Vernon Watkins

William Watkins and Sarah Phillips married in 1902, and had three children, Vernon, Marjorie, and Dorothy.

The family lived at "Redclliffe", a large Victorian house about 4 mi from Swansea, at Caswell Bay.

Watkins read fluently by the age of four, and at five announced that he would be a poet, although he did not wish to be published until after his death.

He wrote poetry and read widely from eight or nine years of age and was especially fond of the works of John Keats and Shelley.

He received his later education at a preparatory school in Sussex, Repton School in Derbyshire, and Magdalene College, Cambridge.

In his early years at Repton, Watkins' quiet, gentle character provoked regular bullying from older boys, though in his last years he attained more popularity as he was able to show capacity in tennis and cricket.

Vernon Phillips Watkins (27 June 1906 – 8 October 1967) was a Welsh poet and translator.

He was a close friend of fellow poet Dylan Thomas, who described him as "the most profound and greatly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English".

Vernon Watkins was born in Maesteg in Glamorgan, and brought up mainly in Swansea.

His birth coincided with slight earth tremors; another baby born that night was christened John Earthquake Jones.

His parents were William Watkins, a manager for Lloyds Bank in Wind Street, Swansea, and Sarah ("Sally"), daughter of James Phillips and Esther Thomas of Sarnau, Meidrim.

James Phillips was a Congregationalist, reputed to know most of the Welsh Bible by heart.

Sarah had a love of poetry and literature; her headmistress arranged for her to spend two years as a pupil-teacher in Germany.

He met Dylan Thomas, who was to be a close friend, in 1935 when Watkins had returned to a job in a bank in Swansea.

About once a week Thomas would come to Watkins' parents' house, situated on the very top of the cliffs of the Gower peninsula.

Watkins was the only person from whom Thomas took advice when writing poetry and he was invariably the first to read his finished work.

They were both Flight Sergeants and were stationed at Bletchley from June 1942 until May 1945.

They remained lifelong friends, despite Thomas's failure, in the capacity of best man, to turn up to the wedding of Vernon and Gwen in 1944.

Watkins was godfather to Thomas's son Llewelyn, the others being Richard Hughes and Augustus John.

Thomas used to laugh affectionately at his friend's gossamer-like personality and extreme sensibility.

A story is told that one evening in Chelsea, during the war time blackout, they were walking along and Vernon tripped over something and fell to the ground.

They were married at the church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, in London on 2 October 1944.

The couple had five children.

One of their grandchildren, Marley Watkins, is a professional footballer who has represented the Welsh national team.

It opens with the obituary Watkins wrote for his friend, which was originally published in The Times on 10 November 1953.

Letters to Vernon Watkins by Dylan Thomas was published in 1957, four years after his death in New York.

It proved to be the first in a number of books that linked Watkins and Thomas.

Poems for Dylan also contains two poems ('At Cwmrhydyceirw Quarry' and 'Cwmrhydyceirw Elegaics') centred upon the quarry in Cwmrhydyceirw where, in August 1963, Watkins and the sculptor Ron Cour picked out the stone that would be inscribed with lines from 'Fern Hill' and placed in Cwmdonkin Park as a permanent memorial to Thomas.

Thomas looked with a torch to see what the offending object was and to his delight all that they could find was a small, black feather (FitzGibbon 1966).

With Thomas, Watkins was one of a group of Swansea artists known as the "Kardomah boys" (because they frequented the Kardomah Café in Castle Street).

Others among this Swansea Group were the composer Daniel Jenkyn Jones, writer Charles Fisher and the artists Alfred Janes and Mervyn Levy.

After he died, in 1968, the school wrote that he was "perhaps the best poet Repton has had".[7] His headmaster at Repton was Geoffrey Fisher, who became Archbishop of Canterbury.

Despite his parents being Nonconformists, Watkins' school experiences influenced him to join the Church of England.

He read modern languages at Cambridge, but left before completing his degree.

'Cwmrhydyceirw Elegaics' had first seen publication in the January 1968 issue of Poetry magazine.

Watkins met Gwen, who came from Harborne, Birmingham, at Bletchley Park, where he worked during the Second World War as a cryptographer, and she, as a member of the WAAF.

They were both engaged in breaking the Luftwaffe AuKa tactical codes in Block F (A).

Gwen was at first billeted at Stony Stratford but later moved to RAF Church Green at Bletchley.

The 1983 book Portrait of a Friend by Watkins' wife Gwen (née Davies) deals with the relationship between the two poets, and in 2013 Parthian Books published Vernon Watkins on Dylan Thomas and Other Poets & Poetry, a collection of previously-unpublished critical work with a foreword by Rowan Williams.

Poems for Dylan, a collection of poems written by Watkins to Thomas, appeared from Gomer Press in 2003.