Former mayor and passionate member of the Melksham community Mrs Sheila Grace Wilkinson has died, aged 90.

For 40 years she devoted herself to helping the town through various groups, organisations and committees, and was the town council’s current longest-serving member.

After moving to Sandridge Road, Melksham, in 1975 with husband John and their two children, the couple soon got involved in the community, and from 1995-97 she served as mayor.

Mrs Wilkinson, nee Baker, was a founding member of the Twinning Association, secretary of the Melksham Gardeners’ Society and a committee member of the Friends of Melksham Hospital.

She was also a trustee of the Rainbow Day Centre and Eleemosynary charity as well as chairman of governors at Forest and Sandridge School.

She ran the Melksham Council of Community Service and was instrumental in raising money for the first community minibus.

Her daughter Margaret Dent, 62, said: “She always wanted to work for the community and do the best for it, she devoted herself to it; she was selfless and genuinely wanted to give and help people.

“She had a strong personality and was very determined. I realise now what an amazing woman she was, nothing stopped her if there was a problem.”

Mrs Wilkinson, who also has two grandsons, Simon and Jonathan, was born in Gospel Oak in Hampstead on April 1, 1924 and was the youngest of three sisters, with siblings Kathleen and Margaret.

Their father Henry died after a short illness when she was nine months old, leaving her mother Lina to bring up the family alone.

During the Second World War she was evacuated to Rutland, but later returned to London where she got a job in the offices of the London Midland and Scottish Railway Company at St Pancras station, where her father had worked as a railway dining car attendant.

When bombs hit the family home they moved to Huntingdonshire, where she met her husband John. The couple married on October 1, 1949 and went to live at a farm in Hickleton, Yorkshire, where daughter Margaret and son Peter were born.

When Mr Wilkinson got a job as a crop husbandry lecturer at Lackham College they moved to Melksham. Mr Wilkinson died in 2002 after 53 years of marriage.

Towards the end of 2013 Mrs Wilkinson’s health began to deteriorate and she moved into the Brookside residential home in Melksham.

After a period in hospital in Bath, she moved to the Wingfield nursing home in Trowbridge, before her death on December 31.

Her funeral was held on Tuesday at St Michael’s Church in Melksham.