Another friend passes on

My very close and dear friend Brian Davey died suddenly in Australia a couple of weeks ago; my wife and I went over to the funeral. Here is my tribute:

My name is Rick Long, I’m from New Zealand and live in a town called Masterton where Brian and his young wife Joyce came to settle from New Plymouth in 1963. Brian had bought a physiotherapy practice in the town.

Masterton is 90 ks north of Wellington and about the same size as Ballina with a population of around 25,000 people. Last year it was voted New Zealand’s most beautiful city.

My wife Marion got to know Joyce when they were in the maternity ward at Masterton hospital together where they had their firstborns, both sons, Gregory for the Davey’s and Brandon for the Long’s.

I had already met Brian as he had become a regular customer in our family butcher’s shop.

The Davey’s bought an imposing house looking down Masterton’s main street just around the corner from where we lived.

Their house and ours both backed on to my parents’ home which had a quite substantial in-ground swimming pool where our growing families spent lots of time together.

Brian and I became firm friends, having an occasional drink together (and I can see both Joyce’s and Marion’s eyes roll when I said the word “occasional”) and we were both invited to join the Masterton Rotary club where we were both very hard-working members.

Brian in fact made a big impact on the town with his enthusiasm and energy and besides being very active Rotarian he was also chairman of the Crippled Children’s Society and chairman of the finance committee of the local Catholic Church.

Brian and Joyce had all their children in Masterton; after Gregory there was Susan and then Fiona. A few hundred yards from where we lived was Lansdowne primary school; our kids all went to the school and Brian and I were both on the school committee.

We used to get away with murder, well almost. On one Saturday morning Brian and I took over the local radio station at gunpoint, binding and gagging the announcer and then reading out ads we had pre-sold to local businesses to raise money for the Plunket Society. You’d never get away with that today.

Few of you will know this, but in 1972 Brian and I started up a very successful business.

Some background; Masterton was dry for 40 years up until 1947. By dry I mean you couldn’t buy alcohol in the town. The citizens voted for restoration in 1947, but also decided the town would own all the liquor outlets and the profits would be returned to the community. A Licensing Trust was set up with a six man board of directors who were voted in every three years at the same time as the local body elections. Incidentally there are twenty six licensing trusts in New Zealand; many other communities followed our lead.

In 1972 the Masterton Licensing Trust built a splendid new lounge bar which they called the Elizabethan Room. It was built Tudor style with high wooden beamed ceiling and a parquet dance floor and a stage for a small band.

It was to be a ladies and escorts bar, but it never took off. A friend of ours who was an elected trustee on the licensing trust board took Brian and me in there one Friday night and we were surprised how few patrons there were. He told us the three piece band on the stage was costing the trust $37.50 a night and the takings over the bar were around $35. Charles Dickens’ Mr McCawber would have been appalled. “Nightly income $35, nightly expenditure $37.50 - result misery.”

Brian and I had had a few drinks and with our usual misplaced optimism we told our friend to tell his fellow board members to give us the room and we’d show them how to fill it.

To our amazement a few days later the trustee rang us and said he had discussed the offer with his fellow board members and they said we could have the premises every Friday and Saturday night for $5 a night, they would keep the takings over the bar, but we could set a door charge at whatever figure we considered viable and that would be ours to keep.

So now we had to put our money where our mouths were.

Discotheques had just come into being though there were few if any in New Zealand but Brian and I did some research, had a local sound technician build us a desk with two turntables, attached to a 400 watt amplifier with four huge speakers which we suspended around the dance floor. We put coloured lights that danced to the music hidden underneath the curtain pelmets, projectors that played psychedelic images on the walls and we installed a large strobe light.

We called all this The Light Fantastique (you Aussies would pronounce this fantasteek, but then again you never ever did learn to speak properly English) and invited dancers to join us every Friday and Saturday night. The fire department decreed we could only have 150 people in the room, we upped that to 200 and charged 50 cents per person at the door. I was the disc jockey playing 45 rpm records on the turntables and Brian was the genial mine host.

Thanks to Brian’s incredibly good welcoming manner at the door and my choice of the right music our enterprise really took off. After the second weekend we had to have a “house full” sign made. Closing time was ten o’clock, as required by law back then, so it wasn’t too much of an imposition. Many of our friends came to join us and in fact we were really just having a party every Friday and Saturday night and making money to boot.

We were taking $200 cash over the weekend which meant a $100 each into our pockets; good money in 1972. The only expenses we had were buying new 45 records from time to time; the trust never ever charged us the $5 a night rent. They either forgot or were so pleased with their bar takings they decided they really didn’t need to.

But all good things must come to an end. I got elected on to the board of the licensing trust at a bye-election when one of the trustees died. Four others stood against me, but Brian was my campaign committee chairman, so I couldn’t really miss.

I worried that there was a conflict of interest with being on the trust and running a business in their premises and Brian said he would like to go overseas and find a new place to settle with his family.

So we sold the business in 1973 after a year of solid trading. Six weeks later the new owner went broke which just proves butchers and physiotherapists really know how to run a disco!

Brian settled in Sydney with his family and I settled down to selling sausages.

In 1990 I rang Brian to boast that I had just been elected the national president of the New Zealand Licensing Trusts association. He countered with the fact that he had just been elected the World President of the Physiotherapists Association, so my news paled into insignificance.

Shifting to Australia didn’t mean the end of our friendship. We have regularly visited the Davey’s and them us. We have been on lots of holidays together in both Australia and New Zealand and on one occasion we took our respective families to America.

And there are constant phone calls and emails.

I rang Brian on the 4th of August, the day after his 78th birthday and a few minutes after the Crusaders had beaten the Lions in the Super 15 final just to remind just how good New Zealand rugby was. He was in high spirts then, unbelievable that he passed away two days later.

And those emails. The last one from him was just a couple of weeks ago and it typically went like this:

A Canadian walks into a New Zealand bar and there was immediately some tension among patrons thinking he might be, God forbid, an Australian. The barman served him a beer and then said, “What do you do for a living mate?”

“I’m a taxidermist,” the stranger replied.

“A taxidermist,” said the barman, “Does that mean you drive a taxi?”

“No,” said the man, “I mount animals.”

“Relax fellows;” said the barman, “He’s one of us!”

You Aussies never let up.

Rest in peace old friend.