Thomas left Swansea Grammar School at the age of sixteen — though we have seen that he had hardly been there at all, other than to write for the school magazine, act in plays, debate, and invent excuses for going home again. For ‘two years’ after that, he told Pamela Hansford Johnson in November 1933, he ‘was a newspaper reporter’ — it was, in fact, a year and a half¹ — ‘making my daily call at the mortuaries, the houses of suicides — there’s a lot of suicide in Wales — and Calvinistic “capels”. Two years was enough’.² Two years was not just enough for Thomas, who had most likely got the job through the influence of his father,³ it was also enough for theSouth Wales Daily Post (which became theSouth Wales Evening Post during his time there). ThePost was part of Lord Rothemere’s conservative Northcliffe Press, ‘with no propensity to rock the boat politically’, as Andrew Lycett points out⁴ — not that the sixteen-year-old Thomas was political, but he did like rocking the boat. The uncontroversial reporting of routine life and municipal events, leavened only by regular visits to the morgue, was unlikely to stimulate an ambitious poet with little sense of personal accountability or civic responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Sydney, Australia

   William Christie (Professor of English Literature)

© 2014 William Christie

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