Dylan's favourite aunt: Annie Fernhill

On census night in 1861, Dylan's maternal grandparents, George and Hannah Williams, were at Waunfwlchan farm, Llansteffan, with their baby son, Thomas.

It was already packed full with family, so that when Hannah became pregnant again in the summer they must have decided to find a home of their own. They moved a few fields away to Llwynhelig, a small cottage without land set in woods south of Waunfwlchan at Morfa Bach, just off the main road from Llangain to Llansteffan.

Here, in February 1862, Annie Williams was born. She was Florence’s eldest sister and, as Annie Jones Fernhill, she became Dylan’s favourite aunt. Annie barely had time to settle into her cot, when her parents moved to Llanllwch, near Johnstown, where her brother, John, was born in 1864.

The next change came soon after. George found himself in disgrace after fathering a daughter, Anne, by his younger sister-in-law, Amy, and the family left for Swansea. They found a place to stay in Fullers Terrace, in the Mount Pleasant district of the town, living in squalid and overcrowded conditions. The rest of Annie's life would now be a journey from this urban Mount Pleasant to another in Carmarthenshire that was just up the road from where she'd been born.

Fullers Terrace was close to the railway station. Soon after their arrival in Swansea, George started work there as a porter. The following year, 1867, another daughter, Polly, was born here. The next move took Annie and the family to Lucknow Street, down near the docks, where another girl, Theodosia, was born in 1869.

By 1871, George, Hannah and their five children were at 29, Delhi Street, a small, two-up, two-down terraced house, which they shared with a widower and his three adult children in what must have been very difficult conditions. (No.29 is the middle house shown below)

It’s said by Amy’s great-great granddaughter, Rowan Stanford-ffoulkes (2004), that Annie had already been in an incestuous relationship with John's brother, Daniel, before she moved in as housekeeper to John, but Stanford-ffoulkes produces no evidence for this claim. Stanford-ffoulkes also claims that Annie and Dan were the parents of a daughter, Gladys Mary, born March 4 1885 at Waunfwlchan farm. Gladys' birth certificate tells us only that her mother was an 'Anne Williams.' Gladys' death certificate of 1893 reveals all: her mother was Anne Gwyn nee Williams, now living with her husband John Gwyn at Plas Ucha, Llanybri, where Gladys died. John Gwyn died three months later. (Stanford-ffoulkes' other story that the fourteen-year old Anne had first been betrothed to, and made pregnant by, John Gwyn's elderly and widowed father, William, is without foundation, not least because William pre-deceased his wife by many years, as census returns show.)

And then to marriage…

In September 1893, Annie, aged thirty, married Jim Jones, from nearby Pentrewyman farm; her address is given as Waunfwlchan, and one of the witnesses is John Williams. They moved into Tirbach, and soon they had a son Idris, born in 1897 at the little cottage.

By 1901, Annie, Jim and Idris had moved to rent Pentowyn, a large farm right on the edge of the Taf estuary that was linked to Laugharne by ferry, and to Llansteffan by a narrow country lane once used by pilgrims on their way to St David’s.

At over two hundred acres, Pentowyn was a step up in the world, and this was also reflected in the composition of the household: it included a cook, a servant and three agricultural workers. Annie’s sister, Polly, soon came to stay, as did Florence and DJ Thomas after their marriage in 1903. It was a beautiful and peaceful spot, with the ferry to take them across to Laugharne, or the lane to bring them to Llansteffan to visit Anne at Rose Cottage, and her new baby, Doris.

Jim and Annie were at Pentowyn until at least 1906; Jim had ambition but not the industry to go with it. He proved incompetent as a farmer and breadwinner and within four years they were renting Fernhill. It was a much grander house closer to Llangain but with only fifteen acres, much of it of poor quality: “a lot of rush land behind it on one side…it was gorse and fern and fir-trees.” [vii]

As a young boy, Dylan had stayed with his other aunt Anne, at Rose Cottage. Frequent visits were made to Fernhill on these summer holidays but Dylan did not start staying there until about 1922.

As I describe in the main paper Dylan and his aunties, he stayed for the whole of each summer holiday, usually without his parents or sister. In a February 1933 letter, he recalled that: “Many summer weeks I spent happily with the cancered aunt on her insanitary farm. She loved me quite inordinately, gave me sweets & money, though she could little afford it, petted, patted, & spoiled me." His experiences in the ramshackle house are captured in his poem Fern Hill and short story The Peaches and they have also been described by two of his Swansea friends.[viii]

According to those locally who knew her, Annie Fernhill was a "very short, stocky type - dark curly hair, fair skin - strong, healthy, not pretty - quite educated, jovial, talkative, slow moving - did not make a go on the farm - would pay nobody - probably poor - kind, nicely spoken, gave plenty of welcome, always a cup of tea - English and Welsh."

As for Jim, he was "tall and dark. Big in his ways - no work in him - left Fernhill farm to ruins - they were in a poor way - received £1 per week compensation - but there was nothing wrong with him." [ix]

Even at Pentowyn, he was a lazy farmer: "Jim Jones was too much of a gentleman there to work...he was taking his shoes off the horses then, to have a message to go to the blacksmiths in Llansteffan. For to go down to have a drink." Nevertheless, Jim's nephew, the author John Llewellyn Jones, notes that although Jim was "certainly a bit idle, had a roving eye and liked his pint, [he] was far from being the domestic tyrant and drunken womaniser of Dylan's story [The Peaches]." [x] I have written more about Jim in A True Childhood: Dylan's Peninsularity published in Ellis (2014) with an extended version online at

https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomaspeninsularity/a-true-childhood-dylan-s-peninsularity

Annie, however, seems to have been a hard worker. Colin Edwards interviewed Rees Davies, who lived in Creigiau-bach, just along the lane from Fernhill:

CE: You mentioned Dylan’s aunt Anne.

RD: She was a woman that worked hard…I think she was fairly strong.

CE: I’m told by some people in Llansteffan that the tradition down there is for the

women to do all the work

RD: Women to do all the work on the farm, do you mean?

RD’s daughter: They work much harder then they do in England!

RD: She did her share…Oh yes, she was a good woman.[xi]

If Annie worked hard, her son Idris was as uninterested in farming as his father. He worked as an apprentice in the Richard Lewis draper's shop in Swansea High Street, and spent his weekends with Theodosia and David Rees at Paraclete manse.[xii] He then served in the First World War in the artillery. Afterwards, he was a postman in Llansteffan, but was knocked off his bike by an American army jeep, and received substantial compensation. He lived with his parents at Fernhill and Mount Pleasant, and also for a time with the Reeses at 2, Blaencwm.[xiii]

There are a number of stories about Idris, including his affected and imperfect English, his efforts at "preaching", and his participation in a mock murder trial and bizarre hair-cutting sessions in the stables of Smyrna chapel, which the police on one occasion unsuccessfully raided. Some of this behaviour appears in Dylan's Fernhill story, The Peaches, in which Idris is given the name of Gwilym, "a tall young man...with a thin stick of a body and spade-shaped face. You could dig the garden with him." [xiv]

Around 1929, the family moved from Fernhill to Mount Pleasant, a tiny cottage of just a kitchen and a bedroom on the corner of the track going up to Llwyngwyn. They bought it with financial help from Annie’s first cousin, Anne of Pencelli Uchaf, and Jim was then found casual work on Llwyngwyn to keep them in food.

Annie died of heart failure (not of cancer of the womb, as Dylan thought) in February 1933. Almost every family in Llangain came to the funeral at Capel Newydd, Llanybri, as well as relatives from Ferryside, Llandyfaelog and Pontardulais, bearing “ample testimony to the high esteem in which the deceased was held throughout the neighbourhood.” Even the Rate Collector was there. Three ministers attended, taking it in turns to officiate at the house, the chapel and the graveside.[xv]

Dylan’s poem, After the Funeral, pays homage to Annie, though he wasn’t at the funeral and could not have stood with her coffin in Fernhill, as the poem describes, because she had moved from there some years before. [xvi]

In the original version of After the funeral, Dylan writes that “Another gossips’ toy has lost its use…Another well of rumours and cold lies/Has dried, and one more joke has lost its point.” This might suggest that he knew the family gossip about Annie and Dr Dan. There would also have been stories about Jim’s drunkenness and incompetence as a farmer. In the published version of the poem, Dylan left out these lines but made a similar point instead: “But I, Ann’s bard on a raised hearth, call all/The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue/Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,”

So much of Annie’s life had revolved around the Llangain "cabbage valley", as Dylan once put it. She'd been born in Llwynhelig, spent childhood holidays at Waunfwlchan, married a man from Pentrewyman, lived in Tirbach, Fernhill and Mount Pleasant, was supported financially by her first cousins in Llwyngwyn, Maesgwyn and Pencelli Uchaf and, for the last four years of her life, had her siblings, Polly and Bob, living close by in Blaencwm. As such, After the funeral, Fern Hill and the second part of Poem in October celebrate the Llangain family circle, the Williams square mile, as much as they mourn the loss of a particular person, place or phase of life. [xvii]

Notes

[i] William Albert Jenkins (1878-1968), coal exporter, shipbroker, philanthropist and politician. Born at 27, Delhi Street, St Thomas, Swansea, 9 Sept. 1878, son of Elizabeth Ann and Daniel Jenkins, who worked on the railways as a vehicle examiner. From census returns, we can see that William Jenkins lived at no. 27 from his birth to his marriage in 1906. By 1901, his father had become a coal agent, and he and his two brothers were working as clerks in coal exporting. He was prominent in the Welsh coal industryas principal of William A. Jenkins and Company, Wholesale Coal and Coke Factors, and also as a shipbroker. He won recognition in many European countries for his commercial activities and his contributions to national and international charities and institutions. Elected to Parliament as National Liberal forBrecon and Radnor in 1922. He lost the seat in the 1924 General Election and afterwards concentrated his political attention on local government. In 1927, he was elected to Swansea Borough Council, on which he served until 1954, being mayor of Swansea 1947-49. Knighted 1938. In his interview with Colin Edwards, St Thomas resident Harry Leyshon said: “Sir William was brought up there – a very studious boy, and worked very hard at languages, chiefly Spanish and Italian, and I think he was friendly with the Williamses…Sir William very rarely went out at all to play with boys in the usual way – he was always studious.”

[ii] For more on George’s finances, see Thomas 2003, chapter 4. The Gammons: to view the 1881 census return for 30, Delhi Street, click View in the attachment box at the end of this page. In 1901, a tug boat mate, aged 70, and his Welsh wife lived at no.30, with one lodger.

[iii] The information that Annie was a housekeeper at Tirbach came from local man Rees Davies, who was interviewed in the 1960s by radio journalist, Colin Edwards. Davies knew the Williamses well. He had been born in 1881 at Bryn, the farm next door to Fernhill, and had been brought up there. By 1911, he was at Creigiau-bach, just opposite Fernhill. A carpenter, he had made Annie Fernhill's coffin and had been a bearer at her funeral. Davies told Colin Edwards: “When they married, Mr Jones and Anne Williams, she was a housekeeper with her uncle at Tirbach. And from there, Mr Williams, her uncle, moved to Pen-y-coed farm. And Miss Annie Williams and James Jones went to Tirbach instead of him.” The tape is in the Colin Edwards archive at the National Library of Wales (NLW). It seems that this happened after 1891 because Annie is with her parents in Swansea on the 1891 census listed as a dressmaker (though she may have been visiting) and Daniel was at Waunfwlchan. John Williams was at Tirbach with two servants, one of whom was domestic. Llansteffan Parish accounts show John at Tirbach in 1886. Both Daniel and John are at Pen-y-coed in 1901. Family member Stanford-ffoulkes (2004) also says that Annie was Daniel’s housekeeper; this cannot be taken as being independent of the Rees Davies interview because the report of Annie being Daniel’s housekeeper was published by Thomas in 2003 p202. This was based on a note in the Colin Edwards archive.

[vii] Polly on holiday: she was there at the 1901 census. Florence and DJ Thomas visiting: Rees Davies interview CE/NLW. Rush land etc at Fernhill: William Phillips in Thomas 2003 p50.

[viii] William Phillips and Tudor Price in Thomas 2003. Also by May Bowen in the same book.

[ix] The descriptions are in the Colin Edwards archive in the NLW.

[x] Too much of a gentleman: Mary Ann Williams of Llwyngwyn farm, Llangain, to Colin Edwards, NLW. John Llewellyn Jones: Western Mail, November 14 1980.

[xi] The interview took place in The Vicarage, Goodrich , Ross-on-Wye, England. Rees Davies’ daughter is identified as Mrs Gwyn Williams. Other testimonies to Annie’s hard work come from Mary Ann Williams of Llwyngwyn (CE/NLW).

[xii] Westgate, Wales and the World, in the Western Mail, November 25 1980.

[xiii] Gwilym Evans, Colin Edwards archive, NLW.

[xiv] Colin Edwards' interview with Gwilym Evans, son of Brook Forge, and notes in the NLW archive.

[xv] Carmarthen Journal, February 17 1933.

[xvi] Annie died on Tuesday February 7 1933 and was buried on Saturday the 11^th. Her death certificate gives the cause of death as heart failure. The extensive list of mourners given in the Carmarthen Journal and The Welshman of the 17^th. does not include Dylan. On the day of the funeral, the Little Theatre would have been doing the final rehearsals for The Merry Wives of Windsor, which opened on Monday February 13. Dylan played Host of the Garter.

The original of After the funeral was dated by Dylan to February 10, the day before the funeral. Annie and Jim had moved out of Fernhill c1929 to a tiny cottage, Mount Pleasant, next to Llwyngwyn farm, where she died and where the ceremony took place before the burial at Capel Newydd, Llanybri.

[xvii] See Thomas 2003 pp221-222 on financial support from her cousins.

References

H. Ellis (2014) Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration, Bloomsbury

R. Stanford-ffoulkes (2004) Dylan – the Cousin

D. N. Thomas (2003) Dylan Remembered 1919-1934 vol 1, Seren.

You can find the census returns for 29, Delhi Street, Swansea at this link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LHaOg-I-qpVB9-KSD7mgfGps2aQtXHWt/view?usp=sharing

or you can hover over the right hand corner of the Pop-out below and click on the arrow.