A renowned cook whose cuisine became synonymous with Cup Match and county games also embodied the values of old St David’s.

Joyce “Dolly” Pitcher adhered to recipes from childhood, dominated by seafood.

She typically avoided written recipes, preferring to create from memory and taste.

Her father, a fisherman, began the family business when she was in her teens.

Ms Pitcher’s stall grew into a reliable Cup Match fixture, dispensing favourites from conch stew and mussel pies to shark hash and fish sandwiches.

“My mother and father were very famous cooks working for all sorts of people,” she told The Royal Gazette in a 1997 interview.

“My dad started the food stall and I would help him along with my mother — it was a family thing.”

Ms Pitcher and her partner, the late Stanley “Jack” O’Connor, who died in 2020, could be found tending the stall at Texas Road as well as at the sports events, where food and socialising featured as much as the game.

The daughter of Sydney and Joyce Pitcher, Ms Pitcher grew up in a vastly different St David’s, before it was reshaped at the end of the Second World War by the building of the US base, which displaced many St David’s islanders.

She told The Bermudian magazine in 2021: “They took all the land. They gave the people with a house another house but those without houses of their own had to rent.

“Old people took it hard when they had to lose their land. A lot of them couldn’t take it. They were used to gardening. They weren’t used to a stone house, you know what I mean? Those people passed on — some of them didn’t even get to enjoy their new homes.”

Her father gained a reputation as a chef for his work at the old US Naval Air Station, and would bring her along to help out once she was old enough.

Her mother also cooked, and the family catered for visitors after the Newport Bermuda Race.

Like many St David’s islanders, the Pitchers grew their own vegetables and kept livestock. Her father dived for conches and mussels, and Ms Pitcher remembered beginning to cook fish at the age of 6.

Mr O’Connor, her lifelong partner, was the son of a St David’s Lighthouse keeper, and the two cooked together on an industrial scale to serve at sports events.

Joe Gibbons, a chef and historian of Bermudian cuisine, said that the couple would toil through the night and catch a little sleep at their stall in the build-up to Cup Match.

“Everything was hands-on,” Mr Gibbons said, calling Ms Pitcher “the queen of St David’s seafood”.

“People loved her persona, with her signature red lipstick, but she had a real toughness behind it.”

Mr Gibbons said that he had studied cooking in the 1990s, and approached Ms Pitcher about working with her and learning about Bermudian food.

Initially sceptical, Ms Pitcher warmed to him, to the point where Mr Gibbons began to feel something “kind of like a family connection” as she shared stories about her life and growing up in St David’s.

“She felt like the grandmother I never had,” he said.

The two travelled to Washington in 2001 for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, where they delivered “Foodways” presentations.

Mr Gibbons recalled: “It was enormously successful. I could prompt her to talk about the past, her history and food. It was a highlight of our lives together.”

He said that cooking and sharing food was a basic value in a rural community where many lived frugally.

“In a relatively poor community, if you could take a casserole dish to a neighbour, that was how you helped out.

“That’s how we bonded as well — through food.”

Ms Pitcher and her partner had three children: daughters Tony and Nancy, and a son, Bill.

She had a tight bond with her late friend Sheila Gosling and her family, helping to cater large parties.

Ms Gosling earned fame for resorting to an old-fashioned washing machine to mix appropriate volumes of rum swizzle.

Ms Gosling’s daughter, Fiona Hatfield, said: “Ms Pitcher was a good soul, a wonderful friend of our family. She was very happy and jovial, and every time I mentioned my mother to her she had the biggest smile.”

Gregory Gosling, her son, recalled Ms Pitcher getting flown to the US by the Department of Tourism and winning a first-place award for her baked fish, “which shortly thereafter, she said to me with much pride, was replicated by many hotel chefs”.

St David’s Lighthouse held a special place for Ms Pitcher.

Aside from its link to Mr O’Connor, her parents had met there, as it was an ideal spot to watch the yachts coming in from the Newport race.

Like Ms Pitcher, the lighthouse is a testament to an old way of life at the East End.

Ms Pitcher told The Bermudian: “I’ve lived in St David’s all my life. I’m the same person. Some people change but not me.

“I’ve been myself. I’m the same old person. Practically all St David’s islanders are like that. They’re strong characters.”

• Joyce Dorothy Pitcher was born on June 20, 1932. She died in July 2023, aged 91