Newspaper Article – Tournament grew from ashes

Tournament grew from ashes

“Burning up the course” is an expression which had particular significance to members of the Maraenui Golf Club – 28 years ago.

It was on January 30, 1955, that fire swept through the two-storey clubhouse reducing the building, stored equipment, members’ golf clubs and social facilities to ashes.

When the alarm went up on Sunday afternoon, club members swelled the ranks of the fire brigade personnel but were hampered by a lack of water.

An attempt was made to run hoses to a well on Te Awa Avenue but it did not provide sufficient pressure.

“We did debate whether to pump water from the sea but we couldn’t run the hoses across the railway lines,” the present club president, Dave Lawrence said.

Bottles found

The fire was a total disaster – or almost.

As club members sifted through the ruins early on Monday morning they made an astonishing find – a find which is now celebrated annually.

Recalling that morning in 1955, some of the club members relate the astonishment of those present when an almost totally undamaged case of Bell’s Whisky was raked out of the ashes.

“And nearby someone found a crate of beer intact. Of the 12 bottles of whisky only one was broken. How the rest escaped we do not know.”

It was hot dry work that day and club members and helpers soon made short work of the beer but the whisky was put aside. Several months later the club president, Mr Norman Smith, proposed that the club instigate a tournament to be called the Fire Tournament which would mark one of the club’s major disasters.

A disaster surpassed only by the 1931 earthquake which left the newly cleared and created fairways furrowed and cracked.

The idea of the fire tournament met with total approval but then the matter of a trophy was raised. What better than one of the bottles rescued from the ashes.

Mounted

A suitable bottle stand was made to mount the annual trophy and for 11 years the tournament winner was presented with one of the salvaged bottles. When the relics ran out club officials decided to continue the practice and to also buy another “trophy” for the women.

Club veteran Gordon Amner became the proud owner of two of the relics when he won the first ever tournament in 1959 and again the following year.

More recently the social tournament has been rounded-off with a barbecue – held within metres of the replacement clubhouse which is still in service although not as a clubhouse but one of the club’s trundler sheds.

Although this building was just a shadow of the original clubhouse it was viewed with pride for many years because of the effort which saw it rise on the same foundations as the first facility.

“The ashes were hardly cool before Jack O’Neil, a former member, began cutting timber at his Awatoto sawmill. By midday on Monday the framework of our second clubhouse was up and within days the timber work was finished.”

Mr Lawrence said that despite suspicions and conjecture the cause of the fire was never positively established.

When the Fire Tournament was played last Saturday, only a handful of members who gathered in the new Maraenui clubhouse remembered they were standing in the club’s third clubhouse. And few would know the reason for a tournament which marks a tragedy overcome by teamwork.

Photo caption – THE framework for the club’s replacement clubhouse took shape before the ruins were off the site.