I have had a most interesting life in an industry which has seen enormous development and is so important to the people of this country," said Richard Godsil in a 1986 interview.

One of the founding fathers of the Irish dairy industry and a director of Board Bainne, where he served on the board for 29 years from 1961 to 1990.

He was also chairman of the Pigs and Bacon Commission, a director of the Irish Sugar Company, Erin Foods, BIM But he was most associated with Fry-Cadbury, where he was appointed joint managind director in 1954, establishing their chocolate crumb factory in Rathmore, Co. Kerry, and overseeing the building and development of their plant in Coolcock, Dublin.

"Dick Godsil was the most urbane and elegent of men," says Tony O'Reilly, who had "great recollections" of working with him in the early days of the dairy Board. "But I think his greatest achievement was to convince the people from Cadbury after the war that Rathmore was the centre of the earth."

Borne in Boherbue Co. Cork, where his father managed the local creamery, he started his working life after U.C.C. in a "travelling creamery" on the Dingle peninsula.

"When Cadbury came after the war to look at Ireland as a milk shed he managed to convince them that Rathmore was the centre of the universe," says Dr. O'Reilly. "You travel through the empty hills of Kerry and come across this amasing factory, the biggest milk crumb factory in the world and you realise that Dick Godsil must have had a rare degree of eloquence to convince them that right there was the only place in the world to put it."

He had, says Dr. O'Reilly "a great rapport" with milk suppliers. He also remembered that Dick Godsil was a member of the board of Bord Bainne.

Dick Godsil married Noreen Fuller from Listowel in 1936 and they had two children, Ann and Tony.