My father, Rhys Webb, who has died aged 96, was at his core a Welsh farmer. A man of immense energy and vitality, working long days, wasting no time and rarely idle, he was also a huge figure in Welsh local government for several decades.
He became a parish councillor at the age of 21, a county councillor at 32, then, aged 43, an alderman, one of the youngest in the history of that office, always as an independent. He chaired three county councils – a result of successive reorganisations that bounced his beloved Edeyrnion like a football between east and west. From 1979, for 25 years, he was the Welsh Local Government Association deputy presiding officer.
As well as this he was a coal merchant for 40 years, after starting his own business aged 19, a member of the North Wales Police Authority from 1985 to 2005 (chairman for the latter half of that period), a justice of the peace (later chairman of the bench), and on the boards of Theatr Clwyd, the Welsh Land Authority, the Welsh Sports Council, and numerous health boards. In 1996 he was made OBE.
Born on his grandfather’s farm in Carrog, in what was then Merioneth, to Alice (nee Davies) and George Webb, a gamekeeper, Rhys was an able student who had to leave school after his grandfather’s death, when his mother inherited the tenancy. Aged 14, in the second year of the second world war, Rhys had sole responsibility for the farm, with all the wartime regulations with which farmers had to comply. This included, for example, a set acreage of potatoes, at a time when upland hill farms relied almost entirely on the horse, and people, for power.
He met my mother, Valmai Edenborough, a music student, in 1947, after she moved to Wales and the severe winter prevented her commute to the Manchester College of Music. She was a promising soprano, and engaged to another student, Martin Milner (later leader of the Hallé under Barbirolli). Somehow a wild Welsh farmer won her, and they married the following year.
Rhys’s farming skills were instinctive. He had a good eye for the coming weather, the likely yield of a half-grown crop, or when a lambing ewe was in trouble. Once at the Royal Welsh show, when every animal he picked was placed, I asked him what it was about a particular bull that had made him predict, correctly, that it would win; he replied: “Look at it! It’s a good animal.”
Despite his achievements in local government, my father was first and foremost a farmer: shouting at wayward sheepdogs; conducting excited discussions with fellow farmers at local shows and auctions; insisting at 87 he was still the best person to do the earmarking.
That this world was vanishing was a source of sadness to him. However he was happy to know that the farm continued in the family, with my niece and nephew being the sixth generation to call it home.
Valmai died in 2011. His three children, Kenneth, Morag and me, eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren survive him.
