FOR MANY years from the 1970s Peter Philp wrote witty and highly informative columns in The Times, distilled from one of his principal careers, antique dealing. Not only was he the doyen of the trade in Cardiff, where he was the third generation in the family business, but he had also been the writer, director, lighting man, designer and presenter of the original TV antiques programme, the very much one-man show Collectors’ Club, first broadcast in 1958.

Denis Alfred Peter Philp, always known as Peter, was born in Cardiff, the son of Alfred and Elsie Philp. He wrote his first play at the age of 15, while still a pupil at Penarth Grammar School, and his ’prentice pieces were performed in scout halls, his father being a leading figure in the Welsh Boy Scout movement.

At 16 he gave up the chance of a scholarship to Oxford to enter the family antique dealing business, A. T. Philp & Sons, which had been founded by his grandfather, with premises in the Royal Arcade, Cardiff. The original emphasis on china had expanded to include furniture and general antiques, to which his father added contemporary furniture, some of it designed by the teenage Peter.

Passages in his early plays attracted the blue pencil of the Lord Chamberlain, then still the guardian of the nation’s morality. Later, in the 1950s, a play even provoked accusations of blasphemy from the Welsh Methodist Synod, since God was introduced as a character on stage among a number of pagan deities. His work won enthusiastic support in other quarters, however. In 1939 Winston Churchill’s actress daughter Sarah, a friend, and her husband, the impresario Vic Oliver, planned to present the 19-year-old’s work in the West End, but the production was an early casualty of the outbreak of war.

In 1940 Philp married Pamela Ayton. They had met when they were 13 and were thus to spend the best part of 72 years together. It was a remarkably happy union. After comparatively uneventful service in the RAF, mostly at Ashburton in Devon, he returned to his double career. During the early 1950s his plays won him numerous accolades, including Arts Council and the Charles Henry Foyle and Peter Ustinov Awards, and the title of Most Promising Young Playwright at the 1951 Edinburgh Festival.

His most successful play — about which Kenneth Rose later wrote: “surely deserved a better future than it actually achieved” — was the 1951 Castle of Deception, which led the leading critic Harold Hobson to bracket his work with that of Pirandello. He himself described it as a “three act play in what I choose to be called bogus verse; but some critics accuse me of forgetting myself and writing genuine verse at times. I can only answer that they are begging the question posed by the play — if there is a point at which the bogus becomes authentic?

“The central character believes that there is. In his pseudo-Gothic castle furnished with fake antiques and works of art, he entertains their human counterparts — a bogus Russian prince, a forger of Old Masters, and a girl of doubtful reputation whom he employs to prove his theory that even the greatest emotion, that of love, can be counterfeited to perfection by the expert.”

Philp’s younger son, Richard, now a noted London dealer in works of art, has observed that this play above all bridged his father’s two careers: “The fascination of fakes and forgeries; how as ‘experts’ we can really be sure of our ‘eye’; the acting — performance art — we perfect at fairs, with their opening nights, stage design and lighting.”

In 1948 Philp moved his family, or at least his wife and their two young sons, to a large Regency house, Llancayo, on the Monmouth Usk, which he hoped would prove to be a fine working base not only for them, but also for his and her parents, where writing, furniture making and dealing could all be accommodated. However, his father would not be separated from the ancestral Royal Arcade premises, and after seven years they moved back to Cardiff. In fact in 1968 Philp did move the business, but only to Kimberley Road in the Pen-y-lan area of the city.

By that time his writing had taken a different, but logical, direction. In 1974 his Furniture of the World was published, to be followed by The Antique Furniture Expert (1991) and Field Guide to Antique Furniture (1992), both written with Gillian Walkling. He was a natural raconteur, and his Saturday columns of advice to owners and collectors in The Times, with others in the Antiques Trade Gazette and elsewhere, won him a wide audience, charmed and instructed by the mixture of wit, deep knowledge and sound common sense.

He was an accomplished dealer, an expert in Nantgarw and Swansea pottery as well as Welsh oak and furniture generally, but he was notably lacking in the killer instinct which can sometimes give good dealers a bad name. When exhibiting at London fairs he would book his carrier for one way only. Everything must go — and almost always it did. His modest prices and love of talking charmed everything away, even stock that no competitor would have dreamed could find a buyer.

Once, when over 70, he took a whole standful of Masonic regalia up to London, which even his son deemed impossible. Not so; before they retired for lunch he had sold the lot to a young and beautiful Brazilian decorator.

At a Chelsea fair he once sold every piece of Welsh oak, and was left with just the aspidistra which had decorated the stand; he auctioned it among the neighbours for a final £10.

At his own parties or his son’s openings Peter Philp was the best of company. Among his other loves were Shakespeare and music. Not only had he written songs and toyed with a musical, but in his youth he had played a cool jazz piano in the clubs of Tiger Bay. He died unexpectedly but peacefully and is survived by Pamela, his wife of 66 years, and their sons Paul, a potter and sculptor, and Richard, the art and antiques dealer.

Peter Philp, playwright, writer, antique dealer and raconteur, was born on November 10, 1920. He died on February 5, 2006, aged 85.