MAKING light of his 100 years and celebrating his special birthday in stylewas Arthur Davies, from Grayshott.

Mr Davies enjoyed his day with a celebratory card from the Queen and surrounded by almost 40 family and friends at a party held in The Fox and Pelican pub, in Grayshott.

Born into a large family and brought up by his parents and grandparents in Birkenhead on the Wirral in Merseyside Mr Davies moved south when he joined the Royal Artillery as a boy soldier and was posted to the south of England.

He met his wife Phyllis, a Grayshott girl in the 1930s and the couple were married in the village in which he has lived ever since.

The father to two sons, Trevor, born in 1945, and his brother Allan, who was born in 1951, sadly lost when she died in 1984.

After serving in India during the war, Mr Davies went on to become a bus driver based in Hindhead for the then Aldershot and District Traction Company which became the Alder Valley following a merger, before being promoted to a bus inspector in the early 1980s, a position he held until he retired.

Now living in a flat in a retirement housing unit in Grayshott, Mr Davies was for many years the mainstay of the village branch of the British Legion, working behind the bar and also acting as the bingo caller.

“We had to go through his address book to organise his party,” said son Trevor whose daughter and family came over from the home in Istanbul to be at the special event.

“Many of the guests were largely related to one of his brothers with nieces and nephews, some of which he had never seen before.”