LESLIE Onslow celebrates his 90th birthday today. An engineer by profession, he is also one of the Onslow Boys – like late brothers Ken and Roy, he played for Swindon Town in the post-World War Two era. Mr Onslow, who lives near Old Town, is widowed and has two daughters, four granddaughters and a great-grandson.

“QUITE a few years, isn’t it?” said Les, with a wry smile, as he prepared to enter his tenth decade, writes BARRIE HUDSON.

Today he was due to celebrate his milestone occasion with an afternoon tea among his many family and friends.

He smiled again: “I don’t know about celebrating, because I would like to be a bit younger!”

Even for such a long life, Les’s has been more full than most.

The aspect of it which put him into local sporting history books began when he was a small child.

Leslie Gordon Onslow was one of seven siblings born to Elsie May and Albert Henry Onslow. Albert was a World War One veteran who worked in the petroleum industry, and both he and his wife were 34 when Les was born.

The family lived in Shrivenham Road, close to the County Ground, so the young Les didn’t have far to look for sporting heroes and sporting ambitions.

“Living along the same block of houses as us was Alan Fowler. He was a very good inside forward. There was also Eddie Jones who was the inside right.”

Alan Fowler was one of Town’s greatest pre-war heroes, taking the top scorer accolade for three seasons. In 1944 in Normandy he became another kind of hero, joining the long list of Swindon men who gave their lives to save the world from tyranny.

Les developed a taste for sport and fitness early on, and his abilities on the football field became obvious while he was still at Clarence Street School.

“I was always a runner, right from school. In my schooldays I was looked upon as being a future footballer of some quality. I played cricket as well, but my main thing was football," he says.

"I had a rather serious image of how I wanted to be. I didn’t smoke or drink – I just trained and got picked up by Swindon Town.”

That happened when he was 18.

“I didn’t sign as a full-time professional. I was a part-time professional because my father wanted me to stay in a job. I had offers to be a full-time player but I had to turn them down.”

Part-time status made no difference to team mates or fans.

“We were accepted as fully professional people. We got on very well with the other players and managers. Really, ‘part time’ didn’t have too much of a meaning because when the opportunity came we were always there.”

On September 20, 1945, having already debuted for Town in a friendly against Bath City earlier that month, Les made his first League appearance in a 1-0 away victory at Torquay.

Les remembers plenty of big crowds, especially for cup matches, and has fond memories of playing among some of the heroes he’d cheered on as a fan not long before.

He played alongside brothers Ken and Roy. The latter was a noted artist in later life as well as being an engineer.

Les married Rita at Christ Church in 1951, and the couple would be together until her death in 1982.

But 1951 also saw Les’s Swindon Town career come to an end, after he broke a leg during an away game in Aldershot, although he continued as a player and later player manager with sides including Chippenham United and Andover until the mid-1960s.

Les had a successful career with Vickers during his sporting days and afterwards.

Joining as a 15-year-old apprentice in 1941, he would cycle – or walk if it was snowing – to the South Marston plant whose most famous product at the time was the Spitfire.

By the time he left 36 years later, Les had risen to the role of chief planning engineer. His career saw him travel extensively overseas during a period when air travel was a glamorous business mostly reserved for a fortunate few.

Highlights included visits to the USA and a crossing of Checkpoint Charlie, the grim Cold War portal separating East and West Berlin.

Changes at Vickers prompted Les to make some changes of his own.

“They dispensed with aircraft repairs and the manufacturing of aircraft and they got into household things," he says.

"At that point I left and started my own business, Les Onslow Machine Tools.”

Les later bought the engineering company run by his brother, Roy, when Roy decided to leave the business, and continued to work until he was well into his sixties.

He puts his longevity down to a lifelong commitment to exercise; he attended the gym at the De Vere Hotel in West Swindon until only a few years ago.

His advice to others hoping to live long and happy lives is simple: “Keep fit – always keep fit.”