Lewis John Wynford Vaughan-Thomas was a Welsh newspaper journalist and radio and television broadcaster. In later life he took the name Vaughan-Thomas after his father.
Biography
Thomas was born in Swansea, in South Wales, the second son of Dr. David Vaughan Thomas, a Professor of Music, and Morfydd Lewis, the daughter of Daniel Lewis who was one of the leaders of the Rebecca Riots in Pontarddulais. He attended the Bishop Gore School, Swansea, where the English master was the father of Dylan Thomas, who was just entering the school at the time that Vaughan-Thomas was leaving for Exeter College, Oxford. At Oxford he read Modern History and gained a second classacademic degree. In the mid 1930s he joined the BBC and in 1937 gave the Welsh-language commentary on the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. This was the precursor to several English-language commentaries on state occasions he was to give after the Second World War. During the war he established his name and reputation as one of the BBC's most distinguished war correspondents of the Second World War. His most memorable report was from an RAF Lancaster bomber during a real bombing raid over Nazi Berlin. Other notable reports were from Anzio, the Burgundy vineyards, Lord Haw-Haw's broadcasting studio and the Belsen concentration camp. Anzio, also known as Lo sbarco di Anzio or The Battle for Anzio - a 1968 war film, an Italian and American co-production, about Operation Shingle, the 1944 Allied seaborne assault on the Italian port of Anzio in the Second World War - was adapted from the book Anzio by Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, who had been the BBC war correspondent at the battle. The film starred Robert Mitchum and Peter Falk. In 1946 Thomas married Charlotte Rowlands. In 1953 he was one of a team of BBC commentators on the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He commentated on the funeral of his fellow wartime BBC correspondent Richard Dimbleby in 1965. In 1967, after leaving the BBC, he was one of the founders of Harlech TV, now ITV Wales, being appointed Director of Programmes, as a frequent TV broadcaster himself throughout his early career with the BBC he had adopted the required BBC accent of the time but employed his more natural native Welsh accent to even better effect in his later career. He wrote numerous books, many on Wales and a favourite subject of his, the Welsh countryside. In May 1970, when President of the Council for the Protection of Rural Wales, he officially opened the Pembrokeshire Coast Path in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park at its southern end, at Amroth, Pembrokeshire. His wartime overview and experiences, and his successful broadcasting career later, enabled him to view life and its vagaries with what he called 'pointless optimism' — a perspective that served him. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1974 Birthday Honours for services to Wales, and promoted Commander in the 1986 Birthday Honours for services to Welsh culture. He died in Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, on 4 February 1987, aged 78. A memorial was constructed after his death, completed and unveiled in 1990 near Aberhosan in the form of a toposcope looking out over the rolling hills and mountains of Wales, with a depiction of Vaughan-Thomas pointing towards Snowdon, Wales' highest peak, which is just visible on a clear day.
