On a wet day in November 1963 a crowd gathered in Cwmdonkin Park, Swansea, to take part in the dedication of a stone (carved by the sculptor Ronald Cour) to the memory of Dylan Thomas, who had died ten years before. Vernon Watkins was there to pay tribute to his friend and fellow poet by reading Thomas's "The Hunchback in the Park" and one of his own poems (of 138 lines) on Thomas, "A True Picture Restored." As he started to read, the weather grew worse, and the crowd began opening umbrellas and bundling up against a steady rain. But Vernon Watkins continued to read, "gravely and beautifully," as Elizabeth M. Jones describes it, cutting not a line in deference to the rain, affirming, as he did throughout his life, his unqualified commitment to his art and to his friends. "We all stood still and quiet," Jones recalls, "in affectionate recognition of an integrity which informed everything he wrote and did."
Vernon Phillips Watkins was born on 27 June 1906, in the town of Maesteg (in Glamorgan, South Wales), the second of three children and the only son of William and Sarah Phillips Watkins.
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