The gardening writer at the South Wales Evening Post is happy to boast that he told a young Dylan Thomas to stop writing.

They worked together at the Swansea paper in the 1930s. Dylan Thomas was a copy boy and the young Bill Willis was a reader. But the poet and author began doodling on the pristine white walls with the heavy reading room pencils, work Mr Willis now describes as “idle scratchings”.

But Mr Willis (87) said: “I did not pay too much attention other than when it began to get out of hand.

“That is when I told Dylan Thomas to stop writing – on the wall at least.

“One other thing that springs to mind is that when he should have been paying close attention to the scripts in his hand, he would spend time with his daydreams, looking out of the window over the North Dock.

“I told him off about that too – it was just the two of us checking for mistakes that could have ended up in court!”

Mr Willis, who eventually worked his way up to being chief sub, has been gardening writer at the Evening Post since 1946. Back then he thought the paper needed the new column and the then editor said he’d see how it went – 54 years later Bill still writes it every week.

He only went into newspapers at 14 to escape the rigid constraints of schooling in the late 1920s.

Now his career in the regional press spans more than 70 years. His In The Garden column appears each Tuesday in the Post’s Family Post supplement.

Mr Willis said: “Gardening has changed quite a lot and I try to keep up with the changes and reflect them in my writing.

“But commercial people tend to get hold of gardening as a hobby, as they do most things, and then that’s that.”

Space to write at length is something Mr Willis thinks is lacking in newspapers today.

“To tell people the news you’ve got to tell a person what it’s all about and write about a subject thoroughly, not like they would today. Again it’s dictated by commercialism,” he said.

“And I’m not sorry I didn’t go for the nationals – they hire people one week and fire them the next. I worked in Swansea for 40 years and it is a very nice place to live.”

But he seldom makes it into the paper’s Adelaide Street offices these days, despite the warm welcome.

He said: “As the years go by your personal contacts there get fewer. I doubt I’d know many there at all now. But it’s still a good read.”

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