My father, John Rhys, who has died aged 95, made a quiet but significant contribution to bilingualism in Wales through his work as a senior civil servant in the Welsh Office.
In that post he was secretary to the government-commissioned Bowen committee of inquiry, which in 1972 recommended that road signs in Wales should be in Welsh as well as English – advice that the government accepted. Intricately involved in drafting the committee’s final report with its chair, the former MP Roderic Bowen, he then became secretary of the Welsh Language Council, helping to draft three of its reports on how bilinguality could be expanded. Many of the council’s recommendations, including the introduction of millions of pounds of public support for the Welsh language, were implemented.
Later, after leaving the civil service, he became director of the University of Wales Press, where he oversaw production of several parts of the university’s Dictionary of the Welsh Language.
Born in Hopkinstown, Pontypridd, John was the son of Blodwen (nee Wilkins) and Trefor Rhys, a teacher. The family moved shortly afterwards to Llandaff North, in Cardiff, where he attended Cardiff high school for boys, later studying Welsh at University College Cardiff and obtaining an MA in medieval Welsh poetry.
He trained as a teacher in Cardiff but soon discovered that he hated the job. In 1953, after just one term at a local school, he switched to working with the National Savings Bank, travelling around schools encouraging children to set up savings accounts.
He spent 13 years as schools officer there until, in 1967, he became a civil servant at the Welsh Board of Health, which merged with the Welsh Office soon afterwards. Working in the Welsh Office’s general division, he eventually becoming its principal, and it was in that role that he was appointed secretary both of the Bowen committee and later the Welsh Language Council.
Having risen through the ranks, John resisted further promotion as it would have meant relocating to London, and in 1976 he moved to the University of Wales Press, where he stayed until his retirement in 1990.
At UWP, Wales’s leading academic publisher in English and Welsh, he found himself having to deal with the effects of severe funding cuts at UK universities in the humanities and social sciences, the main areas in which the Press published. He managed to protect its core academic publications by seeking new sources of income, for example by launching English-language paperback books that could be marketed widely, starting with a series of political portraits edited by Kenneth O Morgan. John was also an active member of the Welsh Books Council and its grants panel.
Outside work, he was a member of the Beulah Congregational (later United Reformed) church, and was elected as a deacon (later elder), serving two terms as church secretary and a term as its synod clerk in Wales. He was also a lay preacher, leading worship in nonconformist chapels of all denominations across south Wales, as well as an officer of the Cardiff Adult Christian Education Centre and the charity Welsh Friends of a World in Need.
His marriage in 1957 to my mother, Sylvia Wood, ended in divorce. In 1989 he married Barbara Brown, and she survives him, along with me and two granddaughters.
