By Callum Ludwig
A well-travelled member of the Warburton Golf Club is still going strong on the course at the ripe old age of 96.
Gerry Hadfield, born in Blackpool, England, has led a storied life which has now led him to him home in Warburton which backs right onto the course.
Mr Hadfield said he left school at 14 and became a carpenter’s apprentice.
“My first job lasted about 12 months because they never registered me so I went to a little one-man business in painting,” he said.
“I then got conscripted to the army after I had turned 18 in 1945 and they sent me up to Aberdeen (in Scotland) to be with a squad of about 30, there were three Englishmen and all the rest were Scotsmen and they were cruel bastards.”
Mr Hadfield served in the British Army until 1948 before returning to his life as a painter. It wasn’t until 1972 that he made the decision to venture to a new life in Australia.
“I had a brother, we were very close. I had four brothers and a sister, but I was very close to this brother and he died suddenly just before his 40th birthday and it unsettled me and I thought, ‘This isn’t life, I want to live a bit’ so I decided to come to Australia with my eldest brother,” he said.
“At the last minute, he called it off because his wife became unwell, she had cancer and we didn’t know so I came over with my wife Myra and my daughter.”
Mr Hadfield said his wife Myra died away 16 or 17 years ago now.
Upon arriving in Australia, Mr Hadfield started their new life in Elwood, near St Kilda, picking up work as a painter where he could, but it was one job that ended up resulting in a significant career change.
Mr Hadfield painted Mickey’s Disco, a popular haunt owned by ‘three crooks’ according to Mr Hadfield, not that he knew at the time, including alleged contract killer Chris ‘Mr Rent-a-kill’ Flannery. Mr Hadfield impressed them with his work and was asked if he could fix up a caravan for donuts to be sold out of.
“So I did it all up, painted put all the benches in ready for it to be loaded, I didn’t know that he was such a crook in those days, and I said it would cost him five grand or whatever it was and he said ‘when I start selling and get the money and then I’ll pay you’, which he wasn’t going to so I said ‘I’ll put it on the load, I’ll pay you for it and you can f**k off’,” he said.
“I went down to South Melbourne Markets, and luckily, the manager there, I just got on well with them,”
“I found that I could make more money working just Saturdays and Sundays than I was in a whole week as a painter, though I was a good painter.”
Through a combination of a good doughnut mixture he got from a man at the market and some knowledge from his father who was a chef by trade, Mr Hadfield went on to have great success for about 17 years selling American-style doughnuts.
Years later he was in the pub at Launching Place and a waitress told him that’s where she had the best doughnut she had ever tried, without knowing he was the one who started it all.
Mr Hadfield moved out to his Warburton home at the recommendation of a friend who was doing the same and went on to join the Warburton Golf Club, despite only having first taken up golf at the age of 70.
Mr Hadfield said he does get a bit tired towards the end of an 18 (a full round of golf).
“My knees have gone, it started with this knee (his right knee) and once once is in pain you start to favour the other and that one gets worse and worse,” he said.
“18 holes is very tiring if you’ve got anything wrong with you, no matter how fit you are, it does drain you.”
Not much one for socialising, at his own admittance, Mr Hadfield does appreciate the respite golf gives him.
He said after his wife died, it was all he had left.
“I’ve got a lot of peculiar traits as far as I was concerned, I can only stand so much of anybody, I can get irritated at stupid little things that people do,” he said.
“It’s the same with golf, as I say about swinging, very seldom do I pre-swing, once you’re down on the tee and you know that you’re not going to put it on the green, so I visualize something and that’s why I’m going to hit two, I don’t need to swing half a dozen times.”
It’s a practice that has held Mr Hadfield in good stead despite his age, with his ‘course maintenance’ approach even seeing him manage to win a few rounds of the Twilight competition in recent years.
Mr Hadfield still likes to get out for a round of nine holes when he can and is also looked out for by Warburton Golf Club President and neighbour Meredith Nursey.
Mr Hadfield said one day, where it turns out he was suffering a minor heart attack, he asked Meredith if she could get the ambulance.
“Ever since then she’s checked on me, not every day, but she hardly ever misses a day when she just knocks on the door and just asks if I’m okay,” he said.
