Professor Peter Stead

1943-2026

President/Founder of the Dylan Thomas Prize for literature and Visiting Professor, University of South Wales; formerly Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Swansea University

My close friend of over sixty years acquaintance, the innovative social and cultural historian Peter Stead, died suddenly from a heart attack on 23 March 2026 aged eighty two. His academic career was largely spent at Swansea University whose History Department he entered as an undergraduate in 1961 ,gaining  First Class Honours in 1964 before, after a brief period of graduate research under the supervision of Kenneth O. Morgan, he became a Lecturer from 1966 until his early retirement as a Senior Lecturer in 1997. This was, in a sense, the most conventional aspect of his professional life, one marked out early on by fine grained scholarly articles on the Lib Lab politicking of dynamic Edwardian South Wales and defined routinely by his exceptional skills as a teacher and the empathetic oversight he displayed in the guidance of so many M.A. and Ph.D. students. However, then and later, there was so much more about his intellect and personality, charismatic and maverick, which made Peter one of the most vital cultural figures in Wales during his lifetime.

Peter Price Stead was born in Barry in August 1943 – living first, as he liked to say, in a house at the top of Trinity Street, the sea fronted town’s steepest hill and later on to be of Gavin and Stacey fame – to Elvira (nee) Price from Maesteg and John Stead from Merthyr. A younger brother, Norman, pre-deceased him. Past locational matters, including cherished family roots in Skibbereen, were important to Peter and magnified his sense of being a totally networked South Walian (always so capitalized) as his policeman father was, on his way to becoming a chief inspector, posted to serve in the various towns his son would claim as his own. Thus he moved in 1957 from Barry and its academically renowned Grammar School to Gowerton and its culturally stellar Grammar School, with a family residential sidestep to Pontypridd alongside his lifelong home base in Swansea. He relished all of the particularity and the connectedness of this industrial working class world and would reflect it in all he said and did as he measured its bounded but global experience.

Peter was, in his pomp, a man of ebullient energy and gregarious character. He was, at times, almost Rabelaisian in tastes and appetite, capable of riding roughshod over more timid or punctilious colleagues but always exuding warmth and friendliness. To be in his company, at rugby matches at St. Helens or the Arms Park or in the fug of adjacent Saloon Bars, was to be at the centre of things, alive to the joys of the passing moment, to its fun and frivolity and fellowship. I never knew him to be truly down hearted – except temporarily if Wales lost badly or his beloved Swans floundered – or bemoaning his lot. Indeed he saw the fact of his place of birth and upbringing, and the concomitant choice of emotional and intellectual attachment to it which he made, as being a great gift to both relish and exploit. He literally possessed South Wales geographically by his personal peripatetic shifts from coastal towns and cities to its diverse valley townships; he gloried in its performative culture, its shining stars of stage and opera and sporting prowess, its transformative politicians and revelatory writers; he would come to analyse its historical patterning, its holistic complexity, and scorn any outsider caricaturing of its people or any alternate tribal mythologising; he sought out, and found for himself, a writing style that was lucid and judicious as he explained that world to itself and proclaimed it to the world at large.

His gifts of eloquence, recall, sharp wit and civic commitment might have led him to take one obvious path – the road to Westminster. He was a youthful activist in the Labour Party and prominent amongst the young ambitious men, and future politicians, of the Wilson/Callaghan era who socialized in Cardiff. He taught adult education classes tirelessly from the springboard platform offered by the WEA and wrote his first book Coleg Harlech in 1976 as a tribute to that haven for autodidacticism. With plenty of time before him, and the demands of a fulfilling job, he hesitated over a political career and winnable elections  slipped by until he stepped forward in 1979 to contest the Barry constituency at the dawning of the Thatcher ascendancy. He did not try again. On the academic front, too, he was moving from straight social and political history to an engagement with cultural matters: especially Popular Culture. Its American aspects went deep with him after two separate years in the US as a Fulbright Scholar at Wellesley College, Mass. in1973/4 and then in 1988/9 at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. The University Courses he now chose to give at Swansea and the books he set out to write would reflect this change of direction.

His single most important publication came in 1989 with the much acclaimed volume Film and the Working Class, a perceptive analytical survey of British and American Feature Films and their comparative representation of the mores of social class. Two years later he wrote a scintillating critical and biographical book on his personal hero, Port Talbot’s Richard Burton: So Much, So Little was an elegiac lament for the creative genius of the man, as much as the actor, whom he regarded as the apex of a classic South Wales, and of its fading. “Burton,” he wrote in 2011, “was our lost leader. He defined the authority and confidence that ought to form the basis of our political and cultural leadership. As a nation we missed a trick.” I can see, as he conceived that line, his wide New York cop shoulders rumble and his Irish green eyes narrow above the inverted Vs of his diabolic eyebrows to dare any challenge to his insight. Initially he had been a firm supporter of devolution but like so many of his generation he came to take  a jaundiced view of that stalled vehicle, or at least of its blinkered drivers, more tribalistic than talented he thought. His own politics became decidedly ecumenical.

Peter was never short of a blistering opinion, or two, and he aired them frequently and tellingly, in a number of formats on Radio Wales; he made documentary films for BBC Wales, notably one  on the phenomenon of Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley as book and film; he was a newspaper commentator of informed provocation on contemporary Wales on both sides of the Bridge; and with the late journalist Patrick Hannan as his teammate he did several years of winning stints on Radio 4’s Round Britain Quiz. He appeared in 1993 at the Hay Festival of Literature, lighting up the tent with a forensically feisty interview with another unsuccessful Labour Party candidate Dennis Potter, batting Wales and England, or rather the respective merits of the Forest of Dean and South Wales back and fro between themselves in front of four hundred people as if it was an International Match. Perhaps it was. Peter’s perceptive study of the great television dramatist’s work had just appeared in book form and it had, typically, pulled no punches as  it accused Potter of being anachronistically obsessed with outward and outdated markings of social class and psychologically scarred by his own origins: “To the west is Wales, and in particular the South Wales coalfield with its own more recent, more fervent and certainly more infamous traditions of militant independence, but no Forester will ever want to claim blood -brotherhood in that direction…the Foresters are English, English in a very special way…naturally suspicious of Gloucester and even more so of London, and yet hated to have their stubbornness in any way associated with that of South Wales. “Being ruled from Cardiff ”, says Potter, was one of the things (Forest of Dean) miners hated about the standardization (within the National Union of Mineworkers) that came after 1948”. Ouch.

After his academic release from Swansea in 1997, Peter took up the offer of an External Chair at the University of Glamorgan where his continued and open hearted engagement with the educational needs of a new generational cohort of students in a neglected hinterland north of the M4 was palpably appreciated. He emphasized to them that just as a conceptual Cymru could not dislodge an actual Wales so a viable future could only be based on an experienced history. He felt independence of mind and spirit was a key attribute in civic societies of self-worth. He would take immense pride in being elected as a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2013 since, for him, the institution was an exemplification of the principles of outspokenness rooted in evidential scholarly work which a fissiparous Wales craved. His self-description was never more accurate: “Enthusiast. Humourist. Romancer”. The enthusiasm was undimmed and voracious, from the latest novels to the furthest travel he and his wife Elizabeth could possibly undertake (postcards home to friends were regular reminders of places explored and luminaries encountered); his humour was infectious, never malicious, a master class in wry observation, as in his affectionate description of tiggerish Rhodri Morgan as a “perpetual sixth former”; and he was certainly star struck by sidesteps and spotlights as he demonstrated with verve in numerous essays and co-edited books on Welsh rugby legends, soccer stars, opera singers, boxers and, of course, actors.  A paean of praise to the latter was Acting Wales: Stars of Stage and Screen in 2002.

Perhaps the single greatest triumph in the full and satisfactory life of this Avatar-at-Large of South Wales was the creation of the International Dylan Thomas Prize for writers worldwide aged under thirty nine, the Swansea poet’s age at his death in 1953. As he told the tale, he was on holiday in Viareggio, Tuscany, in 1994 when, strolling along the beach he came across a plaque marking the cremation there of the twenty-nine year old Percy Bysshe Shelley who had drowned in the sea in 1822. There was also the Notification of  a Prize for new novels whose shortlisted authors would come to the town to give readings. Bingo! Peter imagined how something similar, but more expansive and across the literary genres Dylan had graced, might put his city of Swansea on the world cultural map. It took years of cajolery and persuasiveness to find sufficient sponsorship to launch the Prize as the most lucrative of its kind in the world in 2005 with Peter as its first Chair and, fortuitously and wondrously, the Rhondda writer and University of Glamorgan graduate Rachel Trezise was the first winner of a sixty thousand pounds life changing award. Resolute determination ensured, after sponsorship wavered, that the Prize could be relaunched in 2014, annually for twenty thousand pounds, at and with the support of Swansea University where it has flourished ever since with Peter Stead as its Founding President.

The Dylan Thomas Prize was, and is, a unique link  between the profound cultural legacy of a vanished society and a creative world in which South Wales was once such a significant player. Its existence is, perhaps, no surprise in the light of Peter Stead’s origins and dreams. It was there, all along, waiting with desire and determination, to happen, as was his loving marriage in 1971 to the London born Elizabeth (nee) Hilton, a brilliant applied mathematician colleague in 1960s Swansea: when they first met Peter told an enquiring Elizabeth that his special expertise was “The Tonypandy Riots” and her riposte was that she was: “A Student of the Universe”. It was thus, in cameo, the perfect union, and it lasted fifty five years.

Elizabeth survives him.

 

Written by Professor Dai Smith FLSW CBE