Glyn Tegai Hughes
Ascetic academic and bibliophile who was Warden of the University of Wales’s Gregynog Hall
GLYN TEGAI HUGHES, who has died aged 94, combined a profound knowledge of writing in the Welsh language with a keen interest in the literature of Germany and Switzerland, especially from the Romantic period, and was able to make comparative judgments which cast light on both.
He was also a bibliophile and collector of fine editions, an interest which he was able to pursue as Warden of Gregynog Hall, the University of Wales residential centre near Newtown in Montgomeryshire, now part of Powys, where he was instrumental in reviving the celebrated Gregynog Press.
Glyn Tegai, as he was known in Wales, was perhaps the most cerebral of critics and the most ascetic of book men, but it did not prevent him from playing a part in the public affairs of the country, notably as national governor and chairman of the Broadcasting Council for Wales from 1971 to 1979.
He was born in Chester on January 18 1923, the son of the Reverend John Hughes, a Wesleyan minister whose peripatetic mission ensured that the family did not stay long in one place but moved from chapel to chapel the length and breadth of Wales. The question “Where do you come from?”, often asked in Wales, bothered Hughes, for he was at a loss to say where his roots lay.
After receiving his secondary education at county schools in Newtown, Towyn and Brynmawr, at the Liverpool Institute and Manchester Grammar School, he went up to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he was the Donaldson Scholar, took a First in Modern Languages, and was then awarded his doctorate.
From 1942 to 1946 he served as captain and then temporary major with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and was the deputy assistant adjutant general in the South East Asia Command. One of Mountbatten’s “bright boys”, he retained a great affection for Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka for the rest of his life.
The direction of his academic career was set when he was appointed Lektor in English Literature at the University of Basel in 1952. It was there he discovered an interest in the work of the Swiss Protestant pastor Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), whose novels of Emmental life held great appeal for him.
He wrote two books on German literature – Eichendorff ’s Taugenichts (1961), a study of the novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826) by JF von Eichendorff (1788-1857), and Romantic German Literature (1979), a useful short guide to its subject. Before returning to Wales as the first Warden of Gregynog in 1964, Hughes spent 11 years at the University of Manchester, first as lecturer in Comparative Literary Studies and then as tutor in the Faculty of Arts.
At Gregynog he immersed himself in the history of the old house and its former owners, the millionaire spinster sisters Margaret and Gwendoline Davies, whose generous bequest to the University of Wales it had been, and set about re-organising its library and re-planning its 750 acres. It was he who set the tone, the country-house ambience which so many visitors to Gregynog have subsequently enjoyed.
Those attending courses at the Hall were always entertained, at dinner on the first evening, by the Warden, who would give a witty and sometimes sardonic account of the place in the sisters’ day. One of Glyn’s favourite anecdotes was that, in the days when Gregynog had its own choir, the sisters used to advertise for gardeners with the words “Tenors preferred”.
Even so, it was to be several years before the abstemious Warden, a zealous Wesleyan lay-preacher, would apply for a licence to open a bar at Gregynog, thus obliging some of the thirstier house guests to go to ingenious lengths when smuggling in their own bottles. In the early days of his wardenship, the peaty water served at table from a private reservoir behind the house was jocularly known as Château Tegai.
The aspect of his job into which Hughes threw himself with the greatest gusto was the revival of the Gregynog Press, which had been founded with the Davies sisters’ money in 1923 and was one of the great private presses of the inter-war years. Famous for their bindings, Gregynog books now fetch high prices. At the time, Hughes was chairman of the Welsh Arts Council’s Literature Committee. With the Council’s aid, the Press, given the Welsh form of its name, Gwasg Gregynog, took on a new lease of life in 1974. Hughes steered the work of the advisory board with a firm but sympathetic hand.
Among the first books to be produced was his life of Thomas Olivers, the 18th century Methodist exhorter born in the nearby village of Tregynon whose hymns Come,
Immortal King of Glory and The God of Abram praise are still sung by Wesleyan congregations. With David Esslement, Hughes also wrote a descriptive catalogue of the Press (1990) in which his pleasure in typography, fine printing, binding and illustration was given full rein.
By the time he retired in 1989 Gregynog had published, besides many smaller productions, a number of large-scale books which compared well with those made in the imprint’s heyday. They included works by RS Thomas, Francis Kilvert, Kate Roberts, Robert Williams Parry, Saunders Lewis, Giraldus Cambrensis, Stephen Crane and Dylan Thomas, all of which are now out of print.
On his retirement the board presented Glyn Tegai with a copy, in quarter-leather, of Hugo Wolf ’s Lieder after poems by Eduard Mörike, printed on Japanese Gampi vellum in Trump Medieval, his favourite typeface, of which only 30 copies were made – undoubtedly the rarest piece of ephemera ever produced at Gregynog.
As a literary critic Hughes wrote perceptively about Welsh writing in English, notably the novels set in the industrial valleys of South Wales, but his magnum opus is the essay he contributed to the Writers of Wales series on the great hymn-writer William Williams of Pantycelyn, who composed the original Welsh words of the rugby-match anthem Bread of Heaven. Hughes saw Pantycelyn, with Saunders Lewis, as one of the earliest exponents of Romanticism in European literature.
Politically Glyn Tegai was a Liberal. He stood as the party’s candidate in the West Denbigh division three times between 1950 and 1959, coming a close second to the sitting National Liberal and Conservative members, and was the party’s vice-president for a term.
A close friend of Emlyn Hooson, the Liberal MP for Montgomeryshire from 1962 to 1979, he never wavered in his allegiance to the cause and spoke from many platforms, as he once told his friend Meic Stephens, “just to show whose side I am on”. He was a most eloquent speaker, one of the best the Liberal Party has ever had, in the judgment of Lord Hooson when presenting him for an honorary fellowship at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 2000.
He sat on many committees. As well as serving the BBC on the Broadcasting Council for Wales, he was chairman of Undeb Cymru Fydd (1968-70), a somewhat forlorn rump of the movement which, in Lloyd George’s day, had nearly brought Home Rule to Wales. He was vice-president of the North Wales Arts Association (1977-94), president of the Private Libraries Association (1980-82), chairman of the Welsh Broadcasting Trust (1988-96), and a member of S4C, the fourth television channel in Wales.
To all these posts he brought practical expertise unusual in one for whom the things of the mind took precedence. Some found him aloof, an impression strengthened by his spare frame and analytical manner, but there was a warmer side to his character.
Latterly he settled at Rhyd-y-gro, a house on the Gregynog estate. But after the death in 1996 of his wife Margaret (née Herbert), an Australian, whom he had met at the World Methodist Conference in the United States in 1956, and with whom he set up the marriage counselling organisation Relate in mid-wales, he was seen less frequently around the grounds. He took no further part in public life, content to augment and catalogue his vast personal library and tend the garden shrubs which were one of his few hobbies.
He is survived by a son; another son predeceased him.
Glyn Tegai Hughes, born January 18 1923, died March 10 2017