RICHARD Dinsdale - a gentleman, dearly regarded in Gayle and across the Dales - has died aged 86.

Mr Dinsdale was a chapel stalwart. His funeral was of the like which is increasingly seldom seen. Gayle chapel was full, upstairs, downstairs and next door in the Sunday school room. Mourners spilled over into the street.

He died of suspected asbestosis related cancer, having spent a life working in the family’s 400-year-old building firm.

Known as Dickie Dinsdale, he was born into a Christian family. His father and his uncle were revered Methodist local preachers. His granddad Martin insisted on silence as scripture was read aloud at home. But as a youth he was, in his own words, a “naughty boy”. He once put nails in a bucket of plaster so it would fail. He put nettles in someone’s bed.

It was as a lad that he first believed. He and two other boys were up in the gallery during a mission at Gayle chapel. There was an altar call at the end of a spirit-filled sermon. He and Calvert Harrison went down.

He joined the chapel choir, where he met his wife, Anne. They sang around the circuit and beyond. He once said: “God doesn’t like a darley Christian.” Richard got to know generation after generation of Gayle folk through his work at the Sunday School. He said he was wanted for preaching, but he loved children. To his dying day he was proud of every one who’d come through.

“I know where they are, and they are grand human beings,” he said.

He served adults, too. He was known for gifts of baking and flowers. There he’d be, at the door in a time of mourning, holding sweet peas cut from the garden of the house he’d built next to the chapel.

He had learned to bake, as well as to wash and iron, during his time as a Royal Air Force conscript. “Taught me all sorts,” he said.

Life threw up major challenges. In the course of a year, Richard lost to death six close members of family. “It was rough,” he said, “it put some character on to me.” Richard became known for his great faith.

Long before he died he would say: “At my funeral don’t talk about me, talk about the master.” He would refer to Jesus as his “big Galilean”. “I don’t know what I’d have done without him,” he said.

Of chapel, Richard said: “I’m not much, but it’s made me who I am.”

He leaves behind a wife, Anne, two brothers, Peter and Thomas, three children, seven grandchildren and many more family members and friends. By Andrew Fagg