the time left over from that I try to spend on poems.

A miserable arrangement, which should be reversed."

And yet, during the war years, whilst scripting,

Dylan was also building up the material

for his next collection of poems, Deaths And Entrances -

widely considered to be one of his finest.

So was scripting as detrimental to his poetic output as he thought?

Caitlin Thomas always thought that Dylan was wasting his talent

on this rubbish and that there were

a lot of good poems gone west because of that.

I think that's probably true up to a point

but I think that writers sometimes do things

without even knowing why they're doing them,

and it advances their art or it takes them to a different place.

For three years he doesn't seem to have produced

much in the way of poetry at all,

or he was working on the scripts as far as we can see.

-Was he happier being told what to write?

-Maybe, maybe.

He did say in one letter that a writer cannot be a writer

24 hours of the day.

He has to be a normal human being as well.

And he seems never to have been happier

than when he was having a drink, being convivial,

or lying in a warm bath eating dolly mixtures

and reading the latest Agatha Christie.

So there are other aspects to his life

than sitting down and simply writing.

And perhaps it's dangerous for us to think of film-writing

and poetry as inhabiting opposite ends of the spectrum of writing?

It is dangerous to see them as opposed.

One of the things that's unique about Dylan Thomas -

and I think you could say utterly unique, you know,

the only poet I can think of who manages to do this -

is that he was a success writing anthology popular poems

and at writing high-modernist masterpieces,

and that he also bridged the gap between poetry and popular culture.

He loved popular culture. He was way ahead of his time.

Most of early 20th century writing, modernism particularly,

is set up in opposition to popular culture,

which is seen as completely trashy and trivial.

Dylan never really accepted that,

and so working as a film script writer allowed him

to leap across the gap, as it were.

And a man-made journey still within the island gates

Through valleys and troubles

Over hills slag-black or grey as slumtown slates

Or through fat lovely fields all lying green under their flower folds

To where Wales waits...

Dylan's talent for what he called descriptive visual writing -

the famously idiosyncratic style that would later

manifest itself in Under Milk Wood -

certainly blossomed during his time at Strand.

Meadow and chapel and huge bitten sea coast

Hump-backed, iron-tracked, bricked-over, smoked-out

Spread-eagled bundle of valleys

The valley's voice...

On the centenary of his birth, perhaps it's only fitting

that Dylan Thomas's considerable poetic achievements

should be the main focus of the celebrations.

However, we should not ignore his work

in the field of propaganda and film.

It influenced his development as a poet, and perhaps we cannot

fully appreciate his poetry without also acknowledging his love of film.