After dealing with cannibals and witch doctors, running the county council’s education department was child’s play for Droitwich councillor Dr David Muffett.

Muffett, born in 1919, spent the Second World War on almost continuous active service, being promoted to major by the time he was 22. He then joined the Colonial Administrative Service as a cadet and sailed out to Nigeria, where life was no less dangerous for him than in Egypt, Monte Grande or Palestine.

Becoming fluent in the Hausa, Muffett allowed nothing to stand in the way of justice and good administration. He claimed to have been one of only two Britons whose name passed into the native language – the phrase “Aka yi masa mafed” (literally “One did to him Muffett”) meant “Justice caught up with him”.

In 1960, justice caught up with a tribal chief called Tigwe of Vwuip, who was arrested for cannibalism. Tigwe had apparently been so impressed by the local tax collector’s ability to acquire money on demand that he killed and ate him, reasoning that by so doing he would inherit the poor fellow’s powers.  

Muffett explained: ”He had the shock of his life when he found out we disapproved. At the time we were due to have a United Nations mission visit the area, designated by the Secretary-General to oversee an election, and I wasn’t about to have one of them eaten. I considered it would have been a highly retrograde step.

“So I put Tigwe in jail until the delegation had departed beyond the reach of his culinary aspirations.”

Muffett was once shot at with poisoned arrows, all of which miraculously missed his 6ft 2in frame, though one lodged in the pommel of his horse’s saddle. On another occasion he was cursed by an ill-disposed witch doctor, who dropped dead the next day, greatly enhancing the Englishman’s standing among the local population.

Muffett  was made an OBE in 1960 and retired from what had by then become Her Majesty’s Overseas Civil Service three years later. He was awarded a research fellowship at Harvard’s Centre for International Affairs, where he became a friend of the deputy director, Henry Kissinger, the future national security advisor to American presidents.

He published several books then returned to England in 1978, settling in Droitwich. With the words of his first army major no doubt still ringing in his ears – ”Muffett, you are born to be a leader” – in 1980 he was elected to Hereford and Worcester County Council on a Conservative ticket.

Within two years he was chairman of the education committee, a role he held until 1993. By this time, the larger than life character was nearly as broad as he was tall. With a booming voice and bristling moustache, Muffett was described by the Daily Telegraph as looking like a cross between Falstaff and TV’s Captain Mainwaring.

Even though budgetary constraints were tight, he was determined to improve the pupil-teacher ratio, even if that meant drastic surgery in other areas. The Times Educational Supplement observed: “Depending on your taste, he runs the most cost-effective / mean education authority in the country” – a verdict Muffett took as a compliment.

Muffett gave short shrift to “pointy-headed bureaucrats” and took a tough line with the teaching unions. In 1987, after the NAS/UWT had called a half-day strike without giving notice, he successfully sued them for £48,000 under the Industrial Relations Act. Lighting a celebratory cigar outside the High Court he quipped: “I’m not anti-union, I’m pro-kids.”

In 1992, disillusioned with what he saw as the Conservatives’ betrayal of local government, he left the party, explaining in a letter to his electors in rural areas around Droitwich that although he could no longer support the government, he remained “a High Tory of the old school, one who ‘fears God and honours the King’ (and hardly anyone else besides)”. 

He was re-elected in 1993 as an independent. He died in 2007, having already, in the interests of accuracy, compiled his own obituary.