After the French Open in 1965, I expected to spend a few pleasant weeks touring Europe with my best mate Ken Fletcher before arriving in London in time for Wimbledon.
Ken had other ideas.
“Hughie,” he said, “we’re all off to Germany and Switzerland for a few tournaments but. You go on to London and I’ll see you there in … say, two weeks.”
“But hold on a minute Fletch,” I protested. “I don’t even know one person in London.”
Ken wrote something down on a torn slip of paper and handed it over: “Here’s Lance and Pam Mesh’s address: The Corner Bungalow, Kingswood Road, Shortlands, Kent. Charles the Second used to ride down that road: that’s why it’s called Kingswood Road.”
He said that when I got to Victoria Station in London all I had to do was take the train from Blackfriars Station.
“Tell Lance and Pam that Kenny sent you! … and they’ll put you up until I arrive in town.
“Meanwhile, if I were you Hughie, I’d get a job at Reuters in Fleet Street. Wherever I go in the world, I hear the radio news bulletins and they’re always quoting Reuters.”
Then Ken screwed up his nose as if he were about to perform, and put on a BBC accent: “The Queen today had eggs for breakfast … Reuter says.”
Ken assured me that we wouldn’t have any trouble finding a flat in London once he got there.
“I know this bloke. His father owns 2000 London flats. We can’t miss out.”
But what will this young married couple, Lance and Pam Mesh, think when I turn up on their doorstep … a stranger in a gabardine raincoat … carrying seven items of luggage?
“Lance and Pam will be thrilled!” Ken promised. “We all stay with them every summer: Jimmy Moore, Billy Lee Long, and me. Lance is a dentist so they’ve got central heating, and Pamela is a great cook. She does my Wimbledon washing every year.”
Fletch said Lance Mesh was from Brisbane; his parents owned the Annerley Picture Theatre and Lance had always let Kenny into the pictures for free!
Apparently, Lance was still looking after him.
When I came staggering up the long path between the rose bushes, the strongly-built Lance – who looked like Aussie singer Frank Ifield – appeared in front of the door and stood with arms folded like a security guard in cavalry twill trousers.
“Kenny sent me,” I said – expecting it to work like Open Sesame.
Arms still folded, Lance, who looked about 28, responded: “I’m sorry, but my wife’s not well and we’ve made a new rule: no more of Kenny’s mates this year!”
Devastated, I dropped one of my seven pieces of luggage: the large black-and-white pony skin that I’d bought in Peking … it was something you just couldn’t buy anywhere else.
Just then a young woman emerged from the bungalow in a pink dressing gown with a hot water bottle clutched to her belly: Lance’s wife Pamela, a New Zealander.
She was very pretty.
“Have you got anywhere else to stay?” she asked.
They held a hurried conference inside and Lance came back out [sigh], “Alright … you can stay with us.”
Next afternoon I was hanging my socks on the clothes line when an Englishman came running over from the double-storey Tudor house across the road.
“Australian, aren’t you?” he said in the plumiest English accent I’d ever heard. “I’m John. Well, I want you to know that I’m not playing you squash under any circumstances.”
This John was squash champion at his Kent County Club and told me he had been amazed a few years before when the local dentist beat him. He didn’t know that Lance had been in the premiership-winning Brisbane Grammar School tennis team with Roy Emerson.
So, when Fletch first arrived to stay, John challenged him to a game, saying: “Tennis players can’t play squash.”
What this John from the Tudor house didn’t know was that handball is like squash without a racquet. Instead, you hit the ball with your fist or palm and the person who can use the walls well usually wins.
Fletch was the St Laurence’s College handball champion when he was 11.
Poor John didn’t win a point.
The following year, Jimmy Moore — who didn’t look at all like the champion sportsman that he was — arrived to stay with Lance and Pam.
John said he took one look at Jimmy and, rubbing his hands together, again issued the challenge.
John later learned to his dismay that Jimmy was in London to play Wimbledon … and had represented Queensland at squash.
Again, no points.
John from the Tudor house across the road continued his story: “Last year, I looked out of my study and saw a Chinese chappie in shorts hanging out laundry at Lance and Pamela’s and I thought: They’ve hired a Chinese laundryman! Just what I need!
“So I ran over the street and was astounded when he spoke. He said: G’day, mate. What’s the score, sport?
“He had this broad Australian accent.
“I said: D’you mean to tell me that you are an Australian? And the fellow replied, True blue mate.
“And I said, But you’re Chinese!
“And he replied: It takes all kinds to make a world, eh?”
Billy Lee Long is the exact opposite of a skite: a champion athlete who likes to confuse people with false naivety.
“Can you play squash?” John asked Billy under the clothes line.
“You mean that game played in a small white room with a tiny racquet and little black ball, eh?” Billy replied.
John rushed him off in his Jaguar as fast as it would go to the Kent County Club courts.
He didn’t know it yet, but the bloke in his car had been a member of Harry Hopman’s tennis squad with Kenny Fletcher; was one of Queensland’s top two or three sprinters and swimmers; played golf off a handicap of 1 — not to mention being North Queensland squash champion.
Once again, poor John said he didn’t win a point.
After listening attentively to his story, I assured John that he had nothing at all to worry about.
I was just a reporter who played with an Olivetti typewriter.
So I was useless at squash.
John smiled knowingly.
“Of course you are dear boy,” he said, and turned and ran back across Kingswood Road to the safety of his double-storey Tudor house.
Billy Lee Long, an Australian athlete from Cairns, explores mysterious Hong Kong on his way to London in 1963
[This story is Episode 82 of my radio serial adaptation of my book on Ken Fletcher The Great Fletch. You’ll soon be able to listen to me reading the 150 episodes on substack. I’ll let you know.]
Lance and Pam sound like beautiful people to have so many of Kenny’s friends rock up saying “Kenny sent me” and they would welcome them into their home
No mobile phones back then to let them know Kenny was sending them another one of his friends.
The story of Billy Lee Long reminds me of about 30 years ago through my work I meet a lovely Chinese man who owned a great Chinese Restaurant. He was like Billy spoke with an Australian accent and then I found out he was born in Australia in 1946 the same year I was born. Hugh your stories are always very interesting to read and they do jolt my memory of lovely times in my past
Wonderful story Hugh! The illustrations by David Mackintosh are excellent and include that lovely black and white pony-skin bag. Billy Lee Long looking very fit in the photo of him climbing up a steep Hong Kong street.
Lance and Pam sound like beautiful people to have so many of Kenny’s friends rock up saying “Kenny sent me” and they would welcome them into their home
No mobile phones back then to let them know Kenny was sending them another one of his friends.
The story of Billy Lee Long reminds me of about 30 years ago through my work I meet a lovely Chinese man who owned a great Chinese Restaurant. He was like Billy spoke with an Australian accent and then I found out he was born in Australia in 1946 the same year I was born. Hugh your stories are always very interesting to read and they do jolt my memory of lovely times in my past
Wonderful story Hugh! The illustrations by David Mackintosh are excellent and include that lovely black and white pony-skin bag. Billy Lee Long looking very fit in the photo of him climbing up a steep Hong Kong street.