Page 6 - Club Rockley

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Chapter 2
The Boy from “The Squinting Cat”
When Peter Boos, David Callaghan and I had managed to secure the purchase of Rockley Golf Course, it turned out that I was the only one of the three of us to have ever met the Prime Minister and I was therefore given the task of taking the roll of plans setting out the clusters and the restored Golf Course and the change of the old Golf Club House into the development’s Central facilities, the result of several month’s work by our Architects and our- selves, to ask for his blessing on our project. We guessed that a proposal of this size would end up on his desk anyway, and we thought that it might be good idea and might save a lot of time, if we were able to have his thoughts ‘up front’ in this way.
When I arrived at his office at the Government Offices on Bay Street and found my nervously polite way to his door, his Secretary picked up her telephone, looked at me with a quizzical smile, and asked whom she might say was hoping to see the Prime Minister?
“Tell him that it’s the boy from the “Squinting Cat”, I said.
I was shown in straight away, went through our hopes and plans for the propertywiththePM andhelikedthem,hereallylikedthem,particularlythat we were not going to cut down any major trees and that we would put in good quality tarmac roads, and that there would be no unsightly overhead wires.
He had but one precautionary word of advice, “Just be sure to make a good job of the golf course restoration!” He said, “My pal Peter Morgan’s Dad loves that course and I’m tired of his groaning and moaning since it closed!”
Peter Morgan at that time kept the extremely popular St Lawrence Hotel where so many of us would go for Fish and Chips on a Sunday night. He too had been an RAF man, I believe a Spitfire Pilot, one of “The Few”, in fact! Not only a very nice man, but another hero, that’s for sure! I recall that Peter’s lovely St Lawrence Hotel; right on the sea next to The St Lawrence Church in “The Gap” was a great place to visit specially on a Sunday evening at sunset, when it was quite a ‘gathering spot’, throughout the sixties.