Guy Mountfort, 1905–2003

Guy Mountfort, who died on 23 April 2003 at the age of 97, was a dominant figure in the BOU in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Elected in 1938, he served as its Honorary Secretary from 1952 to 1962 and then as President for a full five-year term from 1970 to 1975. In between, he was awarded the Union Medal in 1967 and, much later, Honorary Life Membership the year before his death. He was proud of the extent to which the Union's membership had grown during his terms of office, though the post-war years were a period of generally increasing interest in ornithology at all levels. But his BOU work was only one aspect of this remarkable…