John Davies, who has died aged 76, was one of the most gifted of a generation of historians who led a remarkable renaissance in Welsh historiography from the 1960s. His Hanes Cymru (1990), later published as A History of Wales (1993), was the first Welsh book published by the Allen Lane imprint. Davies delivered a magnum opus that spanned the entire history of Wales. This is more than just a history book. It is one of the intellectual foundation blocks of the national rebuilding that has taken place in Wales since the 1979 referendum.
Although it was written from a nationalistic perspective, Davies presents a more nuanced approach in which the complexities and contradictions of rural and urban Wales, Welsh speakers and speakers of other languages, industrialisation and globalisation, are given full accord. Unlike labour historians who detested the iron and coal owners and the religious historians who sent them packing with the moneylenders from their temple, Davies included the rich and the powerful alongside the poor and the powerless in his history of Wales.
Davies developed his theme in a series of articles on land ownership in Wales and in his first major publication, Cardiff and the Marquesses of Bute (1981). This was a detailed study of the transformation of a small gull-infested inlet into the greatest coal-exporting port in the world and the role high finance played in the process.
His other works include The Making of Wales (1996), a coffee-table book without any of the defects of the genre. It is a wonderful combination of text and image, a feat John Davies repeated in The Celts (2000) and in Cymru: Y 100 Lle i’w Gweld Cyn Marw/Wales: the 100 Places to See Before You Die (2009), which was the Welsh Book of the Year in 2010.
His Broadcasting and the BBC in Wales (1994) is more than a staid history of the corporation. Davies reveals how, in a country with so few national institutions, the BBC, especially in the early days of radio broadcasting, enabled ideas and ideals of nationhood to form. He explains the process through which a regional broadcaster became a national institution.
Over the years, Davies acquired a reputation as the fount of all knowledge about things Welsh – an encyclopedia on two legs. This is shown to its fullest extent in Gwyddoniadur Cymru/The Encyclopaedia of Wales (2008), which he helped to edit, and in his frequent, always entertaining contributions as a broadcaster.
Davies was born in Llwynypia in the Rhondda Fawr, the son of Mary (nee Potter), a teacher, and Daniel Davies, a carpenter. His father died when he was 11 years old and the family moved to Bwlchllan in Cardiganshire. From the hamlet, in order to differentiate him from many another John Davies in Wales, he gained the name to which he was fondly referred to – John Bwlchllan. He was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Cardiff. In 1963 he took up a lectureship in history at Swansea University and ten years later transferred to Aberystwyth as lecturer in Welsh history. He became a senior lecturer there in 1981, and retired in 1990.
In addition to his academic duties, Davies served for 18 years as the first warden of Neuadd Pantycelyn, the university’s Welsh-medium hall of residence. He undertook his duties with a mix of paternalism and the joie de vivre of a bohemian. His wife, Janet (nee Mackenzie), whom he married in 1966, was herself a talented historian of Wales, and their children, Anna, Beca, Guto and Ianto, lived in the hall in what was regarded as the largest extended family in Wales.
I was Davies’s research student in the late 70s and early 80s and served as his deputy warden in Neuadd Pantycelyn for five years. The names Pantycelyn and John Davies always evoke a smile, quickly followed by a grimace at the recollection of the unique smell of disinfectant in the corridors and the stench of tobacco smoke when he occasionally managed to light his pipe. The spirit of Pantycelyn, crazy but civilised, was John’s own. Who else would not have batted an eye-lid to discover that a Mini had been driven through the hall’s corridors Italian Job-style and parked next to his chair at high table?
He was, in many respects, the perfect warden, for, like his charges, he was forever young. One year (1980-81), he famously changed his image half way through the Christmas term. Gone were the sober suit and the grey hair, to be replaced by a denim-clad dark-ash-blond-haired raffish figure. For weeks, residents would ask worriedly where the old warden had gone. But for many of us, these were but the eccentricities of one of the most remarkable characters it has been our privilege to know.
He is survived by Janet and their children.
• John Davies, historian and broadcaster, born 25 April 1938; died 16 February 2015
