Insufficiently Welsh by Griff Rhys Jones Page A

writing the screenplay, he had never “been able to read the damn book”. It might not have made much difference. Melville the author had never visited Nantucket, or Wales, for that matter. The film was “the most difficult picture I ever made” Huston said later. It was originally budgeted at $3 million but went over to around $4.5 million because of the expense of moving the production from Portugal to Ireland, then to Wales and then the Canaries. Whether much of the quay and the area featured in the epic film it is difficult to tell, but Gregory Peck definitely hung out in Fishguard. He entranced the local women with his beautiful dancing, so they say.
    Fifteen years later, in 1971, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton rolled into town to make the film of “Under Milk Wood”. The fictional name of the town was “Llareggub”, which spelled backwards reads “bugger all”. The director of “Under Milk Wood”, Andrew Sinclair, donated the rights for the 1972 movie “to the Welsh nation” with the hope of raising funds for cultural projects in Wales.
    â€œOnly Fools and Horses” star David Jason played a role in the film, and this time the locals were included too. Hedydd and her sister had the part of little sisters looking into a sweet shop window.
    â€œI remember they gave me a tuppenny bit,” she said when I sat next to her on the bench on the quay.
    I was older than Hedydd. “Was there a tuppeny bit?” I asked “I only recall a threepenny bit.” Decimalisation had ruined everything. It had certainly ruined me. Why was I being so pedantic? The whole thing was a fantasy, after all.
    Hedydd vividly remembered waking up in the night, looking out of her bedroom window and seeing an actor riding a pig outside the pub. This was a dream sequence in the film. The whole visit ultimately remained a dream for the local community. The film people came in all their fashionable clothes, with their huge amounts of money and transformed the quayside, making shops where there were no shops, and building new extensions to the village where there was no village. Then they went.
    There are no shops now, no pigs and only one pub. It seems inconceivable that Lower Fishguard has survived so simply. No gift shop, not even a café. No ice cream placards or tables and chairs on the dockside. It is a little miracle. Except for the rumble and screech of lorries descending to the minute bridge across the Gwaun and grinding up the cliff on the other side, Lower Fishguard is quiet.
    Elizabeth Taylor never made it to Lower Fishguard. Rosie Probert (Taylor’s character) recorded all her bits in a studio in West London. Richard Burton was entranced. “If this were in the Mediterranean,” he is reported to have said, “it would be the most successful holiday resort in the world.”
    He planned to bring his yacht and his lovely bride back. He even boasted that he had the ideal vehicle for exploring the hills: a Mini Moke that lived aboard the boat. But he never came and Lower Fishguard never became famous. I was pleased. And I sensed that Hedydd was too.
    â€“ COASTEERING MOOD –
    The cove at Lower Fishguard looks like an exposed harbour to me, but it doesn’t get much swell, or so Hedydd told me. This is because of the great breakwater that stretches out from Goodwick on the other side of the wider bay to provide a deepwater quay for the Irish Ferry. It was originally built to take Atlantic liners. A few came, including the Lusitania , but then the war intervened and they stuck with Liverpool. During World War Two, two ships from the port (the St David and the St Andrew ) were used to help rescue soldiers from Dunkirk.
    Pembrokeshire is well supplied with shelter. Further down the coast, the deep inlet of Milford Haven is the fourth largest port in Britain in terms of overall tonnage, and the busiest of all for “oil products”, but most