A storyteller who has helped to comfort bereaved people met the Queen to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a trust set up in memory of Winston Churchill.

Janet Dowling, from Ewell, went to Buckingham Palace for a reception to mark the anniversary of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust.

In 2006, the trust gave Ms Dowling a Churchill Fellowship which allowed her to investigate storytelling in the care of the dying and bereaved in American and Canada.

Since then she has worked as a bereavement volunteer for a charity, run workshops, written articles and created a performance set on the subject.

Ms Dowling said: "The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust gave me the opportunity to visit numerous projects in the US and Canada where storytelling was used in different ways to support bereaved people.

"It was an exciting experience, and enabled me to see how the work could be developed and applied with the dying and the bereaved, and with other groups of people who needed help to manage their feelings about their situation.

"This has been invaluable in my work with children and adults. Meeting the Queen is an important recognition of that work."

Leatherhead resident Ian Cowie also attended the reception because he went on a fellowship, through the trust, to investigate clinical pharmacology laboratories in 1976.

Mr Cowie has held senior posts in pharmacology and clinical diagnostics industries and set up a diagnostic products supplier called Point Of Care Testing Ltd.