Page 8 - Club Rockley

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Chapter 3
The “A B C” Partnership
The Barbados Rugby Club went into official training for the 1975 Caribbean tournament in the early summer of that year. I had missed virtually the whole of the 1974 season with torn cruciate ligaments in my left knee but thanks to the ministrations of a new arrival at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, a brilliant physiotherapist (whose previous job had been at Aston Villa FC), I thought, optimistically perhaps, that I would be able to manage one last season. So we set to work at 6 am three times a week running and doing pull-ups on the trees etc on Rockley Beach which, adding in our two training nights at the Garrison Savannah and our Sunday ‘friendly’ match, would be “guaranteed” to have each one of us fit and firing on all cylinders by the time the tournament arrived! This all meant that Peter Boos (our very large second row forward), one of whose jobs was to push the tight head prop (me!) onwards in the scrums, David Callaghan (a brilliant scrum half), and myself saw a lot of each other. The after match discussions in the bar suddenly included the fact that Rockley Golf Club had experienced financial difficulties, and eventually had gone into receivership, the 67 acres of land being thus on the market. Peter Boos, an extremely bright young man, a Chartered Accountant, who was already a partner in my old firm of PKF, led the debates. (I had left PKF to join B S & T in late 1966).
Peter knew the property very well, as his home on Golf Club Road backed onto it. One Sunday, Peter and I walked the abandoned course, with no one else around, on a sunny early morning with a light north easterly breeze blowing softly through the trees. As we walked across what is now the fourth fairway we decided that this place was magical and should never ever have ceased to be a Golf Course. We resolved to try to do something about it.
David Callaghan is an all round sportsman of very high standard; as a young man, he was a finalist in the All Ireland Junior Tennis Tournament, a scrum half at the famous rugby playing school “Black Rock College”, and a very low handicap golfer who was to go on