Dennis Silvan Evans, who spent most of his career in the Government Information Service, rising to become a chief information officer, has died, aged 69.
Dennis worked through a period of changing governments and served people as diverse as Tony Benn and right-wing intellectual Sir Keith Joseph, for both of whom he had a great personal regard.
When the 1964 Harold Wilson Government created the first Secretary of State for Wales, Dennis was asked to set up the London end of the department’s press office, a job he delighted in.
He started his journalism career in Wales on the Pontypridd Observer and spent five years on The Western Mail in Cardiff, subbing first news then features.
The family moved back to Wales when Dennis retired early.
In the early Nineties, he and his wife Jean ran a Saturday journalism school in Cardiff. Dennis was proud that many students found jobs in journalism.
He read history at university and became an enthusiastic local historian. He wrote a history of Peterston-super-Ely, the village in the Vale of Glamorgan where the family lived for the past 16 years. It was published in instalments over three years in the parish magazine and became a greatly enjoyed and talked about feature in the village.
His funeral service was held at Trehill Chapel, to which Dennis belonged. The congregation included people from his days on The Western Mail and from the Welsh Office.
Dennis and Jean were married for 47 years. They brought up their three children, Daniel, Eleri and Bess, when he was working in London and the family lived in Surrey.
Like so many Welshmen, he fantasised that one of his children would one day play rugby for Wales – and one did. As he was fond of saying, it was not his son Daniel who represented the country, however, but his younger daughter Bess, who played women’s rugby for Wales for some 10 years.
Two of his children followed him into journalism. Daniel is with The Daily Telegraph and Eleri is a freelance journalist who has taught journalism in Cardiff University.
He is survived by his wife Jean, his three children and grandchildren Macey Louise, Poppy May and George Huw.
Daniel Silvan Evans
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