Page 9 - Club Rockley

and represent Barbados in Caribbean wide Golf tournaments. David was also a very good centre forward for the Wanderers Cricket Club (Football section) and a useful forward for their first division Hockey Team, of which the great journalist Tony Cozier was the goal-keeper with Francis Deher and Erie Dean the enthusiastic full-backs and Uwe Hass and John Harris the indefatigable half backs, in the team which I had the honour to captain , from centre half , for several years in the 60’s/ ‘70’s. Dave Callaghan was, at that time, by profession, a retail manager with strong marketing skills, which were to stand us in good stead. When the three of us had reached the stage where we had found additional capital and completed the design stages, obtained planning permission and received financial advice on construction and related costs from top quantity surveyors, David took over the marketing of the units. Fortunately for us, he was between jobs at that time, as he was in the process of setting up his own retail/wholesale shoe business and was able to set up an office in the old Rockley Golf Club House and look after our sales and market- ing process as well. Peter and I were able to support him on two or three evenings a week when, together, we made sales presentations at cocktail parties in an upstairs room at the old Club House, to potential investors in the Town Houses and Apartments, explaining our plans for the clusters within the restored Golf Course.
Peter was also able to arrange for us to put on some presentational evenings at the Trinidad Hilton Hotel, where we did our, by now well rehearsed, presentation and where, I recall, we achieved sales of some 70 units. A good job! Especially in the 1970’s days of international financial instability, with the Oil Producing Countries having just got to- gether for the first time to form the OPEC Cartel, with the main objective of increasing the price of oil. The resulting sudden increase from around $ per barrel up to $11, and soon after to over $0, contributed to double digit inflation for some years in the late seventies and to very difficult conditions in the Barbados property market. However, the Barbados Central Bank Governor Mr. Courtney Blackman, gave us approval for a limited amount of Barbadian deposit funds to be made available for first Mortgage Loans to Trinidadian purchasers as well as to Barbadian buyers at Rockley (I think he had probably discussed the matter with “The Chef” from “The Squinting Cat”!) and thanks to a great team
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