Dylan Thomas Welsh Greats

Dylan Thomas is a global icon -

the most famous writer Wales has produced.

As a boy growing up in Swansea,

he filled secret notebooks with poems

that would one day be read around the world.

Poetry was just in him. It was born in him.

Words were living things to him.

Today, Dylan's poetry is almost eclipsed

by his image as a hard-drinking, promiscuous bohemian.

There are, of course, chaotic characters in one's life,

and Dylan, I think, was a pretty chaotic character.

At the centre of this chaos

was Dylan's tempestuous romance with Caitlin Macnamara.

She was a likeable, dangerous woman.

They ganged up, the two of them together, against society,

and they were really a couple of outlaws in that sense.

Dylan's reputation as an outlaw artist

helped make him a celebrity in America.

In the bright lights of New York city,

he found fame, fortune and self-destruction.

The whole business of Dylan in America is pretty sad, really.

A man's got to have a bit of ruthlessness and a bit of...

He lacked that completely,

and when he got to America, he was just eaten alive.

Dylan Marlais Thomas was born in Cwmdonkin Drive

in the Uplands of Swansea in 1914.

He was the younger of two children

born to schoolmaster DJ Thomas and his wife, Florence.

Dylan's mother doted on her son.

She had that overprotective mollycoddling attitude,

and that's what did for Dylan, in a way, throughout his life,

because his mother made such a fuss of him -

cut him so much slack.

He was for ever looking for women to do the same thing to him.

Dylan's father, DJ,

was a schoolmaster who'd earned a first-class degree

at Aberystwyth University,

but had failed to fulfil his potential.

He taught English -

English language and English literature -

for the rest of his life.

That was his career.

But he felt always

that there were higher things that he should have done.

Dylan's father was born in Carmarthen,

while his mother's family came from the nearby peninsula of Llanstephan.

Though DJ and Florrie's roots were in rural Welsh-speaking Wales,

their aspirations for their son

were in line with their life in suburban Swansea.

Though Florence and DJ spoke Welsh fluently,

they insisted that their son speak English,

because that, at the time, was the appropriate thing to do,

and it was seen as the middle-class way of doing things.

Dylan's parents sent him to elocution lessons

to erase any traces of a Welsh accent.

But he got a taste of Welsh-speaking Wales

on his visits to his Auntie Anne and Uncle Jim,

who had a farm near Llangain, called Fern Hill.

ANDREW: Fern Hill gave him the sense of the expansiveness of Wales,

of the beauty of the countryside.

It was his introduction to the old Wales.

I mean, Swansea was a cosmopolitan city

with quite a strong leaning towards England.

Couldn't say that, really, of Carmarthenshire.

And as I was green and carefree

Famous among the barns

About the happy yard

And singing as the farm was home

In the sun that is young once only

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means

And green and golden

I was huntsman and herdsman

The calves sang to my horn

The foxes on the hills barked clear and cold

And the Sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams.

ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS

Dylan's experience of the traditional Welsh Sabbath

came from his trips to Paraclete,

a church in Newton, near Mumbles,

where his uncle, David Rees, was a minister.

He was forced to church three times a day,

and he got that incredible knowledge of the Bible

that permeates his work,

and he also watched this uncle preach,

and it was kind of full of Welsh hoil, and hellfire and brimstone,

and this informed Dylan's way of reading his poetry.

Poetry was a presence in Dylan's life from the start.

DJ passed on his deep love of literature to his son,

reciting the classics to him as an infant.

By the time he was ten, poetry had begun to pour out of Dylan.

At the age of 12, Dylan had a poem, entitled His Requiem,

published in a newspaper.

He'd sent the poem in to the Western Mail,

"His Requiem, Dylan Thomas," and he got a prize.

His parents never cashed the postal order.

It stood on the mantle shelf, and they were thrilled.

But when the poem was published

in a collection of Dylan's verse after his death,

it turned out all was not as it seemed.

A woman wrote to The Guardian, "The poem on page 171, His Requiem,

"was written by my mother, Lillian Gard,

"and was published in The Boy's Own Paper.

Dylan's talent for mischief far exceeded his appetite for learning,

as Vernon Davies, a fellow-pupil at Swansea Grammar School, recalls.

In those days, you had to try five particular subjects,

and if you failed one, you failed the lot.

And the story went round that DJ, his father,

said to him one day,

"Dylan, you've done very well in English.

And he said, "Yes, Father.

"Oh, I'm very pleased.

"But I notice you failed in Mathematics and in Chemistry.

"Yes, Father.

And then, "You failed, too, in French and Geography."

"Yes, Father."

And Father said, "Well, if you had taken Greek,

"you could have failed that, too."

Father could be a little bit sarcastic.

Dylan was no scholar,

but he was a serious and disciplined writer.

He edited the school magazine

and showed an artist's commitment when it came to his poetry.

We all knew there was something different about Dylan and words.

Words were living things to him.

He'd shown this precocious talent.

He'd begun filling these notebooks with brilliant snatches of poems.

Not just snatches, whole poems.

If you look at the poems he was writing at that time,

they are very kind of introverted.

They are looking at his body and trying to make something

of the internal motions of his body and how they relate to the world.

He was going through, basically,

I suppose, what you could call a sort of late teenage angst.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age

That blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

At the age of 16, Dylan left school

and got a job as a reporter on the South Wales Evening Post.

He was, in many ways, a natural journalist.

He had a great curiosity.

He enjoyed the experience of going into the hospitals,

the police stations and the pubs, you know?

It was all part of his education into life in Swansea.

When he wasn't in the pub, Dylan could be found

upstairs at the Kardomah cafe, home to Swansea's bright young things.

They included the painter Alfred Janes and the composer Daniel Jones.

Dylan, who was still pouring his creative energy into his poetry,

felt at home among these fellow artists.

He did decide to cultivate this bohemianism,

which didn't come naturally to him.

He was born in a semidetached house in suburban Swansea,

his dad's a school teacher

and he's got relatives in the Church.

He's basically a Welsh non-conformist boy.

Dylan looked to London as an escape from suburban Swansea.

In April 1933, the Sunday Referee published one of his poems.

It was read by a young London poet called Pamela Hansford Johnson,

who began writing to him.

He goes up to meet Pamela Hansford Johnson for the first time,

they've been courting by letter,

and he knocks on her door in Battersea and she opens it

and he just blurts out, "Have you seen the Gauguins?"

because there was a Gauguin exhibition on in London.

And he later admitted to her that he'd thought all the way on the train

from Swansea to Paddington, "What can I say to impress her?"

and that's what he came up with.

So, there was this desire in him to be intellectual.

She lived with her mother in Battersea,

so he would come...he'd stay with them

and he was beginning to explore London.

I don't think they had a sexual relationship at all.

If their relationship meant anything,

it was simply that she was the one who introduced him to the place.

Within a year, Dylan and the artist Alfred Janes left Swansea

to live with their mutual friend Mervyn Levy

in rented accommodation on the outskirts of Chelsea.

They were going to paint and write poems

but the place was squalid,

and he was used to his mother. He was used to having Florrie around

taking the tops off his eggs. I mean, that's the story...

All throughout his life, people had to take the top off his boiled egg.

He liked to lie in the bath with sweets placed all around the edge

for him just to sit back and eat Dolly Mixtures.

He didn't have any money.

His parents helped him.

There's a story that Mervyn Levy tells that Fred Janes would

turn him upside down and shake him to get the rent out of his pockets

that would fall on the floor, just a few coins.

In London, Dylan survived on hand-outs from his parents,

loans from his friends, and payments for reviewing the odd thriller.

But he was busy building up contacts in the literary establishment,

and in 1934 Dylan got his big break

when his first collection of poetry was published.

The 18 poems of its title were drawn from the closely guarded

teenage notebooks he'd kept in Swansea.

He insisted it had no blurb,

he insisted there was portrait of him at the start,

he insisted the poems have no titles.

Later on, the first lines become titles

but these are just numbered 1 to 18,

and it's got all his great poems that came out in this incredible

burst of creativity he had, fuelled with testosterone

and growth, but he was only 16, 17, 18 when he's writing these poems.

It is just the beginning of everything for Dylan Thomas.

It wasn't a big hit with the reading public

but it got good reviews for a first collection.

It placed him firmly on the literary map in London.

The people who mattered noticed.

He injected a bit of fresh air into the world of poetry in the 1930s.

There was a sort of romanticism about him,

there was a lyricism about him

that you don't get in some of the other poets of that period.

Back in Swansea, Dylan's first book

made a big impression on Vernon Watkins.

Watkins was a young bank clerk

and aspiring poet who modelled himself on Gerard Manley Hopkins,

a Victorian priest who'd written poetry in secret.

18 Poems was on view in the two bookshops in Swansea,

and Vernon felt very indignant because he thought he was

the only poet in Swansea.

And he'd decided not to publish,

to be like Hopkins,

Gerard Manley Hopkins,

and only have his poems published after he was dead, you see?

And he felt really indignant at this Swansea...

because the bookshops had "local poet", you know,

"Swansea poet", and things. And he went in every lunchtime,

from the bank, and read some of the poems,

and he did that every lunchtime for a week.

On the Saturday, he actually bought the book.

Vernon got in touch with Dylan

and the two soon became close friends,

meeting regularly to discuss their poetry.

Dylan knew that Vernon understood what it was like

to, you know, wrench a poem to bits

and try and put it together again

and wrench that to bits and do it.

Often, there were 60, 70, 80 pages of manuscript

for a single poem.

Vernon helped Dylan select and revise the poems

for his second collection of poetry.

In 1936, Twenty-Five Poems was published to critical acclaim.

In the artistic circles in which Dylan now moved,

he came across the Welsh painter,

and notorious libertine, Augustus John.

That year, John introduced his sometime lover, Caitlin Macnamara,

to Dylan.

Caitlin had a beguiling effect on men, and Dylan was no exception.

He kind of fell all over me, you know, put his head on my knee

and never stopped talking.

It seems almost immediately that we kind of fell into bed together.

It all happened so naturally,

as though we'd known each other all the time.

She was a fascinating woman,

and he was obviously fascinated by her.

Caitlin was tough. She knew what was what.

Oh, I thought she was awful, really.

I was frightened of her at first, for years I was frightened of her,

because she had no restraint at all.

She was totally unpredictable.

Caitlin had enjoyed an unconventional upbringing.

She was the daughter of Frances Macnamara,

an Irish bohemian and would-be writer.

Having grown up around artists,

she embraced the role of muse to a great poet.

A little over a year after they met, Dylan and Caitlin were married.

Caitlin really was his finishing school when it comes to bohemianism.

Her own father, Frances Macnamara,

encouraged his wife into affairs.

I mean, Yvonne Macnamara slept with Augustus John,

they shared each other's wives,

and Yvonne then went on to have a lesbian relationship

with a photographer who took...

Nora Summers, who took all the great early pictures of Dylan,

so Dylan, after he got married,

he went down to live with his mother-in-law in the New Forest,

very close to Augustus John's crew,

very close to the Macnamaras,

very close to the Summerses,

and these three truly bohemian families

who define it... I mean, Augustus John was considered

the king of bohemia.

It's not a country, it's a state of mind, but he was the king.

And Dylan I think decided, "God, that looks like the life for me."

But unfortunately, it didn't come naturally to him.

In the free-living environment of the New Forest,

Dylan missed the home comforts of Cwmdonkin Drive.

Dylan got a cold

and went to bed and he asked my mother

for bread and milk,

and she broke up the bread in very rough pieces.

He didn't like that.

He said, "You must do it like my mother does it, in little cubes."

In 1938, a year after they were married,

Dylan and Caitlin left the New Forest.

They moved to Carmarthenshire, where Dylan's family had their roots.

Throughout his life, Dylan was at his most productive

when he was living and writing in Wales.

He found tranquillity and inspiration in the village of Laugharne

on the quiet estuary of the River Taf.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail

With its horns through mist

And the castle brown as owls

But all the gardens

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

Dylan and Caitlin's first child, Llywelyn, was born in 1939,

later followed by a sister, Aeronwy, and a brother, Colm.

When Dylan wanted a break from family life,

he'd catch up with old friends in Swansea.

And when the pubs shut for the afternoon,

he'd retire to Swansea Museum,

as the museum's trainee librarian Elaine Kidwell discovered.

I was in the library with the girl I was taking over from

and this chap came to the door of the library, you see,

came into the hall and he went like this.

And she nodded, "Yes, go on."

She said, "That's Dylan Thomas."

She said, "He's a poet, or something.

"He goes down to the gents

"and he has an armchair there and he goes to sleep

"until it's time. You may sometimes have to go down and knock the door

"and tell him you're locking up," she said, "but he's harmless."

Right. So, of course I wasn't a bit nervous about it

when it was my turn, you know?

So, I knocked the door and I thought,

"My mother would have a fit, me knocking on the door of the gents!"

Anyway, I said, "Mr Thomas, I'm going to lock up now.

"Are you coming out?"

SHE MUMBLES

So, out he came and he was open here and his tie was there

and he said, "Sorry, I do beg your pardon. Yes, yes..."

"Come along," I said.

Well, I knew after a few times, I had to push him up the steps.

I said, "Come on, come on."

He'd go along and said, "Yes, yes, yes, yes."

As I say, beautifully mannered.

In 1939, Dylan published his third collection, The Map Of Love.

But its release was overshadowed by the outbreak of war.

Dylan, who was a pacifist, faced the prospect of conscription.

In the spring of 1940,

he was summoned to an Army medical examination.

He decided that, you know, he was going to flunk this, basically,

and so he got drunk the night before and...

I mean, not just drunk, I mean, just paralytic,

and he went there and, you know,

I don't think that the Army medical officer had much choice

but to declare that he was, funnily enough,

not actually totally unfit for service,

but he was put in the category C3, which meant that he was...

he was only going to kind of be called up if, you know, the...

at the last resort.

But Dylan got his chance to play a part in the war effort in 1941

when he found work in London writing propaganda films.

In the furnaces of Llanelli,

in the roaring cauldrons of the Swansea valley,

in the stamp and clatter and glare of the black and red works,

where the fires never go out,

they fight with blinding, blazing rods and piston rams.

They fight with the rhythm of iron forests,

thrusting between flames.

They fight with white-hot muscles and arms of steel.

Dylan's documentary work

was a valuable source of income during the war years,

but he still struggled financially.

When he was hard-up,

he would do whatever he had to to make ends meet.

Theodora FitzGibbon, Constantine's wife,

met him coming out of her house...

..with her little miniature sewing machine,

which, in the war, was irreplaceable.

Of course, he was going to pawn it.

But she met him and she said, "Dylan, what are you doing with that?"

And he said, "Theodora, you don't think anything bad about me, do you?

"You know I would never do anything that you're thinking of.

"I was going to take it to have it cleaned,

"because I saw a little rust on it."

You know? You couldn't help laughing.

He was always, I think, forgiven for stealing things,

but like a small child, property meant very little to him.

When HE had money, he was tremendously generous.

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

Living in London through the Blitz had a profound effect on Dylan.

It can be seen in the collection of poems he published in 1946,

called Deaths And Entrances.

Civilians were in the front line for the first time,

and Thomas is writing about that and the new horrors of that.

It's a very contemporary and relevant thing.

I think it's one of the things

that makes him an enduring and interesting poet.

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.

The publication of Deaths And Entrances,

which included the poem Fern Hill,

saw Dylan's poetry reach a popular audience for the first time.

There is a moment recorded by one of his friends, Jack Lindsay,

who said, "I did a reading with Dylan Thomas in early 1946,

"and it was the usual group of, you know, bearded bohemians

"and scroungers and hangers-on, tiny poetry audience.

"The next time I did one,

"it was after Deaths And Entrances had come out.

"He'd just made a radio broadcast

"and it was full of, you know, screaming groupies almost."

So, he had a huge audience and he was almost a household name,

and it happened with the publication of this volume.

He was seen as the leading poet then,

probably in the English-speaking world, until the time of his death.

Dylan was becoming a celebrity,

thanks not only to Deaths And Entrances,

but also to his appearances on the radio.

BBC producers in Cardiff and London

valued his gifts as an actor and narrator,

and Dylan was soon reading his own work on air.

The speaking voice was quite light, quite a tenor voice,

and then you got this wonderful poetry voice, which was not baritone,

no, but not tenor,

but this preacher's voice of Wales, this special voice.

August Bank Holiday - a tune on an ice-cream cornet.

A slap of sea and a tickle of sand.

A fanfare of sunshades opening.

A wince and whinny of bathers dancing into deceptive water.

A tuck of dresses. A rolling of trousers.

A compromise of paddlers.

A sunburn of girls and a lark of boys.

A silent hullabaloo of balloons.

The BBC's working culture suited Dylan perfectly.

The people at the BBC drank a lot. Business was done in pubs.

You know, one of the pubs was known as The Gluepot,

because a famous conductor

couldn't get his musicians out of the pub, so...

You know, they loved the pub.

He came from a culture where...

I mean, South Wales culture, where, you know, a man...

a man is only a man if he can hold his drink, if he...

You know, it's not...it's not, "Ooh, he's a drinker."

He's proud of being... "Yes, I'm with...

"I'm in the pub with the boys,

"oh, we had a hell of a night," and so on.

But despite Dylan's reputation as a boozer, work always came first.

Dylan always left The George half an hour before anyone else

and when we got back,

he was working on his part in the studio like a real pro.

And this is the thing people forget.

Nobody leaves a pub to go and work in a studio

when there's convivial and good, friendly company

and good drinking going on

unless they're really serious about the work.

In 1949, Dylan and Caitlin returned to Laugharne,

where Dylan's most important patroness, Margaret Taylor,

had bought them a home called the Boat House.

Dylan would spend his mornings answering letters

and reading thrillers,

before walking to Browns Hotel to meet his father

and do The Times crossword.

Afternoons were reserved for writing.

He used to go into his little shed

and scrape and scratch and mutter and mumble, intone and change,

and he was frightfully slow, you know.

From about two to seven, he might have done just one line

or taken out one word or put in one word.

Dylan's daily routine didn't allow much time for parenting,

as his daughter Aeronwy recalled.

We were not expected to be with my father. We didn't expect it.

If he sort of graciously condescended, as it were,

to call us, that was something different.

He would ask me to come and read with him or whatever,

but he'd have his meals separately to us.

I mean, it even went to the extent of,

when we travelled in the train,

he would be in one carriage reading his novels,

usually Agatha Christie, and eating his sweets,

and we'd be in the other, you know, part of the train with my mother.

He was a hopeless father. I mean, couldn't have been worse.

He just didn't want anything at all to do with the children.

Never bothered with them at all.

But he just liked to feel... they were there, I think.

The roles of attentive father and a material provider

didn't come naturally to Dylan.

We literally did have no money.

But as soon as he got a bit, we used to drink it.

I used to try and steal a few pounds for...

for the Carmarthen market and dishes and pots and pans, plates and so on.

-Steal it from the drinking money?

-Yeah.

Dylan never noticed when I did.

Were you ever in total want, in absolute destitution at Laugharne?

Yeah, constantly. Always, I think.

Cos we put the food bills down and we put the drink on tick

until the patroness came down and paid them off every now and then.

But there was suddenly a glimmer of financial hope for the couple.

In 1949, Dylan was invited to embark on a lecture tour of America

by poet and academic John Malcolm Brinnin.

His work was finding a market in America.

And if you could make your mark there, there'd be lots of money.

Dylan landed in New York on the 21st of February 1950

and gave his first reading

at a New York poetry centre two days later.

He was an overnight sensation.

If you wanted to be cosmopolitan and you lived in New England,

certainly in New York, then you had a duty to yourself

to go and see what this phenomenon was really like.

He mesmerised people.

I used to sell books in America every year, go there four or five times,

and I'd have Dylan Thomas books in my glass case,

and the number of people who would stop, in the early days, and say,

"We heard him read. We never forgot it."

Dylan was feted in America,

but the adulation and hospitality he enjoyed

would prove damaging in the long run.

When he's in New York, he starts drinking spirits,

which apparently he hardly drank beforehand.

After he read, they took him to part...

as they poured drink down his neck.

And, in a way, they wanted...

..a boorish, drunken, bohemian poet.

That's what was in their heads.

That's the myth. And, by then, Dylan delivered it.

As a person... he remained quite immature.

He could be, and often was, very shy.

And when he was shy, he tended to sort of show off or name-drop.

Dylan...

..wanted very much for people to love him.

And...he tried... to gain their love

and to give them what they wished.

There were plenty of women in America

ready to offer their love to Dylan.

Those American women are absolutely shameless, you know.

They were sending him flowers, you know, that kind of thing,

you know, which really turned me up.

And they were all over him. It really filled me with disgust.

I don't think that he was a desperately

sort of attractive-looking character,

but there was something about his personality

that, you know, he seemed to attract women.

And I think it was also, you know,

he was fairly direct as well, you know.

You know, if he had a drink or two inside him, you know,

he could be pretty clear about what he wanted, you know,

by the end of the evening, if you know what I mean.

I think he was the least likely lothario.

He wanted women to cuddle up to,

like his mother had cuddled up to him.

His mother always had a reputation

of having her grandchildren in bed with her.

You know, she loved cuddling up with the kids

and I think Dylan was always looking for an ample bosom to cuddle up to.

On his first American tour,

Dylan embarked on his most significant affair,

with a junior editor from Harper's Bazaar called Pearl Kazin.

When he returned home, she came, too.

When Pearl Kazin followed him from America to London,

Dylan just took her on a boat down the Thames

and took her to weddings and parties,

went down to Brighton for a typical dirty weekend,

but Caitlin got to hear of all of this

and although they were bohemian in a way,

her pride was hurt that Dylan was doing this

in places that she went to

and that a lot of her friends saw him with this young American girl.

That made me furious.

You know, there was I slaving away in the bogs with my children

and there was he gallivanting up

and, you know, I was really absolutely mad with rage then.

I should add that I was quietly trying to keep up with him,

you know, having my revenge done with the local oafs

and I was by no means leading a dutiful, virtuous life.

When he wasn't there, I was drinking as much as I could and...

behaving in a most unconventional way, to put it mildly.

But you wanted him?

No, I didn't want him in that sense.

I wanted him not to betray me, but...I mean...

It's really hard to explain. I didn't want him as a bed-mate.

I wanted him completely faithful to me,

like he wanted me completely faithful to him, you know.

We both had this image of each other which was...

quite ridiculous and romantic.

We wanted the other one to be perfectly faithful,

cos we knew what we did was of no importance at all.

It was just a little physical act we forgot afterwards, you know.

So, I was really sort of following in his footsteps,

trying to outdo him and be worse than him.

But I had a much smaller canvas, obviously.

With infidelities on both sides,

the atmosphere at the Boat House became increasingly fraught,

particularly after closing time.

We had the most appalling fights up in the bedroom,

tearing him down on the ground by those curls

and banging his head on the floor as hard as I could.

I think I was a bit stronger than him, you know.

And he kind of... seemed to allow me to do it.

I think he must have fought back. I don't remember him hitting me much.

-I was doing...

-You used to fight physically with him?

-Oh, God, yes.

Once I took a torch and gave him a hell of a bang on the head.

And the other patroness, Welsh patroness, she said,

"Do you realise you might be killing an immortal poet?" or something.

I couldn't care.... I said, "I don't give a damn."

In the midst of this turbulent domestic scene,

Dylan was struggling to produce his most ambitious work -

a project he'd been planning for years.

He'd written the first draft of it in New Quay,

where he and Caitlin had lived briefly during the war.

He wrote Quite Early One Morning,

a broadcast about New Quay waking up on a day.

A lot of the characters for Milk Wood are first seen

and it's down in New Quay that's inspiring him.

And then when he gets to Laugharne, Dylan says,

"What Laugharne needs is a play about its people, itself."

And there he came an idea he was going to write a play called...

or a radio script, The Town That Was Mad.

It was about a village that didn't want, actually,

to have anything to do with the war,

so that the village was fenced off and considered to be insane,

but in Dylan's eyes, the village was sane and everybody else was mad.

Dylan mentioned his idea to radio producer Douglas Cleverdon,

who immediately recognised its potential.

He secured a BBC drama commission for the piece.

The challenge was actually getting the work out of Dylan,

because there was always a drama, there was always a crisis,

there was always a money problem.

He was a genius, but like all geniuses,

needed a lot of roadies to help them achieve what they can achieve.

And, in a way, my father was a roadie.

Without Cleverdon, he'd never have finished it,

he'd never have got round to it,

but Cleverdon nagged him.

My father, after endless periods of trying to do it,

managed to persuade Dylan that the thing to do

would be to lock him in the BBC library overnight

and pay him the following morning

by the numbers of lines that he'd written.

And so he provided him with an enamel bucket and locked him in.

And the following morning, came back, got Dylan,

who'd worked all night very happily, used the bucket,

and had produced quite a lot of the script.

My father was thrilled

and could see that this was the way to get Dylan to produce it.

In 1952, during the writing of Under Milk Wood, Dylan lost his father.

Just a year earlier, he'd written a poem for DJ.

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

DJ's death

heightened his son's long-standing obsession with his own mortality.

There's no question about it.

He thought about death every single day of his life.

One night, we'd gone back from the pub, Caitlin, Dylan,

some other friends, with me and my wife, to my own home.

And it got late and it was clearly better

that Caitlin and Dylan stayed the night.

But Caitlin said no, she wanted to go home at all costs,

because she liked to wake in the mornings in her own little box

and know exactly where she was.

And Dylan said,

"One morning, we'll wake in our own little boxes

"and know all too well where we are."

And he turned to me and he said, "I die every night,

"and when I wake again in the morning, well, that's a bonus."

He always said, often jokingly, but he always said, "I'll be like Keats.

"I won't live into even middle age."

Dylan had always been a sickly figure,

but by the early 1950s,

he was suffering from asthma, blackouts and gout.

He must have known that drink had become too important,

that he was drinking too much.

Certainly, in the last year or two,

there had been warnings from doctors.

He was unwell, he was exhausted, he was grieving, and...

I think people remember Dylan at that time of his life,

but anybody who went through what he went through that year...

would not be behaving like they normally would.

In 1953, Dylan made two journeys to America.

In New York, that May, he directed and acted

in a public performance of his work in progress, Under Milk Wood.

His fellow actors remarked on how ill he appeared.

By the time he came to make his second visit five months later,

years of high-living were taking their toll on him.

I remember seeing Dylan's passport photo and he looks OK.

He looks like a, you know,

approaching-middle-aged Dylan Thomas.

But in the same passport

was the photograph for his visa for his last trip in 1953.

So, there's maybe five to eight years between these two photos,

and yet it seems to me,

if you blew those two photos up and put them side by side,

it would tell you the story.

The week before he went to America for the last time,

he was walking to the station with Vernon and he said,

"You know, Vernon, I know I've written good poems.

"I don't know whether I've written any great ones."

Dylan delivered his long-awaited script for Under Milk Wood

to the BBC on the 15th of October 1953.

Four days later, he flew to America.

He was met at New York's Idlewild Airport

by John Malcolm Brinnin's assistant Liz Reitell,

with whom he'd started an affair on his previous trip.

When I saw him, I was shocked.

He was feeling quite wretched

and didn't even want to go out that night.

But I began to fear that he might kill himself,

get so ill that perhaps he might, what,

fall down, hit his head or something.

It was a dreadful illness that was coming.

He would retch and...dreadful gastric problems

and he would vomit and just be torn apart by coughing.

On the 4th of November, after a heavy drinking session,

Dylan fell ill.

His private physician, Dr Milton Feltenstein,

visited him at the Chelsea Hotel,

where he sedated Dylan

with an abnormally large dose of morphine sulphate.

I suddenly felt his hand stiffen and I looked at his face.

It was already beginning to turn blue.

Then this sort of dreadful gasping stoppage of his normal breathing.

"Oh, God, call the hospital, call the hospital."

Dylan was rushed by ambulance to St Vincent's Hospital.

He lay there in a coma for five days.

There was a telephone call and Vernon said...

They said, "This is The Times.

"We want you to write an obituary for Dylan Thomas."

And Vernon absolutely agonised. He said, "But he's not dead."

And The Times man said, "He is dying, though."

Caitlin flew to New York to be with her husband.

She was drunk when she arrived at St Vincent's.

I sat on the bed and started to roll a cigarette, you know.

And there's all the other people behind the glass partition,

gazing, you know, and presumably his other woman...

I don't know if that was the Sarah one or the Liz one.

I don't know if that's the same one, the one he was...

living with last, anyway...

and bringing in a lot of fans and all that

on the other side of that partition.

And I couldn't think what I ought to do to perform to them,

to do the right thing.

The last thing I was thinking about was Dylan stuck under there,

because he didn't seem to be there at all, if you know what I mean.

As soon as I saw him, I... I knew he wasn't there,

that he was gone and he would never come back.

The following day, Dylan Thomas died.

He had just turned 39.

Though Dylan died thousands of miles from home,

he was laid to rest in the churchyard at Laugharne.

Two months after his death,

the BBC broadcast the Play For Voices he'd been crafting for years.

Millions listened in to hear Richard Burton take the lead role

in Under Milk Wood.

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town,

starless and bible-black,

the cobblestreets silent and the hunched,

courters'-and- rabbits' wood limping invisible

down to the sloeblack,

slow, black, crowblack,

fishingboat-bobbing sea.

People are so seduced by the stories of his wild life

that they forget that what he was really was a poet.

All his inner genius was in his poetry.

If someone was putting an anthology together

of the greatest poetry of the 20th century, or world poetry,

two, three, four, five of those would have to be in it.

Under Milk Wood is still performed everywhere

and the short stories are read, so that's why he's remembered,

cos he was a great writer, and that's what we forget.