Entry 1 Famous British poets and writers

Dylan’s Family Tree

Could you be related to Dylan? It’s certainly possible! He came from a very large family – his grandparents and great-grandparents, for example, had more than thirty siblings between them.
Both Dylan’s maternal and paternal ancestors came from Carmarthenshire in west Wales. His mother’s family were from the Llansteffan peninsula, farming in the countryside around Llangain and Llanybri. His father’s family came mostly from Brechfa and its hinterland and they, too, were farmers.
The most useful starting point in understanding Dylan’s family tree is chapter one in the book Dylan Remembered 1914-1934. It provides basic genealogical information on family members from Dylan’s great-grandparents onwards, for both sides of his family eg dates of births, marriages and deaths, names of children and occupations.
Dylan Remembered 1914-1934 was published in 2003, and since then a good deal more work has been done on his mother’s side of the family. Two sets of Dylan’s maternal great-great grandparents have now been identified, as well as three sets of his great-great-great grandparents, and this has produced a large volume of new genealogical data. You can find this material, together with family trees.
You should also go to this link if you think you might be related to Dylan’s family through marriage. For example, it has a number of pages on the family tree of Jim Jones Fernhill, who married Dylan’s aunt Annie.
herever I’ve lived, in town or country, I’ve always enjoyed standing at my front window watching my local world go by, and often it’s proved quite useful. I’ve called an ambulance or two, rescued a postman who’d fallen down a coal hole and helped a few drunken neighbours to get their key in the lock. So it will come as no surprise that Walford Davies’ view that Under Milk Wood is ultimately about private worlds, upon which we innocently eavesdrop, rang a few doorbells with me.
Davies also reminds us of Dylan’s early prose and poetry where the formula of the eavesdropper was developed, to emerge later as Narrator in some of his broadcasts, and as First and Second Voices in Under Milk Wood. One of the tasks of the Narrator or Voice is to nudge, coax and invite radio listeners to reach through the heard word to the seen picture, as Davies puts it, helping them into the best vantage points for seeing with the ears. Examples from Under Milk Wood of such invitations are ‘Come closer now’, ‘From where you are’, ‘Look’ and ‘Only you can hear.’ With these and other enticements, Dylan lures the listener into an intimate voyeurism
Both Davies and John Ackerman have suggested that Dylan’s interest in establishing these vantage points came from techniques he had learnt in writing for film. Phrases such as ‘Come closer’ and ‘Closer still’ are found, for example, in his filmscript, The Doctor and the Devils. But, as we shall see, these and similar phrases were invitations that Dylan could also have heard on the radio. The BBC had always been keen to help its listeners do better at visualisation, using the Radio Times to provide coaching on seeing with the ears, and even to chide “aural morons” for lazy listening
References to the radio pepper Dylan’s letters throughout his life, including hiring one when he was on holiday in Italy. He had been interested in the medium since his school days, when he co-founded the Warmley Broadcasting Corporation. He made his first broadcast on the BBC when he was just twenty-two years old, and then appeared regularly as a reader, actor and critic. He also wrote twenty-eight radio scripts broadcast between 1943 and 1954. Not surprisingly, the media historian, Peter Lewis, has concluded that Dylan not only knew radio from the inside but knew it inside out, echoing the view of a much earlier critic that it was a medium that Dylan “had studied and had extended to its highest possibilities as an art form
I want here to consider some aspects of Dylan’s apprenticeship as a radio script writer, during Under Milk Wood’s long period of gestation, roughly from 1933 to autumn 1953. This apprenticeship is, for me, bound up with the matter of Dylan’s radio script genre. In his introduction to these scripts, Ralph Maud suggests that Dylan had found it in the personal reminiscence. I think Maud is right about this, but it’s only part of the story. Dylan had also found his genre in community portraiture, beginning with Reminiscences of Childhood (Swansea), followed by radio scripts on New Quay, Shepherd’s Bush, Margate and Swansea again, ending in 1953 with a cameo of Laugharne. Dylan’s proposals for three other projects were also in this genre: a book, Twelve Hours in the Streets; a stage play, Two Streets; and a piece about Laugharne for Picture Post magazine.
There had been a burgeoning of community portraiture on the radio from the mid 1930s onwards, partly devised to demonstrate that the country as a whole was pulling together during the 1939-1945 war. Both the ubiquity and popularity of these programmes (matched by the success of books such as Louis Golding’s Magnolia Street and Francis Brett Young’s Portrait of a Village) could well have ensured that some of this portraiture was part of Dylan’s listening background as his ideas on Under Milk Wood were developing
The BBC’s flagship of community portraits was Country Magazine, broadcast on the radio nationally from 1942 to 1954, spinning off another series, Songs from Country Magazine, two television programmes and a book, as well as inspiring regional variations such as Village on the Air The BBC producer Geoffrey Bridson noted that Country Magazine was “the most popular series that Features Department ever mounted.” Some thirty editions were about communities in Wales, with Welsh producers and compères. We don’t know for sure if Dylan ever listened to the programme, but he almost certainly did. He took part in two of its editions, whilst some of his friends and colleagues worked on others.
Geoffrey Bridson was an important figure in radio community portraiture, but he was also making a name for himself as a producer of modern poetry. In 1938, he invited Dylan to Manchester to record for one of his programmes. But Bridson didn’t take to him or his way of reading poetry. To make matters worse, Mrs Bridson didn’t take to Dylan either, largely because he tipped the teapot over his eiderdown when breakfasting in bed. Bridson passed him on to T. Rowland Hughes, a features producer with the BBC in Cardiff, but Dylan was not at all confident about taking up Hughes’ suggestion: “It sounds full of dramatic possibilities, if only I was.”
A year earlier, a young Port Talbot teacher, Philip Burton, had felt similarly daunted. He had staged an open-air pageant at Margam Abbey, so successfully that he had revealed, said one reviewer, he was not just a historian but also a poet. Rowland Hughes was in the audience, and invited him to write a radio version of the pageant. Burton protested that it had been conceived in visual terms. Translating it into the heard? Impossible, he replied. But Hughes persisted, and Burton wrote it, later acknowledging Hughes’ patient help. Broadcast in November 1937, it was Burton’s first feature programme for the BBC and one, he said, in which he learned much about the art of radio writing.
It’s worth taking a closer look at Rowland Hughes, and his contribution to community portraiture. He was a dramatist, novelist and poet, an authority on both Welsh and English poetry who had twice won the Chair at the National Eisteddfod. On the first occasion, his poem, Y Ffin, was praised for its lively and colourful pictures in words, a commendation we should remember when we examine his time working for BBC radio.
Between 1936 and 1940, Hughes made some fourteen radio programmes about Welsh communities. Most were on location talking with people in their workplace or village; these were his microphone tours, as one reviewer called them. He also made programmes about other kinds of communities, such as holiday and work camps, as well as one about the Community House in Newtown. But it wasn’t all actuality. Hughes also produced broadcasts with scripts and actors, though these were usually based on fieldwork. In making Best Welsh, for example, he spent several days in the Rhondda, talking “with hundreds of people”, as well as recording their songs, concerts and memories.
Hughes followed BBC usage and referred to these programmes as sound pictures or radio pictures (or radio films, as Dylan called them), in which dialogue sat alongside sound effects, verse and music to provide the listener with enough variety of information to visualise what was being heard. Hughes sometimes used a Narrator or Voice to draw the listener in, but almost as often The Wanderer or The Visitor.
Hughes’ portraits of Welsh communities, as well as his dramatic reconstructions of community life, were broadcast nationally at a time when Dylan himself was thinking along similar lines. As early as 1933, he was working on a story about a village in one of the south Wales valleys. Later came a proposal that a group of Welsh writers should prepare a verse-report of their own town or village. Then Dylan suggested a play about Laugharne, in which its residents played themselves. This was an idea pioneered in the 1930s in Bernard Walke’s radio plays, which featured Cornish fishermen, farmers and miners playing themselves.
In October 1939, Hughes produced Home Fires Burning, co-authored with Jack Jones, and set in a Welsh mining town during the wartime blackout. It was, wrote a critic in the Listener, the “first breath of reality” about the war with Germany. Dylan may well have heard the programme, or its repeat in 1940; he was living in Laugharne with packing cases for furniture but there was also a radio, which Vernon Watkins had given him a few months earlier.
In the broadcast, the Narrator opens with an explicit invitation to listeners to make pictures from the sounds they hear, to see the colliers’ houses through the darkness, just as Dylan directly appeals to his listeners to use their ears to see the sleeping residents of Coronation Street and Cockle Row:
Narrator: Half-past eight and the whole valley dark now…If it were daylight, I could show you the whole valley from here – river, road, railway, streets, terraces, chapel, pits.
But in this darkness your mind has to make its pictures in sound…When your eyes, like mine, get used to the darkness, you can see Heol y Gwaith sloping down to the pit, a row of colliers’ houses...Now, who lives in No. 1? Oh yes, Siâms Davies and his wife Marged...
Now, who lives in No. 2? Of course, that widow, Mrs Evans. She cleans the chapel
The scene with Mrs Evans begins with her switching off the radio, which had been playing a record of an organ fugue by Bach. She then grumbles about the Announcer:
You and your old gramophone all the time. Records and organs is all we’re having from him now.
Putting us very much in mind (and I won’t put it any more provocatively than that) of both Mr Organ Morgan’s martydom to Bach and Mrs Organ Morgan’s complaint that
it's organ organ all the time with him…up every night until midnight playing the organ.
Hughes’ script (and it was very much his script, not Jack Jones’) shows how accomplished he had become in helping the listener turn sound into pictures. A few months later, he produced Rural Background, a programme whose opening brings to mind some of the words and rhythms we would later find in Under Milk Wood. Written again with Jack Jones, Rural Background was broadcast nationally in January 1940, with three Voices, one of whom was Philip Burton. Note the repetitive invitations to the listener to look and see, as well as the naming of vantage points in the landscape, both later used so effectively in Under Milk Wood:
Follow the northward roads to the quiet country, to field and farm and the burning copper of the fern...
Look down from Nant y Rhos or Cefn y Grug, look over the trimmed hedge at the pattern of fields falling to the river...
See the valleys twist the white roads; see the domed hills fringed with mist.
A quiet land of white-washed farms and thick walls green with moss...
Look closer
Rowland Hughes’ feature programmes about town and village life in Wales went hand-in-hand with drama and comedy productions about Welsh communities. These included his productions of Jack Jones’ Rhondda Roundabout and two of J.O. Francis’ one-act plays. Then came Hughes’ production of The Proud Valley in 1940, followed two years later by How Green was My Valley. Philip Burton was in the cast, taking the part of Mr Jonas, a school teacher. But who would play the young boy, Huw Morgan, to whom Mr Jonas gives a beating?
By now, Hughes’ multiple sclerosis was limiting his ability to work. Burton had become his volunteer casting assistant, occasional carer and a go-between with the world outside the studio. He arranged for the BBC recording van to visit the school in Port Talbot where he was still a teacher, and there recorded playground scenes, as well auditioning pupils for the part of Huw Morgan. Burton chose Hubert Clement, who was soon being hailed in the press as an “outstanding radio discovery.” He also cast another pupil, Hubert Davies, as the playground bully; not long after, Davies took part in a six-week BBC Children’s Hour serial. Rowland Hughes, reported the Western Mail, was delighted with Burton’s casting decisions
As Hughes became weaker, Burton did what he could to help in the studio control room, learning on the hoof about radio production:
In radio I owed everything to him. He had discovered me, encouraged me and taught me. We complemented each other; his writing instincts were poetic, mine dramatic...Rowland had also used me extensively as an actor, and so gradually I acquired, by practical experience, an extensive knowledge of radio
Burton could not have had a better tutor. After just five years at the BBC, Rowland Hughes had built a reputation, said The Guardian, as one of the best radio producers now working. The newspaper’s radio critics variously praised his programmes as excellent, noteable, distinguished, brilliant and powerful. It would be no exaggeration to say that Hughes was a pioneer of radio community portraiture, making innovative use of the BBC’s Mobile Recording Unit to broadcast his actuality programmes. Such was his success that after just two years in post, a BBC Wales’ internal review noted with satisfaction that “a large number of speakers who have appeared before the microphone during the year have been peasant people.”
Both Hughes’ versatility and his output (described by one BBC historian as astonishing) place him squarely within the group of “adventurous troublemakers” in the BBC who were determined to put on air the voices, accents and views of working class people. The group’s more prominent members included Geoffrey Bridson and Olive Shapley but Hughes’ broadcasts on workplace communities, such as coal mines, slate quarries, the metal industries and trawler fishing, preceded those of Bridson and Shapley by a year or two.

Burton and Hughes worked well together, perhaps because of their similar backgrounds. Born within a year of each other, they were both brought up in the terraced streets of Welsh industrial towns: Burton was the son of a coal miner in Mountain Ash in the Cynon Valley, whilst Hughes was the son of a quarryman from Llanberis. Both were scholarship boys who went on to take degrees at the University of Wales, before becoming school teachers.

Between 1937 and 1943, Hughes and Philip Burton collaborated on some thirty radio programmes, with Burton as an actor and/or scriptwriter. The first radio script they had written together had been broadcast in early 1940, a story about a midnight journey by lorry from the west coast of Wales to the industrial valleys in the east. In Through the Night, a lorry driver gives a lift to a hitch-hiker; neither of them can see much of the road in front of them, let alone the blacked-out countryside they are passing through.
The authors inventively use the driver as their narrator. Although he is driving blind through the blackout, helpless without the road’s white line, he knows the route well enough to describe the countryside for his passenger, and thus for the listeners at home, helping them to visualise what they cannot see. Of course, Hughes and Burton had no idea that in using a blinded driver as a narrator (and one who was using a white line for his white stick), they would be creating a forerunner of blind Captain Cat, one of the narrators of a play not yet written and only barely conceived.
Hughes had also been gently easing Burton into both production and community portraiture. Their first community portrait together, in 1941, featured people living along the Tywi valley; their second was a broadcast about war-time life in the Rhondda. Their third in July 1943, and written by Burton, was Welsh Lidice, a portrait of the village and villagers of Cwmgiedd. Burton was also gaining experience in broadcasting dramatic productions of Welsh village life, going solo in producing Eynon Evans’ Jubilee Concert, as well as Emlyn Williams’ The Corn is Green.
Then, in early 1945, Burton was commissioned to write and produce a radio impression of a Welsh village by the sea, and he came to New Quay to interview its many sea captains. Burton’s script, Seamen of Wales, begins with a group of reminiscing sailors who anticipate the reminiscing mariners at the start of Under Milk Wood. And whilst these drowned sailors of Llareggub open Milk Wood, Burton's script ends with the drowned sailors of New Quay in their cemeteries of empty graves, because "the whole world is the grave-yard of this little village."
Seamen of Wales was Burton’s first solo production of a community portrait. The Guardian’s critic was not impressed, and thought Burton still had some way to go in developing his production skills. Dylan, too, was learning on the job; by 1943, he had written only three radio scripts, two of which had been found unsuitable. But help was at hand; he was already on the radar of another up-and-coming producer, Aneirin Talfan Davies of the BBC’s Talks Department in Cardiff. Under Davies’ watchful eye, he wrote Reminiscences of Childhood, which could be considered as his first community portrait written for radio.
Two years later, and by now living in New Quay, Dylan wrote and recorded his second radio picture of a community, Quite Early One Morning, commissioned by Talfan Davies as a Portrait of a Seaside Town. But Talfan Davies wanted more; the broadcast had gone down “very well with our listeners. I wonder could you repeat the miracle with a talk on a Welsh country village?”
As far as we can tell, there had been no contact between Dylan and Rowland Hughes since 1938, and nor any with Philip Burton. But Dylan and Burton’s professional lives were now running along similar tracks, with each completing a portrait of New Quay within months of each other. Dylan had the writing (and acting) talent and Burton the greater experience of both community portraiture and radio production. Talfan Davies’ miracle had a chance of being repeated if the two men could be brought together
Looking back, it now seems inevitable that Burton and Dylan’s paths would eventually cross, and that Burton would become a post-Hughesian influence in developing Milk Wood. It’s not known whether the two men met in New Quay in early 1945, but they certainly did later in the year. Burton had officially succeeded Rowland Hughes in July, and Dylan came to see him in search of broadcasting commissions. It was, said Burton, “the beginning of a delightful relationship between us.”
In March 1946, Dylan and family were living in Oxford, in a summerhouse on the banks of the Cherwell; it was cramped and damp but it did have electricity. It also had a radio, so Dylan might possibly have heard Portrait of a Village, a programme broadcast in May from the village of Cassington, just five miles west of Oxford. A few weeks later, he was handing in the script of his third community portrait for radio, The Londoner, set in Shepherd’s Bush, and then his fourth, Margate – Past and Present. Both scripts sit uneasily between drama and community portraiture, and are not amongst his best, but Dylan was still at an early stage in his apprenticeship
Burton was also working hard at radio community portraits. Just six months into his new job, it seems that he already had his eye on producing for Country Magazine. He wrote and produced a piece on Carmarthen, not for Country Magazine, but exactly to its format - a narrator talking to locals, with some country tunes thrown in. Then came the invitations that he might have been hoping for, to produce two programmes for Country Magazine itself, with another six to follow
At the end of 1946, Burton and Dylan appeared in a radio production of David Jones’ In Parenthesis. Come the New Year, they were in Swansea together, gathering material for Return Journey, which Burton was producing for a broadcast in June. As for the script, it was Burton’s idea that Dylan should write about going in search of Young Thomas. When it arrived, Burton realised it was some six minutes short of the required half-hour.
With rehearsals imminent, Dylan came to stay with Burton. He was there for a week, during which they worked on the script. Burton did his bit, writing the scene where Young Thomas encounters a minister in a secondhand bookshop. Nobody noticed, and one reviewer even thought it the best part of the broadcast. Return Journey, with its Narrator and several Voices, was an exceptional piece of both community portraiture and collaborative broadcasting, in which Dylan’s poetic talents were matched by Burton’s radio experience as an actor, producer and scriptwriter. It was, recalled Burton, “a most happy association – he really was marvellous to work with...no, I don’t ever remember talking politics. We always discussed literature, and the theatre. Those were our two great subjects.”
It would be foolish to suggest that Burton had helped Dylan in a way that was at all similar to his mentoring of the actors Owen Jones and Richard Burton. But the support he gave to Dylan, and to others he had helped as a teacher and producer, falls comfortably within Burton’s own description of himself: “I’ve always said I had a Pygmalion complex. I’ve always liked to fulfill myself through other people.”