My grandfather, Gilbert Razzell, died on January 4.

He was not a great man and neither was he a particularly big man. In many ways he was quite an ordinary person and save for one remarkable period of his life, he lived in Sussex for more than nine decades.

A passionate supporter of Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club, he never missed an edition of the Evening Argus and was a lifelong subscriber to the editorial opinion of the Daily Express - in many ways he could be considered an example of "the common man" of his time.

Yet my grandfather was anything but commonplace and as I remember him today, sitting with my own family in Brisbane, Australia, I realise quite how extraordinary he was and how profoundly his achievements have influenced my own life and that of my children.

My grandad's start in life was typical of the early 1900s, living with his three sisters in a two-up, two-down house in Ifield with an outside toilet and a railway line at the bottom of the garden. His father, once a master baker, died an invalid not long after the First World War.

He shared a bed with his siblings for much of his young life and did not know anyone who owned a car.

For his own family, however, he bought a house, established and managed a small, thriving business and saw his two children grow up to secure tertiary-level qualifications and work in the teaching profession despite leaving school himself at the age of 12 or 13.

As a young man he spent the early years of his married life serving as a signaller in India, sometimes monitoring enemy signals under conditions of physical and mental stress we would find hard to imagine today.

He came home a stranger to the people he loved, no longer familiar with the surroundings or routines that had nurtured him and to meet his first born child, whom he had never seen.

I loved my grandad and didn't tell him so often enough but I think he knew anyway. I admired him for his strength, his tenacity, his courage and his resilience.

He has given me the legacy of self-belief and "bloody-minded determination", a respect for the tradition of family and a fondness for liquorice allsorts.

-Clare Meyrick Brisbane, Australia