Pittwater Life June 2017 Issue

Club life
Life Stories
Club Palm Beach has had a
character-shaping influence
on Pittwater’s northern-most tip
over the past 60 years.
Story by Rosamund Burton
original clubhouse was a weatherboard shed. It
was on a block of land beside Lucinda Park,” says
“The
78-year-old club member Peter Verrills. “My father,
Fred Verrills, along with Dick and Jack Martin and other
club members, moved it by skidding it on blocks across
onto Lucinda Park. They made it into a workable, temporary
clubhouse, and there it sat until they bought the land for the
club. I remember in the early ’50s it being placed on this site –
where the Bistro is today.”
Peter Verrills and John Sinclair, who has managed the club
since 1993, are sitting in the outdoor area at the back of Club
Palm Beach soaking up the sun, and reminiscing about the
RSL’s earlier days.
Peter insists that we get his cousin Don Goddard on the
phone, because being six years older, he says, he has that bit
of a longer memory. Don, who now lives in Wagga Wagga, has
been a paid-up member of the club since the official opening
60 years ago, and for several years before that.
“The Treasurer and the Secretary used to open up the shed
about 4 o’clock every afternoon, and the first to arrive became
the barman until someone else relieved him. You bought your
tickets from the Treasurer and they cost a shilling. They came
off a big ticket roll, and were captioned, ‘Buy a Brick’. That
was the funding for the new club.”
There were fancy dress balls and raffles, and John Sinclair
recently found a picture of then club president, Alf Curtis,
and others, dressed in tutus, corsets and suspenders, which
had been another ploy to get funds.
When eventually enough money had been raised the
building work went to tender to the two building businesses
in the area. One was owned by Peter’s father, Fred, and his
brother, Ernie Verrills, and the other by Dick Martin and his
son, Jack.
“They were all good friends,” Peter recounts, “but there was
massive jealousy about who got the jobs. My old man bunged a
blue on when it went to the Martins, as did Carl Gow, who had
bought the land for the club, and was a distant relo of ours,
and they left the club and went to drink in Avalon. But after a
couple of years everyone was back here again and it was fine.”
Every weekend at Club Palm Beach there were parties,
and Sunday afternoons used to develop into amateur
entertainment with everyone doing an act.
“And during the week all the tradies would come here to
drink in the afternoon. Before the days of emails and mobiles
anyone looking for a bricklayer, electrician or plumber would
know to come to the club,” explains Peter.
It is at the mention of plumbers that he recalls when the
club still had a septic tank, and Gordon O’Donnell, the
plumber, came to fix a blockage.
“The septic tank was where that umbrella is,” says Peter,
pointing across the courtyard. “Gordon walked across the lid,
it collapsed and down he went. I’ll never forget it. He was well
and truly in the shit.”
Before Peter Verrills started Palm Beach Ferries in 1976 he
worked in his father’s building business. The council workers
used to come to Club Palm Beach for lunch every day. “If we
were having trouble getting trucks up a steep hill to a property,
for a case of cans, a council truck would arrive with a heap of
road base, and then they’d spread it up the driveway for us.”
The old weatherboard shed was dismantled in the early 1960s
by Bill Martin, Dick’s son, and Peter, who were great mates. Bill
had a trucking business, and it was loaded onto his semi-trailer,
and reconstructed on a block of land Peter owned at Wiseman
Ferry. They were both keen on waterskiing and used it as a
cabin for waterskiing holidays with family and friends.
Peter’s grandfather, Albert Verrills, built the surveyor’s
32 JUNE 2017
Celebrating 25 Years