John Hylton Watts’ life story is eulogised in a 25 December 1959 article about him in Commercial Motors magazine’s online archive.
https://archive.commercialmotor.com/article/25th-december-1959/18/john-hylton
To summarise, he began as an apprentice in his father’s ironmongery business in Lydney, not far from Chepstow. After WW1 he started and grew a number of bus services that eventually covered most of south Wales and a fair part of the southwest of England. The company had assets worth £411 million when it was nationalised in 1950. By then he was moving into the haulage business in Africa. By the time of this article he was 69 but still working, driven in more ways than one; it concludes, “he is driven to his office at Chepstow (a small mansion standing in 20 acres) in his Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce.”
In 1961 he was elected as a Verderer and Inclosure Commissioner of the Royal Forest of Dean. The Verderers were set up by King Canute and were responsible for guarding the monarch’s interest in the Forest. There are only ever four Verderers. Originally that meant looking after “the vert and the venison”, but by this time the role was essentially honorary.
He was a patron of the Royal British Legion in Lydney, where he’d always lived. The clock on the front of their building was placed there in Watts’ memory in the year after his death in 1972.
He had been a director of Chepstow racecourse, and a race in his honour was run there during the August Bank Holiday meeting from 1978 to 1996.