[1] John FitzGerald was a Carmelite friar and priest of Irish parentage, brought up in England, who learned Welsh and made it the language of his religious, intellectual and social life.
He was born Michael FitzGerald in Ludlow, Shropshire in 1927 to parents from County Kerry and spent his childhood in Chesterfield and Sheffield.
At the age of 13, he was sent as a boarder to Coleg Mair, a small Catholic seminary housed in Castell Brychan, Aberystwyth where he was taught Welsh by Saunders Lewis, the dramatist and poet who had lost his lecturer's post at University College, Swansea, following an act of arson at an RAF bombing school that was under construction.
He was then appointed Chaplain to Catholic students at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and six years later to a lectureship in the Department of Philosophy.
His vows meant that he owned only the most modest of cars and in later years a frequent sight in Aberystwyth was his giant frame implausibly squeezed into the smallest model on the market.