AN outstanding member of the community, who was highly respected in Lydford, has died at the age of 91.

Cyril Friend was the son of a farmer who held acreage near Willsworthy Camp.

His headteacher,  Doris Michell, regarded him as her star pupil. He left school at 14 and worked on his father's and other farmers' land throughout the war. He drove the first tractor seen at Lydford in about 1942.

He married Anne Clements and worked for the Forestry Commission where he stayed for the rest of his working life. He ended up as the regional forestry conservation officer with part of his duties being to check on the flora and fauna as well as to conduct interested parties, particularly within Lydford and other Devon forests, but occasionally elsewhere in Britain.

Cyril and Anne had one son Michael who also worked with the commission.

A deeply religious man, Cyril became a Methodist circuit preacher for Lydford, in those days the largest parish in England.

After the war, with the help of the newly formed National Playing Fields Association, Lydford created a committee to administer the use of the new sports field and Cyril took the reins and ably chaired it for many years.  

He was one of the few remaining North Dartmoor dialect speakers and it was a joy to hear him speaking in the rich Okehampton/Lydford dialect, which is slightly different from that of the Tavistock area. Because of this he was invited to make several recordings for Dartmoor's oral history section of the Dartmoor National Park Authority. On these tapes he recorded life in his young days.

His recollections were immense, particularly about Willsworthy Camp in the 1930s. Each summer many thousands of the Army troops came from Salisbury Plain to conduct manoeuvres. In those days the army needed to bring by rail several thousand horses to supplement the few mechanised vehicles and it was also quite a sight to see Willswothy covered by hundreds, perhaps thousand of tents.

Cyril had endless stories of those times including when, during the war in his father's field near the camp he uncovered a clandestine radio transmitter which was probably intended to be used for guiding bombers onto the secret radar site nearby.