After hearing of the death of Sir Brian Urquhart, a soldier and dedicated peacekeeper in the UN who was born in Bridport, mayor Cllr Ian Bark, was touched to find out more about his life.

Sir Brian Urquhart died on January 2 at the age of 101 at his home in Tyringham, Massachusetts.

Cllr Bark said: "His long and eventful life was, I'm ashamed to admit, something I was completely unaware of. His was a life truly well lived and his legacy will continue to have a profound impact for years to come."

Here's what the mayor found out.

Sir Brian was born in Bridport in 1919 in his grandfather's house. His father was Murray Urquhart and his mother Bertha, nee Rendall, a schoolteacher born in Bridport. The family home was at 48 West Allington.

He was brought up by his mother after his parents' marriage broke up and his education began as the only boy among 200 girls at Badminton School for Girls in Bristol, where his mother was a teacher. He won a scholarship to Westminster School in London and went onto Christ Church, Oxford University. After two years at university, the Second World War began in 1939 and he joined the British Army.

During training camp in 1942, his parachute partly failed in the last moments of a jump; he recalled looking up at its "tulip shape" as he plunged into a ploughed field. Severely injured, he was told he might never walk again. But within a year he had re-joined his unit and saw action in North Africa and Sicily.

In 1944, as a senior intelligence officer, Sir Brian, unsuccessfully opposed Operation Market Garden, an ill-advised airborne assault to seize bridges over the Rhine. Its failure cost 17,000 Allied casualties. The episode was chronicled in a 1974 Cornelius Ryan book, "A Bridge Too Far," and in a 1977 Richard Attenborough film of the same name in which his character was named Major Fuller, to avoid confusion with General Urquhart.

Later in the war, searching for German atomic research sites, he stumbled upon the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

After the end of the Second World War, he joined the United Nations (UN) at its birth in 1945.

Cllr Bark added: "It was here that he would truly make his mark.

"Whilst peacekeeping was not originally envisioned for the United Nations, Sir Brian, as deputy to Dr Bunche, the American who won the Nobel Peace prize for mediation of the 1948 war in the Middle East, firmly believed in the UN as an arbiter of international disputes. He was instrumental in creating its peacekeeping forces, calling them an army without an enemy - only difficult clients.

"It was Sir Brian who decided that UN troops should wear blue helmets to distinguish them from actual combatants, and he articulated the principles of their peacekeeping operations, saying they should enter a war zone only with broad political support and a mandate to remain above the conflict, to use force only as a last resort and ultimately to end hostilities and facilitate negotiations.

"In a post-war era rife with revolutions, regional disputes and Cold War conflicts, darkened by fears of an East-West nuclear conflagration, Sir Brian deployed and often led his lightly armed peacekeepers into war zones in the Middle East, Congo, southern Africa, Kashmir, Cyprus and other places. They sometimes failed to defuse explosive situations, but often succeeded in easing tensions and assisting refugees.

"Whilst working for the UN he was kidnapped and severely beaten by rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo, leapt out of an airplane at 1,200 feet and survived when his parachute partly failed as he landed. He led peacekeeping forces in many war zones. He once downed a bottle of whiskey to avoid freezing on a sub-zero flight through a blizzard to find Yasser Arafat.

"Until his retirement in 1986, he worked as a principal adviser to five UN secretaries-general, directed 13 peacekeeping operations, recruited 10,000 troops from 23 countries and instituted peacekeeping as one of the core tenets of the organisation.

"In his memoir, A Life in Peace and War, about the UN's earliest days, Sir Brian wrote: 'We were all optimists…who believed in the possibility of organising a peaceful and just world'.

"But most of all he was — especially in retirement — a devoted family man, a beloved patriarchal rock to his 30 descendants and second wife of nearly 60 years, Sidney, famous for her beauty and a tolerance of pretentiousness that was even lower than Brian's. They adored one another and sparred merrily. She survived him by just one day.

"Sir Brian Urquhart's life was one truly well lived and as a son of Bridport his legacy fits perfectly with our Citizens Charter and Rights Respecting Town principles."

Read Cllr Bark's blog here.