49 Fun Facts About Dylan Thomas

In which Welsh city was Dylan Thomas born on 27 October 1914?

Dylan Thomas was born at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the Uplands district of Swansea and kept the house as his base until his parents moved out in 1937, writing much of his early poetry in his bedroom there.

From which collection of Welsh tales did Dylan Thomas's father take his son's first name?

The Mabinogion tells of Dylan ail Don, a boy who makes for the sea at his baptism. In Welsh the name sounds like 'Dullan', but Thomas insisted on 'Dillan' and corrected BBC producers who said otherwise.

What was the profession of Dylan Thomas's father, Jack?

Grammar-school English teacher Jack Thomas was senior English master at the school his son later attended, and read Shakespeare aloud to Dylan from infancy.

What sporting feat did Dylan Thomas pull off as a schoolboy, to his lifelong pride?

He won the mile race at his school's sports day, and carried the local newspaper's photograph of his victory with him for the rest of his life.

For which newspaper did the 16-year-old Dylan Thomas work as a reporter after leaving school in 1931?

The South Wales Daily Post took him on as a junior reporter, but he left within two years and made poetry his main work.

What was Thomas's café circle of young writers, artists and musicians called?

The Kardomah Gang met at the Kardomah Café and included the artist Mervyn Levy and the journalist Charles Fisher. Bombs destroyed the café in 1941, and Thomas mourned it on radio as 'razed to the snow'.

Which newspaper's 'Poet's Corner' prize led to Dylan Thomas's first book, 18 Poems, in 1934?

The Sunday Referee's Poet's Corner prize paid part of the cost of 18 Poems. The previous winner, Pamela Hansford Johnson, had written to him about a poem in the column and became his first serious girlfriend.

Which poets' group printed Dylan Thomas in its first anthology, though he refused to sign its manifesto?

The New Apocalyptics printed Thomas's work in their first anthology, but he would not sign their manifesto. Henry Treece, one of the group's leaders, still went on to publish a book-length study of him in 1949.

In which London pub did Dylan Thomas meet Caitlin Macnamara in 1936 and propose within hours?

They met at The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia in April 1936, introduced by the painter Augustus John, her lover at the time, and married at Penzance register office on 11 July 1937.

Caitlin Macnamara, Dylan Thomas's future wife, joined the chorus line of which West End theatre as a teenager?

The London Palladium, where Caitlin was a chorus girl before dancing in Paris. She and Thomas later married penniless, against his parents' wishes.

What were the names of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas's three children?

Llewelyn, Aeronwy and Colm were born in 1939, 1943 and 1949; Aeronwy is thought to be named after the River Aeron, near Plas Gelli in Cardiganshire where the family lodged during the war.

Which Carmarthenshire town, 'the strangest town in Wales', was Thomas's final home?

Laugharne struck him as strange because its people spoke with a broad English accent though Welsh country lay on every side. He made his last home at its Boat House in 1949 and is buried in its churchyard.

Who bought the Boat House for the Thomas family in 1949?

Margaret Taylor, A. J. P. Taylor's wife, had already housed them in a summerhouse at her Oxford home and at the Manor House, South Leigh, and in 1951 bought them a house in Delancey Street, Camden Town.

What did Dylan Thomas convert into his writing shed on a cliff ledge near the Boat House?

A garage, believed to have been built for the first motor car in the town, became the cliff-top shed where he wrote several late poems. It is preserved with papers strewn across the table as if he had just left.

Which pub in his home village was Thomas's local, opposite the house he rented for his parents?

Brown's Hotel on King Street faced the Pelican, the house he rented for his parents. His wake was held at Brown's after his funeral in November 1953, and Caitlin's followed there in 1994.

The 1945 poem 'Fern Hill' evokes which place from Thomas's childhood summers?

His aunt Ann Jones's farm near Llangain, Fernhill, gave the poem its name. The same place, renamed Gorsehill, is drawn far more bleakly in his short story 'The Peaches'.

In what poetic form is 'Do not go gentle into that good night', written for Thomas's dying father?

A villanelle: nineteen lines on two rhymes and two refrains. Thomas sent it to a friend in 1951, adding that the one person he couldn't show it to was his father, who didn't know he was dying.

Under which working title did Dylan Thomas send the BBC the first half of Under Milk Wood in 1950?

The Town That Was Mad was to end with the town declared insane and fenced off. He dropped that plot, printed half the play as 'Llareggub', then renamed it when his American agent warned the name would put audiences off.

How does Dylan Thomas describe Under Milk Wood's genre?

'A play for voices' is the play's subtitle: Under Milk Wood was written for radio, to be heard, not seen. Its town, Llareggub, reads 'bugger all' backwards.

Eleven days before its New York premiere, Dylan Thomas read Under Milk Wood solo at which university?

Harvard University's Fogg Museum heard him read the unfinished play alone on 3 May 1953. He finished the script for the full-cast premiere only after his agent's assistant locked him in a room.

Which composer discussed an opera with Dylan Thomas as librettist, on love and language after the bomb?

Igor Stravinsky agreed in 1953 to write an opera to Thomas's libretto and expected him at his California home to start work. Thomas died that November, and the composer wrote In Memoriam Dylan Thomas instead.

Which American poet organised Dylan Thomas's US tours and wrote Dylan Thomas in America?

John Brinnin ran New York's Poetry Center and first brought Thomas to America in 1950. His candid memoir of the tours, published two years after the poet's death, painted him as a drunk and a philanderer.

Which Dylan Thomas story, recorded in 1952 to fill an LP's second side, is credited with launching America's audiobook industry?

A Child's Christmas in Wales was an afterthought: Thomas reached the studio with too little to fill the record and remembered a Christmas story he had sold to a magazine. It became one of the label's best sellers.

In which Greenwich Village pub did Dylan Thomas do much of his drinking in his final days?

The White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street was his haunt. After a session there on 3 November he went back to his hotel boasting of a record run of straight whiskies, a tally long since discounted as a tall story.

How many 'straight whiskies' did Dylan Thomas claim to have drunk on 3 November 1953?

Eighteen straight whiskies, 'I think that's the record', was his boast on returning to his hotel. Biographers now discount the tally as a tall story from a man who was already very ill.

Where in New York was Dylan Thomas staying during his fatal final visit?

The Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street was his base from late October 1953. He collapsed there and was carried out in a coma on 5 November, four days before he died.

Which drug, injected by his doctor hours before he fell into a coma, may have hastened Dylan Thomas's death?

Morphine. His doctor diagnosed delirium tremens and injected it though Thomas was already struggling to breathe; within hours he fell into a coma from which he never woke.

To which New York hospital was the comatose Dylan Thomas taken on 5 November 1953?

St Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village took him in, already in a coma. Caitlin flew in from Britain, and her first words on arriving are reported as 'Is the bloody man dead yet?'

Rumour said Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, but which illness did his post-mortem name as the primary cause?

Pneumonia was the primary cause the post-mortem recorded. Because he had been on a drinking binge in his last days, many assumed alcohol alone had killed him.

In which Christopher Nolan film does a scientist keep reciting Dylan Thomas's 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light'?

Interstellar. Michael Caine's Professor Brand recites the poem while sending astronauts to find humanity a new home, yet confesses on his deathbed that he had long thought his plan to evacuate Earth impossible.

Which Welsh actor starred in the first BBC broadcast of Under Milk Wood in 1954?

Richard Burton spoke First Voice in the BBC Third Programme broadcast of 25 January 1954, which won that year's Prix Italia; he returned to the part in the 1972 film alongside Elizabeth Taylor.

Which Dylan Thomas book led the critic Philip Toynbee to call him 'the greatest living poet in the English language'?

Collected Poems came out on 10 November 1952, gathering the poems he wished to keep, and soon won the Foyle poetry prize. He died in New York a year later, almost to the day.

For which outfit did Dylan Thomas write wartime documentary scripts?

The Strand Film Company gave him his first regular income since his newspaper days. For These Are the Men he put new words over Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi rally footage, so that Hitler and Goebbels seem to confess their crimes.

Which condition got Dylan Thomas graded C3, among the last to be called up, at his wartime army medical?

Weak lungs: he had suffered bronchitis and asthma since childhood. Dreading conscription, he had already tried and failed to find a reserved job, and his film and radio scripts later counted as essential war work.

In which Cardiganshire seaside town did Dylan Thomas rent the bungalow Majoda in 1944-45?

New Quay is where he rented Majoda, a wood-and-asbestos bungalow on the cliffs. In March 1945 a friend's husband, a commando on leave, fired a gun into it in a jealous rage and was charged with attempted murder.

In which country did Dylan Thomas spend January 1951 researching an oil-company documentary?

Iran. The film he went to write for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was never made, but his vivid account of life in the refinery town of Abadan was broadcast on BBC radio that spring.

Dylan Thomas, buried in Wales, has a memorial stone quoting 'Fern Hill' in which London church?

Westminster Abbey. The stone in Poets' Corner, unveiled on St David's Day 1982, almost thirty years after his death, carries the poem's closing lines: 'Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea'.

The Dylan Thomas Prize was originally open only to which writers?

Writers under 30 were its first target, and Rachel Trezise took the first prize for her story collection Fresh Apples. The limit was later raised to 39, the number of years Thomas lived.

Which 1940 book holds Dylan Thomas's autobiographical stories of his Welsh boyhood?

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog echoes Joyce's title, and Thomas admitted he kept the 'flippant' name because his publishers thought it would make money. Sales were slow all the same.

Which satire by Dylan Thomas and John Davenport stayed unpublished for decades for fear of libel?

The Death of the King's Canary is a mock detective novel about choosing a new Poet Laureate, the 'King's Canary'. Its parodies of living poets, Thomas among them, kept it out of print until the 1970s.

Which 2014 film about Dylan Thomas's first American tour featured Celyn Jones and Elijah Wood?

Set Fire to the Stars takes its title from the last line of his poem 'Love in the Asylum'. Celyn Jones, who co-wrote the script, plays the poet, with Elijah Wood as the anxious academic who invited him over.

Which actor played Dylan Thomas opposite Sienna Miller's Caitlin in the 2008 film The Edge of Love?

Matthew Rhys played the poet in The Edge of Love, with Keira Knightley as his friend Vera. Its screenwriter called the love story her own invention, but the shooting at the Thomases' bungalow really happened.

Which future composer helped the teenage Thomas set up the 'Warmley Broadcasting Corporation'?

Daniel Jones and Thomas began as boys with a fight, retold in the story 'The Fight', and ran their mock radio station from Warmley, the Jones family home. He became a symphonist and later edited Thomas's poems.

With which Mumbles-based amateur drama company did the young Dylan Thomas act in the early 1930s?

The Little Theatre took him on in 1932, when his sister Nancy was already a member, and cast him in Noël Coward's Hay Fever. Since 1979 the company's home has been the Dylan Thomas Theatre.

In which city did Thomas outline an early Under Milk Wood at a party in March 1949?

In Prague, as a guest of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union, he told the play's story at a party. His interpreter, Jiřina Hauková, later recalled an organist who played to sheep and a baker with two wives.

Which novelist, despite his low opinion of Thomas, became a trustee of the poet's estate?

Kingsley Amis thought little of Thomas's poetry, yet joined the trust that guards his copyrights at the invitation of his drinking friend Stuart Thomas, the solicitor who ran it.

Who wrote Dylan Thomas's obituary in The Times?

Vernon Watkins, the poet and bank clerk who had been his friend since 1935, wrote the unsigned Times obituary, though Thomas had failed to turn up as best man at his wedding in 1944.

'Land of my fathers, and my fathers can keep it' is a line from which 1948 film Thomas scripted?

The Three Weird Sisters (1948), a Gothic melodrama set in a Welsh mining village that Thomas co-scripted, gives the line to the character Owen Morgan-Vaughan; it is often misquoted as the poet's own verdict on Wales.

Which blind old seafarer from Under Milk Wood has a statue of his own near Dylan Thomas's in the Maritime Quarter?

Captain Cat grew out of Thomas's early plan to have the play told by a blind narrator, and the audience follows much of the town's day through him. His bronze stands near the statue of his creator.