Welsh Roots

Glyn Davies was born in 1919 in Abertillery in Monmouthshire, in South Wales and his family moved shortly afterwards to the nearby village of Aberbeeg. His full name was Glyndwr Davies, (named, by his patriotic parents, after Owain Glyndwr, the national hero of Wales who was called "Owen Glendower" by Shakespeare in Henry IV) but he was more commonly known as "Glyn". Although Monmouthshire is a fairly anglicised area nowadays, Welsh was the language used at home by his parents and brothers and therefore he did not learn English until he went to school.

One day while playing in the woods near Aberbeeg Infants School, he dislodged some strange, small coins lying in the ground and took them to his teacher. They turned out to be Roman and that was his first exposure to monetary history, a subject that was later to become a consuming interest.

His father, Price Davies, was a former coal miner, who started work underground in 1892 at the age of 11. The employment of children of that age for that type of work in Britain had been abolished by law about 20 years earlier, but in practice exceptions were made where the income a child of that age could earn was important for the family. As Price's own father had lost his own father when he was just 5 years old that applied in his case. Price met his wife, Annie, just after the Welsh Revival when they were brought together by their shared faith.

By the time Glyn Davies, the third of three brothers was born, (an elder sister and a younger brother both died as babies) his father's lungs had been affected by dust and in the fierce competition for jobs in the recession following World War I, was no longer able to find work as a miner. Therefore Price Davies repeatedly moved about South Wales in search of work and undertook a number of temporary jobs ranging from street gas lamp lighter to agricultural labourer in order to support his family while also undertaking work for his church.

The constant moving meant that Glyn Davies attended a great number of different schools with considerable disruption to his education. Nevertheless, growing up during the depression of the 1930s and seeing and experiencing its effects at first hand (At one stage a school nurse diagnosed him as suffering from malnutrition) stimulated an interest in economics, and the head teacher at the school he was attending in Llandrindod in Mid Wales urged him to apply to go to the University of Oxford.

As a knowledge of Latin was then a prerequisite for admission he began an intensive study of that language but 6 months later the family moved again and therefore he went to school in Tonypandy where, at that time, Latin was not taught, and therefore he applied to Cardiff instead. However, at Tonypandy he was taught by an enthusiastic economics teacher, Mr White, who entered him for the nationwide examinations of the Royal Society of Arts in economics in 1938, and Glyn Davies won the First Place and Medal.

The front and reverse sides of the Royal Society of Arts Medal awarded to Glyn Davies in 1938.

Military Service in World War II

When the Second World War broke out Glyn Davies left university and joined the British Army without waiting to be called up and without first telling his parents. His mother would not have been keen on the idea since one of her brothers, William Thomas Griffiths, had been killed in the First World War and she had lost two other brothers who died as children. Another relation on her side of the family, William George Nicholas, was to die while serving with the Fourteenth Army, "the Forgotten Army", in Burma in 1944. Mostyn Cole, the second son of the sister of Glyn's mother, also served in the 14th Army in Burma but fortunately he survived.

Glyn Davies served in an armoured reconnaissance regiment, the Royal Dragoons, which was attached at times to the famed 7th Armoured Division or Desert Rats, (at various times it was part of other divisions instead, since divisions are not fixed formations) spending the best part of a couple of years in the see-saw campaign in North Africa.

At the decisive battle of El Alamein in 1942, the Germans and Italians both thought the armoured cars of the Royals were those of their Axis partners and, taking advantage of this confusion, the Royal Dragoons passed within yards of the German artillery becoming the first troops in the British 8th Army to break through the enemy lines into the open desert.

In Sicily, while on reconnaissance, Glyn Davies was fortunate to escape, almost unscathed, from the wreckage of his armoured car after a direct hit by a shell which passed straight through the body of the driver, Ned Mole, who was sitting next to him. Subsequently he took part in the invasion of Italy before the regiment was transferred back to Britain to take part in the Normandy invasion and the campaign in northwestern Europe as part of the British 2nd Army. Near Hilvarenbeek in Holland he had another lucky escape when, as he was closing the door of his armoured car, it was suddenly knocked shut by a glancing blow from a shell that failed to explode.

In France, Belgium and Holland, Glyn Davies shared his armoured car with Hugh Cholmondeley (Lord Rocksavage) who, after the war, became Lord Great Chamberlain and presided over the state opening of parliament. At the opposite end of the social scale, while in Italy along with other troops in ‘A’ Squadron, the Royal Dragoons, he sometimes shared his armoured car with a pig called Busty. He recounted the story of this amusing interlude in an article in the Army Quarterly and Defence Journal in July 1998, probably the only occasion on which a journal of military history, tactics and strategy has published an article about a pig!

After the 2nd Army crossed the Rhine he was reconnoitring the area near Belsen, ahead of the main advancing forces, when he heard a radio message in German discussing a typhus epidemic in the concentration camp there. He reported what he had overheard to headquarters and was ordered not to enter the camp but to carry on past it. There was typhus in Belsen, Anne Frank had died of it there just a few weeks earlier, but later on Glyn Davies couldn't help wondering if it was possible that some of the staff of the camp had wanted the message to be overheard in order to delay the entry of British soldiers and give them time to get away.

Academic Career and Related Work

The University of Strathclyde

In 1959 he left Canton High School in Cardiff, where he had been teaching economics, French and geography, and moved to Glasgow to become a lecturer at the Scottish College of Commerce which, a few years later, was to become part of the new University of Strathclyde, and rapidly gained promotion to senior lecturer. One of the subjects that occupied him was regional development and he drew attention to the paradox that labour shortages can exist in areas of high unemployment, thus making the task of attracting firms to such areas more difficult. He also emphasised the dangers of "regional economic civil war" as the poorer parts of Britain competed with each other for government assistance and inward investment.

At Strathclyde Glyn Davies encouraged inter-disciplinary research and chaired the University's Regional Studies Group which drew together economists, other social scientists, and engineers to study the problems of the Scottish economy. A typical example of the Group's work under his leadership was the Galloway Project, a study of the economy of south west Scotland undertaken for the Scottish Tourist Board.

The Welsh Office

In 1968, largely because of his work in the field of regional development, he was seconded from Strathclyde to the Welsh Office as the first person to hold the post of Senior Economic Adviser to the Secretary of State for Wales, who at that time was George Thomas, the future Lord Tonypandy and Speaker of the House of Commons who became a firm friend. At that time there was a serious lack of statistics on the Welsh economy and Glyn Davies played a significant role in remedying these deficiencies.

There was a backlog of facts to be extracted, such as the table of identifiable public expenditure in Wales that was included in evidence to the Crowther Commission on the Constitution (which was considering the arguments for devolution of power to Scotland and Wales) and the index of Welsh industrial production. This showed that by the end of the 1960s production in Wales was increasing more rapidly than in the rest of Britain but he repeatedly pointed out that it was not sufficiently fast to counter Wales's dismal economic legacy. Targets for the number of new jobs required were usually based on the number of registered unemployed but these took no account of the lower activity rates in Wales and therefore underestimated the scale of the problem.

One of the keys to attracting more firms to Wales was the improvement of the infrastructure and Glyn Davies was responsible for making the economic case for the extension of the M4 motorway from Cardiff to Swansea. Despite some opposition from within the Civil Service this was accepted and today all parts of industrial South Wales are within relatively easy reach of the motorway.

Denmark and the Aftermath of the Second World War

Immediately following the Germany surrender at Lüneburg Heath the Royal Dragoons, took part in the liberation of Denmark. Among the Germans taken prisoner was Lieutenant Otto Wendt von Radowitz, an aristocrat, and Glyn Davies was given the task of escorting him home to Germany on his release. (According to the orders given to Glyn Davies on 22 August 1945, the British Consulate in Copenhagen wanted von Radowitz to search for "some English documents of importance, believed to be in the safe at Falkenberg Castle"). Von Radowitz's mother showed her gratitude at seeing her son again by offering Davies a copy of Mein Kampf, signed by Hitler himself, but the offer was tactfully declined.

A more lasting result of his stay in Denmark was the meeting with the young Danish woman, Anna Margrethe, (or Grethe) who, in 1947, was to become his wife. Therefore when he returned to Cardiff, Glyn Davies was keen to complete his studies as quickly as possible so that he could start work and get married. However, he was told that after 6 years of absence he could not take an honours degree in less than two years so instead he settled for an ordinary degree and also took a diploma in eduction before starting work as a primary school teacher. That was the beginning of a career teaching children and students at all levels from 5 year olds to postgraduates. In his spare time he took University of London honours and masters degrees in economics as an external student.

Uwist, Cardiff

In 1970 Glyn Davies became the first occupant of the Sir Julian S. Hodge Chair of Banking and Finance at the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, UWIST (which later merged with University College Cardiff to become Cardiff University, the largest part of the federal University of Wales) and held that post until his retirement in 1985. During that period he was also Chairman of the Wales Careers Advisory Council and Honorary Vice-President and Secretary of the Cardiff Business Club.

In association with Sir Julian Hodge he attracted a series of high-profile individuals to give lectures at UWIST, including two Governors of the Bank of England, Sir Leslie O'Brien and Robin Leigh-Pemberton, the Duke of Edinburgh, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, (Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund), David Rockefeller (a banker and senior member of the American oil industry dynasty) and Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi Arabian oil minister whose influence on OPEC and the world economy was then still at its peak.

During the 1970s and 80s Cardiff developed as a financial centre, both through the establishment of branches of financial institutions from elsewhere in the UK and overseas, and through the creation of indigenous institutions among which was the Commercial Bank of Wales (later taken over by the Bank of Scotland), of which Glyn Davies was the economic adviser and subsequently also a director. Later on he became the economic adviser to another indigenous Welsh bank, the Julian Hodge Bank. He also undertook consultancy work for Berger, the paint manufacturer.

Among his publications while at UWIST was National Giro : modern money transfer, the first book about postal giro systems since the establishment of Britain's Giro. The foreword was written by James Callaghan who, three years later, was to become the British Prime Minister.

In Overseas investment in Wales Glyn Davies highlighted the way in which the Welsh economy, which had previously been dominated by heavy industries such as coal and steel, was being transformed by foreign investment from many countries, especially the United States, Germany and Japan. Two other publications, in which he combined his interests in regional development and monetary economics were European finance for development and Building societies and their branches.