Dr Terry Glanvill was a legend in his lifetime. His full name was Alfred Terry Heath Glanvill, and his father was a doctor in Chard. By the time Terry was eleven, he had won boxing championships and without training, he swam across the River Erme - which was notorious for cross currents - for a mile and a half in under forty five minutes. He was a pupil of Allhallows School in Honiton and then Rousdon and become a house prefect excelled in boxing and played rugby for the school.

Dr Terry qualified at St Bartholomew’s in 1944 and served in the 6th Airborne Para Field Ambulance during the war. In 1949 he started working as a general practitioner in Honiton with Dr Catherine, his partner and wife. Terry was Honiton’s longest serving town councillor and he was elected Mayor three times as well as a district councillor. He was the President or Chairman or member of dozens of town organisations and clubs and often attended two or three meetings in one evening.

Dr Terry loved prize giving and presentations and proved it by donating twenty three chains of office and forty cups to local organisations. He was always prepared for a newspaper photocall and kept a variety of uniforms that he could wear for any occasion in the boot of his car. In the course of his life, he met many VIPs including Princess Margaret, Princess Alexandra and Pope John Paul II. He was a great ambassador for Honiton and promoted the town wherever he went in the world.

Terry was renowned for picking up litter and sweeping the High Street especially after wedding guests had thrown confetti outside the church. He was sometimes seen playing hopscotch by himself in the middle of the night on the paving slabs outside The Grove. In the 1980s he came up with the idea of racing woodlice while studying animal and insect behaviour at a summer school at Nottingham University. He designed and patented an eighteen lane circular racetrack and raised hundreds of pounds for local charities. He raised thousands for charity by running the London Marathon four times.

Terry served in the St Johns for thirty seven years and was a medical officer with the International Rescue Corps, working in earthquake zones in Armenia, Bosnia and Mexico. At the age of seventy-one he was the surgeon on a cargo passenger ship which sailed 20,000 miles through the Bay of Biscay.

Dr Terry had wise words for his younger patients. He advised them to prepare for old age by choosing a hobby to occupy them in retirement. He said that ‘old age was not a time in life but a state of mind and if you think you’re old, you will be’.

Terry died aged seventy five after suffering a heart attack shortly after attending a meeting at Honiton Hospital.