A broken window in Adelaide

As well as the excitement of the finale of the Six Nations rugby football tournament, made all the more sweet by the victory of Wales as champions and winners of the Grand Slam, the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne is playing out its drama as I write. Melbourne is Australia's 'second city' but it has not always played host to the Grand Prx. For many years the South Australian city of Adelaide gave itself over to the thrills, excitement and glamour of motor sport. Another memory springs to mind.....

In the year of grace 1991, as the long premiership of Mrs Thatcher was coming to an end, marking the close of the decade that would become to be known by the short-hand of ‘the 80s’, and what was to become the shorter but turbulent early 1990s under one John Major was just beginning, the Oldest Trainee journeyed to the other side of the world. At that time it was popular for gap-year students – between school and university or further/higher education – to take time to work and travel and in the Oldest Trainee's case it was mid-degree course and it was travelling to the Southern hemisphere. Due to a combination of academic exhaustion, an understanding university tutor and a suggestable nature, it was South Australia that became the focus of travelling attention . . Suffice it to say, he found a way through the good offices of a sympathetic tutor at the University to persuade the academic authorities to grant him leave of absence for a year – a suspension of studies – in order to take time out from the ‘treadmill’ of study followed for many a year since the age of 4. A friend of the family who had attended Cambridge University in the 1950s with the pater familias of the Legoe family and had subsequently gone out to Australia to live and work for a while, suggested both a visit Down Under and a sojourn with his old friend’s family.

It is not a highly recommended technique to endear oneself to your hosts, but launching oneself through the glass door of the host family on the first night of arrival is exactly what this writer did on his arrival in the city of Adelaide. Having been kind enough to respond to a telephonic entreaty from the airport to pick up the friend of a friend and having furthered that generosity by putting that stranger up for the night, these blameless citizens of the South Australian capital found themselves dealing with a long-haul traveller who leapt through glass doors. He had chosen the family, or rather the family had been unlucky enough to be landed with him by virtue of their names being on a contacts list provided by a family friend (of the Oldest Trainee) who seeded the idea of the Great Australian adventure in the first place.

Thus it came to pass that on a balmy weekend evening in the first flowering of a Southern Hemisphere summer, having left the Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, the Oldest Trainee found himself in the garden Jacuzzi under an Australian sky in the city of Adelaide. Having been reassured by the host father that he, the father, had not claimed on the house insurance for a while and warned by the host mother not to presume or expect help from anyone just because of the fact of friendship long ago between one family and another, he started his Australian sojourn.

After that window-shattering experience in the capital city of the free-settled state of South Australia – a distinction the burghers of its capital city and across the state never cease to point out, giving South Australia an Anglicised flavour of a certain kind, it was into the hands of the Legoe family of Adelaide and Robe and South east South Australia that he was passed before he could do much more damage.

In the year of his visit, the Australian Grand Prix was still being held in Adelaide. En route to meet George Legoe, eldest son of gentlemen farmers and as near-landed gentry of the South Australian state as it gets, the father of that most forebearing of host families showed him the sights of the city in preparation for the Grand Prix by driving the route that the drivers would race: at that time Adelaide shared with Monaco the distinction of being host to a motor race actually raced within the city itself – Melbourne was to steal the Formula 1 crown from Adelaide, but at that time the South Australian capital was Queen of the Australian motor racing world. It turned out that the Oldest Trainee was to be present at the race which was run in a sustained downpour of rain and viewed from an office block near the track.

The handover of the troublesome visitor to George Legoe having taken place outside the city limits, the journey continued southwards towards Robe in the south-east of the state. George was taciturn but friendly and he indulged the Oldest Trainee's stream of questions.

The Legoe family have major connections with Adelaide, as do half the farmers and land-owners of the state. George’s mother Marianne was from a family connected to the founder of the city and the state itself. Adelaide was named after Queen Adelaide. As was the case with many farming families, the Legoes had a house in the city and his younger brother Will attended one of the Universities in Adelaide (Flinders). The traffic from Robe to Adelaide was frequent and an unremarked feature of their lives: the family networks had friends whose children studied in the city at university or had attended as pupils one of the various boarding schools modelled on the English system. The Legoes themselves had a school link with Geelong in Victoria. All in all Adelaide was the nearest major city and in Australian terms, up the road in journey time: three hours. A country town and a small city, three hours apart, not a problem for citizens of this island continent.