A little-known chapter in the life of Dylan Thomas — his journey through Iran for an oil giant — is the subject of a new free exhibition in Swansea.
Pouring Water on Troubled Oil: Dylan Thomas in Iran opened this week at the Dylan Thomas Centre, tracing the Swansea-born poet’s 1951 trip at a pivotal moment in the history of Britain and Iran.
Thomas was hired by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company — the firm now known as BP — to write a publicity film, travelling from Tehran to the oil city of Abadan, then home to the largest refinery in the world.
His visit came against a backdrop of growing industrial unrest and the Iranian oil nationalisation movement, which was challenging British control of one of the world’s most strategically important energy resources.
The exhibition takes its title from the poet’s own sarcastic verdict on the job, delivered in a letter — his role, he wrote, was to help “pour water on troubled oil”.
And the story leads straight back home: crude extracted and refined in Abadan was shipped to Swansea and processed at Llandarcy — Britain’s first oil refinery, less than ten miles from the poet’s birthplace.
Displays on the Atlantic Duchess tanker explosion in Swansea in 1951, alongside photographs of oil infrastructure and workers, reveal the human labour and risk that underpinned the industry on both sides of the connection.
The exhibition brings together rare archival documents, photographs, letters, notebooks and films — drawing on the National Library of Wales, BP Archives, the BBC Written Archives Centre, The National Archives and the Harry Ransom Center in Texas.
At its centre is filmmaker Nariman Massoumi’s 26-minute documentary, which reimagines the journey through archive images and Thomas’s own lyrical reflections — voiced by actor Michael Sheen.
There’s a premiere too: a rare film interview with the acclaimed Iranian writer and filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan, recorded in 2017 before his death in 2023, recalling his meeting with Thomas in Abadan.
Letters written to his wife Caitlin and literary friends reveal the poet’s impressions of Iran and the turbulence of his personal life — displayed alongside his Tehran notebook and a photograph of him resting at a remote roadside.
The archives also show how Thomas landed the job through his often-overlooked career as a film scriptwriter — with officials describing the commission as “one of the most important publicity projects ever undertaken” by the company, and the displays exposing the colonial assumptions built into it.
Thomas never completed the script — but the trip produced the BBC radio broadcast Persian Oil in April 1951, and annotated scripts in the exhibition reveal how producers cut his harrowing description of child destitution witnessed at a hospital.
The exhibition is co-curated by Massoumi and Jo Furber, the centre’s lead curator, and developed from the research behind Massoumi’s 2023 documentary of the same name.
The exhibition runs until 1 July 2027, with free entry — the centre is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 4.30pm, in the Maritime Quarter, where the main Dylan Thomas exhibition was shortlisted for a national award last year.
For a writer the world knows through Cwmdonkin Park and Laugharne, it offers something new — a fresh angle on Wales’s most celebrated poet, and on how deeply Swansea’s own industrial story was bound up with oil.
