Scholar who battled odds....

The walls of Les Reynolds home in Chadwell St Mary are lined with pictures of Sir Winston Churchill.

"A giant of a man," says Les. It takes one to know one.

Les' own struggles and achievements have a Churchillian element about them. His battles against well-nigh impossible odds and entrenched prejudices almost defy belief.

These struggles lasted 17 years. In the end, like the much-shorter struggle of World War 2, they had a sort of happy ending.

Les was made an MBE, he hobnobs with royalty, is a member of the great and the good. In the world of the docks, not just here but in Europe, he remains a towering figure.

Yet even at 78, in comfortable enough retirement with his Amy (his delightful wife of 57 years), with his books and his collection of 200 prize neckties, the battles go on.

Les believes that he is a wronged man. Certainly, when you examine the evidence, the chronicles of jealousy and bigotry are convincing -- and chilling.

"I'm not embittered," says Les, quaffing a lunchtime glass of red wine and quite clearly not a man whose life has been unduly blighted by the past.

"It's just that it's not too late to put things right." By way of righting these wrongs, Les has used every device -- writing to newspapers, chasing MPs and councillors, presenting his carefully-documented case to anybody who will listen.

The case is compelling enough, but there is something else going on here, you feel, another dimension to these labours for justice.

As with Les's hero Winston Churchill, there is almost a mental need to struggle against the odds. Once a fighter, always a fighter.

Les was pitched into the life's fray at the age of 16, when his father, a Thames lighterman died. The family had dockwater in their blood.

"I was born 400 yards from the Tilbury dock gate," Les will tell you. "My grandad was a docker. Amy's father was a docker. Amy's grandfather was a docker."

Les, however, was clever, he passed his 11-Plus, and his father said: "This child at least is not going to go into the docks." Sadly, he was wrong.

"When Dad died, Mum was left with ten shillings a week widow's pension," says Les. "I had to forget about any further education."

This didn't stop him qualifying as a navigator in the war. His grasp of trigonometry helped. So did the job description that he gave the RAF authorities -- "river pilot".

Then the war ended and he returned to the drudgery of a tallyman's work at the docks. "Dockers are the best people in the world," says Les. "When my father died they presented my mother with a biscuit tin with £84 in it.

"It's a terrible existence," he says. "And the only relief is when you line up in the rain for a greasy mug of tea. I'd flown Wellingtons, I'd had a batman in the RAF -- and what did I come back to? -- the morning call."

There was just one way out of the dock gate -- education. And so, with Amy's blessing, Les embarked on a course of hard labour far more arduous than anything the dockyard cranes could dump in his direction.

After a day's work, Les would return home and work into the night at his books. There were no grants, no sabbaticals, no refunds on the midnight oil burnt. If Les sat an exam he had to take an unpaid day off work.

His string of qualifications (Economics, Port Operation, Shipping, Forwarding) renders him a veritable ports professor.

Yet the years went by and the midnight oil went on burning. Was Les smitten by study for its own sake? "Not at all," he says, with some force.

"I'd (be sitting studying and) hear the TV going through the wall. The urge to say 'Ach, that's it', to just give it all up and be like everybody else, was strong."

Every time he armed himself with a new academic certificate and presented himself for employment he met a blank wall.

Various excuses were offered, but Les has a simpler explanation: "The stigma of being a docker was just too strong."

Thus 17 years went by. Exam, rejection, exam, rejection. . . . "I was getting pretty desperate," Les says.

Then, in 1964, he was invited to join the staff of Greys College. The principal was the late Ivor Williams, who hired Les with the words: "I don't know if it's because I'm a Liverpudlian, but I've inherited a love of shipping."

As director of port studies at the college, Les made the leap in quick time from lonely, neglected scholar to one of the most significant figures in the European shipping and docks industry.

MPs, dock bosses, civil servants from Whitehall, industry workers from as far away as Bournemouth and Ipswich, beat a track to the college.

"The course was so well attended we had to ask in the police to control traffic," recalled Ivor Williams, in his memoirs.

The accolades followed swift and fast, including membership of the National Ports Council and the Churchill Scholarships board, and the MBE.

Les was a lot more than just an inspiring teacher, he was, in the Old Testament language which he himself likes to quote, a voice crying in the wilderness.

The British docks industry had to realise the nature of the technical revolution that was overtaking it before it was too late.

One of the most telling tributes to Les came from a Dutch rival, Klaas de Wall: "For 35 years I tried my hardest to persuade shippers to use Amsterdam and my aim was to see Britain become an offshore island. . . . The fact that I failed was down to one person, Les Reynolds."

Only in one area did Les Reynolds go unacknowledged. Again, to quote principal Ivor Williams: "(Les's) successes were ignored by the County, who failed to congratulate Reynolds on his MBE, and successes with the ports Operation Course . . . nor did they admit that they had been wrong to oppose his appointment."

Ivor Williams retired in 1971. His successor was very different. After his arrival, all promotion ceased. Les's explanation is simple: "academic snobbery . . . the jealousy and bigotry that existed among academics and the academic bureaucracy."

The academic establishment can be as haughty and cliquish as any family of aristocrats. Once a docker, always a docker. Les, quite simply, was "not one of us".

The practical result is that Les Reynolds has retired with a case full of medals from docks all over Europe -- but the pension of a junior lecturer.

He has just received a long, letter from old friend, Mary Churchill, Sir Winston's daughter. It wouldn't be too fanciful to imagine that this particular correspondent recognises similarities with her father.

While he waits for the call, however, some acknowledgement of his achievements from the County of Essex might be nice.

Quoting the Old Testament once again, Les Reynolds MBE reminds us: "A prophet is not without honour save in his own country" -- or county.

Service -- Les Reynolds with a souvenir of his days during the war. He went on to become a 'voice in the wilderness' for the UK's dockers and has many accoldades to his name, including MBE

Picture: DAVE HENDERSON

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.