Glyn Tegai Hughes, obituary: esteemed literary critic who championed Welsh writing

An ascetic academic, Hughes also participated in public affairs, notably as national governor and chairman of the Broadcasting Council for Wales

Hughes wrote perceptively about Welsh writing in English, notably the novels set in the industrial valleys of south Wales (BBC)

One of Wales’s best literary critics, Glyn Tegai Hughes 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 judgements that 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 the old county of Montgomeryshire, now part of Powys, where he was instrumental in reviving the Gregynog Press.

Glyn Tegai, as he was known in Wales, was perhaps the most cerebral and ascetic of critics, but it did not prevent him from playing a part in the public affairs of Wales, notably as national governor and chairman of the Broadcasting Council for Wales from 1971 to 1979.

He was born in Chester in 1923, the son of the Reverend John Hughes, a Wesleyan minister, whose peripatetic mission ensured that the family did not stay long in any one place but moved from chapel to chapel throughout the length and breadth of Wales. The question “Where do you come from?”, often asked in Wales, bothered Glyn Tegai, 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 first-class honours in modern languages tripos, and was then awarded his doctorate.

From 1942 to 1946 he served as captain and then temporary major with the Royal Welsh 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 lecturer 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: Eichendorffs Taugenichts (1961), a study of the short novel 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 spinster sisters Margaret and Gwendoline Davies, whose generous bequest to the University of Wales it had been, and set about reorganising its library and replanning its 750 acres. It was he who set the tone of the country-house ambience which so many visitors to Gregynog, however briefly, have subsequently enjoyed. Those attending courses at the hall were always entertained by the warden, at dinner on the first evening, who would give a witty and sometimes sardonic account of the place in the sisters’ day, with cameo sketches of such people as Thomas Jones (1870-1955), the Machiavellian civil servant whose judgement in the appointment of staff and the purchase of paintings, including some important Impressionist works, was the only one they trusted.

One of Glyn’s favourite anecdotes was that, in the days when Gregynog had its own choir, the sisters, at Jones’s bidding, 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 more bibulous 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 Chateau 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 millionaire Davies sisters’ money in 1923 and was one of the great private presses of the interwar years. Famous for their bindings, Gregynog books now fetch high prices among dealers and collectors.

At the time, he was chairman of the Welsh Arts Council’s literature committee and, as literature director, I was an ally in this enterprise. With the council’s financial aid, the Press, given the Welsh form of its name, Gwasg Gregynog, took on a new lease of life in 1974 under its controller Eric Gee and its chairman, Lord Kenyon. 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 (1725-99), the 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, the second controller under the new dispensation, the warden 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 the Press had published, besides many smaller productions, a number of large-scale books which compared well with those made at Gregynog in its 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 the occasion of his retirement the board presented Hughes with a copy, in quarter-leather, of Hugo Wolf Lieder after poems by Eduard Morike, printed on Japanese Gampi vellum in Trump Mediaeval, his favourite typeface, of which only 30 copies were made. The distinguished printers Brooke Crutchley and Vivian Ridler were among the 14 subscribers to what must be the rarest piece of ephemera ever produced at Gregynog.

The Press, which Hughes did so much to reanimate, is still printing but, after the withdrawal of the Arts Council’s grant and the dismissal of David Esslemont in 1997, its prospectuses became much less frequent.

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 (1717-91) of Pentycelyn, the man who composed the original Welsh words of the powerful hymn usually sung at rugby-matches as “Bread of Heaven”. With Saunders Lewis, he saw Pantycelyn as one of the earliest exponents of romanticism in European literature, and brought to his reading of the hymns and prose-works several theological insights and a sensitive understanding of the historical and literary background which make this monograph a major contribution to our understanding of the literature of the period.

Politically, Hughes 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 and now a peer of the realm, he never wavered in his allegiance to the Liberal cause and spoke from many platforms, as he once told me, “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 judgement of Lord Hooson when presenting him for an honorary fellowship at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, in 2000.

He also sat on many committees. As well as serving the BBC as national governor and chairman of 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 which, in Wales, broadcasts partly in Welsh.

To all these posts he brought practical expertise unusual in one for whom the things of the mind took precedence over mere financial or administrative niceties. Some found him aloof, an impression strengthened by his etiolated complexion, spare frame and analytical manner, but there was a warmer, more generous side to his character of which he sometimes allowed a glimpse.

On retirement, he went to live at Rhyd-y-gro on the Gregynog estate. But after the death in 1996 of his wife Margaret, an Australian, whom he had met at the World Methodist Conference in the United States in 1956, he withdrew from the activities of the house and Press. 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.

Glyn Tegai Hughes, born 18 January 1923, died 10 March 2017