R.S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas
Thomas in his eighties
Born	Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-03-29)29 March 1913 Cardiff, Wales
Died	25 September 2000(2000-09-25) (aged 87) Pentrefelin, Wales
Nationality	Welsh
Occupation	Poet, priest

Ronald Stuart Thomas (29 March 1913 – 25 September 2000), published as R. S. Thomas, was a Welsh poet and Anglican priest who was noted for his nationalism, spirituality and deep dislike of the anglicisation of Wales. John Betjeman, in his 1955 introduction to Song at the Year's Turning, the first collection of Thomas’s poetry to be produced by a major publisher, predicted that Thomas would be remembered long after he himself was forgotten. M. Wynn Thomas said: "He was the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience. He was one of the major English language and European poets of the 20th century."

R. S. Thomas was born in Cardiff, the only child of Thomas Hubert and Margaret (née Davies). The family moved to Holyhead in 1918 because of his father's work in the Merchant Navy. He was awarded a bursary in 1932 to study at Bangor University, where he read Latin. In 1936, after he completed his theological training at St. Michael's College, Llandaff, he was ordained as a priest in the Church in Wales. From 1936 to 1940 he was the curate of Chirk, Denbighshire, where he met his future wife, Mildred "Elsi" Eldridge, an English artist. He subsequently became curate-in charge of Tallarn Green, Flintshire, as part of his duties as curate of Hanmer.

In Hanmer he was an assistant to the Revd Thomas Meredith-Morris, the grandfather of writer Lorna Sage, a fact later described by Byron Rogers as a "crossing of paths of two of Wales's strangest clergymen", Whilst Sage devotes a great deal of her autobiography Bad Blood to her late relative, however, she does not mention Thomas at all, who was in any case in Hanmer before Sage was born. Her memoir gives some insight into the strange environment in which Thomas worked as a young priest. Thomas never wrote a great deal of his curacies and nothing is known of the relationship between him and Meredith-Morris.