FRANCIS Brett Young, the Worcestershire author of many best-selling novels between the two world wars, died in South Africa at this time 50 years ago, aged 69.

Berrow's Journal said this of him in its obituary of April 2, 1954: "The writer of nearly 40 books published within the space of 30 years, he succeeded Galsworthy as the most English of our representative novelists."

Francis Brett Young was born in North Worcestershire in 1884 and studied medicine at Birmingham University before entering his first career as a doctor.

During the First World War, he was posted to East Africa to serve as a medical officer to the Rhodesian Regiment.

After the war, however, the call of writing later became much stronger than medicine, and he gave up his post as a family doctor for life as a novelist. Like another GP-turned-author (A.J Cronin), he was to project a compelling and attractive image of doctors in his books. Best known of them is My Brother Jonathan, made into a classic black and white film.

Brett Young settled next on the Isle of Capri for 10 years, producing a dozen successful novels, but his love of his native Worcestershire brought him back to the county in 1933 when he bought an elegant Georgian manor, Craycombe House, near Fladbury.

Ever more popular novels continued pouring from his pen - some of them using settings in Worcestershire and the neighbouring Black Country. Especially popular with the reading public was his book The House Under the Water, which weaved its potent plot around the flooding of the Elan Valley in Mid-Wales to supply Birmingham with water.

Away from writing, Francis Brett Young devoted some time to fruit farming and to watching cricket at New Road where he sat on the Worcestershire CCC committee as a vice-president.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, he and his wife made the sacrifice of handing over their lovely home at Craycombe House to the British Red Cross for use as a soldiers' hospital.

They then lived as best they could in the Orangery, built in the gardens of the house and used by them previously as their music room.

The couple moved next to Cornwall where Brett Young compiled his epic The Island - a collection of 46 poems illustrating the history of England.

However, ill-health eventually took its toll on him, and he was advised to live permanently in South Africa where he spent the last nine years of his life.

But his final journey was to be back again to his beloved home county. His wife Jessica brought his ashes from South Africa for interment at Worcester Cathedral where a memorial plaque to the author can be found in the North Transcept.

Brett Young's last resting place fulfilled a desire expressed in his epic poems collection The Island

"And when they asked him where he would be, he bethought him of our church of St Mary at Worcester, saying 'I commend my body and soul to God and to St Wulstan.' And so here they buried him ..."