A Dylan Thomas literary pilgrimage to Swansea

Dylan Thomas 1914-53 was born in Cwmdonkin Drive in the wealthy part of Swansea, South Wales and his childhood was largely spent there. His education was at a Dame School not that far from home and then onto Swansea Grammar School. He left school at 16 to become a reporter for the local newspaper and soon joined an amateur dramatic grp in Mumbles, but still continued to work as a freelance journalist. When he wasn’t writing, Thomas spent his days visiting the cinema and theatre in the Uplands, walking along Swansea Bay and drinking in all of Swansea's pubs.

Cwmdonkin Drive, Dylan Thomas' childhood home

Thomas was also a regular patron of Kardomah Café Castle St in the centre of Swansea, a short walk from the local newspaper where he worked. It must have been a very exciting place for a young, want-to-be writer, particularly as a literary and artistic circle started to meet in the Kardomah Cafe in c1930. The poets, musicians and artists who gathered there became The Kardomah Boys. Dylan Thomas’ footprints are all over Swansea.

Why did it take so long for Swansea to recognise its most famous son in monuments, theatres, houses and pubs? Firstly from 1932 on, Thomas was outside Swansea more than he was in Swansea. As he became more famous, he lived in London. Later he had a house in the village of Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, West Wales. A number of times he went on extended visits to New York.

Secondly, in February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the Luftwaffe in a 3 nights' blitz. Rows of shops, pubs and buildings, including the iconic Kardomah Café, were destroyed. Thomas later walked the bombed-out shell which was once his home town centre; he himself thought that his old Swansea was dead. Fortunately for Swansea historians, the Kardomah Café later reopened on Portland St, not far from the original location.

Uplands Tavern, Swansea

Finally Dylan Thomas was a difficult citizen and my guess is that the good burghers of Swansea had had enough of his antics. By the time his highly acclaimed first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published in December 1934, Thomas was already a heavy drinker. Even when he married Caitlin MacNamara and had three children (born 1939, 1943 and 1949), he and Caitlin binged and brawled their way around any pubs that were open. The children raised themselves in neglectful chaos. The young couple spent an inordinate amount of time and money in the late 1930s and 1940s drinking, so there was never enough money for ordinary family expenses. Needless to say, at the outset of WW2 Thomas was classified as too sickly to fight, suffering from chronic bronchitis, asthma and alcoholic damage.

But alcoholic or not, Thomas really did become famous, within Britain and elsewhere. Thomas was well known for being a dynamic speaker, best known for his poetry readings. His powerful voice captivated American audiences during his speaking tours of early 1950s. He made 200+ broadcasts for the BBC, including his best single work, Under Milk Wood, a 1954 radio play based around the inhabitants of a boring small Welsh village. Thomas' poems, And death shall have no dominion (pre war) and Do not go gentle into that good night 1951 became very well respected. When Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast of Milk Wood in 1954, the audiences couldn’t get enough of sexy Welsh males.

Dylan Thomas died in a New York hotel in November 1953, just after his 39th birthday. His body was brought back to Wales for his burial in the village churchyard at Laugharne, in the presence of his mother and his wife.

Thomas wrote half of his poems and many short stories while living at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive Swansea. The house has been recently restored to the tastes popular when bought by the Thomas family, and is available for house tours. Another monument stands in Cwmdonkin Park, one of his favourite childhood leisure areas, close to his birthplace. The memorial is a small rock in a closed-off garden, inscribed with poetry and set within the park.

Walk or ride along Swansea Bay's 8ks promenade which is still lovely to look at, and breathe the invigorating sea air. The tax payers of Swansea started creating a Memorial Thomas Walk in this very Maritime Quarter. The yacht marinas, museums, art galleries, a theatre, bars, restaurants, an observatory should all be visited. Stone sculptures and bronze statues dot the area, including a statue of Thomas’ seafaring Captain Cat and a statue of Thomas himself in front of his theatre. For great images of the port area, see Contested Terrain blog. For a very useful guide to 3 days in Swansea, see Wales Cymru blog.

Capt Cat statue, Swansea Marina

Dylan was a member of Swansea’s Little Theatre in the early 1930s, when they were based in Mumbles. The Little Theatre has its own exhibition as a tribute to Thomas. Apart from this theatre, performances of his work can also be seen at the Dylan Thomas Literature Centre (formerly the town's Guildhall and reopened in 1995) and during an annual festival each October. The Swansea Museum has a permanent exhibition on Dylan Thomas and his life, as well as a bookshop filled with his works. The Dylan Thomas Theatre is at the edge of Gloucester Place/square at the marina. In 2004 a new literary prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, was created in honour of the poet and is awarded to the best young published writer. Following this, in 2005, the Dylan Thomas Screenplay Award was established, run by the Dylan Thomas Centre and given at the annual Swansea Bay Film Festival.

Dylan Thomas Literature Centre

Several of the pubs in Swansea also have associations with the poet. The Queen’s Head claims it is one of the few remaining traditional pubs in Swansea, and was a favourite haunt for Thomas when he worked as a cub reporter at the South Wales Evening Post newspaper. The Uplands Tavern boasts the Dylan Thomas Snug, where the writer used to sit.  One of Swansea's oldest pubs, the No Sign Bar, was another of his favourites and was mentioned in his stories. The seafront pub, Antelope, which stands in the famous Mumbles Mile, is looking decrepit. This old pub, complete with its open fire and 1930s architecture, will be renovated with its Thomas memorial material in situ. Having a Thomas association is very good business for a Swansea pub.

Amazing botanical artist II: Marian Ellis Rowan

Marian Ellis Ryan (1848-1922) was born in Melbourne and grew up near the Strathbogie Ranges. She was raised in a family which had an appreciation of natural history, gardens and art, but like Marianne North, she had no formal art training. Nonetheless her favourite subject was Australian wildflowers.

Ellis made her first trip abroad at 21, basing herself in Britain. In 1873 Ellis married Frederic Rowan, a British Army officer and settled in New Zealand. The couple, and their only child, then moved to Melbourne and while living there, she further developed her skills as a wild flower painter. Talented and enthusiastic, she emerged as a decent artist and won important art prizes in Australia and overseas. I don’t suppose the professional male artists were very pleased with her success.

The couple returned to Victoria 1877, exhibited her work in international exhibitions in Australia, India, England, Europe and the USA 1879-93, winning more medals. In an age when most middle class women did not work outside their own homes, Ellis travelled widely.

From the 1870s on, she painted thousands of largely water-colours. Like Marianne North, she travelled extensively, relishing settings which were both difficult to get to and dangerous. Her images ranged from the large, boldly coloured and carefully detailed flower studies to small, more intimate garden scenes and bird studies. And she confidently publicised her own adventures, visiting Queensland’s rain forests, West Australian arid goldfields, New Guinea and New Zealand mountains. She had become a fine painter of wild flowers, insects and birds, combining scientific accuracy with freshness.

Christmas bells and wildflowers, Western Australia, 1879

Ellis visited Western Australia a number of times during her life. It was in Albany in 1880 that Ellis met the English painter Marianne North, and after a few years, they went on a painting tour together. North was generous with her younger student. She shared ideas about writing her adventures and also of how to house and promote her works for posterity.

Anyhow the fast fading nature of a newly picked flower meant working quickly, often out in the bush. Most of Ellis’ original water colour studies were painted in less than optimum conditions, in the heat of the Australian bush. Yet her ability to compose a complex image, use of colour and her quick painting skills, without preliminary sketches, were often commented on.

The 1880s was a highly productive era for Ellis: she painted rare species for one scientist’s work and she made several versions of her more popular subjects for sale in exhibitions. This was a wise career move. Many engravings of her flowers and scenes were published, her watercolours became bolder in colour and presentation, and she began to paint in oils as North had encouraged.

Because of her fame, Ellis became an important example of the independent Australian woman artist. Of course male artists may have dismissed her paintings as Not Real Art. And they may have been right in one small way: her work was at the boundaries of art and natural history illustration. More than simply recording the physical appearance of plants, each painting revealed a strong sense of design and colour. Her flowers and birds images were often set in an environment which was done in an impressionist style. Her images of New Guinea moths and butterflies showed her draughtsmanship and accuracy.

Flower Hunter in Queensland and New Zealand was published in 1898. Flushed with success, Ellis left to visit America and stayed for 7 years. In New York, she met another young female botanist and together they travelled the USA and West Indies, collaborating on 3 books which became standard texts for botany students: A Guide to the Wildflowers 1899, A Guide to the Trees 1900 and Southern Wildflowers and Trees 1901. Her book illustrations were hugely successful.

Tropical jungle flowers, Johnstone River Qld, 1887

Ellis returned to Australia 1905 and set a new goal for her art: to find and record every species of wildflower on the continent. Even during the hardships of WW1, when she was nearly 70, Ellis set off to New Guinea for seven months. The Royal Worcester Porcelain Company had commissioned her to paint flowers and birds of paradise in New Guinea. During these New Guinea visits, Ellis found and illustrated many unclassified flowers, birds and butterflies. Ever mindful of the importance of publicity, many of these 1,000 paintings were later exhibited in Sydney in 1920.

After her husband’s death, Rowan returned to Christchurch New Zealand where she was delighted to discover the work of Margaret Stoddart. What a brave and unconventional woman Ellis was. The trips were discomforting in terms of her health and safety, but later she said that they were also extremely exciting and stimulating for her art.

Rothschild's Bird of Paradise, Papua New Guinea c1917

Ellis Rowan died in Oct 1922. This prolific artist left 3000+ paintings of scientifically accurate native flora, birds, and insects. The Australian government bought 947 of her wild flower works in 1923; the National Library of Australia now holds the largest collection of Ellis' work. Queen Victoria received three of her paintings in 1895, the South Australian government bought 100 and the Queensland government bought 125. For a good selection of Ellis’ beautiful flowers and birds paintings, see Peintures Musique et Poésies blog.

What might have started off as a genteel wifely pastime turned into a profitable, respected public career. This was no mean achievement in Victorian and Edwardian times, as Paluma Print blog attests. But when art historians say she was a very ambitious woman, I wonder if it is damning Ellis with faint praise. Pencil and Leaf blog said Ellis Rowan was a self opinionated, obsessive, vain and gritty artist and a tireless self publicist, who painted more species of Australian and international flora than any other artist then.

The book, The Flower Hunter: Ellis Rowan, published 2002

Amazing botanical artist I - Marianne North

Marianne North (1830-1890) was the eldest child of an MP in the British Parliament. She had shown an interest in painting and writing, proper accomplishments for a young Victorian lady and suitable hobbies, but not career, for the daughter of an upper middle class family.

North, Jamaican cultivated flowers, 1871

Her father Frederick North certainly introduced her to the great and the good in the world of politics and of science. Frederick travelled throughout Europe and the Middle East, on both business and pleasure, and Marianne would often accompany him. On these trips, she learned to improve her skills as an artist, being taught first by a Dutch woman artist, and later by Valentine Bartholomew, a flower painter connected to the royal court. While visiting Kew, she met Sir William Hooker who presented her with specimens to sketch. But she had little formal training in drawing and painting.

North, Tobacco Plants

With her father’s death in 1870 and having never married, Marianne received much of her father's very pleasant estates in Lancashire and Norfolk, and now sought to use it in her passion: painting flowers in their natural settings. She clearly had the means, funding her own trips to the far corners of the world to find her flowers in their natural environment.

And, as Edwardian Promenade has shown, there was new wave of lady explorers travelling the globe not as mere appendages to their male kinfolk, but as scholars in their own right. This blog also lists some wonderful books on Victorian lady travellers and scholars.

Her first journey alone was in 1871, when she travelled via Jamaica to the United States and Canada. Being well connected from birth, she of course had suitable letters of introduction, so initially it would seem that her travels were comfortably looked after. However sometimes she had to make her way through rough landscape, scaling cliffs and enduring swarms of insects.

North learned to paint in a fast, impressionistic style that was seen as either a feminine weakness or a scientific triumph, full of vitality. She understood plant taxonomy, being a keen naturalist herself, and had a number of species named after her.

Her second solo journey took her to the jungles of Brasil, where she stayed for 8 months and completed 100+ paintings. Then in 1875 she travelled across America on her way to Japan and Ceylon, then she returned home. In a very short time, she was on her way again, this time to India. She remained in India for 15 months and produced a remarkable 200 paintings of mostly plants, but also of the local buildings she liked. Upon her return to London in 1879 she exhibited her work at The Conduit Street Galleries, where visitors seemed to enjoy her work.  LITTLE AUGURY, Heather on her travels and Squidoo blogs have image after image of North’s beautiful work

Marianne North Gallery, Kew Gardens

In 1879 she wrote to the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Sir Joseph Hooker, suggesting that she bequeath her collected works, along with a building suitable to house them, to his Gardens at Kew. There was only one extra request: that this site should serve as place for garden visitors to rest. Her donation was accepted and Kew gained one of it most significant components, The Marianne North Gallery. Her friend, architectural historian James Fergusson, designed the building after her favourite Indian colonial sites. Later (in the 1880s) she carefully arranged all her 832 paintings in a dense mosaic on the walls, sorted according to geographical location of subject.

Charles Darwin, a close friend of old Mr North, encouraged Marianne to travel to Australia and New Zealand, to paint Antipodean native plants in oils. In that expedition she met and befriended the younger artist, Marian Ellis Rowan, an important meeting, as we will see next post. In the meantime it is of interest to note, according to Laura Ponsonby, that North considered Darwin the greatest man living and had hoped that he would open her Gallery in 1882. Sadly he died some weeks before the event.

In 1883 North was in the Seychelles and in 1884 in Chile, still painting. After a life time of travel, no mean feat for a woman of that era, having led an adventurous, productive life. She retired to Gloucestershire, where she died in Aug 1890.

Her book, published 1892, two years after her death

After her death, Marianne’s extensive journals were edited and cleaned up by her sister, Catherine North Symonds, and published in two volumes in 1892 as Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North, London, Macmillan, 1892.

Marianne North was the best connected and the most intrepid woman artist of this era, but was her oeuvre considered popular and talented during her own life time? I can find a few contemporary references to her work by admiring women activists, but none by male artists.

Florilegia, collections of flower paintings, have been done since Sir Joseph Banks depicted and published images of plants he collected on the Endeavour in the 1760s. Yet it is only now (1995) that Chelsea Physic Garden established its own Florilegium Society whose primary aim is the portrayal of the Garden's entire collection. These modern scientific artists would have loved having North as part of their team.

In the next post, I will write Amazing botanical artist II - Marian Ellis Rowan.

Boscombe beach pods, Bournemouth

I had been fascinated by the popularity of beach huts in Australia and Britain, and wrote up a history of the humble huts with a sense of nostalgia. It seemed inevitable that the huts, so hugely popular after WW1, would never increase in number and could well decrease.

Overstrand Building, with pods to both sides of the central facilities

Now an alternative has been brought to my attention. Retro-style beach pods offering panoramic views across Bournemouth's artificial surf reef appeared for the first time in the BBC News in April 2009. 400+ people registered interest in buying the lovely pods within the Boscombe Overstrand complex. Boscombe Blog was of course very excited about the new lease of life for the area. Half of the pods will be sold on a 25-year lease, with the remaining pods will be reserved for casual hire from the council.

Pod interior

Proleno Blog noted that Wayne and Geraldine Hemingway were commissioned by Bournemouth Borough Council to revive the dilapidated 1958 Overstrand building and Grade II listed Boscombe Pier of 1889. Not surprisingly, seaside regeneration was always one of the favourite goals of the Hemingways. You can see that the centre of the Overstrand will be the public areas: shops, restaurant and surf school. On each wing, to the left and right, stretch the rows of pods.

A single beach pod will cost a fortune (£90,000) but unlike the old beach huts, will have mains electricity, hot and cold running water, kitchen units and French doors leading onto a small private balcony overlooking the beach, but no fridges. To prevent people sleeping overnight in the pods, power will be switched off at night. Each pod has one wall that is a piece of retro, coastal art in its own right.

Boscombe has indeed reinvented the beach hut.