Thomas’s womanising was ‘just a myth’

Caitlin Thomas, the long-suffering wife of Dylan Thomas, is supposed to have burst into the hospital room where he lay in his last hours shouting: "Is the bloody man dead yet?" Yet following his death in 1953, imagining him in his grave, she wrote in her diary (up for sale at a London book dealer for £250,000): "Oh God, oh Dylan, it must be cold down there; it is cold enough on top, in November, the dirtiest month of the year that killed you on the ninth vile day. If only I could take you a bowl of your bread, and milk, and salt, that you always drunk at night, to warm you up.

"I am not going into that waste allotment of a TS Eliot elegy of a cemetery. Dylan will have to move up, in his single ditch, snug under the cliff, and make room for me; then we can keep each other warm, or cold, or maggot breeding."

George Tremlett, a biographer of Thomas and Caitlin, tells the Times that the popular myth that Thomas was a frightful womanising drunk who badly mistreated his wife was no more than that, a myth, perpetrated in the first biography of his life written by John Malcom Brinnin in 1955. The damage was perpetuated in this year's film, The Edge of Love, in which Matthew Rhys played the Welsh poet and Sienna Miller was Caitlin (pictured, left, in the film with co-star Keira Knightley.

Tremlett, who knew Caitlin well, says the number of affairs Thomas had has been grossly exaggerated and although he enjoyed pubs – and could hold a pub audience spellbound - he was not capable of holding his drink beyond two pints.