Legacies . . . .

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams (1879-1975), was a hard-drinking travelling shoe salesman who spent much of his time away from his home and family. His mother, Edwina (Dakin) Williams (1884-1980), was an archetypal “Southern belle” with social aspirations that descended into snobbery and behavior that was neurotic and hysterical.

One of the main early influences on his life was his grandfather, the Revd Walter Dakin (1857-1955), an Episcopal priest who baptized him soon after his birth. The playwright spent much of his childhood years in his grandfather’s rectories, first in Saint Paul’s Parish in Columbus, Mississippi, and then in Saint George’s Parish in Clarksdale, Tennessee, from 1917 to 1933.

In an interview in 1958, three years after his grandfather’s death, the playwright said: “The two most wonderful people in my life were my grandfather, who was an Episcopal clergyman, and his wife, my grandmother. I was born in the Episcopal rectory and I grew up in the shadow of the Episcopal Church.” Dakin “was higher church than the pope,” Williams said of him, and he loved to travel. 

*The above extracted from www.patrickcomerford.com - re-reading The Night of the Iguana

Richard Jenkins, in the coal pits and pubs, he was known as Dic Bach. His seven boys and four girls called him “Dadi Ni.” Richard Burton, named Richard Walter Jenkins at birth, was named after his father. When young Richard was born in 1925, his father was 49, his mother, Edith, 42. Edith would live only two more years; she would die giving birth to Richard’s younger brother, Graham. As a result, at the tender age of two, Dadi Ni sent Richard away permanently to live with his older sister, Cecilia, and her violent miner of a husband in the nearby town of Port Talbot. Only occasionally did Dadi Ni come to visit Richard.

*The above extracted from the blog, lisawallerrogers.com

Night of the Iguana