Nick Scannel plays the pipes during an emotional visit to the memorial clock tower. Photo / Ian Cooper
Nick Scannel plays the pipes during an emotional visit to the memorial clock tower. Photo / Ian Cooper
IC15102020rsa_1 The gathering of about 50 for Sunday's Taradale RSA centennial service. Photo / Ian Cooper
The Taradale RSA has at last marked its centennial with a weekend of commemoration which was delayed by the Covid-19 crisis.
The celebrations celebrated 100 years since the establishment of the RSA initially on a site around the current Taradale Fire Station site in 1920. They were based in the club on the Gloucester St site it has occupied for almost 65 years.
A meet-and-greet on Friday night was followed by a dinner on Saturday night, and a Sunday service a few hundred metres away at the Taradale clock tower and war memorial.
It seemed symbolical that as the outdoor service took place in fine, sunny weather, two doves swooped above the gathering, one settling atop the tower as the club's youngest-ever president, Brayden Coldicutt stepped forward with patron Carol Murfitt to place a bouquet at the foot of the monument.
The gathering of about 50 for Sunday's Taradale RSA centennial service. Photo / Ian Cooper
Formed in the aftermath of World War 1, the club was initially for returned services personnel. Still, with ever diminishing numbers who've served, the celebrations attracted many who had parents or grandparents in the two World wars, while there were veterans of conflicts such as the war in Vietnam.
Among the longest-surviving club members present was Bruce Johnson, who was aged four when his dad left for the war in 1940 and nine when he returned five years later.
With a stint of Compulsory Military Training (a form of conscription finally abolished in New Zealand in 1972, had been a Territorial Force Volunteer and a member of the Waipukurau RSA before arriving in Napier 51 years ago, buying a motel next door to the club and then joining-up.
Coldicutt's father, Peter, started with the club when his dad would take him down about 1968, and soon found himself progressing up the ranks, initially as "curtain-puller" with the club's concert party.
The flag raised by Taradale RSA member Graeme Duncan. Photo / Ian Cooper
He had been part of the Taradale RSA ever since and part of its "family" he said.
Also speaking during the commemoration was Ethel Kearns, who reckoned she must have been one of the last around who had been around when the club moved to its current site. Her father went to war in 19th Battalion and returned home an ex-Prisoner of War.
Bill Johnson honoured those who had built the club into a Taradale institution, including getting a War Memorial attracted in the former borough, but also had a word for the contemporary city leaders.
"One of the roles was to look after the memorial," he said, digressing into a little city politics with reference to issues over Napier's War Memorial Centre on Marine Parade. "It's time the Council got cracking," he said. "Where's our eternal flame? Where's our wall of remembrance."
