THE 30 years after the Second World War were an extraordinarily difficult period for the Prison Service in England and Wales. The prison population rose from 15,000 to 40,000; the prisons estate had suffered considerable war damage, and the staff were ill prepared for the challenges that lay ahead.

Fortunately, a group of staff were recruited between 1946 and 1950 who had developed into capable leaders through their wartime experiences; and this group succeeded in meeting the crises of overcrowding and security which almost overwhelmed the service.

Lyn Davies was one of that group. He was energetic and confident, well-liked and respected by his staff. His peers also held him in considerable esteem and elected him chairman of the Prison and Borstal Governors Representative Organisation, 1969-72.

He had a clear appreciation of the importance of the basics for prisoners: food and plenty of positive activity. He was shocked at the low standards of catering he found in 1947, and was proud of the improvements that he and his colleagues achieved over the next three decades in prison catering.

In 1956 he was appointed Governor of the new open prison at Bela River. The development of open prisons was an imaginative response to the huge growth of the prison population, but establishing one in an area like Milnthorpe, on the edge of the Lake District, which had no previous experience of hosting a penal establishment, was a daunting task. Davies undertook it with panache and success. He spent long hours meeting community groups to build up trust, and prisoners were quickly involved in a large number of community projects, from clearing snow from school playgrounds to helping to clear roads around Shap. By the time he moved on, Bela River was well established.

As Governor first of Chelmsford and then of Strangeways, Davies was faced with quite different challenges of high security and of scale. Chelmsford was a prison coping with notorious gangsters, including all the train robbers for the period of their appeals against their long sentences. These were the years when two of the train robbers escaped, to be followed by the spy George Blake, who escaped from Wormwood Scrubs. This led to the Mountbatten report into prison security.

While successfully running Chelmsford, Davies found time to take a course in criminology, and the resulting qualification was a source of great pride to him after his rather disastrous academic beginnings. To have been governor of these two difficult prisons during these years without disaster was no mean achievement.

Some of his finest work was delivered in that most challenging of environments, the Northern Irish prisons. In his years in Northern Ireland, he encouraged the development of professionalism in the Northern Ireland service and regained some of the control over the prisons which was inappropriately being exercised by the military and the police. It was the exceptionally difficult period of the hunger strikes and dirty protests, and certainly there was no reduction in the pressure on Davies in the years leading towards his retirement.

William Islwyn Davies was born in Newport, Monmouthshire. Because of the First World War he was brought up by his maternal grandparents. Educated at Newport Grammar School, he left without formal educational qualifications in 1932. He joined the Civil Service in 1937 as a GPO telegraphist, so when war broke out he was immediately allocated to the Royal Corps of Signals.

He flourished in the Army and was soon commissioned; he saw service on D-Day and in the battles across France and Germany with the Third Reconnaisance Regiment. Wounded on a number of occasions, he was promoted to captain while on active service.

In 1946 he found himself responsible for two camps of 6,000 displaced persons, and was able to effect substantial improvements in their living conditions. This experience may have planted the seeds of his future career.

After demobilisation, he returned to the GPO as a telegraphist, but quickly recognised that the war had revealed in him an ability to command which would be little used there. An advertisement for assistant governors in the Prison Service caught his eye, and he soon began his service at Portland Borstal, transferring to Feltham in 1950.

He was promoted to deputy governor in 1953 and sent north to Durham Prison, to give him experience of working with adult offenders. In 1956 he was posted to the Bela River on promotion to Governor Class 3. He returned to his native Wales in 1960 to govern Swansea Prison — where he was but one of many Davieses on the staff and among the prisoners.

In 1964 he was selected for promotion to Governor Class 2 and sent to Chelmsford. Further promotion followed in 1968 when he was sent as Governor Class 1 to take charge of Strangeways in its centenary year. He was there until 1972 when he was asked to join the Prisons Inspectorate.

In 1974 the Northern Ireland Prison Service sought a director of prison operations and Davies filled that challenging post from 1975 to 1977, when he finally retired from public service.

In retirement he undertook a number of projects, drawing on his extensive prison experience. He inspected the main prison in Cyprus and undertook a review of Rampton Special Hospital.

He was very active in his church and locally, and was chairman and then treasurer of the Llanhennock Cheshire Home for more than 15 years. One of his regular commitments was to return to Hexham on Remembrance Sunday to join the Northumberland Fusiliers, with whom he had fought. He retained an active interest in the Prison Service, keeping in touch with his old colleagues through the Retired Prison Governors Association.

He is survived by his wife, Elsie, and their three sons.

Lyn Davies, prison governor, was born on April 15, 1916. He died on November 7, 2003, aged 87.