Teifion Phillips

Glamorgan teacher who created a conveyor belt of gifted 'Barry historians'

Teifion Phillips, teacher: born Pontardawe, Glamorgan 9 September 1917; Headmaster, Barry Boy's Comprehensive School 1971-81; married 1945 Marian Roberts; died Barry, Vale of Glamorgan 12 December 2002.

In 1914 the railway and docks town of Barry in South Wales was the greatest coal-exporting port in the world. By 1945 those economic glory days had long gone but the town was about to come into its own as a classic example of what civic responsibility could mean, in education and general welfare, in post-war Britain. Central to these developments would be the man who arrived in 1946 to teach History at the Barry Boys' County School for one term – and retired as Headmaster (of Barry Comprehensive School) in 1981. Over that 35-year period Teifion Phillips would prove to be one of the most extraordinary teachers of 20th-century Wales.

The grammar school was already in the habit of producing shooting stars for the academic firmament: through its redbrick late Victorian buildings in the 1930s had passed the archaeologist Glyn Daniel, the Cambridge economic historian David Joslin and a future Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, Sir John Habakkuk.

Phillips now set about creating a conveyor belt of "Barry historians". Within a decade boys began to arrive in clutches at Balliol College, Oxford, to read History. The talent spotter became a mythical figure in pedagogic circles. His hit rate, at Oxford and then elsewhere, started early with the second pupil he sent to Balliol in 1952 after National Service, the future President of Corpus Christi and the greatest cultural historian of the early modern world, Sir Keith Thomas.

The debt of stimulation and guidance was never forgotten as Thomas readily recalled at his former teacher's funeral, where so many career historians gathered to reflect how their professional lives had been shaped by his nurturing. Professor Gareth Williams and Professor Peter Stead, writers on popular culture and social history in Wales, Professor Martin Daunton, one of Britain's leading economic historians, Professor John Baylis, expert in international politics, and myself in the field of cultural studies and Labour history, could all testify to this primary drive.

However, there was just as much that was histrionic as historical about the man, and perhaps traceable to the years that had formed him before he came to Barry. (He was certainly proud that a close cousin was Rachel Thomas, the quintessential Welsh "mam" of stage and screen.) Phillips was born, one of five brothers and sisters, into the family of a stonemason in Pontardawe in the Swansea Valley in 1917. This was Welsh-speaking Wales but still firmly part of the industrial belt and subject to the intense deprivation of the inter-war years.

The boy is recalled as being temperamentally marked out for the nonconformist pulpit but was soon yearning to study Law at Cardiff. Straitened circumstances meant, instead, that after leaving Ystalyfera Grammar School, he would travel daily from home to the fledgling University College Swansea. Graduation did not bring employment except for voluntary work for bed-and-board summer camps on the Gower for the long-term unemployed. The Second World War altered that and his subsequent life.

He served in the Pays Corps until promotion to the rank of Warrant Officer in the Royal Army Education Corps (which included a stormy year in Palestine). He came under the command and influence of Boris Ford, whose own distinguished post-war career would encompass the United Nations Secretariat and the editorship of the many-volumed Pelican Guide to English Literature. It was Ford who was partly instrumental, after demob, in sending him on the path of "networking" via extramural summer schools in Oxford. Phillips had married in 1945 and with Marian, a former ATS sergeant, began his real life's work on being confirmed in the post at Barry Boys in 1946.

What made him special as a teacher was a particular quality of generosity of spirit allied to unrelenting intellectual endeavour, which allowed him to shower pupils with ideas, pamphlets, articles, books and, most precious gift, confidence. Nor was this confined to an academic élite. The actor and producer Keith Baxter was one who, at 16 in the late 1940s, felt that no one had faith in him except the strongly accented, rather idiosyncratic Teifion. Desire was turned into decision and Rada accepted Baxter. His career would unfold in the West End and on Broadway with his mentor ever present and critically discerning in the audience. The support, by letter or phone, once begun never ceased.

With Teifion Phillips there was always a sense of someone who had been to a centre somewhere, of debate or scholarship or performance, and was returning with an intellectual route map to take you there too, and maybe let you stay.

He was quite clear that he personally would stay in the town he had adopted and which he worked for, unremittingly, outside school hours through the Labour Party whose meetings he minuted with cryptic wit and whose deliberations he chaired with an even hand. It was Phillips who ensured the party had candidates of the excellence of David Marquand in 1964 and Phillips who canvassed unrelentingly from 1950 when Dorothy Rees was briefly MP until Labour triumphed again in a mid-1980s by-election. And, all through the years when public provision of culture still meant something to his party, it was Phillips who chose books for the Public Library at the town's (now neglected) centre.

It was all of a piece with him: the willingness to discover deeply and then disseminate widely what was truly of value for meaningful lives to be lived – and was palpably present in all he said and did for successive generations in his school and his town.

Dai Smith