Page 10 - Club Rockley

effort we were able to reach the number of committed sales suf- ficient to achieve the required support from Richard Cox and his team at The Royal Bank of Canada, which Bank provided the bridging support finance for all the clusters which Peter, David, and myself were to develop and build together, from 1975 to 1987. But, back to the Carib- bean Rugby Tournament of 1975. The Host nation was us! It was the first time Barbados had hosted the tournament since it’s inception in 1967 and it was actually held just a few weeks after the date when the three Rugby friends, Geoff Atkinson, Peter Boos, and David Callaghan (or the ABC boys as we were now called by some!) had secured their purchase of the lands of Rockley Golf Club. (September 2nd 1975.)
Attending the Rugby Tournament were Peter Brown, the Senior Partner in PKF, Jamaica and Richard Hobday the senior partner of the PKF Trinidadian practice, who were house guests of Peter Boos for the duration of the tournament which was held over a couple of weeks towards the end of the 1975 rainy season in Barbados. Naturally the guests heard all about our Rockley project and both of them, with considerable enthusiasm, asked to become shareholders in the venture.
Rockley really needed more share capital than we had, anyway, and both were very good business people, with Peter Brown having done some much admired developments in Jamaica, whilst Dick Hobday had achieved the unusual feat of being the appointed Receiver of a failed Hotel in Trinidad, eventually bringing it’s fortunes around, and handing it back to it’s presumably delighted shareholders as a working, profitable, hotel. So we took them both on board and they were to contribute greatly to the development of the first six Rockley clusters until Peter Brown left the Caribbean to take up residence in Texas, and Dick Hobday retired.
It was Peter Brown who introduced the very talented architect who came up with our Clusters concept. He was David Twiss, originally from Liverpool but then living and working in Jamaica. It was at the time of the very serious political troubles there. One day, David Twiss and his family, whilst attending a weekend pool party at a friend’s house, were present when there was a horrific incident and they were close up witnesses to a brutal murder. From that moment on, they just wanted to leave Jamaica.
David came to Barbados and the “Design Collaborative Partnership” 8