Len Mount was born on 28th May 1942 in Herne Bay, Kent, to a military family. His father served in the Royal Artillery was continually being posted to different locations, and so the family was always on the move. Len reckoned he held the record for the number of schools attended – 32 in all!
At the age of eight he lived in Egypt where he first became interested in the hobby of model flying that was to become the major part of his life. When the Suez crisis arose in 1950, he was evacuated along with other military families back to the UK. Back in England he went through a succession of schools but as he told me “my interests were never that well appreciated by my teachers”.
Len served in the army for 8 years, leaving in 1966 to live with his father in Maidstone Kent. He started work at Rochester open-air swimming pool as a superintendent, which he thought was a great cushy job. As he told me “all I had to do was to make sure there was no one at the bottom of the pool.” Little did he know that the person he was to marry often sat on the hill overlooking the pool to have lunch.
Len and Olive were married a year later - a marriage that was to last right up until Olive’s passing in February 2017.
As anyone who met them both, Len and Olive were devoted to each other, and she became not only a soul mate but someone who was pretty handy with making blades and fuselages from Len’s moulds.