OBITUARY: Stuart Thomas

No one who had dealings with the literary estate of Dylan Thomas could afford to ignore Stuart Thomas, the sardonic Swansea solicitor - he was not related - who ran the copyright trust set up at the poet's death in 1953.

The beneficiaries were Dylan's widow, Caitlin, and their three children. Stuart Thomas was the junior partner in a family firm (the other partner was his father) when the trust was mooted in the graveyard at Laugharne the day Dylan was buried. Soon he found himself at war with the belligerent Caitlin. Thereafter he never stopped cursing the trust and telling funny stories about it. He outlived Caitlin by a year.

The Two Thomases, Dylan and Stuart, attended the local grammar school at the same time, but they were no more than acquaintances. At the funeral Dylan's boyhood friend the composer Daniel Jones thought to safeguard any meagre earnings there might be from future royalties on his works. Dylan's literary agent, David Higham, was there, as well as Stuart Thomas. With Caitlin drinking whisky in the vicinity and not acting as widows are supposed to, the three agreed that a trust would be in her best interests, if only she could be persuaded to agree to one.

In the event she proved amenable, and Thomas, Jones and Higham became the trustees. Later she blamed drink for letting her sign the irrevocable deed five weeks later, and she swore affidavits to that effect in vain attempts to have the settlement overturned.

Money, to Caitlin, meant cash in hand and no questions asked. Her attitude from the start was peremptory. When the poet began to appeal to the public more in death than he had in life, and undreamt-of money rolled in, she raged at Stuart Thomas, who effectively ran the trust, for doing cautious things like accumulating capital for the children's education.

It is true that all the trustees saw her as a dotty woman, out to make their lives a misery, and soon lost patience. Dan Jones thought she was clinically mad. Stuart Thomas, never famous for answering letters, might have handled her more tactfully than he did. "You are my solicitor, not my dictator," was one of her milder rebukes. When she finally came to rest in Italy - with a Sicilian partner she was careful not to marry in case he got control of the money - long frenzied letters sped into the dusty office in Swansea, demanding extra cash for clothes or an olive grove or an apartment with marble fittings.

In between, Stuart Thomas also managed to be friend and confidant. A convivial man, with political views somewhere to the right of Margaret Thatcher, "Stewbags" made a good drinking companion. He used to visit Caitlin in Italy or London or Ireland, expenses paid by the trust, often accompanied by his wife, Eve, a considerable woman in her own right. Business was discussed in a haze of alcohol, which meant that afterwards no one was quite certain what had been decided.

Events took a nastier turn through the late 1960s and into the 1970s - by which time the trust was generating nearly pounds 30,000 a year - when Caitlin turned to several new solicitors, and started suing the trustees. She had Stuart Thomas reported to the Law Society for malpractice. Nothing came of it, though the toothcomb triumphantly turned up pounds 70 charged to the trust for unspecified services at the Bristol Channel Yacht Club, one of Stuart's favourite haunts.

Two of Caitlin's children, Aeronwy and Llewelyn, helped restrain their mother, and sometimes even convinced her that the trustees were not syphoning off a fortune. Matters were complicated by Llewelyn's marriage (later dissolved) to Rhiannon, the daughter of Stuart's wife Eve by a former marriage; Stuart thus became Llewelyn's stepfather-in-law.

Stuart Thomas did not care for literary circles, but he made a permanent friend of Kingsley Amis when Amis was a lecturer at University College, Swansea, before Lucky Jim made him famous in 1954. Every August, as soon as the Garrick Club closed for the season, Amis would travel down to Swansea to stay with Stuart and Eve. One of the characters in Amis's The Old Devils owes something to the solicitor.

Amis was made a fellow trustee in 1986 - a typically eccentric choice, given his well-known distaste for Dylan Thomas and all his works. But Stuart Thomas, only survivor of the original trust, had no time for such fastidiousness.

The trust's beneficiaries are now the three children. Its gross income last year was pounds 120,000.

Paul Ferris

John Hamilton Stuart Thomas, solicitor: born Swansea 31 October 1914; married 1954 Eve Edwards (one son); died Swansea 13 August 1995.