Television
Winning Wynford
Clive Gammon.
In the private voice of Wynford Vaughan-Thomas there is a barely-suppressed giggle. It gurgles behind the stream of stories and snatches of mildly-scurrilous song and sometimes it came through in first of Thames Television's threepart autobiography of this brilliant man, perhaps the best of BBC radio's war correspondents, who is now the funniest man in Wales. The cherubic face, the long, enquiring hooter, are now more than sixty five years old and the changes the years have made, in the public persona anyway, are Against what most people would consider the normal way of things. The authoritive voice from the Anzio beachhead, from the Lancaster over Berlin, from the camp at Belsen now plangently recites such ditties as the Gower Toast first taught to Wynford in pre-war days by Phil Tanner, who died in the workhouse there in the'fifties: "Here's to the maiden bright with honour/Many's the time I've laid upon her/ I've done it standing and I've done it lying/and if I'd had wings I'd have done it flying."
It's not the same if you write it down coldly. You cannot convey the extraordinary sound, half whistle, half whoop, that Wynford, maybe via Phil Tanner, inserts immediately after the word "wings". "I don't talk Tynan words," he said. He doesn't need to.
It's difficult enough for me to write about this first instalment because, a generation behind, I experienced so much of what he• talked of, and so much of it was unchanged. Swansea ,Grammar School, for instance, now unrecognisably comprehensivised but for me, as for Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, an accentric and lovable school where no-one was made to do anything much if he didn't feel like it but which nevertheless produced, yearly, mighty crops of open scholarships. Trevor Lloyd, (the head master who yelled after Wynford and Dylan Thomas, "I hope you get caught, you wicked boys!" when he saw them sneaking off to play,billiards in the town) had gone when I got there but Soapy Davies, the senior classics master I shared with Wynford. We cruelly abused him, as Wynford's generation had done, for his alleged habit of lunchtime drinking at The Mountain Dew, the pub just up the road.
But I am being self-indulgent, as maybe I am also in regretting that in this programme, though several of Wynford's best songs were introduced, there was no room for his classic 'The Vampire of Pell Street' _ - "The one prime innocent produced by Welsh education," he called himself, and it is this quality of innocence which the man retains, shiningly, even now. It is said by some of his contemporaries that he reacted oddly to the sight of the camp at Belsen, that afterwards he showed no interest in such serious matters as politics and that the light side of his personality became more and more his habitual pose. Whatever happened to him then, though, it cannot have been altogether for the bad.
There was much innocent sex in the programme, too. By today's reputed standards, Wynford was a late developer, hand-holding and furtive kissing on the Promenade being the height of erotic experience until he met a Russian lady who finally showed him what was what on the beach at Caswell, just before he went up to Oxford.
Two more instalments to come. I implore anyone who desires rich of language and story not to miss them.
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