“Darling, I don’t want to tie myself down.”Anyway it’s a wonderful thing to be with a man whose wife doesn’t like sex, knowing you’re keeping a friend’s marriage together.”Sophie Parkin. Tourism, and its special environmental requirements in the coastal and rural areas of Pembrokeshire, was given high priority in his long list of public appointments. He served with the Keep Wales Tidy Committee, the Keep Britain Beautiful Campaign, and Clean World International.But it was as Chairman of the Wales Tourist Board from 1978 to 1984 that he came to prominence as a public figure. For this sterling service, it is said, Parry was made a life peer by James Callaghan in 1975.Be that as it may, Parry’s career blossomed soon afterwards. He was appointed to the Open University’s Advisory Committee on Studies in Education, which he served as Chairman from 1978 to 1984, and to the British Tourist Authority. From 1969 to 1978 he was Warden of the Pembrokeshire Teachers’ Centre.He once told me that he had been born a socialist and had imbibed its philosophy with his mother’s milk and that was confirmed in his autobiography, A Legacy for Life (1996).

A lifelong and largely contented member of the Labour Party, he stood as its candidate on four occasions: in Monmouth (against the Conservative Peter Thorneycroft) in 1959 and in Pembroke in 1970 and at the two general elections of 1974. Harold Wilson, the Labour leader, was expected to speak at a public meeting, but was several hours late reaching the hall and so, knowing his people as he did, Gordon Parry stood in the breach and entertained the audience with his considerable skills as a public speaker until Wilson eventually arrived. In the last three of these the seat was held, by a margin of about two per cent, by Nicholas Edwards, who was to become Secretary of State for Wales.It was during the campaign of October 1974 that, according to local folklore, he won his spurs as a Labour stalwart. He spoke with that striking burr, half-Welsh and half-Irish, that seemed to have grown out of the legendary past of Dyfed, land of The Mabinogion, which has seen countless waves of immigration from across the water.Educated at Neyland in the south of the county and below the Landsker line that marks the Englishry from the Welshry in these parts, he was brought up English-speaking but had great affection for the Welsh language and regretted that he was unable to speak it with any fluency.

The last time I saw him he had just been to a Welsh chapel in Cardiff, “because I love the sound of the language”; he had taught himself enough to hold conversations in it.He was by profession a teacher, trained at Trinity College, Carmarthen, and holding posts at primary schools in Pembroke Dock, Neyland and Haverfordwest before becoming, in 1952, Librarian and Housemaster at the County Secondary School in Haverfordwest. He held high office with a variety of national bodies in his native Wales, but it was his attachment to the Baptist faith of his youth and his passionate love of the county of Pembrokeshire that distinguished him from many politicos of his generation.Born near the small town of Narberth in 1925, he never moved very far from his native patch, delighting in the people and landscapes of the westernmost county of Wales and content to put his talents at the service of the local community. Gordon Parry was the very epitome of Christian Socialism, whose principles he endeavoured to put into practice during a lifetime of public service. She would collect seaweed to put in her own baths and was always experimenting by plastering fruit, flowers and vegetables over herself, then walking around her shop in Marylebone High Street – she called it feeding her skin. It wasn’t until she reached her sixties, however, that she started Martha Hill, her range of 100 per cent natural beauty care products, untested on animals – well before the Body Shop or Neal’s Yard.Whilst the Suez Crisis of 1956 was absorbing Britain, Martha met her third husband, an Egyptian diplomat, Monty Fakhary, who, instead of returning to Egypt at the end of his appointment, quit the embassy and stayed in England with Martha.

She put her spare energy into the farm – she introduced modern machinery but kept to organic methods and built up a prize herd of Guernsey cattle.When she found that the outdoor life was beginning to ruin her skin, she started investigating the old country ways of looking after the skin using only natural products. She had a devoted clientele of models, actresses and jetsetters for her original designs, and was also the first name in fashion to start doing larger sizes (her own frame having crept up), operating a thriving mail-order business.All the products for her Martha Hill beauty products range were, and still are, made completely from natural ingredients made up by her chemist in Switzerland. She opened London boutiques in the King’s Road, Chelsea, and Marylebone High Street (where I was her Saturday girl, aged 13) and was back to knitted fabrics, see-through and crocheted miniskirts and maxis. Sadly the marriage only lasted five years.By then the Sixties were beginning and Martha Hill could see the fashion explosion ahead. By 1947 she had a son, David, and was pregnant with her daughter, Sally, when her husband died in a flying accident.