Saturday, August 30, 2025
Perched on a cliff
If you happen to be in the area, then walk from the car park at Southgate to your left as you face the sea. Once you get to the last house on the cliff, walk at a 90 degree angle to the edge and step down to a ledge just below it. That is where the memorial stone has been placed. There are more detailed instructions in this blogpost by Andrew Green.. Green writes of Watkins and the memmorial stone as follows:
The stone’s near-invisibility might be a mirror – perhaps a deliberate one – of the nature of Vernon Watkins the man. By all accounts he was a self-contained and undeclarative person, unlike his close friend Dylan Thomas, and might have been averse to a public drawing attention to himself. It’s true, there’s a plaque commemorating him in Pennard Church, a small, slightly crooked plaque on the outside wall of the care home at Southgate where his house once stood, and a third on the wall of the old Lloyds Bank in St Helen’s Road, Swansea, where he worked. But he’d have been more embarrassed than flattered, you sense, if he’d been accorded the equivalent of the Dylanolatry that litters Swansea, Laugharne and other Thomas locations. Hunts Bay, with its modest, bowl-like valley sweeping down to the rocks and the sea, would have been enough for him.
The stone gives his dates (1906-67), below his name and the phrase, ‘Poet of Gower’. This epithet grounds him in his beloved adopted homeland, though it also makes him sound a ‘local’ or ‘regional’ poet, like William Barnes or George Crabbe, whereas the claims he makes in his poems are not primarily about locality but about wider themes of life and (especially) death.
The inscription carries a line, carved by Ronald Cour, from one of Watkins’s best-known poems, the long-line ‘Taliesin in Gower’: ‘I have been taught the script of the stones, and I know the tongue of the wave’.
In my view, Watkins was a more substantial poet than his contemporary Dylan Thomas, though I also agree with Andrew Green that Nigel Jenkins lays better claim to be the 'poet of Gower'.
Vernon Watkins was born in Maesteg in Glamorgan, and brought up mainly in Swansea, living with his family in a large Victorian house in Caswell. He met Dylan Thomas, who was to be a close friend, in 1935 when Watkins had returned to a job in Lloyds bank in Swansea.
The building that once housed that bank in Walter Street, is now a betting shop. It did at one stage boast a blue plaque to commemorate Watkins, but according to the council website, that is now situated on the St. Helen's Road wall of the Common Meeple board game cafe.
With Dylan 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.
Watkins met his wife, 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.
With Dylan 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.
Watkins met his wife, 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.
Gwen was the author of several books, including Dylan Thomas: Portrait of a Friend (1983), Dickens in Search of Himself (1987), and Cracking the Luftwaffe Codes: The Secrets of Bletchley Park (2006). She passed away on 14th January this year at the age of 101.
