My father, Gerwyn Davies, who has died aged 97, was a primary school teacher who was instrumental in setting up an innovative teaching facility for Traveller children in the early 1970s.
A Welshman, Gerwyn spent most of his classroom career in Bedfordshire, and it was there, while serving as headteacher of a primary school in the village of Kensworth, that he helped to set up the Travellers school in 1970.
The initiative came about during a teachers’ strike that year, when Gerwyn and a friend, both away from school as a result, decided to take a caravan to the village and, with some volunteers, began teaching a group of Traveller children from the Luton and Dunstable area.
The numbers were small to begin with, but the idea attracted the support of the Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and Travellers, and was later boosted by a donation from John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
It was also eventually backed financially by the local education authority, on whose land the caravan was sited, and the Traveller children, while taught separately, joined the other Kensworth kids for PE, meals and assemblies.
Gerwyn was born into a Welsh-speaking community in Cwmafan in south Wales to Emlyn, a collier, and his wife, Louisa (nee Hill). He won a scholarship to the county school in Port Talbot, and was taught by Philip Burton, who became the adoptive father of his more famous classmate, Richard Burton.
After teacher training at Caerleon College in Newport and then national service in the Royal Navy, he moved to England in 1948 to take up a teaching post at Tennyson Road primary school in Luton. It was in Luton that he met Gwyneth Sault, also from Wales and also a teacher, when they found themselves sitting together on the bus on the way to the town’s Welsh chapel. They married in 1950.
After seven years at Tennyson Road, Gerwyn moved to Beecroft school in nearby Dunstable and in 1964 he was appointed headteacher of the primary school in Kensworth, where the Travellers school sprang into life.
In between his teaching, organisation of a local poetry society and playing and refereeing rugby, Gerywn became the local secretary of his National Union of Teachers branch and was a frequent visitor to its headquarters at Hamilton House in London in the days when the NUT leader Doug McAvoy was a thorn in the side of governments.
As a result of his Travellers school initiative, his employers later gave him a sabbatical year to go to Birmingham University to study educational psychology in relation to the needs of Traveller children.
On retirement from Kensworth in 1983, for five years he was a Labour county councillor in Bedfordshire, and despite the Conservatives having overall control he was given the chairmanship of the education committee.
In 1989 he and my mother moved back to Wales, where he became chair of the Aberavon constituency Labour party, playing a role in the selection of the current MP, Stephen Kinnock. He was also active in campaigning on the “Yes” side of the 1997 referendum on devolution which led to the setting up of the National Assembly for Wales in 1999.
He is survived by Gwyneth, their three children, me, Roderick and Jonathan, and six grandchildren.
