Quiet hero rejected Oxford to live with a jungle tribe

BRITAIN is full of unsung heroes and heroines who deserve recognition. Here, in our weekly obituary column, the moving and inspirational stories of ordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives, and who died recently, are told by their loved ones . . .

No one who met Glyn would have had any idea of the extraordinary life he’d lived before his family settled in their small corner of Dorset.

I first came across this modest, humble man when he joined my church ten years ago.

What struck me initially were his wisdom and calm.

But, over time, as I started to learn about his fascinating past as a missionary, I saw his quiet determination, along with a certain amount of derring-do.

He certainly needed the latter to live deep in the Brazilian jungle, as he did for many years.

the eldest of five siblings, Glyn was raised in Lancashire, where his father was the headteacher of a village school.

From there, he went on to Manchester University, where he developed the Christian faith that would inform his life.

Glyn had a keen academic brain and, in another life, would have been a great physicist — his early research was key in the invention of the MrI scanner and, in the Sixties, he was offered a post at oxford University.

But Glyn believed he had a calling to missionary work.

after training at bible college, where he met his wife, Cynthia, he flew to Mexico to undergo jungle survival training, then learned Portuguese to prepare him for his final destination in South america.

His goal was to reach the Kadiweu, a small, primitive group in southern central Brazil known for their horse-riding skills.

Leaving Cynthia and their young children, ruth and andrew, in the city of Cuiaba, where the mission was based, Glyn reached the Kadiweu in 1968.

We can only imagine what the tribe made of this quiet english man arriving so unexpectedly in their midst. Determined to win their trust, he lived alongside them, building his own primitive dwelling from bamboo poles and cane leaves and gaining their confidence over time by working with them and showing his gentle humour.

once he felt accepted, he went back to collect his family and, over the coming years, the Griffiths spent months at a time with the Kadiweu, interspersed with periods back in Cuiaba and the UK.

their life with the Indians was a simple one, their home a mud and bamboo hut.

Cynthia washed their clothes in a stream and the family grew pineapples on a small allotment, bartering supplies they brought from the outside world.

they had two more children, Simon and Mark, although the latter sadly died a week before his third birthday of an aneurysm while the family were in Cuiaba.

all the while, Glyn was working on his big project, which was to write the new testament in the tribe’s own language — no small endeavour, as Kadiweu was a spoken, not a written, language.

It was, in some ways, his life’s work. It was finally presented to the tribe in 2000, more than 30 years after he first met them.

With Cynthia’s help, Glyn also published an entire Kadiweu– Portuguese dictionary in 2002.

By then, they had returned to the UK and Glyn was not in the best of health: a neurological disorder meant his hands shook so violently that it was a struggle for him to hold a cup.

Yet he bore this with great fortitude and became a muchloved member of our church, elected to the position of church elder. ‘our Wise Man’, we used to call him. He is much missed.

Dr Glyndwr Griffiths, born May 11, 1934, died November 9, 2017, aged 83.