IT was with deep personal sadness I learnt on return from holiday of the death of my friend Bill Gwilliam, at the age of 90.

No one did more in a lifetime than Bill to chronicle the history of the city of Worcester and county of Worcestershire.

Importantly too, his prolific writings on the Faithful City's past have always been in a most readable, fascinating and absorbing form, full of colour and with a liberal sprinkling of humour.

In the early years of Memory Lane, back in the 1980s, I regularly collaborated with Bill, making weekly visits to his Northwick Close home.

There I would enjoy cosy chats during which he would suggest subjects for my Evening News features and allow me to dip freely into his research volumes to compile my articles.

At that time, his wife Kath, though infirm, was very much party to our conversations and I know just how hard her death struck Bill.

He was never really quite the same in spirits and enthusiasm afterwards and clearly greatly missed her, though having the consolation of regular visits and outings with his two sons David and Bob, his grandchildren and his daughter-in-law.

My first contact with Bill Gwilliam came when he was a teacher at Christopher Whitehead Boys School and I was a pupil there back in the 1950s, though I was never in his class. I understand from our chats that he was an illustrator with a national magazine during the war years.

From Christopher Whitehead, he moved on for several more years teaching at Worcester's Nunnery Wood Secondary School, where he was much respected by pupils and fellow members of staff.

Throughout his life, local history was a consuming passion of Bill's and, both during his teaching career and after retirement, he researched and compiled volume after type-written volume on the history of the city and county of Worcester, covering a myriad of subjects such as folklore, pubs, crimes, newspapers, transport, rivers and, above all, people and places.

He also amassed a huge collection of photographs of Worcester in times past, and one of the double bedrooms of his Northwick Close home was packed with a treasure trove of local history research. Shelf after shelf and cupboards were lined with his type-written volumes and his photo albums.

When I began producing my weekly Memory Lane features for the Evening News, I received invaluable help from Bill, and I'm sure many other local history researchers down the decades will have had cause to be equally grateful for his ready assistance.

Bill always exuded an abounding enthusiasm for the extremely eventful and chequered past of Worcester and of the county, and he had a veritable font of knowledge to impart from his painstaking researches, which must have taken countless days to undertake.

Thankfully, I understand most of his research volumes have been copied over recent years and are now in the County Record Office archives for posterity.

Happily too, important facets of Bill's vast writings have not being allowed to languish away from public accessibility.

Two books of his work have been published and are, I believe, still available in bookshops - Old Worcester: People and Places and Worcestershire's Hidden Past - both produced by Halfshire Books.

Many an audience down the years has also enjoyed the talks Bill used to give to local clubs and societies such as Probus and women's groups, and I also heartily applaud local historian Pam Hinks, who has so patiently made some of Bill's researches available to an even wider audience via the internet.

It was my great pleasure, back in 1997, to be among those who sent off letters of recommendation to Buckingham Palace in the hope that Bill Gwilliam would be awarded an honour by the Queen in recognition of his lifetime's work to local history.

Joyfully, the outcome was the award of the MBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1998. I know that the Buckingham Palace Investiture, where Bill received the medal personally from Her Majesty, was probably the most memorable day of his life.

On a personal note, I was also able to share with Bill another proud moment. In January, 1988, Worcester's Mayor of that year, Councillor Clifford Lord, invited Bill and I to a Guildhall reception where he presented us with certificates bestowing "the Mayor's Special Commendation for an outstanding contribution to the City of Worcester in the field of" ... in Bill's case, local history, and in mine, journalism.

Surviving to the grand age of 90, Bill did, of course, live through a wealth of significant local and world history himself!