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Nancy Thomas - 1906 - 1953

Dylan Thomas as a small boy with his sister Nancy

Dylan’s sister Nancy Marles Thomas was born in September 1906 at her parents’ rented home in Montpellier Street, Mount Pleasant, Swansea.  She attended the local High School, the girls’ equivalent of the Grammar School, until 1925, after which she hosted a reading group for her friends at Cwmdonkin Drive.  She continued to live with her family until her marriage.

Like Dylan, Nancy acted in Swansea’s Little Theatre Company, then based in Mumbles, for a number of years.  She met her first husband, Hadyn Taylor, at the Company’s base in Mumbles.  Nancy, Hadyn and Dylan all starred in a production of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever in 1932, and a reviewer from the Mumbles Press  mentioned all three, being particularly impressed by Nancy’s performance:

“Simon, who is an artist with an explosive temper and untidy habits, asks a snakily beautiful creature to stay. Mr E.C. Hughes was well cast as David Bliss. Equally well done was Simon’s part by D.M. Thomas. Mr Hadyn Taylor was sufficiently convincing as Greatham. Miss Nancy Thomas, as the shy and maddeningly well-brought-up Jackie Coryton, executed one of the best efforts in characterisation it has been my privilege to see for a long time” (quoted in The Life of Dylan Thomas by Constantine Fitzgibbon (London: Dent, 1965)

After their marriage in May 1933 (they were only able to afford the wedding thanks to a legacy from Aunt Annie at Fern Hill, who had died in the February), Nancy and Hadyn moved to London.  They lived on a houseboat in the Thames, which Dylan visited in 1934.

Nancy served as an army driver in the during the war, mostly in India, and she was one of six women who accompanied British forces into Singapore after the Japanese surrender in 1945.  During the war she met and and fell in love with Gordon Summersby, an army officer whose first wife had been General Dwight Eisenhower’s mistress.  She left Hadyn in 1940 and later married Gordon in India.  They returned to England where they lived in a small cottage in Brixham, Devon.

During the winter of 1947-48 Nancy stayed in Blaen Cwm to care for her father when Florrie was taken into Carmarthen Infirmary after falling and breaking her knee.  After Florrie’s recovery, Nancy and Gordon returned to live in India, as Gordon’s attempts to earn a living as a commercial fisherman in Brixham had not been as successful as anticipated.

Nancy died of cancer in April 1953 in Bombay, four months after the death of her father and six months before the death of her brother.  Both her husbands outlived her by a considerable time (similarly, Caitlin outlived Dylan) - Gordon Summersby died in 1994 and Haydn Taylor in 1991.