My father, John Rhys, who has died aged 95, made a quiet however vital contribution to bilingualism in Wales by his work as a senior civil servant within the Welsh Workplace.
In that put up he was secretary to the government-commissioned Bowen committee of inquiry, which in 1972 advisable that street indicators in Wales ought to be in Welsh in addition to English – recommendation that the federal government accepted. Intricately concerned in drafting the committee’s ultimate report with its chair, the previous MP Roderic Bowen, he then turned secretary of the Welsh Language Council, serving to to draft three of its studies on how bilinguality might be expanded. Lots of the council’s suggestions, together with the introduction of thousands and thousands of kilos of public assist for the Welsh language, had been applied.
Later, after leaving the civil service, he turned director of the College of Wales Press, the place he oversaw manufacturing of a number of elements of the college’s Dictionary of the Welsh Language.
Born in Hopkinstown, Pontypridd, John was the son of Blodwen (nee Wilkins) and Trefor Rhys, a instructor. The household moved shortly afterwards to Llandaff North, in Cardiff, the place he attended Cardiff highschool for boys, later finding out Welsh at College Faculty Cardiff and acquiring an MA in medieval Welsh poetry.
He educated as a instructor in Cardiff however quickly found that he hated the job. In 1953, after only one time period at an area faculty, he switched to working with the Nationwide Financial savings Financial institution, travelling round faculties encouraging youngsters to arrange financial savings accounts.
He spent 13 years as faculties officer there till, in 1967, he turned a civil servant on the Welsh Board of Well being, which merged with the Welsh Workplace quickly afterwards. Working within the Welsh Workplace’s common division, he finally turning into its principal, and it was in that function that he was appointed secretary each of the Bowen committee and later the Welsh Language Council.
Having risen by the ranks, John resisted additional promotion as it could have meant relocating to London, and in 1976 he moved to the College of Wales Press, the place he stayed till his retirement in 1990.
At UWP, Wales’s main tutorial writer in English and Welsh, he discovered himself having to cope with the results of extreme funding cuts at UK universities within the humanities and social sciences, the primary areas wherein the Press revealed. He managed to guard its core tutorial publications by looking for new sources of revenue, for instance by launching English-language paperback books that might be marketed broadly, beginning with a sequence of political portraits edited by Kenneth O Morgan. John was additionally an lively member of the Welsh Books Council and its grants panel.
Exterior work, he was a member of the Beulah Congregational (later United Reformed) church, and was elected as a deacon (later elder), serving two phrases as church secretary and a time period as its synod clerk in Wales. He was additionally a lay preacher, main worship in nonconformist chapels of all denominations throughout south Wales, in addition to an officer of the Cardiff Grownup Christian Training Centre and the charity Welsh Mates of a World in Want.
His marriage in 1957 to my mom, Sylvia Wooden, resulted in divorce. In 1989 he married Barbara Brown, and she or he survives him, together with me and two granddaughters.
