The Kardomah Gang

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The Kardomah Gang was the name given to the various artists, musicians, poets and other writers, which frequented the Kardomah Café on Swansea's High Street, Wales, c. 1930. Regulars included Charles Fisher, poets Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, composer Daniel Jones, Fred Janes, Mabley Owen and Tom Warner. It was in this Café, that these friends would drink coffee and discuss amongst many subjects, Einstein & Epstein, Greta Garbo, Stravinsky death, religion and Picasso.

During February of 1941, Swansea was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe, known as 'The Three Nights Blitz'. High Street was just one of the many streets in Swansea that suffered badly, the rows of shops on High Street, including the 'Kardomah Café', were destroyed.

Dylan Thomas' came back to visit Swansea, where later he wrote about the devastation in his radio play, entitled, 'Return Journey to Swansea'. In the play, he describes the Café as being, 'Razed to the snow' . The Kardomah Café reopend and can still be found today, on the city's Portland street, a short walk from where the original was.

The site where the original Kardomah Café was situated, was originally a church; it was in this church that Dylan Thomas' parents were married.


Some recollections of the cafe and the people who met there were recorded by Fisher and are available at kardomahgroup.net [1]

  • "My recollections of the place date from the year I started working for the Post (1934?) Dylan, briefly a reporter at the same time as myself, was in the process of leaving the paper and preparing his assault on literary London. (But he and I were in the habit of meeting there even before then, in Grammar School days when editing the school magazine was used as a pretext for cutting classes)" etc...

[edit] External links

  • Piece that appeared in the Independent about the Kardomah occasioned by the death of the last surviving member, Charles Fisher, in 2006: [2]
  • BBC Wales documentary on "The Kardomah Boys", broadcast in 1997 [3]


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