 Twitter on X as it is now. And I just just wonder what the future holds for the likes of James Blunt and X because it would have been it would have been great thing for James Blunt. And when he first started out on it, you know, give him a forum and give him a voice and people saw him and just an entirely different light. And he's very self deprecating and very entertaining on there. But just the way that the way that X is going and what's been done with it, you know, just wonder, will he with the likes of James Blunt and shift over to different platforms or what might come on stream to challenge X? That's not for us to worry about or to discuss. But I'll tell you what, it is the poet Dylan Thomas's 70th anniversary. Today, he passed away on the 9th of November, 1953, at the age of just 39 in the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York. And there's a connection to Donnie Gall because he was brought here for a holiday by his literary agent back in 1935 and ended up spending a summer here. And it's detailed, his time here is detailed in a chapter in the book The Road to Glen Law. And the chapter is actually called Welching in Donnie Gall. And it's about a bit about his life and his relationship with Donnie Gall. The book, very big, very well illustrated and absolutely beautiful book. And by all accounts, flying off the shelves, we're going to find out a wee bit more about Dylan Thomas and the book. I know we featured the book when it first came out, but Christy Gillespie is with us now in the studio to tell us about the Dylan Thomas connection. Christy, good to see you again. Great to see you. Right. Tell us, how did someone like Dylan Thomas end up spending a summer in Donnie Gall and then the remotest part of Donnie Gall, a place where there wasn't even a road into? Yeah, well, there was, I suppose, method to the madness, like it's kind of hard to understand how a Welsh poet, especially at 20 years of age, would end up, as you said, in a valley that was once described as being on the periphery of the periphery. But anyway, to make a long story short, it wasn't what was in it for him. In theory, it was what wasn't here for him. Yeah, that would be fairly succinct. All right. He had just started hitting the big time the year before he had won a competition and the prize was to get your first set of poetry published. And so in 1934, he brought out his first collection of poems, very simply titled 18 poems. And it did very, very well for him. But he knew that if he was going to really hit the big time that he would have to leave his hometown of Swansea and to travel to the big smoke of London, where he would be closer to literary agents, getting stuff into papers, that type of thing. Yeah. But as was his want over his life, when he went, he kind of started enjoying the Bohemian life that wee bit too much. He didn't even have his own place to stay. He used to move from friend to friend. Eating wasn't very steady. Go out every night, fritter the night away, drinking a mess and smoking. And this is a time when writers and poets would have been bigger stars. They would have been fatted more, maybe more than they are now. Well, you see the written word, you were talking a minute ago about James Bluntnecks and Twitter, I wonder what Dylan Thomas would have made of X. But you know, as a result, like he had a couple of underlying medical conditions anyway, he was always a soft child growing up. And he used to suffer from asthma and so on. But that type of a lifestyle where he was doing all the smoking of the day and always believed himself to be sicker than he ever was and used to tell people he was dying from TB and all that type of thing. So eventually, a literary agent called Jeffrey Greerson realized that if there were to get any more quality poetry out of him that he needed a recuperative holiday. And so it wasn't really by chance that he landed into Donegal because Greerson himself, I discovered in research, had been on his own honeymoon three years beforehand and had stayed in Carrick. So he had done tailing, he had done Glenn Cullum kill, he had done the whole lot. He knew the area. He knew the area. And I suppose if you're talking about getting somebody away from the bright lights of London, well, you couldn't get much further than Glenn Cullum kill really because you're right on the edge of the Atlantic. So the two of them landed at the Kelly Beggs at the railway station. They took a taxi into or the bus into, which was wonderfully named the BBC, the Bugger Bus Company. And they took that bus into Glenn Cullum kill and they stayed the first night at what would be known nowadays on the Main Street as Rortes. At that time it was a bar and lounge and also there was bed and breakfast above. So on that night, I'm sure they were talking to the locals, said they wanted a nice quiet spot. And the locals were telling them, well, nine years before a very famous American artist came here and he stayed in a place called Glenn Loch, where it's two hours from the nearest road. So You should check that out. Check that out. And probably they thought, well, if it's good enough Rockwell Kent is good enough for us. And so they headed on in and by that time the Valley owners, Dan and Rose Ward, realized that Kent wasn't for coming back even though he had told them that he would be arriving back into Glenn Loch. And so they had no problem in renting out the little apartment that Rockwell Kent had fashioned out of a cow buyer. Was it an apartment as we would know an apartment? No, it was literally the upper room of an old house that was being used as a cow buyer. And when Kent came in 26, because he was a trained architect, he renovated the whole thing. So it was a one-bedroomed Beeshoe, a piece of accommodation. And it was most definitely of its time. Of its time. So the two of them, like the funny thing was, in a sense, Gerson was taking him on a recuperative holiday. The part he didn't realize was he was bringing him into the potchimaking capital of Donegal. He overlooked that part. He slightly overlooked that part. But the two of them kind of got really into the healthy living and they were fishing the lakes. They were walking through the hills. There's a wonderful piece that both of them reminisced about how they went up to the cliffs that surrounded the lake there. And there was an echo. And they started shouting, we are the dead, the dead, the dead, to get the echo coming back. They used to go down to the seashore. What's known as the clad them over is the biggest storm beach in Ireland. And did a lot of walking. And as I said, kind of were kind of keeping well away from the drink as best they could. But after a fortnight, Gerson decided because of work that he had to go back to London. But Dylan decided that he was going to wit because he was then working on finishing his second set of poetry, which will come out the following year and was titled 25 Palms. So the first was 18 Palms. The second was 25 Palms. So he was working on the second collection when he was in Glenlaw. How did that second collection do when it came out? It did very, very well. I mean, it would include some of his better known poems, one of them being And Death Shall Have No Dominion, which would be one of his most famous poems of all. Some of the poetry that he was writing at the time, like Alterwise Now Light and I In My Intricate Image, are some of the most complicated poetry that he ever composed in his life. Because at that early stage, he looked on his poetry that if you take a word that it wasn't just the meaning of the word as we would have now, but the sound was most important. One of his friends once said that his favorite phrase was in the beginning with the word. And so when you try to read some of this poetry starting off, you find it very dense, very hard to understand, because it's very heavy in imagery. So it's not the meaning, it's often the sound of the words. In other words, when it comes up in the syllabus, students hate to see it. Yeah, but his later stuff, because during the war years then later on, he worked a lot in film during the war years, you know, not alone just writing the scripts for the film, but working on creating stuff. So his later poetry that we would know very well, it wasn't much simpler and easier to follow. But one of the poems that he worked on in Donegal was I In My Intricate Image, and it finishes off with the two lines where you can very much hear, you know, the whole thing of Glenn Locke, because he finishes it off with, that was the God of beginning in the intricate sequel, and my images roared and rose on Heaven's Hall. Roared and rose. Yeah. And a lot of imagery, you mentioned imagery, there will be a lot, not just those two lines alone. And so how long did he end up spending altogether in Glenn Locke? Well, on his own, he spent July and August. And, you know, we have to spend two months, I suppose it would be the best two months. It would be definitely weather wise. You know, it would have been the best of the two months. There's no doubt about that. But you get a great insight, because he writes a fair number of letters while he's there, including a number to a friend Bert Trek back in Swansea, where he gives descriptions of where he's living, and, you know, the people and the whole lot. And whereas Kent, in 1926 was Folsom and his praise of everything, kind of rose tinted glasses, because Kent, when he was doing his art, he was very much a realist. And he always felt that you had to live the life of the local people in order to be able to translate it onto canvas. And so he had a great respect for the people. He had, you know, he was effusive in his praise of everything and the kindness, he really got the people. Whereas Dylan Thomas was more kind of a 20 year old, if you don't mind the kind of the term, he was a bit of a smart ass. And he was trying to be clever to clever friends. And so a lot of what he was doing was younger and more mature, I suppose. Yeah. That was basically it. So at one stage, as an example, to give you an idea of the type of thing he will come out with, he described our draw as being a wild, unlettered, an un-French lettered place, a village that you couldn't be too far from. That wouldn't endear him to local folk. Well, it's not the kind of thing you would see in a board falcher poster nowadays. But, you know, for all of that, he seemed to be quite happy while he was there, but then eventually, the inevitable boredom set in with him, which was a lifelong trait anyway, and loneliness as well. And so eventually he decided that he had had enough. And so he essentially up and left one morning without even saying goodbye to Rose and Dan. Without even paying his bill. And hadn't paid his bill, even though he'd been left ample money by Geoffrey Grierson to do. So he went back, if that wasn't bad enough, he went back to London and started boasting about his mid-Netflix. That's why I have four chapters in the book about Dylan, and that's why one of them is called Welting and Donegal, because that is what Grierson refers it as. He was so mad about it, Grierson, that he sent the money out of his own pocket to Dan and Rose. But that finished the relationship between Grierson and Dylan Thomas, even though he would later write that his best memories was of Dylan and Donegal and down looking at the coastline and the puffins and all that. So was Antics and Donegal sort of hastened the end of the relationship between Grierson and Dylan Thomas? Oh, there was no relationship afterwards. When his collection of poetry came out the following year, he panned it when he was reviewing it. And he said the 24, 25th of it were psychopathological nonsense. And I'm sure the 125th that he liked was, and death shall have no domain. Oh, that's pretty much what I'd really under it and say. And was there a notebook that Dylan Thomas was putting bits and pieces into during his day and Donegal resurfaced years later? From the age of 15, right up until he was 19, while he was living at home, a lot of his early ideas and so on are written down in a series literally of school notebooks. And four of them were known. I would always have had a feeling through the research that had to be more because like the poetry that he was working on in Glenn Law, that didn't appear in any of the other notebooks. They're out in a collection now in America. But after he died, a number of his bits and pieces were bequeathed to his mother-in-law, that would be Kathleen McNamara's mother. And she didn't really get on the best with Dylan, even while they were alive. But she asked her handyman to burn everything that they had. And instead he put them into a plastic bag and he left them in a drawer. And after he died, they were found again. And this was the Irish notebook. And the Dylan Thomas scholar said it was the greatest discovery since he had died. And when it eventually came up for auction, it was bought for over £100,000. And it's now back in Swansea in the collection of the university there. But I suppose a strange little caveat which I cover in one of the chapters in the book. I was interviewing a wonderful character he's dead now called Jimmy Carr. And Jimmy would have lived in that area, would have known that Dylan Thomas was there, but really didn't know an awful lot about him, apart from the fact that he enjoyed his pot chain and that he'd been a poet. But Jimmy was telling me that the story of the Mid-Netflix had never been finished properly, in that it had been told directly to him that in 1946, as he put it, or the way he put it, was the first year after the war, a strange woman from Limerick had appeared into Glen Column Kill, had taken Tom Maxwell's taxi out to Kilchie Fanot, which would be the closest part of the road to Glen Law, went in for the night, paid all the bills and then disappeared again. And I says, who was she Jimmy? And he says, I don't know, she was just a fine woman. Now, when I carried on kind of doing me wee bits and pieces of research at the time, I discovered afterwards that the last time that the Thomases came to Ireland was in 1946, that they had spent four days in Dublin before going down to the Puck Fair, where Dylan was supposed to be doing a piece on the Puck Fair. The magazine group stupidly gave them the money beforehand. They went on a merciful bender, Dylan and Kathleen and two friends from the north. Did they make it to the Puck Fair? They were in the Puck Fair and part of the Puck Fair was there used to be a 24-hour licence. So they spent 48 hours straight drinking without going to bed at all. And so precious little of anything did they see while they were there. And after that then, they went back to Wales again. So, I mean, when you put all the facts together, Jimmy was writing, this was the first year after the war, Kathleen McNamara's people were from Clare. So, to describe her as a limerick woman was a, you know, a forgivable mistake. But who else would have come the whole way to Glenlock to settle up a bill in 1946? So even whether it's true or is not true, I would like to think that after it all, that they made efforts to... Possibly, possibly. You'd like to think so. You'd like to think so. Even though the bill actually had been paid by Grayson after... That would be Grayson's version of it. And then, I mean, just to sort of bookend this, excuse the pun, he died at a young age at 39 in New York. He did. Well, you see, he met up with Kathleen McNamara the first year after the fiery Kathleen, the first year after he left Glenlock and they got married. They had three children. And I suppose the last association with Glenn Cullum-Kill would be that, whereas if they called their first two children very Welsh names in Cluellan and Erony, the be as Welsh as you would get, the third child was named Cullum. So you would like to think again that he was still thinking of Glenn Cullum-Kill. But as the years went on, the tax man got after him. And because he never had... Outside of the years of the war, when he was working on the films for the War Ministry, he really never had gainful employment. And he was very slow as a writer in that and trying to make money out of poetry and prose. And that was naturally a very hard thing to do. And of course, he was doing a lot of drinking, but eventually the tax man got after him and he had never paid a bill. He'd never filed a tax return in his life. So eventually he got onto the American lecture circuit and he went out on four different years. And naturally, you know, he was doing really well when he was doing the lectures and that, but then going on benders afterwards and started the American habit of taking upers and downers and the whole lot. And so on his last trip to America, he was kind of working on and promoting his new play for voices under Milkwood. And he came back to the Chelsea Hotel one night and made the famous statement whether it's true or not. And just after drinking 18 whiskeys, I think that's straight whiskeys. I think that's a record. And then he fell into unconsciousness. Doctor was called and he had a number of underlying medical conditions at the time, but he was given a couple of very strong doses of morphine, which didn't help went into a coma and never came out of it. So Kathleen was sent from Wales. She came out to meet him. And she was supposed to have said when she came in again, had been drinking herself before she landed it. But she was supposed to have commented as the bloody man dead yet. And he went on for another couple of days, but eventually, sadly, he passed away. And his body was brought back to be buried in Loch Arn, close to the little house in Butchhead, where he used to do a lot of his amazing work. I sat into a brilliant career. Anyhow, and just fascinating to learn more about the Donegal connection to Dylan Thomas on what is the 70th anniversary of his death outlined in the book, The Road to Glen Law, four chapters dealing with the visit here to Donegal. And there's one in particular, which as you mentioned there, isn't Christy good to catch up with you again. And thanks for that. Thank you very much. We're turning this Black Friday read in the