Dylan Thomas' boat house, Laugharne. Photo: Photo: Kevin Latham / flickr CC.
Dylan Thomas: A compassion for mankind
Stevie Krayer writes about Dylan Thomas’s Quaker connections
The most unworldly Quaker in Wales could scarcely have failed to register that 2014 is the centenary of the birth of a much-mocked, much-misrepresented and much-adored Welsh poet – Dylan Thomas.
Although Quakers cannot, alas, claim Dylan as one of our own, there are surprising connections. (His wife) Caitlin’s mother and grandparents were Quakers; her grandmother lived in the village of Congénies in Southern France, where there is now a Quaker centre. (They seem to have been a rather grand style of Quaker: according to Caitlin, ‘Grandmother Majolier was always very formal; she changed for dinner; she had silver and fine china and a marvellous cook…’). Caitlin’s brother-in-law, the artist Rupert Shephard, made a number of watercolours of the Quaker Meeting house and cemetery at Congénies, as well as portraits of Dylan, Caitlin and Caitlin’s mother Yvonne. These were among paintings exhibited in the National Museum of Wales back in May 1977.
A further connection: after the second world war, Dylan co-scripted a film based on a study of current housing needs by the Bournville Village Trust, called When we build again. The film was financed by Cadbury’s. The original study is described as having been written ‘in a spirit of optimism and vision’ for a new and better world for ordinary people after the war was over.
Dylan himself seems to have been ‘of the Quakers’ party without knowing it’, so to speak. An early close friend of his, Bert Trick, spoke of Dylan’s ‘tremendous compassion for mankind’ and remembered that ‘one thing he was outraged about was any show of violence’.
Asked about Dylan’s religious views, Bert said: ‘He believed in the freedom of man to be man, that he shouldn’t be oppressed by his fellows and that every man had the stamp of divinity on him… in the orthodox sense of being a church-going Christian, one could answer very definitely “no” … but beyond that, in a mystical sense, he was very religious … He felt that there was a supreme being with which you could get in touch direct. That you hadn’t to wait for benefit of clergy and that sort of thing, that in each one of us – well, what’s the word I want? “The green fuse”, you know, his poem…’
Dylan’s whole oeuvre was profoundly spiritual, and his hatred of war and violence surfaces repeatedly in his writings. Not a Friend, then, but a writer for Friends to cherish.
This article was first published in Calon, the newsletter of Meeting of Friends in Wales.
