Telford magistrate Les is leaving the bench

"One reason is I've got Parkinson's Disease and was finding it a bit more of a strain, and secondly I didn't seem to have the interest in it I used to have. There was not so much work coming through," said Les, who will turn 70 in December.

"I was appointed to Shifnal, and then transferred to the Wrekin bench, and then Telford bench."

On his retirement he was presented with a commemorative plate and a framed certificate.

Among his highlights in that long career on the bench which began in 1985 has been sitting with a High Court judge, and going with him for lunch in Shrewsbury accompanied by a motorcycle escort.

Other memories include a family hearing in which an agitated woman threw a chair at the bench – it missed him.

Then there was the time when his daughter passed her driving test and he started looking for a car for her, and recognised some of his courtroom "clients" selling their wares.

"They steal cars and do them up," he said.

"My daughter said his cap got lower, and lower, and lower," said wife Sue.

Les, who lives in Tweedale, was one of the last to work at Dawley's Ever Ready battery factory, starting there in 1960 and finishing in 1993.

"I started there as a labourer, then became an electrician, and then foreman, and became engineering manager. I finished when it closed down and started my own company with two other blokes."

Ever Ready, where the workforce was mostly local women, seems to have been a happy place.

"When I started there there were women singing. We had parties. It was called the 'fun factory' at one stage."

At the new business, called Univercell Battery Company, Les was a director and the engineering manager.

"It's a big thing for a Dawley bloke to become manager of his own company," said Les, who called it a day on his working career three or four years ago.

He hails originally from Alma Avenue making him, in an expression derived from the local dialect, a true "Dawley mon".

Among other strings to his bow he was in Dawley's junior band, served in Broseley Army Cadets, was a youth leader for five years at Old Park Methodist Church, a Samaritan for eight years, and a past president of Ironbridge Rotary Club, of which he remains a member.

"Les has the greatest sense of humour of anybody in the club and consistently has contributed more to the club than almost anybody else," said fellow Rotarian Trevor Davies.

It was about 2000 that Les was diagnosed with Parkinson's, although at first he kept it secret from everybody except Sue – and it was only by chance she found out.

"I wouldn't have known if the paper had not fallen to the clinic floor. I picked it up and it said Parkinson's," said Sue.

"I said: 'Don't say a word. I don't know what this means,'" said Les.

It was a quivering hand which had provided the first indication of a problem.

"I thought I had had a mini stroke. I didn't tell anybody. Then I made arrangements to go and see a specialist and he did some tests. He said: 'You've got Parkinson's.' Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. I came out and didn't tell anybody. Then people began to notice and I thought I better tell them."

Les stood up at the Rotary club and announced to members _ one or two of whom already suspected something was amiss _ that he had Parkinson's.

"It just went quiet," recalls Sue.

"I think he thought 'I've got this problem. It isn't going to change my life.' You have to keep going forward and not go back."

And Trevor said: "Les has shown a great deal of courage."