Friends of Cwmdonkin Park fundraising coffee morning

Swansea's Mansion House is in serious need of investment, which if done properly could both pay for itself and being in a nice income for the council. However, in the meantime it remains an iconic venue for charity events and other occasions.

The latest organisation to take advantage of this opportunity was the Friends of Cwmdonkin Park. They have recently been reformed to both enhance and protect this historic park in Swansea's Uplands district.

As their website says, this park has undergone many changes as a result of winning heritage lottery funding and these alterations culminated in celebrations for the 100th anniversary of Dylan Thomas’ birth in 2014.

The Friends of Cwmdonkin Park is a community group dedicated to supporting the council and community in its attempts to keep the park a beautiful space for everyone to use. This includes:

• Sponsoring and supporting activity that maintains and improves the park
• Encouraging people to use the park by providing local events and activities

This morning's event saw about 45 local people gather in the Mansion House to raise money for this cause and, as is usual, there was cake. There was also an outstanding performance by two stalwarts of Swansea's Little Theatre, who gave us a history of the park, read related poems, and even performed a scene from Dylan Thomas's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog'.

One of the poems was 'The Hunchback In The Park', which starts:

The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.

Dylan Thomas's birthplace is at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, just across from the reservoir in the park. He lived there until he was 19 and made use of and wrote about the park.

One of his poems is inscribed on an engraved memorial stone to the poet which was erected in 1963. One of the projects being pursued by the Friends is to restore this stone so that the poem is readable once more.