My friend Morag Morris, who has died aged 90, was a great creative force who gave generously of her knowledge and love of poetry to hundreds of students at the Guildford School of Acting and the University of Surrey.
She was born Rona Morag Gray in Glasgow; her father was a civil engineer who came from a long line of Quakers. Morag was sent to the Mount school in York, but in 1940 returned home to study French and English at Glasgow University, graduating in 1943. For the last two years of the second world war Morag worked in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park with a team of codebreakers at the heart of Britain's intelligence operations.
She joined the BBC and shivered through the freezing winter of 1946-47 while her boss monopolised the small office fire. She then transferred to the more congenial features department, where her work brought her into contact with a creative bunch of producers and poets, including Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice.
She married David Morris, a surveyor, whose father, Sir Parker Morris, gave his name to space standards for public housing, and they moved to Guildford. When the new University of Surrey opened in 1966 – and after warning the vice-chancellor that the institution wouldn't last long if it didn't have a soul – she was given a job teaching poetry to musicians and engineers. Subsequently she taught students at the Guildford School of Acting, part of the school of arts, to read and speak poetry.
The university's annual Morag Morris poetry lecture started in 1974. Each year a distinguished contemporary poet is invited to talk about the work of another 20th-century poet or group of poets, with the lecture illustrated by readings by drama students. Morag's nurturing of emerging actors – including Jonjo O'Neill, who has since played Richard III with the Royal Shakespeare Company – in the skills of reading aloud is part of her enduring legacy.
Morag was a shrewd commentator on poets and poetry, with a particular knowledge of war poetry. When the Wilfred Owen Association was formed in 1989 to boost interest in Owen's work, Morag became a committed supporter. Her mischievous spirit and capacity for friendship also found expression in the early days of the nativity plays performed at the Wintershall estate in the Surrey Hills, where she was pleased to be surrounded by donkeys and sheep.
Her marriage ended in divorce. She is survived by her daughters, Deirdre and Oonagh, and five grandchildren.
