Ex-politician met sultans – and played in the band
GLOBE-TROTTER BUSINESMAN SERVED ON THE COUNTY COUNCIL
A FORMER county councillor, community leader and dance-band drummer has died at the age of 94.
Raymond Mason represented Sileby on Leicestershire County Council for the Conservatives from 1989 until 2005.
He was involved with Leicester Children’s Holiday Centre in Mablethorpe, Royal Society of St George and Loughborough Twinning Association – and was a school governor until the final months of his life.
During a globe-trotting career, he visited almost 100 countries for countybased Hawker Siddeley Power Engineering, meeting presidents, sultans and ministers to seal contracts for power stations and electrification systems.
Mr Mason started playing drums in jazz bands during the Second World War and played with the area’s leading dance bands, including “Smiling” Johnny Smith, Jock Samson, and the Lew Branston Orchestra, in the 1940s and 1950s. He regularly played as a guest with bands from the Caribbean to Kuwait, and continued to play in smaller ensembles into his 70s.
Born in Oadby, he attended Kibworth Beauchamp Grammar School, leaving aged 17 in 1943 to volunteer – on the day he was old enough – for Bomber Command. Having completed initial training as a pilot, Mr Mason was given the choice, due to an oversupply of aircrew towards the end of the war, of leaving the service or redeploying to a ground role.
He chose to leave and started work for Armstrong Siddeley, in Leicester.
He married Mavis three months after meeting her and they moved to her home village of Cossington in 1955, the same year he joined Brush Electrical Engineering in Loughborough, before beginning life on the road as an export sales manager with what became HSPE (Hawker Siddeley Power Engineering), based in Burton on the Wolds.
In the 1980s he lived in Malaysia with Mavis, a long-serving Charnwood borough councillor, before taking early retirement in 1987.
From 1991 to 2003 he was chairman of the Leicester Children’s Holiday Centre in Mablethorpe.
He also found time to indulge his other passion for British classic cars, restoring a 1936 Alvis.
Raymond Mason died peacefully at home on September 21 and is survived by his wife, daughter Samantha, son Dan and four grandchildren.