HE was a local boy made good. Coming from a docks family, he became a star of the stage in the West End and New York and of the silver screen, a noted producer and between it all served with an elite unit in RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War.

His name is Richard Dunn, and if he is not well-known now, his family, who still live in Newport, would like to change that.

His great-nephew David Wall lives off Commercial Road, Pill’s main thoroughfare. “He had a colourful and distinguished life but came from humble, working-class beginnings and we'd like people to know about it.”

Richard was born in 1909, when Newport was one of the greatest ports in the world. Pill was at the bustling heart of it and the Dunn family were well-known as David explains: "The Dunns were the main operators of tugboats in the docks, until their last one was scrapped in the late 1970s. It was hard work. My grandfather's generation and before might not come home for days if there was work to be done and the docks were that busy then.”

Richard decided the family firm wasn't the life for him and chose to do something different. The talented youngster had taught himself to play piano and as in those days, David notes: “Pill had at least 40 pubs and most of them had a piano - there would have been plenty of work".

The lure of the entertainment world was eventually too great for Richard and he left Newport when he was 18 for the lights of London. His first stage role was playing Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream.

By 1933, the baritone-voiced actor had joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company who still perform the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. It was to be a constant for much of his life from then on. He played major roles like Antonio in The Gondoliers. He also featured in Trial by Jury and The Yeomen of the Guard, touring with the company in New York.

But war was to interrupt his promising theatrical career. He left the company in March 1941 to join the RAF.

He qualified as a navigator and was originally based in Egypt but later served in Pathfinder squadrons flying missions over Germany. During the war Bomber Command suffered a 50 per cent casualty rate, but the Pathfinders were at even more risk than the bombers. They were the first aircraft over a target, often flying alone without escort. It was their job to find the target and mark it with flares or small bombs. As navigator, the success of the mission would rest on Richard's skill at guiding the bomber to where the attack was to take place.

The role played by the RAF bomber force had made David sometimes reluctant to trumpet his uncle’s role, but says: “I feel now that what Bomber Command endured has been recognised. They were never given a medal after the war, in many ways they were forgotten, because what they did was controversial. It's only recently Bomber Command has been honoured with things like the memorial in London. That's another reason why now I feel Richard's story should be told.”

After having been demobbed at the end of the war, Richard took to the stage again, performing at the London’s Adelphi Theatre in 1949 as a singer in the musical play Tough at the Top. But it was film that would feature in the next chapter of his story.

Richard’s first appearance on the silver screen was the 1946 drama Caravan alongside the British star Stewart Granger in one of the most popular British releases of the year.

He also appeared in the 1949 comedy the Cardboard Cavalier, where Richard performed with the music hall star Sid Field and the British screen siren Margaret Lockwood.

But the best-remembered of his big screen work was Angels One Five. The 1952 film told the story of an RAF fighter squadron at the height of the Battle of Britain and starred Jack Hawkins and Michael Denison, two of the biggest names in British film at the time. It was among the top ten biggest films of 1952.

Wendy Wall remembers her father, Richard's brother, taking him to see her uncle in Angels One Five in Newport at the Olympia picture house on Skinner Street. "It was such an amazing experience to see him up on the screen in our town. I was so proud of him.”

The film explores the arbitrary nature of war in the air, where lives could be randomly snuffed out. This of course, echoed Richard’s own wartime experience in the RAF. David thinks Richard’s acting may have helped his great-uncle cope with what he had seen in wartime.

"I often wonder how they managed coming back to normal life after the war. I think Richard was lucky, despite what he had seen, because being an actor he had a form of escapism.”

He had some other theatrical roles including in The Best Damn Lie at the West End’s Winter Garden in 1957, but acting work then began to tail off for Richard and it marked another change of course.

David explains that Richard’s health began to get worse, and using his experience as an actor on stage and screen, he began giving elocution lessons.

Based in the salubrious Woburn Mansion in London, many of his clients came from abroad to be taught to enunciate in what was then seen as the ‘correct’ way as he would have learned to do many years before. Like many who escaped their humble beginnings at that time, his Newport accent would have been lost early on.

Although his Newport twang would have long disappeared, Richard still came home, Wendy explains. “Whenever he came to Newport he would go to sing at St Michael's church in Pill. His faith was very important to him” she says. “He was granted an audience with Pope Paul VI in 1965 and we still have the inscribed letter given to him to remember it by.”

He stayed true as well to the stage and to Gilbert and Sullivan, whose roles he had played before the war.

For the last ten years of his life Richard produced the Savoy operas for the Plymouth Gilbert & Sullivan Fellowship, where he was patron of the Plymouth Pavillion Theatre. His last production was an open-air performance of The Yeomen of the Guard for the city's 1970 Mayflower celebrations. He died in December 1970.

Wendy feels an “enormous sense of pride” in everything he achieved. She says: “In life, not many people are able to what they want to do, but he managed it. Most of us work as we have to, but for him to come from Pill and then achieve what he did, become a star of stage and screen, a producer and director and RAF officer, is incredible."

“I'm proud of all my family, but he deserves to be read about. I'm his next of kin, so I feel a real responsibility to make sure his story is told. I feel like I've done my bit."

David too feels that more should know about this inspirational Pill boy made good who escaped his humble origins and did extraordinary things: "I would love to see a plaque of some sort in the Riverfront theatre to tell people who he was, where he was from and what he achieved. It would tell them that they could do it too."