Walk in the footsteps of Dylan Thomas in Wales
Following in the footsteps of the famed Welsh poet, who roamed, dined and wrote in Swansea and Mumbles
On the trail of LAUGHARNE, WALES Dylan Thomas, nearly every pub along the Welsh side of the Bristol Channel has a picture of their best customer/national literary icon.
Brown’s Hotel, here on King Street and down the lane from his boathouse writing shed, has a prominent black-and-white of the romantic poet with his mother, Florence, in their bar. The perfect place to snap my drinking-age son — named Dylan Thomas — and his mom in the same seats.
Thousands of admirers have already come through: Jimmy Carter, Patti Smith, Mick Jagger and Pierce Brosnan, the latter’s son also a Dylan Thomas, with dad supposedly competing with Jagger to buy a bed Thomas used at Brown’s, now a quaint boutique B&B.
Scanning the walls at the Queens near Swansea Bay, and the Pilot overlooking the pier at Mumbles beach, it seems the author of Fern Hill, Under Milk Wood and A Child’s Christmas in Wales never died, just stepped away for a bit. Should he ever return, however, the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea has a framed copy of a hefty unpaid bar bill in pounds, shillings and pence.
He was just 39 when he died in New York after overdoing it on his 1953 American lecture tour, but few of his craft crammed so much into so little time.
The story starts in Swansea, his birthplace and second largest city in Wales, a short train from West Country English attractions in Oxford, Bath and Torquay.
Crossing the Severn River through the greenery, pastures and small rail stations with bilingual signs (Welsh is a treat if you can eavesdrop on natives), head down Swansea’s lively High Street past castle ruins to Thomas’ massive exhibition and theatre. The centre highlights his influence on pop culture, starting with Bob Dylan albums and his head shot among the greats on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover.
Press on to Swansea’s marina villas, where vintage crafts are moored next to shops and restaurants, to the Promenade, where crashing waves do not deter local fishermen gathered on its steps. Through a squabble of seagulls, look in the distance for Mumbles lighthouse, visible as in Thomas’ day from his home at No. 5 Cwmdonkin Drive.
“I grew up to be a sweet baby, a precocious child, a rebellious boy and a morbid youth,” he wrote of Swansea, which had 28,000 unemployed as he reached adulthood in the Depression. By that time, he’d mined local characters in and around town for three-quarters of the prose he’d produce. He composed 140 poems alone between 1930 and ’33, mostly at Cwmdonkin, a residence now restored with its own tour.
He described that modest abode and surroundings as a world within a world that set his imagination free.
“New refuges and ambushes in its woods and jungles, hidden homes and lairs for the multitude of imagination, from cowboys and Indians and the tall terrible people who rode on nightmares through my bedroom.”
It’s also where his father/teacher infused the Welsh language, a huge benefit to Dylan’s brief newspaper career at the South Wales Daily Post and more vitally, his elocution with the Swansea Little Theatre company.