Under Milk Wood
Under Milk Wood is a 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The BBC commissioned the play, which was later adapted for the stage. The first public reading was in New York City in 1953.
A film version of the same name, directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released in 1972. A second adaptation of the play, directed by Pip Broughton, was staged for television in 2014 for the 60th anniversary of the piece.
An omniscient narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small Welsh fishing town, Llareggub,.
They include Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, relentlessly nagging her two dead husbands; Captain Cat, reliving his seafaring times; the two Mrs. Dai Breads; Organ Morgan, obsessed with his music; and Polly Garter, pining for her dead lover. Later, the town awakens, and, aware now of how their feelings affect whatever they do, we watch them go about their daily business.
Origins and development
Background
In 1931, the 17-year-old Thomas created a piece for the Swansea Grammar School magazine that included a conversation of Milk Wood stylings, between Mussolini and Wife, similar to those between Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard and her two husbands that would later be found in Under Milk Wood.In 1933, Thomas talked at length with his mentor and friend, Bert Trick, about creating a play about a Welsh town:
In February 1937, Thomas outlined his plans for a Welsh Journey, following a route that would "be decided by what incidents arose, what people told me stories, what pleasant or unpleasant or curious things...I encountered in the little-known villages among the lesser-known people."
A year later, in March 1938, Thomas suggested that a group of Welsh writers should prepare a verse-report of their "own particular town, village, or district."
Laugharne
In May 1938, the Thomas family moved to Laugharne, a small town on the estuary of the river Tâf in Carmarthenshire, Wales. They lived there intermittently for just under two years until July 1941. They did not return to live there until 1949.The author Richard Hughes, who lived in Laugharne, has recalled that Thomas spoke to him in 1939 about writing a play about Laugharne in which the townsfolk would play themselves, an idea pioneered on the radio by Cornish villagers in the 1930s. Four years later, in 1943, Thomas again met Hughes, and this time outlined a play about a Welsh village certified as 'mad' by government inspectors.
Hughes believed that when Thomas "came to write Under Milk Wood, he did not use actual Laugharne characters." Nevertheless, some elements of Laugharne are discernible in the play. A girl, age 14, named Rosie Probert was living in Horsepool Road in Laugharne at the 1921 census. Although there is no-one of that name in Laugharne in the 1939 War Register, nor anyone named Rosie, Laugharne resident, Jane Dark, has described how she told Thomas about her. Dark has also described telling Thomas about the ducks of Horsepool Road and the drowning of the girl who went in search of them.
Both Laugharne and Llareggub have a castle, and, like Laugharne, Llareggub is on an estuary, with cockles, cocklers and Cockle Row. Laugharne also provides the clock tower of Myfanwy Price's dreams, as well as Salt House Farm which may have inspired the name of Llareggub's Salt Lake Farm. Llareggub's Butcher Beynon almost certainly draws on butcher and publican Carl Eynon, though he was not in Laugharne but in nearby St Clears.
New Quay
In September 1944, the Thomas family moved to a bungalow called Majoda on the cliffs outside New Quay, Cardiganshire, Wales, and left in July the following year. Thomas had previously visited New Quay whilst living in nearby Talsarn in 1942–1943, and had an aunt and cousins living in New Quay. He had written a New Quay pub poem, Sooner than you can water milk, in 1943, which has several words and ideas that would later re-appear in Under Milk Wood. Thomas' bawdy letter-poem from New Quay to T. W. Earp, written just days after moving into Majoda, contains the name "No-good", anticipating Nogood Boyo of Under Milk Wood.Thomas's wife, Caitlin, has described the year at Majoda as "one of the most important creative periods of his life...New Quay was just exactly his kind of background, with the ocean in front of him... and a pub where he felt at home in the evenings." Thomas' biographers have taken a similar view. His time there, recalled Constantine FitzGibbon, his first biographer, was "a second flowering, a period of fertility that recalls the earliest days … great outpouring of poems", as well as a good deal of other material. Biographer Paul Ferris agreed: "On the grounds of output, the bungalow deserves a plaque of its own." Thomas' third biographer, George Tremlett, concurred, describing the time in New Quay as "one of the most creative periods of Thomas's life."
Some of those who knew him well, including FitzGibbon, have said that Thomas began writing Under Milk Wood in New Quay. The play's first producer, Douglas Cleverdon, agreed, noting that Thomas "wrote the first half within a few months; then his inspiration seemed to fail him when he left New Quay." One of Thomas' closest friends and confidantes, Ivy Williams of Brown's Hotel, Laugharne, has said "Of course, it wasn't really written in Laugharne at all. It was written in New Quay, most of it."
The writer and puppeteer, Walter Wilkinson, visited New Quay in 1947, and his essay on the town captures its character and atmosphere as Thomas would have found it two years earlier. Photos of New Quay in Thomas' day, as well as a 1959 television programme about the town, can be found here.
There were many milestones on the road to Llareggub, and these have been detailed by Professor Walford Davies in his Introduction to the definitive edition of Under Milk Wood. The most important of these was Quite Early One Morning, Thomas' description of a walk around New Quay, broadcast by the BBC in 1945, and described by Davies as a "veritable storehouse of phrases, rhythms and details later resurrected or modified for Under Milk Wood." For example, the "done-by-hand water colours" of Quite Early One Morning appear later as the "watercolours done by hand" of Under Milk Wood.
Another striking example from the 1945 broadcast is Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard who later appears as a major character in Under Milk Wood:
Mrs Ogmore Davies and Mrs Pritchard-Jones both lived on Church Street in New Quay. Mrs Pritchard-Jones was constantly cleaning, recalled one of her neighbours, "a real matron-type, very strait-laced, house-proud, ran the house like a hospital ward." In her book on New Quay, Mrs Pritchard-Jones' daughter notes that her mother had been a Queen's Nurse before her marriage and afterwards "devoted much of her time to cleaning and dusting our home... sliding a small mat under our feet so we would not bring in any dirt from the road."
Jack Lloyd, a New Quay postman and the Town Crier, also lived on Church Street. He provided the character of Llareggub's postman Willy Nilly, whose practice of opening letters, and spreading the news, reflects Lloyd's role as Town Crier, as Thomas himself noted on a work sheet for the play: "Nobody minds him opening the letters and acting as kind of town-crier. How else could they know the news?" It is this note, together with our knowledge that Thomas knew Jack Lloyd, that establish the link between Willy Nilly and Lloyd.
There were also other New Quay residents in Under Milk Wood. Dai Fred Davies the donkeyman on board the fishing vessel, the Alpha, appears in the play as Tom-Fred the donkeyman. Local builder, Dan Cherry Jones, appears as Cherry Owen in the play, as Cherry Jones in Thomas' sketch of Llareggub, and as Cherry Jones in one of Thomas' work sheets for the play, where Thomas describes him as a plumber and carpenter.
The time-obsessed, "thin-vowelled laird", as Thomas described him, New Quay's reclusive English aristocrat, Alastair Hugh Graham, lover of fish, fishing and cooking, and author of Twenty Different Ways of Cooking New Quay Mackerel, is considered to be the inspiration for "Lord Cut-Glass … that lordly fish-head nibbler … in his fish-slimy kitchen... scampers from clock to clock".
Third Drowned's question at the beginning of the play, "How's the tenors in Dowlais?", reflects the special relationship that once existed between New Quay and Dowlais, an industrial town in South Wales. Its workers traditionally holidayed in New Quay and often sang on the pier on summer evenings. Such was the relationship between the two towns that when St Mair's church in Dowlais was demolished in 1963, its bell was given to New Quay's parish church.
Other names and features from New Quay in the play include Maesgwyn farm the Sailor's Home Arms, the river Dewi, the quarry, the harbour, Manchester House, the hill of windows and the Downs. The Fourth Drowned's line "Buttermilk and whippets" also comes from New Quay, as does the stopped clock in the bar of the Sailors' Arms.
Walford Davies has concluded that New Quay "was crucial in supplementing the gallery of characters Thomas had to hand for writing Under Milk Wood. FitzGibbon had come to a similar conclusion many years earlier, noting that Llareggub "resembles New Quay more closely and many of the characters derive from that seaside village in Cardiganshire..." John Ackerman has also suggested that the story of the drowned village and graveyard of Llanina, that lay in the sea below Majoda, "is the literal truth that inspired the imaginative and poetic truth" of Under Milk Wood. Another part of that literal truth were the 60 acres of cliff between New Quay and Majoda, including Maesgwyn farm, that collapsed into the sea in the early 1940s.