Family and friends are preparing to bid farewell to prominent hotelier Harry Pilgrim who has died at the age of 91, writes Leah Marshall.

Mr Pilgrim continued the family tradition of hotel ownership when he and his wife Valerie bought the Trelawn Hotel in Mawnan Smith in 1956 and then the nearby Meudon Hotel a few years later. His father had bought the Budock Vean Hotel when Mr Pilgrim was just a child and his grandmother had run the Nansidwell through the war years from 1938.

In 1937, while at St Joseph’s School in Streatham, London he watched from his dormitory window as the Crystal Palace burnt to the ground.

Before he began a life in the hotel trade, Mr Pilgrim had experienced the horrors of World War Two.

In 1943, during a cricket match at Downside Abbey School where he was a pupil, a Sea Hurricane crashed onto the pitch. The accident killed nine pupils. A pupil right next to Mr Pilgrim died in the accident.

In a piece written for the BBC he said: “We were in St Mary’s Catholic Church, Falmouth when Father John Fanning, parish priest, announced that we were at war with Germany.

“Although expected, few could have known what incredible and permanent changes lay ahead for us all, young and old.”

As Mr Pilgrim turned 18, he was exempt from fighting and going to war as he had a bad heart. Instead, he went to work for the Cornwall Electric Company, his job was to take electric to farms and make houses electrically safe after they had been bombed.

When the war ended, he was able to continue in his father’s footsteps and begin building his hotels, alongside following his passion for sailing.

It was in 1964 that Mr Pilgrim bought the Meudon Country Manor House, which he developed into a hotel and opened two years later.

An ardent sailor and member of the Royal Cornwall Yacht club, Mr Pilgrim taught blind people how to sail in Falmouth bay. This began after one of his friends lost their sight after their Spitfire was shot down during the war, and he joined Blind Sailing Week with the RCYC.

This is something his son, Mark, continued

Following in his father's footsteps, Mark Pilgrim, has done this for 30 years and will be back out on the waters this summer. Mark said: “He taught a gentlemen called Rusty Webb to sail in the 1960s, and he promptly went off to sail single-handedly across the world. He went off in fact, before Sir Francis Chichester.

“My father knew Sir Francis, they were great friends and he would stay here at Meudon right up until he died. In the last few days of his life he stayed here.”

Mark added: "Sailing was his passion and hotels were his stock in trade, his business. He was a tremendous man.”

The family run hotel found national fame in 2012 after appearing on TV's the Hotel Inspector, and it was then that Mr Pilgrim decided to step down after 50 years. However, according to Mark, his father never really stopped but "stayed in his chair and carried on." He was the chairman of the board until his death.

He is survived by daughters, Nicola Rangecroft, Tessa Rabett, Gaye Woods and Bridget King and son Mark and eight grandchildren with a great-grandchild due next month.

Gaye has been the director of the hotel since 2012, while Mark and Tessa maintain the gardens.

“We look after the magnificent gardens, eight and half acres that go down to the sea,” said Mark.

Mr Pilgrim died peacefully at home on January 12 in the house he had built himself within the the grounds of the Meudon Hotel. His funeral is to take place at St Edward's Church in Mawnan Smith on February 7.

Mark said: “The church has so much history for my father. His father gave the land for that church to be built on and my sisters Bridget and Gaye turned over the first sod when the church was built in 1964. When I came along, I was the first person to be baptised in the church.”