FRIENDS – and there were many – of the inimitable Alf Webb say that the wartime shrapnel scattered in his body after being shot down over Albania lay behind his death at the age of 85.
The enthusiastic amateur archaeologist, writer, archery expert and Second World War hero, unassuming to the last, had been ill for some time. Losing a close friend last year probably did not help.
Alf's road to the Dean was a long as well as a colourful one but once he was here he liked it so much he stayed.
As a soldier in the Second World War he was detailed to ferry vital medical supplies into Albanian partisans by glider. Heavy flak brought the aircraft down and left him with horrific injuries. Once smuggled out of the country he bore the scars for the rest of his life.
While recovering in Stoke Mandeville Hospital in London he met a nurse he was later to marry – only to lose her not long afterwards through illness.
Following one of many operations to remove shell fragments Alf was sent to the Forest of Dean to recuperate, and the rest, as they say, is history – a particularly poignant word because Alf fell in love not just with the area and its people but also with its deep and mysterious past.
I felt lucky to interview him a few years ago after he had just discovered a beautiful little stone age flint arrowhead while on the Offa's Dyke path.
"I just climbed over a stile, shook some mud off my boot, and there it was," he said, his eyes twinkling with amusement at the random nature of fortune.
Fortune had led him along many avenues: as a communications expert he had travelled the world's remotest places setting up radio masts (it's said he was the first white man invited into the secretive Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan). He volunteered to work on the Roskilde Viking Ship and earned an honorary award from the University of Copenhagen for research on 10th and 11th century bows. He earned a Doctor of Archaeology degree for work on preserving Mary Rose artifacts, was a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of London (pointing out with amusement this gave him the letters FRAIL after his name), and a member of the Society of Archer Antiquities.
At his adopted home in Lydney he wrote Dark Age Dean and, seven years ago, A Strange War under the pseudonym Spider Smythe. There were many other papers and booklets on finds in the Dean where he joined the Dean Archaeological Group (becoming president in 2001) and later helped to found the local branch of the University of the Third Age.
He will be greatly missed by a wider circle of friends as well as people he helped generously with advice and time.
Hugh Soar of the Society of Archer Antiquities said: "His capacity for survival was equalled only by his unrelenting search for knowledge."
•The funeral service for Alf Webb is to take place at the Forest of Dean Crematorium, Yew Tree Brake, on Wednesday February 23 (1pm).