Tom Smith - Telegraph In a later interview Smith said that he felt MUSTARD's problem was that it was "so far ahead of its time" and there had been no political will to push it forward. "There is nothing worse than being right at the wrong time," he reflected. Thomas William Smith was born at Grimsby on March 27 1927, the son of a sheet-metal worker who worked for a trawler repair company. As a boy he enjoyed fishing and making model aeroplanes. From Wintringham Grammar School in Grimsby, he won a scholarship to read Aeronautical Engineering at Queen Mary College, London University. After graduation in 1948 he joined Gloster Aviation in Gloucestershire and the following year moved to English Electric (later subsumed into BAC and subsequently British Aerospace), a former tram manufacturer based near Preston which had turned to making aircraft during the war. There he was one of a team of four, under Freddy Page, working on the early development of the Canberra bomber. He was subsequently heavily involved in the development of the Lightning fighter aircraft and he took a flight in one of the two-seater trainers to become one of the few people who, at that time, had flown faster than the speed of sound. He was also among the leaders of the team which developed the TSR-2, the Cold War strike and reconnaissance aircraft project which was cancelled by the Labour government in 1965. After the MUSTARD project, Smith was involved with the development of the Jaguar and Tornado, and in his last years - with what by then was British Aerospace - he led a team of some 40 engineers researching various technologies in the defence and aircraft field. Much of his work remains classified. Outside his work, Smith developed his hobby of aero-modelling, winning the national championships in the class of free-flight powered models on three occasions. On one occasion, having just failed to qualify to represent Britain in the world championships, he was asked to stand in for the Japanese team, who could not afford to make the journey. This gave rise to his only injury arising from his hobby, when he nearly lost a finger while starting the Japanese engine by flicking the propeller. He also played table tennis competitively until the age of 50. After retiring in 1990, Smith moved to Tetford in Lincolnshire. In 1948 he had married Winifred McCormick, the daughter of a Grimsby trawler skipper, with whom he had a daughter and four sons. In 1995 Winifred suffered a severe stroke which left her in a near vegetative state in a nursing home. Over the five years before she died in 2000, he lived in an annexe at the house of his son, Anthony, near Brigg, during which time he met and befriended Jean McIntyre Cox. They married in 2000, some months after Winifred's death, and moved to East Keal, a village near Spilsby on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds . Jean died in 2009 and he is survived by his five children. Tom Smith, born March 27 1927, died October 3 2012