His eldest sister, Cecilia, ‘Cissie’, who had more to do with his upbringing in working-class South Wales than anyone else, was, according to him, the model for what he wanted of women. He saw Cissie as a ‘green-eyed, black-haired Gypsy’, and had to wait half a lifetime to meet someone of the same calibre. Or so he implied. With someone as famous as the Burtons, you can never be sure that what you read about him hasn’t been invented or exaggerated.

He met Taylor when ‘Cleopatra’ was being filmed and they were the stars, though at the time she outclassed him. She was probably paid the best part of a million dollars, in as much as you can ever be sure what anyone in Hollywood was paid in the mad wild spending years. The production was a sort of nightmare. Burton, playing Mark Antony, was heard to say, ‘I have to don my breastplate to play opposite Miss Tits’.

She was ofted ill and accident-prone. Dancing with a film director at a party she once stepped on a match which ignited and set fire to a fringe of ostrich-feathers on her dress. Things happened to her, which was the general idea of the publicists. When the affair was under way, and attracting much attention, Burton was heard to complain, ‘How was I supposed to know the woman was so effing famous’.

Over the years they divorced and remarried more than once. Both of them and their somehow not-quite-normal public image belonged to a show-biz Hollywood that has almost gone. Burton used to fight against that image by saying that women weren’t his real passion – it was books. It may even have been true, but it’s the women we remember, and especially that enticing Miss Taylor.

Most of his women were (perhaps) too fond of him to gossip. Not that there’s any reason to doubt Miss Welch. He was a charming, lecherous Welshman, enviably successful with women.

I never met the man himself, only family, friends and actors – all too many actors – and, best of the lot, a former schoolmaster called Philip H. Burton. He brought me closer to Richard than all the rest put together.

In the early 1940s PHB taught at a school in Port Talbot, the steel-making town on Swansea Bay where Richard was born. He was fond of the boys he taught. Unmarried and living alone in lodgings, he was described to me by former pupils as a teacher who liked to put an arm around you. Or, if you were both sitting down, his palm might encounter your knee and give it a friendly rub. Friendly rubs would be repeated at intervals.

It didn’t worry anyone, but it served to categorise him. He was ‘queer’, in the language of the time, thought I doubt if he ever risked being active in that direction within a small community like Port Talbot’s, more than sixty years ago. His passion was the theatre. He dreamt of finding a talented boy he could make famous, and in the end he did.

The boy was Richard Jenkins, born 1925, son of a coal-miner with too many children. He left school at sixteen and went to work in a local shop, from which Philip Burton, who had been his school-teacher and had recognised a depth of character as well as a striking voice and face, helped rescue him, then got him back into the educational system.

Within a year or two, PHB tried formally to adopt him. The difference between their ages was insufficient by a matter of weeks to allow this, so a legal agreement was drawn up, making him a ‘ward’ of the schoolmaster, and changing his surname from Jenkins to Burton. His family agreed to this. They were poor; they stood aside, not without dark murmurings, and let the magician frame the future.

PHB’s ambition was to mould his ‘son’ into a Shakespearian actor. This didn’t quite work. Films were quicker and made more money, and that was the direction that Richard would take. PHB, meanwhile, gave up teaching and joined the BBC in Cardiff as a radio producer (one of the writers he worked with was Dylan Thomas). I happened to meet him in 1948 or 49, when I was a post-war conscript in the RAF and send the Welsh BBC a playlet I’d written about an imaginary drama-group that was staging a production in a village. It found its way to PHB, who accepted it, and it was duly broadcast.

Richard Burton hadn’t yet come on the scene, beyond small parts on the stage in London. I had never heard of him. Nor had anyone else.

Much later, PHB went to live in America, at first in New York, then in Key West, where he had settled by the time I went to talk to him about Richard. It was November 1978. I stayed two or three days at his wood-built house, cool and single-storied, recording him for a radio programme I was making, and ultimately for the Richard Burton biography I would write.

The walls were decorated with photographs. Several were of Richard in stage dress, Richard as Hamlet, Richard as Coriolanus.

PHB, bald, kindly, and inclined to fuss, could have been a retired bank manager. He had a wide circle of friends. ‘Lonely?’ he said. ‘I’ve never been lonely in my life.’ He also had a lively sense of his own worth. When he was first in Key West, guides on tour buses that passed the house used to announce that it was occupied by the father of the famous Richard Burton. He had that stopped, or so he said. He was Phil Burton, a figure in his own right.

There was a trace of sadness in the way he spoke of Richard, the boy he had cherished and taken such pains with, who starred in unsatisfactory films, drank and womanised, let his talent by diluted, and derived much of his fame from his antics with the gaudy star of stars, Elizabeth Taylor. PHB hinted at his own uneasiness. He told me a long story of going to an airport to meet Richard and Elizabeth. Richard was on his way to do Hamlet in Canada in 1960, and was in urgent need of his mentor’s guidance.

PHB went to get his diary of the time. It was one of those five-year jobs with a lock. He found the date and looked at the entry, and his face changed. ‘I fear it didn’t happen at all as I told you,’ he said, and changed the subject.

He was a diligent host, with not more than a hint of other things. The only shower was in his bedroom. There wasn’t a towel within reach, so when I emerged, dripping, he had to bring me one. Doors that might have been better closed were inclined to be left open.

The morning I left, he insisted on making me a big breakfast. He stood outside, waving me off. He lived another sixteen years, dying in January 1995, aged ninety. I never saw him again.

Mynydd y Gwair is in fact within Gower, which of course consists, historically, not only of the peninsula that adjoins Swansea, but includes a slab of connected countryside north of the city. The moorland is at the far end of it, nine or ten miles away.

Here, in the 1930s, a clever but fraudulent inventor, Harry Grindell Matthews, built a laboratory in which he claimed to be perfecting a death ray. Sometimes this became a ray that would stop internal-combustion engines. Either way it would have been a weapon to win wars with. Matthews convinced many people at the time, and may even have convinced himself. He had low-rise buildings constructed behind a high fence, and there were tales of passing cars that suddenly stopped without warning and started again five minutes later.

Nothing ever came of it. He was a fraud. People in Swansea knew him as ‘Death Ray Matthews’ and winked. An Air Ministry file about him from the 1920s, once secret, can be read at the National Archives in London. A young Government scientist called Henry Tizard, later famous, dismisses Matthews and tells colleagues that ‘the man is trying to bamboozle you.’

As a professional bamboozler, who lasted into the early 1940s, Death Ray Matthews might be worth an ironic memorial. Something dignified. like the blue plaques in London on houses saying ‘Sir William Dogsbody lived here,’ might be going a bit far. But Harry Grindell Matthews sought and failed to find the Death Ray here would go nicely at the base of a wind turbine.

Aeronwy (sometimes ‘Aeron’), who married another Welshman(Huw Ellis), was more anxious than her siblings to promote her father’s memory. She lectured on him and read his poems in Britain and America; she also wrote poetry of her own.

Her relationship with her mother was turbulent, as were many people’s. When Aeronwy knew that I was going to Sicily in 1991, to see Caitlin with a view to writing her biography, she asked me to take a pound of English tea from Harrods. I duly handed it over, but all Caitlin did was roll her eyes and say it was typical of her daughter. Why send her English tea when she could buy it in Catania? Aeronwy also sent a tin of chocolate biscuits. They too were scorned; Catania had plenty of biscuits. Still, they got eaten.

Born in 1943, Aeronwy was  10 when her father died. Her recollections were genuine, if a bit on the thin side. Colm, the youngest child, was born in 1947. I met him once. He lives in Italy. The son who seemed more in the Dylan mode was the elder brother, Llewelyn (1939-2000), who inherited mischievousness from both his parents. He worked as an advertising copywriter for some years. Then he was a municipal gardener, and after that he drifted into doing not very much except put money on horses and go in for literary competitions. He was a betting man – as his father was, on a modest scale. At one time Llewelyn lived in Spain, where apparently he won a large sum, tens of thousands, on the national lottery, which exchange control might have prevented him taking out of the country. So he hiked across the border with the money in a haversack, under his sandwiches. Or so he said.

He was an entertaining companion, as long as you didn’t mind his habit of provocation.  Once, when staying at my house, he decided he didn’t like the colour of the ankle-socks my wife was wearing as she sat on the sofa. He pulled them off with one masterly sweep and threw them on the log fire. Afterwards he made grovelling, entirely insincere apologies.

Like his siblings, Llewelyn benefited from a share in the copyright income of his father’s literary estate, which has generated £100,000 a year and is still flourishing. In Caitlin’s lifetime, half the money went to her and one-sixth each to the three children; later the children’s children had a share.

The surviving child of Dylan and Caitlin is Colm. He keeps a lower profile than his siblings ever managed.