Under Milk Wood: A Play for Ears: Reflections on T. Rowland Hughes, Philip Burton and Dylan Thomas

First published in the May 2020 issue of New Welsh Review.

David N. Thomas

Wherever 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.[1]

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.[2]

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.” [3]

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. [4]

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.[5]

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.[6] 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. [7]

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.” [8]

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.[9]

Nudging along to Llareggub, with T. Rowland Hughes

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.[10]

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. [11]

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. [12]

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. [13]

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. [14]

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...[15]

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...[16]

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? [17]

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.[18]

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.[19]

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.” [20]

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. [21]

Community portraiture: Philip Burton’s apprenticeship

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.[22]

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." [23]

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. [24]

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?” [25]

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.[26]

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.” [27]

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.[28]

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.[29]

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. [30]

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.”[31]

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.”[32]

Drip-Feeding Llareggub

In autumn 1947, when Dylan was living in South Leigh, a few miles west of Oxford, he travelled to London to meet up with Burton. They discussed Dylan’s ideas for The Village of the Mad, as Under Milk Wood was then called. Burton later wrote about this meeting in two letters sent in 1967 and 1968 to a former BBC colleague, Douglas Cleverdon. They provide further details about Dylan’s ideas for the mad village but, more importantly, they also reveal the way in which Burton was helping to guide Dylan through the process of writing a script that would be suitable for radio:

In our meeting at the Café Royal, which must have been very soon after Return Journey, he told me he was working on The Village of the Mad, and outlined some ideas for it. I did not see a script of any kind. I remember discussing the idea of having a blind Captain Cat as a narrator, which he thought peculiarly appropriate for radio, and I told him he might find it limiting and that I certainly found it gimmicky, in much the same way that Richard Hughes’ use of darkness was in Danger. [A Comedy of Danger]

My own feeling is that he soon scrapped the mad village idea as too limiting. After all, it largely depended on the bureaucracy of rationing, and a gibe at that was yearly becoming less pertinent. You will remember that the trial was to determine whether the people of the village, whose values challenged those of the contemporary society, should be left to die by cutting off their food rations. I have an idea that I told him that I felt the framework of the trial to be too artificial and that the life of the village was what mattered, but this might be hindsight on my part. [33]

As the year ended, Burton also had other things on his mind. He’d been asked to write and produce an edition of Meet the People, in which men and women were recorded talking in their workplace communities. He had also been invited to write a programme to mark the Silver Jubilee of broadcasting in Wales. He skilfully built the broadcast, which he also produced, around a Narrator and two Voices. [34]

In 1948, as Dylan worked further on Under Milk Wood at South Leigh, community portraiture was still very much in both their minds, and Country Magazine was the programme they each worked on. Burton produced an edition on the Gower in January. Dylan followed in February with a broadcast from Witney in Oxfordshire, with another by Burton in May from North Wales. Dylan compèred one from Kent in June, whilst Burton ended the year with an edition from Radnorshire.

Dylan’s Witney broadcast reveals that he had learned a good deal about the villages of the Cotswolds in both his twenty months living in South Leigh, and the year spent in Oxford itself. South Leigh residents have recalled how Dylan pub crawled through the countryside, making notes on village life as he went, expeditions which presumably drip-fed his thoughts about community portraiture in general and the people of Llareggub in particular. [35]

By this time, there were also other media feeding these thoughts. I have written elsewhere about the influence of Thomas Thompson, through his regular column in The Guardian about the residents of Plum Street, and his many books on Lancashire communities, which we know that Dylan admired. Thompson also wrote most of the episodes of Burbleton, an imaginary northern community, as well as another radio series, Under the Barber’s Pole, set in the fictional village of Owlerbarrow. Alongside Thompson, we should also consider other seminal community portraits known to Dylan, such as Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, and Stephen Leacock’s book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. [36]

In May 1949, Dylan and family moved to the Boat House in Laugharne; this made contact with Burton much easier, and they were soon meeting up to talk about Dylan’s progress on Under Milk Wood. Dylan sent a report on the play to his agent who replied: “We have noted that P. H. Burton of Cardiff knows all about it, and will eventually want to do it." Burton then went off to America to make another community portrait, American Village. Broadcast in October 1949, it featured the usual suspects: the minister, the schoolmistress, the storekeeper, the garage proprietor and so on. It was, said The Guardian, an excellent documentary. [37]

That same month, the poet Allen Curnow visited the Boat House. Dylan took him to his writing shed, and showed him a draft of the unfinished Under Milk Wood which, said Curnow, was titled The Town That Was Mad. This is the first known sighting of a script for the play, so Curnow’s testimony suggests that some, much or even all of the first half had been written within the ambit of Dylan’s friendship and professional relationship with Philip Burton. [38]

October 1949 was notable in yet another way. Burton was promoted from production into staff training, based in London. On the very day that the BBC announced his appointment, news came through that T. Rowland Hughes had died. The loss of both men, said The Western Mail, was a severe blow to Welsh broadcasting. Hughes would be greatly missed, the paper’s radio critic wrote, not least for his constant search for new microphone talent. Amongst his many considerable contributions was

to discover Philip Burton...[whose] departure will be a setback to broadcasting in Wales. No-one of his competence and radio production range now looms up on the Welsh Regional horizon...[he] was specially helpful to new script writers...whenever he found enthusiasm and promise he took trouble to foster them, and several new script writers have “arrived” in Wales of late in consequence.[39]

With Burton leaving production, responsibility for the Milk Wood project was handed to Douglas Cleverdon at the BBC in London. Dylan sent him thirty-nine pages of the first half, still called The Town That Was Mad, in October 1950. Despite various inducements and exhortations (“By all that you hold most holy in Wales, do try and finish it."), Cleverdon failed in his many efforts to help Dylan complete the play. There is no merit in a story, recounted on Desert Island Discs, that these efforts included locking Dylan in a BBC library for several nights, with an enamel bucket to pee in. [40]

By now, said Burton, he had got “to know Dylan very well and we had worked happily together.” Yet there is little, if anything, that remains of a paper trail that could tell us more about their friendship, or their work together on projects such as Milk Wood. There are no letters, for example, from Dylan to Burton in the Collected Letters, presumably because it was Burton’s lifelong practice to destroy incoming mail once he had dealt with it. Nor do we know when, if at all, they met up after Burton had moved from Wales. Dylan was up and down to London, whilst Burton went back and forth to Wales, taking part in radio productions and adjudicating drama competitions. He had also been appointed to the Welsh Committee of the Arts Council. [41]

Love the Words, Free the Lark

By December 1951, Burton had decided to leave the BBC. There had been many successes, including the part he and Rowland Hughes had played in community portraiture. That same month, the BBC Wales annual review noted “the rich resources of character” to be found in local communities: “the voices of ordinary men and women have been heard on the air to an ever-increasing extent.” A new generation of broadcasters was now extending the Hughes-Burton achievements with programmes such as Pobl yr Ardal and Off the Beaten Track, whose final broadcast (which came from Dylan’s family village of Llansteffan) coincided with the announcement of Burton’s departure.[42]

Burton was now a freelance writer and producer, and was soon offered a contract to write the first twelve episodes of The Appleyards, the first ever soap opera broadcast on British television. Then came a television play, The Dark Wood, shown on St. David’s Day, 1953, an adventurous mix of sex, religion and politics set in Llanddewi, a fictional steel town in south Wales. It had mixed reviews, though the Daily Mirror’s critic found himself

tingling with excitement. For once, television tackled REAL life...it succeeded because it was about REAL people with REAL problems...the best piece of original TV theatre in years. [43]

The following month Dylan went to America to give the first readings there of Under Milk Wood, but he arrived in New York with only the first half of the play written. If Burton had been midwife to this first half, then John Brinnin, Dylan’s American agent, was one of the midwives to the second, squeezing it out of Dylan in the days leading up to its first public cast reading on May 14. [44]

Dylan returned to Laugharne at the beginning of June 1953, with ideas about writing for television, including a programme about a Butlin’s holiday camp. Then, in September, he and Burton arranged to meet in Swansea. Burton was anxious to hear more about how Under Milk Wood had developed, but Dylan soon dismissed the radio play. He was “on fire” about a new project, and he asked for Burton’s help. It was, wrote Burton, an entirely new venture for Dylan, a stage play set in a town in the south Wales valleys. But venturing onto the stage or into the valleys was not at all new for Burton; following on from his play about Llanddewi, he was now working on another play, Star-Crossed Lover, set yet again in a valleys’ industrial town. Dylan and Burton were clearly still walking side by side, and in step.[45]

They met again in London in October when Dylan was on his way to America for his fourth and final visit. They decided together that the play’s working title would be Two Streets, and Burton made suggestions about a dominating central character, the Voice of the Valley. But above all, Burton saw his role as that of placing Dylan’s poetic talents and imagination within the possibilities of stage practicalities:

My part in the discussion was to suggest how Dylan’s vision might best be realised in the physical opportunities and limitations of the stage, for the play was to have little resemblance to the normal, commercial three-act entertainment…during the discussion he had enjoyed treating me as an obstructive stage-producer whom he had to badger and plead with. In the actual staging of the play, his mind’s eye had not seen much beyond the opening…[46]

They spent part of the evening talking about Under Milk Wood, mulling over revisions that Dylan wanted to make. The following morning, Dylan was still full of excitement about Two Streets. They agreed to meet again as soon as he returned: “I’ll write you from New York, and see you as soon as I get back.” Perhaps Dylan did write; amongst his possessions that were brought back from New York after his death was a letter from Burton.[47]

Burton, of course, had other things to think about besides Under Milk Wood. He had a number of BBC radio programmes to complete, including Star-Crossed Lover. It was broadcast on the Welsh Home Service in January 1954, and it’s production was very much a family affair. Written and produced by Philip Burton, it starred his son Richard Burton, as well as Richard’s wife Sybil Williams and his lover Claire Bloom. The Burtons came together again three weeks later. Philip, Richard and Sybil were in the cast for the first broadcast on January 25 1954 of Under Milk Wood. Philip also adapted the play for the first complete stage reading, at the Old Vic in February 1954.[48]

Under Milk Wood followed on directly in the tradition of radio community portraiture developed in Wales by T. Rowland Hughes and Philip Burton. It was also the BBC’s most accomplished and popular radio sound picture. But what about the play’s visual productions? Was the seen more insightful than the heard? Philip Burton thought not, finding the play “diminished by visual performance.” Some reviewers of the subsequent stage and television performances agreed. The Spectator’s review of the Edinburgh stage production was emphatic. The play was an

unquestionable masterpiece that has been written for voices alone; to add sight to hearing is at the best unnecessary, at the worst distracting and vulgarising: presenting, with a nudge and a wink, What the Butler Saw to illustrate poetry…I don't want to see them at all; I don't even want to see Diana Maddox's delectable Polly Garter. I have been taught already to see with my ears.[49]

A reviewer of the first television production put it more succinctly: “Made visual, it is like a lark in a cage instead of on the wing.” Perhaps the time has come to set the lark free. Is this the moment for the Dylan Thomas Trust to ration its permissions for visual productions of the play, thereby restoring Under Milk Wood to its original status as a Play for Ears? There would be several good reasons for doing so, not least because, as one reviewer put it, you can often hear an idea better with your eyes closed than you can see it with your eyes open and staring.[50]

Having sprung free from his own cage at the BBC, Philip Burton was soon on the wing to America, where he spent the rest of his life, making a name for himself on the lecture circuit and as the director of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Did the two midwives who helped bring Under Milk Wood into the world ever meet? They certainly did. Burton and John Brinnin were on the stage together in New York in 1964 at a ceremony to honour Dylan’s memory.[51]

There had previously been a desultory exchange of letters, and a brief meeting: would Richard Burton be interested in playing Dylan on the stage, in an adaptation of Brinnin’s book, Dylan Thomas in America? Philip Burton was cautious in his reply, a caution that, regrettably, did not reach down the years to touch the makers of the 2008 film The Edge of Love or the BBC’s 2014 centenary biopic, A Poet in New York:

But there are difficulties...there is no guarantee that a good book will make a good play....then there is the incredible difficulty of bringing a genius convincingly to life on the stage; the temptation would be to show the self-destroying public performer when all that really matters is the private poet...yet, in spite of all this, if a truly exciting and worthy play about Dylan turned up, Richard would have a very special interest in it.[52]

Since the 1950s, John Brinnin had wintered at his home in Key West, Florida. Philip Burton went to live in Key West in 1974, first as a winter resident and then permanently five years later. He and Brinnin sometimes worked together; they were both on the advisory board of the Key West Review, and appeared occasionally on the same bill during the annual Key West literary seminars, but their lives and their interests could hardly have been more different.

Brinnin was an impecunious playboy, who scrounged and misappropriated money to support his lavish lifestyle, whiling away his time at afternoon sherry parties or playing poker on the beach. [53]

Philip Burton, said the Key West Citizen, became one of its more celebrated residents. This was partly through the many poetry readings and talks that he gave locally. But he was also deeply involved in other aspects of community life, particularly fund-raising for the local library and church. The community portraitist had become a diligent community activist. In 1993, he was honoured with the title and duties of Grand Marshall for a sponsored five mile annual walk, partly to raise money for a local soup kitchen. The eighty-eight year old Burton managed two miles before reluctantly being driven back to town. A long illness followed soon after, and then his death in 1995. [54]

He left no epitaph, but here’s one from the students of a local college, written eleven years before his death, on why they had chosen him to deliver their Commencement Address:

We felt that Mr Burton has inspired and motivated many people in his lifetime. That’s the sort of speaker we wanted...he is a man with many success stories – a man with a real sense of purpose and personal drive. [55]

Philip Burton’s must surely be a life that deserves a Life.

________________________

Notes and Reading follow below

Acknowledgements

The BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) and the National Library of Wales (NLW) for supplying scripts, including those by T. Rowland Hughes, Jack Jones and Philip Burton. My thanks also to Angela John, who read an early draft and thereafter was unstintingly mavenly, as well as to Jack Jones’ grandchildren, Carol Coleman and Norman Cogswell, and Rhian Davies, the daughter of Hubert Davies. Many others helped, including several staff at the BBC WAC, Elen Hâf Jones at the NLW, Cassie Tozer at Cathays Library, Madeline Keyser at the Lilly Library, University of Indiana (D.G. Bridson and Douglas Cleverdon archives), Curtis Small at the University of Delaware (John Brinnin archive) and Joy Worland, Waitsfield Library, Vermont. I am, as usual, indebted to the Colin Edwards archive at the NLW, with thanks as well to Elen T. Jones of the Screen and Sound Archive at NLW.

Notes

1. Private worlds, vantage points etc: Davies and Maud (1999), ppxxvii-xxviii.

2. Film scripts etc: Davies and Maud (1999) ppxl-xlvi and John Ackerman (1995) pxxiii and p103.

The listener as voyeur: see chapter 6 of Jeff Porter (2016) for more on this in relation to Under Milk Wood.

Coaching: for example, Richard Hughes’ melodrama, Congo Night, was broadcast on November 8 1926, with the Radio Times giving the following advice to listeners: “To get the right atmosphere for listening to this play, lights should be turned down and the play heard in darkness or by fire-light. It will then be easier to imagine the mysterious Congo night….”

Here’s another example from the broadcast of a play by J.O. Francis: “Mind Picture: Imagine that you are looking at a country road running from left to right before your line of vision. In the background trees in full summer foliage divide the road from a moor. It is eleven o'clock on a bright moonlight night. Close to a roadside fire there are two old boxes. On one of these sits Twm Tinker, a vagrant poacher of perhaps forty-five. On the ground at his feet is a frying pan containing steak and onions...” (Radio Times September 7 1926).

The Radio Times also occasionally published warnings about passive/lazy/casual listening: see, for example, C. B. Rees (1938) on radio being used as background noise by “aural morons.”

3. Radio/wireless in Italy: see various letters e.g. to John Arlott, June 11 1947.

Warmley BC: co-founded with his friend, Daniel Jones. It broadcast poetry and music from an upstairs room of Daniel Jones’ house to the listeners downstairs. See Jones (1977) pp32-33 and also reproduced in Maud (1991) pv-vi.

Dylan’s poem read on the BBC: The Romantic Isle, June 28 1933. First BBC broadcast: Life and the Modern Poet, April 21 1937.

Dylan knew radio inside out: Peter Lewis (1981) p77, who concludes that any connections between Under Milk Wood and Dylan’s film scripts are tenuous.

Highest art form: see Birch (1954).

4. Maud on Dylan’s radio script genre: Maud (1991) px. of the Introduction. Maud used the word “genre” but it was replaced with “oevre” by the New Welsh Review editor.)

New Quay/ Quite Early One Morning 1944. Shepherd’s Bush/The Londoner 1946. Margate/ Margate - Past and Present 1946. Swansea/Return Journey 1947. Laugharne/Laugharne 1953.

Picture Post article: see his letter to John Ormond, March 6 1948.

Twelve Hours in the Streets: described by Dylan as “the life of the streets from twelve noon to twelve midnight…[a] cross-section of the life of the English streets for a whole modern day.” See his letter to D. Gottlieb of January 1945, as well as the footnote to his previous letter to Gottlieb, December 19 1944.

Two Streets: see later in this article.

5. Amongst the radio series providing community portraits were Ourselves by Ourselves October-December 1933, Provincial Journey April 1935-February 1938, Village Opinion February 1936-October 1937, The Changing Village October-November 1935, Our Country Correspondent October 1935-April 1937, The Village October-December 1936, In the Village Hall October-December 1938 and Village Picture June 1947-June 1949. There were also a large number of one-off programmes such as Geoffrey Grigson’s Cornish Village Revisited 1938, A Village Tour 1939, Our Village 1940, Ralph Wightman’s The English Village 1940, The Village Pub 1940, A Village School in Wartime 1941, Village Discussion 1943 and Walter Rose’s The English Village 1943.

I would not include The Archers as a possible influence on the play; it did not start broadcasting nationally until January 1951, by which time Dylan had already written most of the first half.

Golding’s Magnolia Street, a bestseller set in a Manchester street, published in 1932, and turned into a play (1939) and a film (1951). Golding and Dylan were both members of the Savage Club, and Dylan mentions him in his letter of December 19 1950.

Brett Young’s Portrait of a Village, (1937), about a village called Monk’s Norton, with a paperback in 1942 and a magazine serialisation,. Dylan received money from Brett Young as a result of an appeal by Stephen Spender – see Dylan’s letter of July 4 1940.

6. Village on the Air: October 1948 to May 1950, a total of forty-nine broadcasts in all. Using a recording car to interview villagers, alongside a dominant Narrator, it possessed, said an admiring reviewer, “the secret of capturing our attention so that imagination can more freely wander.” Western Morning News, December 15, 1949. The first broadcast of Village on the Air was on October 6 1948, from Longhope, near Ross on Wye, in Gloucestershire, and put out on the Home Service from the BBC studio in Bristol. Recording van etc: see https://whiteladies.televault.rocks/tag/village-on-the-air

7. Country Magazine: I have written more about the programme in Two Dwellings on the road to Llareggub at https://sites.google.com/site/davidnthomasauthor/dylan-blogs

Songs from Country Magazine: broadcast from 1944 to1952. The two television programmes were in 1946 and 1947. The book was Francis Dillon’s Country Magazine, published in 1950.

For Bridson on Country Magazine, see Bridson (1971) p82.

Friends and colleagues working on Country Magazine: they included Francis Dillon, Country Magazine’s founding and principal producer, Philip Burton, Wynford Vaughan Thomas, Aneirin Talfan Davies, and Desmond Hawkins, who worked on more than thirty editions of the programme. Hawkins was one of Dylan’s London drinking companions and, at one time, his editor. See Dylan’s letters to him in Collected Letters.

8. Stayed with Bridson: see Bridson (1971) p 206. The programme was The Modern Muse, broadcast on November 18 1938. Dylan read The hand that signed the paper. It was Dylan’s first broadcast of one of his own poems. Bridson says he first met Dylan in London in 1933, in the company of the booksellers, David Archer and Charles Lahr.

Dylan and Rowland Hughes: Collected Letters, October 29 and November 3 1938. Hughes had joined the BBC in Cardiff in 1935.

9. Vision of the poet and the insight of the historian: the Western Mail, July 24 1936.

Impossible: Burton (1969) p55. Burton had previously written Granton Street. It was not a community portrait but a play about a family, set entirely in their front room. It was produced by John Richmond and broadcast in February 1937.

Nudging along to Llareggub…..

10. 'Y Ffin': 1937. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Rowland_Hughes

11. Community House, Newtown: Opened by Gwendoline Davies of Gregynog. See the Western Mail, October 4 1935.

Best Welsh: see Hughes’ own account of his fieldwork in the Rhondda: T. R. Hughes (1939) and at: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/eeaf17b1b90342e585321a9607b966a1?page=11

12. Radio films: see Dylan’s letter to Oscar Williams, March 26 1945.

13. Dylan’s early ideas about Under Milk Wood: 1933: Bert Trick, in Thomas (2003) p165. A verse-report: letter to Meurig Walters, March 28, 1938, Collected Letters.

A play about Laugharne: a suggestion to Richard Hughes, December 18 1939.

Bernard Walke: parish priest at St Hilary, just outside Penzance. Fishermen etc playing themselves: The Western Land and At the Ship Inn. The Western Land was first broadcast in October 1930, and repeated twelve times, both nationally and regionally, the last being in June 1939. At the Ship Inn was broadcast in December 1937 from the Ship Inn, Mevagissey. Walke’s other BBC broadcasts, which used the villagers of his parish rather than professional actors, include Bethlehem (1926-1934), The Eve of all Souls (1932-1941) and The Little Ass (1931-1932). For more on Walke, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Walke.

Dylan and Caitlin were married in Penzance in June 1937 and lived in the area until August 1937.

14. Home Fires Burning co-authored with Jack Jones: Hughes had previously co-authored Best Welsh with Jack Jones and it’s clear from the script that Jones was the principal, and perhaps the only, author. It is equally clear from the scripts of Homes Fires Burning and Rural Background that Hughes had taken over much of the writing.

Home Fires Burning was broadcast on October 18 1939 at 20.30 and repeated on April 13 1940 at 17.40.

First breath of reality: Grace Wyndham Goldie in the Listener December 28 1939, quoted in Davies (1994) p132.

Radio from Vernon Watkins: see Dylan’s letters to Watkins of April 1939 and May 11 1939.

15. Home Fires Burning: BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) October 18 1939.

16. Rural Background: BBC WAC January 20 1940.

17. J.O. Francis plays: The Poacher and Birds of a Feather.

18. Occasional carer: see Burton’s account of carrying Hughes on his back into the BBC control room: Burton (1969) p85, in which he also notes his role as go-between: “I became his contact with the world of which he was being robbed.”

Hubert Clement: After leaving school, Hubert took his voice and performance skills elsewhere, not to the radio or stage but to the pulpit, as did Hubert Davies, another talented pupil that Burton cast for How Green was My Valley – see below. (Western Mail of April 18, May 6 and May 9 1942). For more on Clement and his career in the Presbyterian church, see http://www.hermon.wales/hubert-clement---tribute.html

Hubert Davies: he was cast as Mervyn Phillips, the school bully (Western Mail, May 6 1942). On Burton’s recommendation, Davies also acted in a BBC Children’s Hour serial produced in Cardiff, whilst he was still in school – see John (2015) p.24. During his teenage years, Davies moved away from his chapel upbringing, and attended St Theodore’s Church in Port Talbot, where he was mentored for the priesthood by the Rev. Eric Roberts. After leaving Port Talbot Secondary School, he studied at Carmarthen College of Education. He became a religious studies teacher, and subsequently a Head Teacher. He was a lay preacher for most of his adult life in both church and chapel in the Port Talbot area. He maintained contact with Burton via correspondence until Burton’s death. With thanks to Angela John and Hubert’s daughter, Rhian.

19. Burton on being taught by Rowlands: Burton (1969) p86. Burton’s output on the BBC can be tracked through the BBC Genome project, beginning with the 1937 broadcast of his play, Granton Street.

20. Hughes one of the best radio producers: The Guardian, 28 February 1940.

BBC Mobile Recording Unit: 1936-1937 tour of Wales.

BBC review, peasant people on air: Nest Jenkins, BBC publicity office, quoted in Davies (1994) p115.

21. Output astonishing: J. Davies (1994) p115.

Adventurous troublemakers: see https://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/people-nation-empire/opening-doors. See also Bridson (1971) ch. 2 on his programmes with mill workers and miners in the North, and Shapley (1938, 1939) and (1996) and her obituary at https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/mar/15/guardianobituaries. It’s useful to compare Shapley’s 1938 article in the Radio Times about her interviews with lorry drivers with that of Rowland Hughes’ 1939 article on interviewing miners. See links to both articles in the list of reading below.

Hughes precedes Bridson and Shapley: Hughes’ actuality broadcasts on the coal, slate, metal and fishing industries were in 1936 and 1937. Bridson’s on coal, wool and cotton workers were in 1938, as were Shapley’s on shoppers, hotel workers, the homeless and lorry drivers. Her broadcast on miners’ wives was in 1939.

Community portraiture: Philip Burton’s apprenticeship

22. Tywi valley: the programme was Carmarthen to Llandovery, August 28 1941, with Wilfred Pickles as Billy Welcome. Rhondda programme: Welsh Mining Valley, March 21 1943.

Jubilee Concert, October 29 1942. The Corn is Green January 27 1945. Jubilee Concert was Burton’s first solo production for the BBC.

23. Seamen of Wales: broadcast on March 1^st 1945. For more details, see Thomas (2004) pp.291-92. Reminiscing sailors: ("I was in Wellington…the night of Pearl Harbour."/ “I remember taking 5½ months to go from Swansea to Panama"/"I'll never forget that dinner in Hong Kong."/"It was funny to see the beachcombers in San Francisco…"/"I was walking up a street in Laurenco Marques…"). The criticism in The Guardian said: “...it had too great a proportion of talk and too little perspective. A nearly continuous run of conversation, however lively, does not give shape and clarity to radio work. Rather more narrative, with more sense of visual panorama and of spacing in the sequences, would have improved Seamen of Wales.” (March 3 1945).

24. Two scripts not suitable: one was rejected, another had to be rewritten in the studio. See Maud (1991) p. ix.

25. Repeat the miracle: letter from A. Talfan Davies to Dylan, September 25 1945, quoted in Collected Letters p.635.

26. For Dylan’s experience as an actor at school, in the YMCA and in the Swansea Little Theatre, see Thomas (2003) pp260-267.

27. Delightful relationship: Burton (1969) p88.

28. Cassington: broadcast May 26 1946. See the Radio Times online for an article on the programme at https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/f88dd0470e8d4b539f4f4037c4221a6a?page=3

A radio in the Oxford summer house: see Dylan’s letters to Vernon Watkins, April 27 1946 and to Tommy Earp March 1 1947.

The Londoner: the timing is unclear but see Dylan’s letter to Jean Leroy, July 22 1946, in which he says he handed in the script on July 11.

29. Carmarthen programme: What’s it Like to be There? West Wales: Carmarthen, Light Programme February 23 1946.

30. In search of the Young Thomas: Burton, Early Doors (1969) p89.

31. Return Journey was first broadcast on June 15 1947 on the Home Service. The rehearsals were April 1/2 1947. On Burton helping to write the extra minutes for the script, happy association, talking literature etc, see the interview with Colin Edwards in Thomas (2004) p142-143. Burton also describes the visit in his book Early Doors pp87-90. On collaborative broadcasting, see Nerys Williams (2019).

32. Pygmalion complex: Burlington Times, December 17 1987. For more on Jones and Burton, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Burton_(theatre_director) and John (2015) for further information.

Drip-Feeding Llareggub

33. The Café Royal meeting: this is first mentioned briefly in Burton (1953) and reproduced in Tedlock’s 1960 book. There is also a 1991 tape recording by Burton about this meeting in the Screen and Sound Archive at the National Library of Wales, though Burton's recall is imperfect and jumbled. This present account of the meeting is contained in two letters from Burton to Douglas Cleverdon, dated October 9 1967 and February 26 1968, in the Cleverdon archive in the Lilly Library, Indiana. The love letters affair: the letters between Mog Edwards and Myfanwy Price. Chapel organist playing for sheep: "Organ Morgan goes to chapel to play the organ. He plays alone at night to anyone who will listen: lovers, revellers, the silent dead, tramps or sheep." (p61 of the Davies and Maud definitive version of the play)

A Comedy of Danger was broadcast in 1924.

34. Other things on Burton’s mind: (1) Meet the People ran from September 1947 to January 1948 and from July 1948 to May 1949 on the Light Programme. Burton contributed to the edition of Dec. 18 1947, when he talked with Emrys Griffiths, a miner. (2) Silver Jubilee broadcast: Radio Comes to Wales, Feb. 13 1948.

35. South Leigh interviews with Colin Edwards: see Thomas (2004) pp124-139.

36. T. Thompson and Dylan: The poet Paul Potts has described how Dylan

“loved sweets, bubble and squeak, thrillers, tripe and onions and T. Thompson the Lancashire writer.” See Potts (1961) p183. For more, see my A Third Dwelling on the road to Llareggub: Dylan Thomas and Thomas Thompson, August 2018, at https://sites.google.com/site/davidnthomasauthor/dylan-blogs and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Thompson_(writer)

Plum Street column in The Guardian: it ran from 1923 to Thompson’s death in 1951.

Burbleton: created by BBC staff in 1937. You can read about it here: http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/5e01d8e3eaa442509c128446396b5f5a?page=13

and see the details of each programme at: https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?order=asc&q=Burbleton#search

Under the Barber’s Pole broadcast on the Home Service between 1947 and 1952, and published by Allen and Unwin in 1949.

Wilder, Leacock and Dylan: see my From Cheltenham to Mariposa: a wander along the road to Llareggub, October 2017, at https://sites.google.com/site/davidnthomasauthor/dylan-blogs. In a BBC broadcast, Dylan said of Leacock: “I read only his ‘Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town’, for only in these did Leacock create a home for his imagination, a ‘place’ in which his people could be born and die, love, fall down, philosophize, have their hair cut, let their hair down, put their feet up.” See Maud (1991) pp193-194.

37. Met up to talk: a letter from Jean LeRoy of David Higham’s office in March 1950 to Caitlin tells us that Dylan's meeting with Burton had taken place in 1949. They may have met around July 29 when Dylan was in Cardiff for a BBC programme.

David Higham letter: September 1949.

American Village: described by the BBC as a “radio impression of a typical New England village.” Broadcast October 18 1949.

38. Curnow and script: Images of Dylan in the NZ Listener, December 18 1982.

39. Death of Hughes, promotion of Burton: “Y Tiwniwr”, The Western Mail, October 31 1949 and April 3 1950. Hughes died on October 24.

40. First 39 pages to Cleverdon: enclosed with Dylan’s letter of late October 1950 to Cleverdon. See Collected Letters.

Imprisoned: this account was given by Cleverdon’s daughter, Julia, on Desert Island Discs, January 18 2015. Douglas Cleverdon did indeed once lock Dylan in a BBC library, but this was to finish a programme about Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, as Cleverdon himself makes clear (1969, pp18-19 esp. footnote 1.) John Brinnin (1955) makes it equally clear that Dylan arrived in America in May 1953 with just the unfinished first half of the script. For more on this, see The Birth of Under Milk Wood, in Thomas (2004) and online at https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandnewquay/birth-of-under-milk-wood

41. No letters from Dylan to Burton - see Callard (1997) p.97. There does not seem to be any professional correspondence between Burton and Dylan at the BBC’s archives in Reading.

Arts Council appointment: see The Western Mail, January 11 1950.

42. Mining rich resources, BBC review etc: see the Western Mail December 31 1951.

Pobl yr Ardal: twenty programmes from towns and villages in Wales, January 1951 to April 1954.

Off the Beaten Track: five programmes October 6 to December 1 1951 from Nefyn, Grosmont, Newport (Pembs.), Rhydymain and Llansteffan. On the Llansteffan programme, see the Western Mail, December 3 1951: “Off the Beaten Track from old-world Llanstephan in Carmarthenshire brought out the attractiveness of the unsensational, unflurried village life. The village policeman, barber, innkeeper, singing minister and wife...all sounded natural and people worth knowing.”

43. The Dark Wood: Daily Mirror, March 2 1953. St. David’s Day: March 1^st.

44. Squeezed the play: Liz Reitell, Brinnin’s assistant, was mainly responsible for forcing the last part of the play out of Dylan. Seehttps://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandnewquay/birth-of-under-milk-wood

45. Butlin’s: on a worksheet dated June 1953, Dylan Thomas Archives, University of Texas, Austin.

Arranged to meet in Swansea etc: see Burton (1953). There is another account, given some ten years later, of the October London meeting - see Thomas (2004) p236.

46. Burton (1953)

47. Write from New York: Burton (1953). Letter from Burton: see Ferris (1999) p325.

48. Star-Crossed Lover: broadcast on January 4 1954. It also starred Robert Hardy and Hugh Griffith. For accounts, see the Western Mail, January 11 1954 and the South Wales Gazette, January 1 1954. The play is thought to have been based on Blaenavon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaenavon

Claire Bloom: she had first met Burton in 1949, and then played opposite him at the Old Vic in a number of productions and they became close. She dates the first time they slept together as 1953, after her return from filming in Berlin. See her memoir of 1996.

49. Burton on UMW visual performance: Burton (1969) p97.

UMW at the Edinburgh Festival, a review: The Spectator, August 31, 1956.

50. UMW on television 1964, a review: The Stage and Television Today, March 12, 1964.

Hear an idea better: see (Anon. 1956).

51. Burton and Brinnin on stage together in 1964: see Burton (1969) pp179-180. And also see https://www.nytimes.com/1964/05/24/archives/wales-to-receive-a-bust-of-thomas-bronze-from-poets-death-mask-to.html

52. Philip Burton’s five letters to John Brinnin were in March and April 1956, January 1961, May 1978 and April 1981. They are in the Brinnin archive, University of Delaware. Burton’s letter to Brinnin about Richard Burton and a play adaptation was dated January 2 1961.

53. For more on Brinnin, his lifestyle, debts and scrounging, see Thomas (2008).

54. Burton in Key West: details taken from the Key West Citizen. The issue of February 5 1984 gives 1974 as the start of his winter residency and from 1979 as a permanent resident.

55. Students’ epitaph for Burton: Key West Citizen, April 8 1984. Burton’s commencement address appears in the issue of April 16 1984.

Reading

J. Ackerman (1995) Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts, Dent

C. Acton (1959) The Voices of Milk Wood, Irish Times, April 22.

Anon. (1954) The Theatre of Words: The Poet’s Call to Fresh Adventure, The Stage, February 11.

Anon. (1956) Under Milk Wood Does Stand a Third Dimension, Newcastle Journal, August 14

C. Bloom (1996) Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir, Little Brown.

M. Bragg (1989) Rich: The Life of Richard Burton, Hodder.

E. Birch (1954) The Playwright’s Craft and the Poet’s Art, Truth, April 2.

D.G. Bridson (1971) Prospero and Ariel, Gollancz

J. Brinnin (1955) Dylan Thomas in America, Avon

P. H. Burton (1937) Granton Street, radio broadcast February 15 1937.

(1948) Radio Comes to Wales, radio broadcast February 13 1948.

(1953) untitled, Dylan Thomas Memorial Number in Adam International Review, and in Tedlock (1960)

(1954) For the Whole World, in the Radio Times, March 5.

(1969) Early Doors, Dial Press

(1991) The Dylan Thomas I Knew, Screen and Sound Archive, NLW.

(1992) Richard and Philip:The Burtons, Owen

(2004) Dylan Thomas, in Dylan Remembered 1935-1953 (2004), ed. D.N. Thomas, Seren

(2017) Granton Street: A Play in Three Acts, Alun Books

D. Callard (1997) The Other Philip Burton in Planet, 122

H. Chignell et. al. (2014) Regional Aesthetics: Mapping UK Regional Cultures, Palgrave

D. Cleverdon (1954) The Town 'that has fallen over bells in love', Radio Times, January 22

(1954b) A Talk on Under Milk Wood, the Journal of Design and Fine Art, 13

(1957) The History of a Radio Classic, the Radio Times, June 28

(1966) Under Milk Wood, the Weekend Telegraph, December 16

(1969) The Growth of Milk Wood, Dent.

(1954b) A Talk on Under Milk Wood, the Journal of Design and Fine Art, 13

(1957) The History of a Radio Classic, the Radio Times, June 28

(1966) Under Milk Wood, the Weekend Telegraph, December 16

(1969) The Growth of Milk Wood, Dent.

J. Davies (1994) Broadcasting and the BBC in Wales, UWP

W. Davies and R. Maud (eds.1999) Under Milk Wood: the Definitive Edition, Everyman

F. Dillon (ed. 1950) Country Magazine, Odhams

K. Edwards (1974) Jack Jones, UWP

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

P. Ferris (1999) Dylan Thomas: The Biography, Dent

L. Gilliam (1935) Tracking the Storm, the Radio Times, March 16.

Dinner is Served, the Radio Times, October 11.

L. Golding (1932) Magnolia Street, Gollancz

T. Hajkowski (2017) The BBC and National Identity in Britain 1922-53, MUP

T. R. Hughes (1939) Best Welsh in the Radio Times, May 12 https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/eeaf17b1b90342e585321a9607b966a1?page=11

P. Jackson (2014) Dylan Thomas: The Anti-Fascist Propagandist in Ellis (2014)

A. V. John (2015) The Actors’ Crucible: Port Talbot and the Making of Burton, Hopkins, Sheen and All the Others, Parthian

D. Jones (1977) My Friend Dylan Thomas, Dent

S. Leacock (1912) Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, The Bodley Head. Free online at https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/leacock-sunshine/leacock-sunshine-00-h-dir/leacock-sunshine-00-h.html

J. Larios (2015) Undersung: John Malcolm Brinnin, in Numero Cinq, May.

P. Lewis (1981) The Radio Road to Llareggub in British Radio Drama ed. J. Drakakis, CUP

R. Maud (ed. 1991), On the Air with Dylan Thomas, New Directions

K. Murphy (2016) Behind the Wireless. A History of Early Women at the BBC, Palgrave

E. G. Pietersma (1995) Dylan Thomas and Radio, MA thesis, McGill University.

J. Porter (2016) Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling, Univ. North Carolina Press

P. Potts (1961) Dante Called You Beatrice, Eyre and Spottiswoode

C. B. Rees (1938) There’s an Art in Not Listening, in the Radio Times, February 25

J. Rowlands (1975) T. Rowland Hughes, UWP

O. Shapley (1938) Producer in Search of a Programme, in the Radio Times, September 2

(1938) Night Romance of the Roads in the Radio Times, October 28 https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/098b809b72394f2593d5d6c055f19b6d?page=8

(1939) Miners’ Wives, in the Radio Times, March 14

(1996) Broadcasting a Life, Scarlett Press

T. Rymer (1959) Literature on Record, Birmingham Daily Post, November 24.

A. Sinclair (1975) Dylan Thomas: Poet of his People, Joseph

G. Stowell (1938) Broadcasting the Borough of Burbleton, Radio Times February 11

E.W. Tedlock (1960) Dylan Thomas:The Legend and the Poet, Heinemann

D. N. Thomas (2003) Dylan Remembered 1914-1934 vol. 1, Seren

(2004) Dylan Remembered 1935-53 vol 2. Seren

(2004) The Birth of Under Milk Wood, in Thomas (2004) and online at https://sites.google.com/site/dylanthomasandnewquay/birth-of-under-milk-wood

(2008) Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas?, Seren

T. Wilder (1938) Our Town, free online at http://studylib.net/download/8328277

H. Williams (1983) The Road to Llareggub, a BBC broadcast, November 3 1983

N. Williams (2019) Dylan Thomas's ‘Return Journey to Swansea’: A Collaborative Radio Poetic, in Modernist Cultures, 14,1, and online at https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/handle/10197/10705

F. B. Young (1937) Portrait of a Village, Heinemann

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