THE son of a renowned surrealist photographer who was a friend of Dylan Thomas is to give a double talk in Tenby on Saturday, July 20.

Tony Penrose – whose mother was Lee Miller – will be speaking at Tenby Museum and Art Gallery on Lee Miller and Dylan Thomas, and Women At War.

Lee Miller first met Dylan Thomas during the Blitz. She had arrived in London to be with Roland Penrose in 1939 and lived with him in his house in Downshire Hill, Hampstead. Thomas was a frequent visitor, having known Penrose for more than a decade.

In 1936 he was present at the opening of the First International Surrealist Exhibition and was a well-known attender of openings at Penrose’s London gallery.

The friendship continued and in December 1946 she photographed him for Vogue magazine. Later, in 1950, Thomas was to play the role of Onion in Desire Caught By The Tail, a play by Pablo Picasso, translated and produced by Penrose.

The talk tells the story of Thomas’s little-known intersection with the world of the surrealists, a world he enjoyed, although he was known to reject some of the movement’s underlying ideas.

Lee Miller is thought to have become the only woman combat photographer with the allied infantry in Europe during the Second World War.

She covered the Blitz to the Allied invasion and advance across Europe to the grim aftermath of the post-war years in Austria, Hungary and Romania.

For Miller, a woman at war was any woman caught in the madness called war – not the servicewomen and the Land Army girls but the housewives struggling along the street with pots of water after the water main was destroyed in the Blitz.

Miller portrayed the quiet heroism of nurses working round the clock in field hospitals, and the humiliation of shaven-headed French girls accused of having German boyfriends. She confronted viewers with the women Holocaust survivors, and the freed slave labourers.

The talk, which is being staged in conjunction with the History Shed Experience, runs from 6.30pm-8.30pm.

Tickets are extremely limited and cost £10 (£8 for Friends of the Museum). To book please contact the museum on 01834 842809 or via email info@tenbymuseum.org.uk