It is with a heavy heart that I write this article. Les sadly passed away on the 10th January 2023. He was only 70 years old. In our modern day world 70 is not considered old. We even say that 60 is the new 50 and 70 is the new 60. We live longer and many of us in our seventies are as fit as fiddles. So when a dear friend of ours passes away at that age we are doubly shocked.
The third shock we have is that we have lost a great guy with a heart of gold. He was a wonderful family man and a devoted member of our Rotary. Rotary exists to do charity work. We raise money to help people who are worse off than ourselves. It is a real privilege to be a part of that as we meet people of like minds who care.
Les was one of these. He cared. An example of this was that he brought the charity Mary’s Meals to our attention.
Mary’s Meals is a Scottish registered charity which sets up school feeding programmes in some of the world’s poorest communities, where hunger and poverty prevent children from gaining an education. Mary’s Meals now works with communities in 12 different countries around the world, providing a meal for more than a million of children every school day. One of Mary’s Meals’ projects is The Backpack Project, which encourages supporters to donate school backpacks and fill them with materials such as notebooks, pencils, flip-flops and T-shirts to send to children in Malawi.
This is all due to Les. Once a year, we hold World Porridge Day where we have a Breakfast meeting instead of an evening meeting. We all eat porridge and our Rotary donates to Mary’s Meals.
Les was a local boy, born and bred in Pembrey. He went to Pembrey Primary School and then Queen Elizabeth Grammar School in Carmarthen. He trained as an accountant.
He was always smiling and laughing and he had an aura of openness and welcome. One of our Rotarians described him as,” one of Nature’s gentlemen”. He was what we would call a genuine bloke. He joined the Llanelli Round Table. He joined our Rotary Club in 2011 and remained a member for the next 12 years until he passed away. He was awarded the Paul Harris Fellow for his services to Rotary. He became the President of our club from 2013 – 2014.
He cared very much about his community and believed in being involved and giving back to local people so that they would care by his example. He was a school governor of Glan-y-Mor School while his children attended there. He felt that we should invest in young people and he acted upon this belief. In fact Les began his charity work in 1975 when he became a founder member of Cefn Sidan Rotaract club started by Cefn Sidan Rotary Club to bring young people together for fellowship and charity work. Many lifelong friendships were formed as a result.
He was interested in restoration of local public buildings such as Court Farm , Pembrey and the Dome of the Pembrey airfield. Even if he was not sure that he would succeed he would still give it a go, as they say.
He loved playing football even as a child. His grandmother knitted him a scarf with all the colours of all the teams in the UK when he was at primary school. As an adult, he believed in helping young people through football and worked very hard to encourage local teams in Carmarthenshire. It was a sign of how they felt about him, when at his funeral the young men formed a guard of honour at the gate of the crematorium. He worked with the Carmarthenshire leagues.
Because of his work in the community, his involvement in the football leagues, his work with young people, his Rotary , he touched many hearts. The proof of this was at the funeral. There were about 200 people there to remember Les.
He will be sorely missed in our Rotary, as a man of integrity and a good friend. Although he is no longer with us, he will always be with us in our thoughts. As written in the Funeral programme,he will be “sadly missed by all his family and friends.”
Charles Darwin once wrote: “Man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.”
This was Les.
