A TIRELESS community worker who was a medical worker on D-Day has died aged 91.

Robert Elmore, an Emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, set up the Elmore Committee to support ex-offenders and sat as chairman of many influential groups such as Oxford Community Health Council.

His nephew Ken Hastings said he was much-admired and gave his life to serving society.

In his later life, Mr Elmore volunteered with Witney-based charity Guideposts Trust, providing community care for those with dementia, learning difficulties or mental health problems for 20 years.

Robert Elmore was born in April 1924, in South London. He had an older brother and sister and his father was regularly away at sea.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to Dorset but after the death of his father, he returned to London to seek employment and found work with electronics company GEC.

He was called up for military service but, as a devout pacifist, his non-combatant status was accepted by military authorities and he was posted to 225 Parachute Field Ambulance as a surgeon’s assistant.

In the early hours of D-Day, June 6, 1944, he parachuted into France and set up an aid centre at a chateau, which soon filled with casualties until field hospitals were established. He continued to serve in Belgium, Holland and Singapore, before being discharged in 1947.

After being awarded a English Literature degree from Keele University, he worked as a lecturer at City of London College, where he developed a special interest in constitutional and administrative law, with special regard for health and social care.

In 1965, he accepted a lecturing appointment at the Department for Extra Mural Studies at Rewley House, Oxford, and set up the Elmore Committee in 1968. It ran a boarding house for ex-offenders in Lake Street and the project is running to this day. He became increasingly involved with voluntary social care agencies, serving as chairman of the Oxford Diocesan Council for the Deaf, the Council for Voluntary Services in Oxford and the Oxford Community Health Council, a body which was his brainchild. He also chaired the Standards Committee of the Oxfordshire County Council.

The Department at Rewley House was granted college status in 1990 and subsequently was renamed Kellogg College. Mr Elmore was one of the founding fellows and became an Emeritus Fellow in 1991, the year he retired.

Mr Elmore, who never married and had no children, died on January 8 at the John Radcliffe Hospital.