On 9th September 1953, Welsh poet and playwright Dylan Thomas handed the barely completed script for the play for voices Under Milk Wood to the BBC before embarking on a reading tour of the United States.  His intention was to revise the script before its first broadcast. However, Dylan died during the American tour and was never able to edit the play.  

An omniscient narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of a fictional small Welsh fishing village Llareggub ("bugger all" backwards). These include the nagging Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard; Captain Cat, remembering his life at sea; Organ Morgan ; the two Mrs Dai Breads  and Polly Garter.  When the town awakes, we see them go about their business and how their hidden emotions affect their daily lives.

There is no doubt that Dylan based many of these characters on the inhabitants of Laugharne, a small seaside town in Carmarthenshire where Dylan had lived for several years. It is the author of this post's small claim to fame that the character of Captain Cat was based on Great Uncle Johnny, a retired sea Captain who was almost blind, and who spent many hours conversing with Dylan Thomas in Laugharne.

On September 9th 2009, Carnedd Uchaf, a peak in the Ogwen valley in Snowdonia, was renamed Carnedd  Gwenllian in honour of Princess Gwenllian, the daughter of Llywelyn, the last native Prince of Wales.  The peak has been renamed following a campaign by the Gwenllian Society. Other summits in the Carneddau range have also been named  as Carnedd Llywelyn and Yr Elen after Gwenllian's parents Llywelyn and Eleanor. The new name will also be used in the latest editions of Ordnance Survey maps for the area.

John Penry (9th September 1559 – 29 May 1593) is Wales's most famous Protestant martyr.  He was born at a farm near Llangammarch, Powys and is known studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1580.

Originally a Catholic, Penry soon became a Protestant, with strong Puritan views.  Following an act of parliament in 1562, which had laid the groundwork for translating the Bible into Welsh and the issuing of the translation of the New Testament in 1567, Penry was critical of the failure of  there being enough copies for each parish church in Wales.

In 1590, Archbishop Whitgift, angry at the criticism, had Penry's house at Northampton searched and imprisoned him for a month, but Penry managed to escape to Scotland, where he continued to publish his works. Penry returned to England in  1592, becoming a regular preacher for separatist congregation in London (a group who had lost hope in reforming the church from within) and was arrested and imprisoned once more in 1593 on a charge of sedition, based on the  draft of a petition to Queen Elizabeth I that contained harsh and offensive language.

He was hanged on 29 May 1593 without being allowed to see his wife, Eleanor, or his daughters, Comfort, Deliverance, Sure-Hope and Safety. 

Born on 9th September 1914, Alexander Cordell was the pen name of George Alexander Graber, an adoptive Welshman who was one of Wales' most prolific writers.

Cordell was born in Columbo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in September 1914.  As his father had done so before him, Cordell entered the army and served with the Royal Engineers during World War Two. It was while convalescing from a wartime injury that he was sent to north Wales and it was from here that his love for Wales grew.  A Thought of Honour, published in 1954 was his first novel, followed by perhaps his most famous work, Rape of the Fair Country (1959), set in Blaenafon.  The second novel in what was to be a trilogy, Hosts of Rebecca, followed a year later. Cordell produced the third novel of the trilogy, Song of the Earth, in 1969.  After his death in 1997, Torfaen  Council bought his desk and typewriter and put them on display in the Blaenafon Community Heritage & Cordell Museum. 

Selected bibliography:

Rape of the Fair Country (1959)

Hosts of Rebecca (1960)

Song of the Earth (1969)

This Sweet & Bitter Earth (1977)

Land of My Fathers (1983)  

Born on this day 1932 in Liverpool

Alice Thomas Ellis  - critically acclaimed novelist and columnist of the popular Home Life series in the Spectator

Born in Liverpool as Anna Lindholm, she moved in Penmaenmawr to her mother's family during the second world war and her childhood in northwest Wales was to have a big impression on her throughout her life, with several of her novels having a Welsh background.  She was educated at Bangor Grammar School and Liverpool School of Art and at 19 she converted to Catholicism, becoming a prospective nun, before embarking on a bohemian lifestyle in 1950s. 

Much of Thomas Ellis's life was absorbed by motherhood. She had seven children, her second son Joshua died at the age of 19 after he fell off a roof at Euston station while trainspotting.   It was his death that made her go on writing, comparing the pain of his death to a form of amputation.

Her complex personality was demonstrated by the diversity of the subjects about which she wrote.  For example, she was stongly anti-feminist but wrote about independent, strong women, she was averse to housework, but was an accomplished cook and she took a relaxed view of her friends' tangled love lives, yet she was fiercely opposed to the liberal movement of the Catholic church and the idea of women priests.  After the death of her husband she moved to an isolated farmhouse in Powys, to concentrate on her writing.  She was elected in 1999 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

On 9th September 1680, Henry Marten (regicide of King Charles I of England) died a prisoner in Chepstow Castle. choking whilst eating his supper.