Good morning, Swansea!

There would be no Dylan Thomas without David John Thomas.

That sounds like a statement of the obvious - of course there'd be no Dylan without his father.

What I mean is that the poetry, the voice, the literary obsession that made Dylan one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century: all of it came from one man, in one house, in the Uplands.

His name is not on any trail. There is no statue, no theatre, no murals. This week, we tell his story.

I’ll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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D.J. Thomas was born in 1876 in Johnstown, just outside Carmarthen. The family home was a cottage called The Poplars, and his father Evan worked the railways. Evan - otherwise known as "Thomas the Guard" - was a man who spent his working life on the South West Railways and presumably expected his son might do something similar.

Instead, D.J. won a scholarship to the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in English - and in 1899 arrived in Swansea to take up a post at Swansea Grammar School on Mount Pleasant, where he would stay for nearly four decades.

D.J. harboured ambitions as a poet himself - and when his first child was born in 1914, he had a very specific name in mind…

A few weeks before the birth, D.J. had been serving on a committee to welcome a new Welsh National Theatre to Swansea, while an opera called Dylan, Son of the Wave - based on a character from the ancient Welsh tales of the Mabinogion - was being staged in London. The name “Dylan” was virtually unknown at the time, and his son’s middle name was unusual too - “Marlais” came from his great-uncle Gwilym Marles, a bardic poet-preacher from rural Carmarthenshire.

By the time Dylan was born, D.J. was already a well-established figure at the Grammar School - respected, sharp, and very good at his job. He rose to become Senior English Master, and over the years built a reputation for the kind of teaching that produced results, regularly getting boys into Oxford and Cambridge at a time when that was no small achievement for a grammar school in an industrial Welsh town.

He read poetry aloud in the classroom - including Shakespeare and the Romantics - with enough conviction that it actually worked on teenagers. One former pupil remembered it years later:

"All the boys who were with me at school, and who have spoken to me since, agree that it was his reading that made them, for the first time, see that there was, after all, something in Shakespeare and all this poetry."

D.J. also wrote poetry himself - and at home, he made sure the conditions for it were impossible to ignore.

The Thomas’ family home at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive in the Uplands still stands today - a red-brick semi-detached in a quiet residential street that could pass for any other house on the road. Inside, it was something else entirely.

A friend of Dylan's, Bert Trick, described visiting the family home years later: "Every room you went into in the Thomas' house was strewn with books. Even in the kitchen, they'd be under the kitchen table, up on the sideboard, piled with books."

D.J. had his own study, and it was here that Dylan spent hours working obsessively through his father's collection. Dylan described it himself in an interview: "My proper education consisted of my liberty to read whatever I cared to. I read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out like stalks."

From the time Dylan could talk, D.J. had been reading poetry aloud to him at home - the same way he did in the classroom. Nursery rhymes at first, then the real thing, with D.J. exposing his son to poetry as early as the age of two. By the time Dylan was four, he was reciting verses from Shakespeare. The sound of language, the rhythm of a line - all of it absorbed before his boy fully understood what any of it meant.

D.J. and his wife Florence were both fluent Welsh speakers, raised in Welsh-speaking communities in rural Carmarthenshire, and D.J. even gave Welsh lessons from home in the evenings. But he made a deliberate decision not to raise Dylan or his sister Nancy as Welsh speakers, believing English was the language of opportunity - the way to get on in the world.

Dylan, meanwhile, grew up tangled in his own Welshness - drawn to it, dismissive of it, unable to fully claim it or leave it behind. The poet most associated with Wales wrote entirely in English and once described it as "the land of my fathers, and my fathers can keep it." That ambivalence started at home in the Uplands, with a choice his father made.

The decision about language and the decision about names were made by the same man, with the same deliberateness - someone who had very clear ideas about what his son should be, and how he should move through the world. Dylan carried both with him for the rest of his life.

In 1933, D.J. was diagnosed with throat cancer after a dentist noticed an ulcer under his tongue. He travelled to London for treatment and eventually recovered, but his health was never quite the same again. He retired from the Grammar School in 1936.

In his later years, even as his eyesight failed and his world contracted, the relationship between father and son remained close. After Dylan settled in Laugharne with his wife Caitlin, D.J. and his wife Florence moved nearby. Dylan visited daily where they did crossword puzzles and chatted about his work. Caitlin remembered it plainly: "Dylan had always written poetry not only to please himself but also his father."

During the long years of his father’s decline, Dylan wrote what would become his most famous poem. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night is addressed directly to a dying father - but there is something else in it too.

D.J. had spent decades building his son's voice, shaping the instrument, putting the words there. And when the time came, Dylan used that voice to issue a command: don't go. Rage against it. The man who had taught him to feel language in his chest was now being told, in the most powerful language Dylan had, to stay alive.

D.J. Thomas died on the 16th of December 1952, with Dylan holding his hand. He was 76.

Less than a year later, Dylan was dead too, after collapsing in New York at just 39. D.J.'s death had triggered a rapid decline in Dylan's mental and physical health that he never pulled out of. He had told Caitlin that his father had been responsible for everything he had ever learned.

Dylan's name is everywhere in Swansea - the theatre, the statue, the books, but D.J. Thomas's name is no where to be seen.

And yet, here was a railway guard's son from Carmarthenshire who spent decades teaching literature to other people's children while quietly raising a genius at home. The relationship between them - close, complicated, and built entirely on a shared love of words - resulted in some of the most celebrated writing in the English language, penned by the man who became Swansea’s most famous son.

Swansea claims Dylan Thomas as its greatest cultural export, but it was D.J. Thomas who made it possible.

I'll catch you on Sunday!

Andrew.

A huge thank you to Geoff Haden from Dylan Thomas Birthplace for sharing rare images of D.J. Thomas. If you've never visited 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, it's well worth booking a tour. They also have a brilliant evening coming up on April 29th - photographer Robin V. Robinson in conversation about her new book Spaces and Places of Dylan Thomas, right in the parlour where Dylan once wrote. In person or on Zoom, tickets are available at their website. 🎟️

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