Page 3 - Club Rockley

The story of the development of Rockley Golf Course, Christ Church, Barbados. 1975 to 2003.
Chapter 1 “The Chef.”
My wife Jenny and I arrived in Barbados aboard the French Cruise liner “Les Antilles” on a beautiful morning in May 1964, well over fifty years ago. En route to Barbados the ship had docked at the two French Islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe and I had been surprised and not a little shocked at the seedy, slightly raffish and even villainous run-down appearance of each of those two Caribbean ports. Imagine my delighted surprise, then, when the ship docked at the brand new, spotlessly clean Deep-water Harbour at Bridgetown, particularly as the Royal Barbados Police Band were playing some lively renditions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas in the arrivals hall. My mother had been an enthusiastic member of The Harrogate Operatic Society so I knew and loved the music and felt quite at home in the Barbados of 1964, almost immediately! I had been lucky enough to have been offered a job in the Barbados office of one of the leading international firms of Chartered Accountants Pannell Kerr Forster & Co, and even luckier to have married my beautiful wife Jenny in the April of that year.
My first job was to prepare the accounts and audit the books and records of a Travel Agency which was located on an upper floor of Barclays Bank at Broad Street, Bridgetown, called “The ABC Travel Agency”. Quite how it came to have that name I do not know, because the owner turned out to be an English gentleman called Norman Wilkes. I would think that Norman was then perhaps in his early fifties, an affable, charming man who, I understood had fought in the Second World War, in the RAF.
The audit took about a week or so and I recall that it was a fairly straight forward job, mainly because the manager, Mr. Francis Jemmott
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