Page 14 - Club Rockley

1
apartments respectively. Once again, Jack Johnson won the construction contract, but this time ran into financial difficulties towards the end of the contract and we wound up paying his wages bill for the last few weeks in order to get the job finished on time. Fortunately, whenever things got tough, Peter Boos was an absolute ‘rock’. Always calm and collected, he was a good man to have on your side. (Incredibly, even better than when he used to do my jumping for me in the line-out.) Eventually the two clusters, which had sold out very quickly when we had first put them on sale were well built and completed on time. The units on the eastern side of “Lemon Arbor” are, in fact, probably the most attractive ones we ever built, and possibly enjoy the best breezes on the property too. I recall that apartment 41 was a great favourite of my pal, the late, great, magician, Paul Daniels, who was a frequent visitor with his wife, the lovely Debbie McGee. Debbie, happily, has recently had great success (2017) on the popular Saturday night UK TV Show “Strictly Come Dancing”.
The next cluster- “Plumtree” was purchased in it’s entirety by one man, a charming French Canadian businessman from Montreal named Ronald Marchesault. Ron had expressed his interest, following a holiday by two leading Sales Agents who were with the Royal Trust Corporation of Canada, the largest real estate company on the East coast, and a major player in real estate business and finance throughout Canada.
Cyndi and Tom, the two sales agents, came to Barbados on a re- ward bonus holiday trip after selling out Ronald’s ‘MURB’ development of (Presumably vertical) high rise apartments in Montreal.
I recall that MURB stood for “Multi User Residential Building” for which, at that time, there were tax breaks for the builder and/or the de- veloper as the City had an urgent need for town centre accommodation. When did any city ever have sufficient reasonably central living spaces, I now ask myself, but there you go, “MURBS” were the “in-thing” in Montreal at that time, and Ronald had hit a winner with one of them. And so, the “Plumtree Cluster” became quite a story, all on its own!
Cyndi and Tom had come to one of our sales presentations when we were completing the sales for the second phase at Rockley, and, on their return to Canada must, in turn, have interested Ron, who informed us that he was interested in buying the next cluster. How cool was that! we thought. So, off I went on a brief visit to Montreal to finalize a deal