A desperately sad day for those of us who knew Les, although probably the vast number of youngsters in ATC now will not have heard of him, which is their loss. It always astounds me how true characters can simply vanish, but with the turnover of staff it is inevitable.
I could write pages about the 10 years I spent working with Les. I was never on his watch, but used to spin with them on afternoons. We had fun times galore!
One afternoon Mary Took shouted that there was an emergency; Les leapt out of the supervisors' chair and crashed down in the middle of the approach room. When he got up he bore an extraordinary resemblance to Captain Mainwaring, with his tie round his neck and his glasses over his ear!!
Then there was the day Les brought up a group of wet-behind-the-ears BA command course types. He'd told them that the Supervisor had to be fully aware of what's going on both in the tower and approach but just as he arrived in the tower there was the screaming roar of a Sea Fury (or something similar) doing a barrel roll along runway 05R, which Les certainly did not know about! The SVFR Director had conveniently cleared it "across Heathrow, along runway 05, not above 1500ft", with very strong emphasise on the "not above". The pilot got the message and we all enjoyed the show. Poor Les probably had lots of phone calls later!
The French were on strike and as the afternoon watch arrived there was a definite lull in the traffic with nothing in the approach sector. We found that Les was on his way so we fixed with the TMA guys to hang on to any traffic for 5 minutes and we all hid behind the radar consoles. Les came bowling in to take over watch to find the entire London Approach room empty!!
When Les retired, I was on my first afternoon spin with B watch. They told me that there would be a small send-off "do" the following evening and that I should wear a bow tie. I never took B Watch seriously so my wife made me a huge bow-tie, about 2 feet wide, out of psychedelic orange and blue material. Of course, when I arrived at work dressed like a circus clown, all of B Watch were wearing their best DJs, frilled shirts and smart bows. At least Les saw the funny side of it!
The bit about Les's suit was a classic. Les was walking around in the approach room and one of the controllers intercommed his colleague and said: "Will Les' suit ever come back into fashion?" A short while later there was a level bust and an incident. When the official transcript appeared sometime later it included all intercom and that sentence had, in the remarks column, the standard phrase "not believed to have and relevance to the incident". When Les retired, one of the controllers involved in that incident wrote "I shall miss the Sidney Greenstreet suits, Les".
I hope you're laughing up there, Les.... What a joy it was to work with you in those Golden Days 30+ years ago. Thanks for the great times.
I offer my very sincere condolences to Les's family. Watch the sky each night - that star twinkling so brightly is probably Les..
RIP and God Bless Les.
Brendan McCartney