THE Wyke Regis widow of explorer Stephen Williams has shared some memories of her husband of 50 years.

Stephen Williams BEM, was an accomplished Arctic explorer and served in the Royal Navy for 28 years.

His widow Margaret said: “He was very loyal to his friends and had a wonderful sense of humour.

“He was a happy, kind man and his granddaughters adored him.”

The father-of-two was diagnosed with bowel cancer this year and died three weeks later on April 16.

Mr Williams and his expeditions were featured numerous times in the Dorset Echo, along with other regional newspapers which charted his team’s journey across the Arctic.

Mrs Williams still keeps copies of cuttings from the regional newspapers her husband's ventures were featured in to remember his achievements.

His first expedition was with Commander Angus Erskine on the 1972 Royal Navy Expedition to Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, which had not been explored since 1934.

Mr Williams and six others trekked thousands of miles across ice caps and glaciers, recording flora and fauna and climbed several unscaled mountain peaks and 7,500ft Commando Mountain, which owes its name to them.

He later led two expeditions himself.

The first was to Liverpool Land in Greenland in 1977, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year, where his team climbed a mountain and gained Buckingham Palace’s permission to name it Jubilee Peak.

He led another party to Ellesmere Island in 1980, where he discovered 700-year-old remains of a pre-Inuit village and made many important discoveries, including a 19th-century letter found under a cairn, which were placed in Canadian museums.

His daughter Lisa Rushby said: “On one expedition the team’s doctor got an eye injury and my father had to operate on him, with no knowledge of how to do anything like this.

“My father gave the doctor local anaesthetic so he could give him instructions on how to remove the eye and operate on it, without a second thought. It’s amazing.”

In 1981 Mr Williams was awarded the British Empire Medal for leadership in the 1980 expedition and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin visited HMS Osprey to present the award personally.

He was awarded the Royal Geograph-ical Society’s Ness Award for his work.

Before he retired, Mr Williams spent 15 years working for the Ministry of Defence on its Trident missile prog-ramme, but Lisa said her father still had a passion for everything ‘expedition’, whether restoring equipment or writing about the subject on internet forums.

She said: “My mum and I went to a car boot sale and picked up a 1937 primus stove for £2 because we wondered if Dad could get it to work.

“He worked all day in his shed and took it to bits, but when it was finished it looked brand new.

“That sparked his love for finding and restoring things like paraffin lamps.”

Lisa said her dad faced life with ‘extreme dignity’.

She said: “He was so organised he gave me a list a week before he died of all the things I had to do after he’d gone.

“One of the things was to notify everyone online and we received so many photos from all over the world of a lit lamp and a glass of wine in remembrance.

“He will be very missed.”

Margaret Williams said: “In the last two or three days before he died he said “I’ve had the most wonderful life.”

“And he had. He did so many things.”