Pentre Arms, Llangrannog

button_lang_frenchLink to Welsh translationPentre Arms, Llangrannog

This inn has been a seafront landmark since the Victorian era. Poet Dylan Thomas was expelled for helping himself to drinks behind the bar here.

In 1861 the inn was home to Anne Griffiths and her three sons and three daughters. Her husband was a sailor.

Evan and Catherine Jenkins kept the inn in the 1890s and 1900s. He owned a smack (small sailing ship) called Ocean. It was wrecked on rocks near Cardigan on 3 October 1895, the day after delivering a cargo of culm (coal-dust balls to fuel limekilns) to Llangrannog. It had then departed empty, to be laid up for the winter near Cardigan. A gale sprang up before the tide had risen enough for it to clear the estuary bar. There were only two crew, the captain and another sailor, who reached the shore in the ship’s lifeboat.

One morning in December 1917, the body of Norwegian sailor Karl Danvig Andersen was carried into the Pentre Arms. He was one of 18 crew on the Bergen-registered steamship Nor which had been torpedoed at 3.15pm the previous day by a German U-boat while travelling empty from Caen (France) to Glasgow. The submariners surfaced beside one of the ship’s two lifeboats to ask the ship’s name, then disappeared.

Villagers quickly took the 16 surviving sailors (one had died in the sea) into their homes, where fires were lit in “best rooms” and dry clothes found. An inquest returned a verdict of “death from exposure” on Karl, aged 28. His funeral at St David’s Church was said to be the biggest ever seen in Llangrannog.

Dylan Thomas once had an afternoon drinking session at the Pentre Arms with his friend Ira Jones, an RAF ace whose exploits had earned him celebrity status and four medals (DSO, DFC, MC and MM). The two were later caught taking drinks from behind the bar and immediately ejected by landlord Tom Jones.

The pub was a favourite meeting place for some of the greatest Welsh-language poets and writers of the 20th century, including T Llew Jones and Dic Jones.

Postcode: SA44 6SP    View Location Map

Website of the Pentre Arms

Other SHIPWRECK HiPoints in this region: 
New Quay lifeboat – established after a spate of wrecks, including six in one night
Fishguard lifeboat – medals awarded after seven were rescued from a Dutch wreck in 1920

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