His contemporaries included David Rees, author of the standard work on the Korean War of 1950–1953, and Sir Sam Edwards, physicist.
After serving as a conscripted pay clerk in the Royal Air Force, Ferris worked on Swansea's evening newspaper before moving to London in 1953, where the magazine Woman's Own employed him to edit readers' letters and invent some of his own.
This was variously reviewed as a 'brilliant, often riotously funny tour de force'[2] and as 'yet another version of the [Kingsley] Amis-hero banging about full of lust and discontent.
Cora, daughter of a field-marshal, had been Crane's flamboyant mistress; at one time she ran a brothel in Jacksonville, Florida, the Hotel de Dream.
Apart from a fleeting encounter, Ferris had no personal dealings with Thomas; but the fact that both came from suburban households in Swansea helped him place the poet in his locale.
'[9] (The biographer Brenda Maddox wrote that 'when Ferris's Caitlin, in which she collaborated (for a fee) was published, one of her sons asked the dreaded question: "But did you like my mother?"
Throughout the century authoritarians have been able to hypnotise us with their programmes for confining the so-called beast that lurks in the flesh, and entrepreneurs have been able to make money by doing the opposite and exploiting our desires.
Among his subjects were Evan Roberts, the Loughor evangelist of the early 20th century, who claimed mystical powers; Aneurin Bevan, the rumbustious socialist MP who ushered in the National Health Service in 1948; John Barnard Jenkins, a Welsh political activist, who ran a one-man bombing campaign in 1969; and, inevitably, Dylan Thomas.