Granddaughter E: When I think of Grandad, I see him in the kitchen at the Old School House, early in the morning, pottering around making scrambled eggs for his visiting grandchildren. He always seemed so happy, I think it was the only time he was allowed to cook!

Granddaughter L: When I think of Grandad, I think of Autumn half term holidays spent walking around Colemore, with Grandad walking the special way he did with his walking stick - not that he needed it. He used to light a bonfire for us down the road from the Old School House. We'd play card games and he would show us puzzles while Granny would cook Olé* , a popular meal with nearly all her grandchildren ("I'm not so sure about me!"). He was always so interested in ideas we had, which made us feel important. Certain smells can bring Grandad back to me in a second, fresh cut grass (he was always so proud of the lawn), and the smell of wood in his workshop/garage. He always used to try and take photos of us without us knowing because he thought it made for a better photo, but we would always know.

Granddaughter A: It seems alien to me that the rest of the world remembers Dennis Cambell in terms of his successful career in the Navy or his invention of the angled-deck. To me, he was just my Grandad. A constant presence in my childhood and, though living quite far away, he and Granny were a big part of my world.  

There were always three sorts of occasions when we'd see our grandparents; in the early days, they would come to visit us in Penarth including a few Christmases but these visits became few and far between as I grew up. During half-terms they would have us come to stay in the Old School House in Colemore, which must have been a challenge to entertain four boisterous grandchildren for a week. Then in later years we would more commonly choose a nice, country pub to meet up with them for lunch mid-way between Hampshire (their home) and South Wales (ours.)  

Though my grandparents were still very active people when I was a child, I never knew a time when Grandad was working. He was retired for all of my living memory. So when I remember my Grandad I remember a tranquil, content life in their much-loved Old School House, nestled in the heart of English countryside.  

To occupy us on our visits, Granny and Grandad would take us for long walks that always seemed to feature, walking past the donkey and the farm house with the turkeys and the giant rusting buoys that we'd climb upon, with a quick check in on the Colemore church, where my other grandfather had christened me as a baby and where my Granny would play the organ from time to time. We would invariably walk past the house of friends of my grandparents, which we loved more for its swimming pool, than any fond acquaintance we had with its owners. These walks would turn into long rambling adventures round the farmers field where there would be much excitement about the boom of the farmer's bird scarer set on a timer, and each footstep would be littered with “do you remember when...” stories, from the time that Shell Lane, along with the rest of Hampshire got caught in the big snow and my brother dug tunnels into the snow drifts, to the time that my father went hunting for wild garlic in the bluebell woods leaving my brother crying out in fear about the encroaching “wild darlick”.   

It is strange the detail that such childhood memories bring when you scratch at the surface because one's perception is so different before you turn ten. A lasting feature of those walks for me is how intently I would watch and try to imitate the way my Grandad swung his walking stick, with a clever, little swing of the hand, which gave it added momentum. It always seemed such a distinguished movement. And this was my Grandad – with so many clever, little quirky ways. The clever, little quirky ways which carried him along in all our eyes as a man of quiet, self-assurance. A man of purpose. A man who was clever in so many ways.  

My Grandad's house was always filled with little puzzles to tax every visitor, from his rubix cube, to the mercury in the maze, and from the puzzle with the wooden block on the ring to the gyroscope. Grandad also had this neat, little, science, puzzle book, which contained all sorts of tricks. The one that sticks in my memory was how to get an egg into a glass milk bottle. Grandad would give such gentle encouragement to me as I worked my way through those puzzles, studiously working out the solutions. It was great to have his seal of approval.  

Grandad loved to be the solver of puzzles. 

Petrol Thief Trap One famous occasion he'd realised that his petrol was being used up at a rapid rate in his car. Having spotted this anomaly a couple of times he determined to find out the cause. He set a fine thread to run from the petrol cap on his car to the upstairs bedroom and then attached a bell** to the thread. Just as Grandad suspected the bell rang in the early hours of the morning and he caught a local lad red-handed siphoning off his petrol. Grandad was particularly proud of his detective work on that one.

Though Grandad was retired, he was always busy. He would always have at least one project on the go. He'd have described himself as 'a bit of an artist', and some of his paintings could be found on the walls of their home. However, he was also a perfectionist. (A trait I think I had the misfortune to inherit.) He had intended to do a portrait of all his grandchildren and my siblings and I looked on jealously at the portrait of my sister, which displayed a wispy toddler with such a good likeness to my sister that we envied it greatly, but Grandad could never be satisfied with any attempts he made at doing pictures of the rest of us and we certainly never saw those attempts.

Grandad was also a craftsman. He made two large pine dining tables for my family, one of which stands proudly in my mother's house and the other in my sister's, under which my granddad's first and third grandchildren have been swinging their feet for 13 and 10 years respectively. He also made shelves for all three of us girls to display our little collection of ornaments, and my Granny still has a master-size, similar set of shelves for her to display the memorabilia that she and Grandad collected from their round-the-world travels. When my brother was young, Grandad made him a farmyard, a fort and a car park to play with, and we all played with it in turn, along with the wooden house that my mother had played with as a child. But of course, my most favourite object that he ever made was the little wooden child's desk that he made for me one birthday. It included a secret little compartment with a clever little lock about which he told me and only me. I kept that secret for years from my siblings. Even when he made identical desks for my sisters, he did not give them a secret compartment and I loved how special that made me feel.  

However it was my brother and our male cousin who had a special place in Grandad's heart. He would share a kinship with them that we all stepped back from and observed. Whether it was through engines or wood work, Grandad would take the time to impart knowledge to the men in the family and it wasn't something that us girls would resent. We understood.

Were there any signs of the Naval Admiral in the Grandad I knew? Well, he was not a boastful man and did not spend his time spouting about his achievements. Though when one of us had the foresight to quiz our Grandad about his life in the navy he would take the time to explain. I certainly treasure the moments I had with my Grandad when it was just him and me and he would show me the photos in his room of the boats, or the diagrams and the newspaper articles that he has collected of the invention of the angled deck. Once, after my sister had taken the time to ask Grandad about his time in the Navy, he had given her a blue folder that contained photos of ships and articles. None of us quite knew what to make of it, but we knew she had been favoured to be given such a gift.

There were other signs of the sailor in my Grandad. He was a man of precision. He always had his own room and that was kept in ship-shape order like the gentlemen's quarters that they were. He had a single bed with the foam mattress he had got used to using in the Navy. I would always fancy that his little back windows in front of his desk were like those of a captain's cabin, from where he could survey the comings and goings of the bird table and the conservatory that he built. When my grandparents finally decided to move to a smaller house in the town because they were getting older, my Grandad made an exact replica of the new house floor plan to scale, along with to scale models of all their furniture, so that they could plan the layout of their house months in advance of moving in.  

My Grandad was also one for his routine. Lunch and dinner were always served at the same time every day in his house and an hour before both, his little digital watch would go off to notify us all that “the bar” had opened. During these two hours of the day it was perfectly respectable to quaff a few drinks but after that point the bar was very clearly closed and not to be opened again. In some respects things had to be just so for Grandad. He made the sign to hang in the porch way of the old school house, with a no entry symbol around a high heeled shoe, so that he could protect his wooden, parquet floor. It was a constant source of anxiety for him that some nincompoop would totter her way across that floor in ridiculous heels and unwittingly damage his floor.  

Sometimes Grandad's particular ways would drive us all potty. He would never believe my sister that she hadn't lost his prized pair of secateurs, and quiz her about the location of the secateurs for years and years. He would never let me open the window in the back of his car however car sick and pale I became because he didn't like to have a breeze on the back of his neck. I will always remember my mother's exasperation as she came off the phone the day that we were heading off on holidays because Grandad had phoned her up to say “don't forget the only really important thing you need to remember is PMT – passport, money, tickets” She was growling with the indignation of being a mother of four and still needing to be told such things. Yet it is precisely those exasperating things that we miss so dearly now. Whenever I am packing for abroad his “PMT” comes racing back to me.  

The other evidence of Grandad's role in the navy were the photo albums. A trip to Granny and Grandad's was not complete without pulling out the photo album. Before the holiday snaps in Spain, Turkey and France, or mesmerizing pictures of my own mother as a child with her tight curls and self-conscious stance, there were collections of black and white photos of Grandad in uniform, meeting glamorous dressed ladies and posing in groups of faces with names of people I would never know. And then of course there was the photo of my grandparents wedding with my Granny in her long silk gown and my Grandad in his uniform walking through the archway of swords held up by his fellow service men. That photo stood in pride of place on my Granny's bureau and still does to this day. 

Granny and Grandad did everything together in the time that I knew them. I know there must have been long period of time when they were apart when he was in the navy, but they were never apart in my memories of Grandad. I don't recall any open displays of affection between the two of them. They were simply just in cahoots. They understood each other and agreed with each other in most things. They knew their roles in everything they did. Cooking was my Granny's department. Washing up was my Grandad's. Feeding the birds was my Granny's role. Playing ricabee and sevens with us children was Granny's department, as was reading stories to us every morning. Discussing politics with us grandchildren in later years was my Grandad's role and Granny deferred to him.

When I think about Grandad I realise now that his life almost spanned a whole century. I remember him pointing out the hole in the wall in our local bank and commenting to me that once upon a time that would have been inconceivable to him when he was young. But he was not left behind by technology. He loved to be one foot ahead of the game. He had the digital watch before everyone else. He mastered the use of the video, and used it to record his favourite television programme “MASH”. He understood how cefax worked on the computer and regularly perused its pages when cefax first came out. Granny left all of that to him and is still under the impression that Grandad is the only one who could master a video control.  

But there must have been elements of our modern lives that he found difficult. He was quite a traditional man; Went to Westminster school as a boy; Worked his way through a career in the Navy; Married; Two respectable daughters. Yet neither daughters were so conventional and both of them had their wild side. I wonder how he really felt about my mother as a teenage mum, or my parents divorce 10 years later. I'm sure he must have been baffled at mum's first boyfriend after the divorce, a gentle giant with long hair and a laid back outlook on life. Then his grandchildren grew up and we were even more of a wild bunch of fun loving rebels. It all must have felt a far cry from the world he knew so well. Yet I know he and Granny loved us all and we worked hard to protect him from the extreme elements of our rebellion. It is sad for me now that he never did get to see how we all turned out and where our lives led. I think he would be much reassured if he could see us all now.  

So Dennis Cambell: who was he to me? He was a tall, slim man, who was always well turned out with his silk scarf around his neck and his dappled green-yellow jacket. My sister once compared him to Fred Astair and he certainly had that twinkle about him. He had the greatest smile and when he smiled his eyes would light up with kindness. He was a quirky, clever funny man who made me feel loved and yet also he was a man who had more serious things on his mind. I felt he knew stuff that I didn't know and had common sense in how to get stuff done. He was just my Grandad.