Lucky Jim in Swansea

When people think of famous authors associated with Swansea, most will name Dylan Thomas, some will suggest the poet Vernon Watkins, who drafted much of his work perched on a clifftop in Pennard, while others will talk about Kingsley Amis, who worked at Swansea University between 1949 and 1961.

As the Swansea University Alumni site says, Amis published his first novel in 1954 while lecturing at the university:

It was called Lucky Jim and it was a comic satire on higher education, set in a provincial university. There are obvious parallels with Swansea, although Amis always said that he based the story more on Leicester where his friend Phillip Larkin had been working at the time. It is hard to imagine that working in Swansea did not impact the way Amis crafted Lucky Jim. Many of his subsequent novels, including That Uncertain Feeling were based on south Wales, as was The Old Devils, for which Amis won the Booker Prize in 1986.

When interviewed for the BBC’s Desert Island Discs programme in 1986, Amis repeated something he had often written, which was that the best work of his life had been conducted whilst at Swansea. Despite the reputation he had in some quarters, there is plenty of evidence to show that Amis was an engaged and likeable lecturer who connected with his students and gave his time generously. Classes were often held in the pub, students were invited to parties at his house, but he also gave a lot of time to activities such as judging student short story competitions.

At least one of his books was filmed in the city. In 1961, That Uncertain Feeling was made into a film starring Peter Sellers, with the title changed to Only Two Can Play, to avoid confusion with similar contemporary titles. It was also adapted by the BBC in 1986 as a television series, starring Denis Lawson and Sheila Gish, this time with the original title. 

That was also filmed in Swansea, with some interesting use of locations. In one scene the leading characters are in Rhossili and get into a car to drive back to the city. However, the vehicle instead, heads out in the opposite direction towards Worms Head. It looked good on the screen though.

The book is a satire on life and culture in a Welsh seaside town, involving a married librarian who begins an affair with the bored wife of a local bigwig. Amis, who was of course, an English incomer to Swansea, mocks Wales's devotion to culture and learning as false and pretentious.

Amis's last novel, The Old Devils is also set in Swansea, with the television adaptation being filmed in Mumbles.

At the time I started at Swansea in 1978, Crefft, the student newspaper had just ceased to exist. I was involved a few years late in founding a replacement student newspaper called DoubleTake, that lasted a few years after I graduated before being replaced by the Waterfront newspaper. The illustration above is an interview with Kingsley Amis in Crefft in 1954