Vernon Watkins

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

Dylan Thomas, a close friend of fellow poet Dylan Thomas, referred to him as "the most profound and highly accomplished Welshman writing poems in English."

Early life and studies

Vernon Watkins was born in Maesteg, Glamorgan, and grew up mainly in Swansea. His birth coincided with slight earth tremors; a new baby was born that night, named John Earthquake Jones. William Watkins, a manager for Lloyds Bank in Wind Street, Swansea, and Sarah ("Sally"), the niece of James Phillips and Esther Thomas of Sarnau, Meidrim, are among his parents. James Phillips, a Congregationalist, was said to have memorized the majority of the Welsh Bible by heart. Sarah had a passion for poetry and literature; her headmistress arranged for her to spend two years as a pupil-teacher in Germany. 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 just 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) from Swansea's Caswell Bay.

By the age of four, Watkins had begun to read fluently, and at five, he announced that he would be a writer, but that he did not want to be published until after his death. He wrote poetry and read extensively from eight to nine years of age, and was particularly fond of John Keats and Shelley's books. He received his secondary education at Repton School in Derbyshire, and Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Watkins' quiet, delicate personality sparked regular bullying from older boys in his early years, but he rose to fame in recent years as he continued to play in tennis and cricket. The school wrote that he was "perhaps the finest poet Repton has had" when he died in 1968. [7] Geoffrey Fisher, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, was Repton's headmaster. Despite his parents' nonconformist backgrounds, Watkins' education led him to join the Church of England. At Cambridge, he studied modern languages but left early in his degree.

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Career

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 Vernon's parents' house, situated on the very top of the cliffs of the Gower peninsula. Vernon was the only person from whom Thomas took advice when writing poetry and he was invariably the first to read his finished work. 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. 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. 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). Vernon was godfather to Thomas's son Llewelyn, the others being Richard Hughes and Augustus John. Letters to Vernon Watkins by Thomas was published in 1957. The 1983 book Portrait of a Friend by Watkins' wife Gwen, née Davies, deals with the relationship.

Others in the Swansea Group known as the "Kardomah boys" were the composer Daniel Jenkyn Jones, writer Charles Fisher and the artists Alfred Janes and Mervyn Levy. Vernon wrote the obituary for Dylan Thomas and when he died, Philip Larkin wrote his obituary.

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

They were married at the church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, in London on 2 October 1944. The couple had five children.

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