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Old Boys' Union
Blue & Blue
WW2 Honour Roll
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Old Boys' Union
Blue & Blue
WW2 Honour Roll
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Bernie was born to Edna and Leonard Walford on Bastille Day, July 14,
1947. In the late 1940s the family lived in a flat in 34 Victoria St
Potts Point. This terrace was owned by the Fairfax family, and is right
at the end of Victoria St - at
the most beautiful and stunning location, overlooking the city. Leonard
was an amateur watercolourist and the Walford family shared premises
with, then lived a few doors away from, the artists Sali Herman, Lloyd
Rees, William Dobell and the later academic doyen of Australian art,
Bernard Smith. It would be nice
to think that Bernie gained his Christian name from an association
between his father and Bernard Smith.
When Bernie had just turned 3 years of age, and his brother
Terry was 8, Bernie’s mother died suddenly at home.
Leonard, Terry and Bernie then moved to a block of flat
2 doors away, again in an equally spectacular location. Tragedy struck a
second time in 1963 when Bernie was 16, his father also dying suddenly
at home from a heart attack. It was this second tragedy, I think, which
brought Bernie more significantly into my life, when in the aftermath of
Bernie and Terry’s loss, my mother asked me to try to include Bernie in
our back-lane cricket and touch football.
I had first met Bernie when I was in kindergarten at St Vincent’s
College, a few doors up from where we both lived in Victoria St Potts
Point. We both moved on to primary school at Marist Brothers
Darlinghurst and at some point Bernie was kept back one class, so that I
don’t have a clear recollection of much interaction with him until his
father’s death, though I do recall serving with him as an altar boy,
possibly before 1963.
The years 1963 to 1969 were marked by some very fun times
together with some mutual friends– plenty of cricket (Bernie was a good
left-hand fast-medium bowler); table tennis, and later some parties, at
his and Terry’s flat; hilarious visits to Luna Park; walking through the
back streets of Kings Cross after midnight screenings at the Flee-house
cinema in Darlinghurst Rd.
This era came to an end in 1969 when Terry joined the Navy and
Bernie decided he wanted to move to a new flat in Kings Cross on his
own. This experiment did not work. As I learned later from him, the next
five years were marked by loss of his job at the Martin Place Post
Office, homelessness, arrest for vagrancy, two stints in Long Bay (which
didn’t seem to faze him), transfer to Rozelle Hospital and then transfer
in 1973-4 to a boarding-house in Balmain, with support as an out-patient
of Balmain Community Health Centre. It was a chance meeting on the
streets of Balmain in 1974 that led to the resumption of our regular
contact, something we maintained from then on.
Bernie lived at the Boarding House for 10 years, with the
kind support of the manager Mary and her husband, Bernie helping out as
a kitchen-hand as well as working some hours in a laundry
When this couple retired, and the boarding house closed,
intensive efforts to find alternative accommodation yielded what seemed
an ideal solution – a room of one’s own, plus three meals a day. Bernie
however lasted one night at Bondi Lodge, deciding that the food was not
to his taste. Two stints in private rentals followed over the next three
years, the second ending when the building in which he lived in Double
Bay was sold for redevelopment. This triggered a three month stay at
Matthew Talbot in Woolloomooloo. At this point my brother Gerard stepped
in and, miraculously, within a short time, a one-bedroom unit in public
housing at Maroubra was allocated. Bernie prized this spot and lived
there happily for almost thirty years until 2016, only having to give it
up when a sudden decline in his health forced a move to Sir Joseph Banks
aged care facility at Botany.
It has been remarked that given Bernie’s psychiatric and even
cognitive impairments, he did well to live until the age he did. It is
true that the support he received from myself, Gerard, Lorraine and
Lindy was critical. But the reality was that our involvement, while
long-standing, was not day-to-day. We would see Bernie for social events
but, until he moved to Sir Joseph Banks Aged Care Facility, often
several weeks would pass without even phone contact. What was more
important week-to-week was the institutional support services that were
gradually extended – from community health from the 1970s, to public
housing from the 1980s, then (soon after the year 2000) financial
management of his pension by the Trustee and Guardian, weekly Home Care
service and a free ring-in telephone service by Telstra; and then from
late 2016 the good and friendly care provided by Sir Joseph Banks.
Bernie’s friends, and here I would like to especially mention Joe Rosa,
played a key role in linking Bernie into these services but the on-going
support role fell to the workers involved. What this shows is the
importance of a partnership between informal friends and family and
funded services – funded services which were not available in the late
1960’s. And in regard to this partnership, I would like to acknowledge
the magnificent social support, weekend to weekend, provided by my
partner Lorraine and my brother Gerard in ‘topping up’ and enriching the
experience for Bernie in his last years two and a half years at Sir
Joseph Banks. Not to mention their huge role in years prior to this.
Even with this platform of medical and social support from
friends and services, Bernie’s endurance can only be explained by
passions and qualities within the man himself.
Bernie had a great passion, an
obsession, with collecting – and collecting things of quality.
Over the years Bernie acquired perhaps 4 -5 thousand books – ranging
from an almost complete collection of Disney Golden Books through to a
vast trove of large and expensive (but discounted) coffee-table books on
history and geography – the history of art, the cities of the world and
so on. He loved the idea of learning - so his unit was replete with
school and university textbooks on mathematics, physics and chemistry.
When we had to clear his unit in 2016, the University of Sydney Book
Fair was more than happy to take 90% of his holdings, all neatly sorted
horizontally and piled high to the ceilings.
Bernie also liked to collect music records – vinyl and then CD’s,
though his holdings were depleted from time to time in the 70s and 80s
when he had to pawn them. Bernie’s phalanx of books was matched by his
appetite for purchase of clothes. Dozens upon dozens of ties and socks –
all of the utmost colour, with David Jones (thank you very much) his
preferred venue for window shopping and sometimes purchase.
As community mental health staff trying to contact him would
know, Bernie was apt to be up and out of his unit very early of a
morning and late to arrive back. He liked to, as he put it, ‘look
around’ – so his days were spent ‘looking around’: the city, the Cross,
Edgecliff and Double Bay and venturing much further field by train – to
Parramatta and the like – or by traversing long distances on foot
(Maroubra to Randwick, even Maroubra to the city on a few occasions). It
was this endless walking which, his friends always thought, helped to
compensate for a lifetime of hamburgers and Coke-a-Cola. It was also
this walking, and curiosity about places, that brought Bernie into
contact with shopkeepers and people in the street – where his knack of
remembering names, and his normal politeness, endeared him to many who
got used to seeing him ‘around’.
It was his keenness for some things of his
experience, which I shared in common, that made time I spent with Bernie
easy to take. He had an almost photographic recall of people and places
of his childhood and adolescence – his school years, the scene at Kings
Cross and Potts Point, the films and pop music of this era. He also made
no demands when we met up: ‘where are we going’, ‘what are we doing’ he
would say, not ‘I want to do so and so’.
When it was all said and done, Bernie was ‘on his own’. In part,
this was his choice, and perhaps something linked to his schizophrenia.
I gather efforts by community health staff to include him in some social
group outings tended to fail. Whatever the case, he did have to face
many challenges just to survive. He seems to have been prone at times to
‘angry calling out’ when alone at home, as I learnt from neighbours and
overhead myself a few times when I walked down the hallway to his unit.
What triggered these episodes at home, only psychiatrists and other
professional staff might comprehend: at least sometimes, I think it was
actual or perceived slights in the street, often from young gangs of
kids. At other, more serene
times, when in social company Bernie seemed a bit lost in his own world,
it became clear he was musing about something in the world of school and
youth.
Time
spent out and about with Bernie felt good, in a funny, free-wheeling way
- a sense of freedom. Being with him, and thinking about his life, did
trigger pools of feeling in me – about shared memories of growing up in
Kings Cross and Potts Point, about the losses of his childhood and
adolescence, about the world of boarding-houses and about his on-going
life. He had a gallantry about him, and a resourcefulness and staying
power, which got him through the decades. Even in his last, infirm
months he was doing his best to oblige us. So, now, hooroo old son, may
you rest in peace.
Michael Howard (Class of 1964)
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Vale
Bernie Walford 1947-2019, an Old Boy of Marist Brothers Darlinghurst
My earliest memory of Bernie was the 3rd
Class photo of 1958 with Bernie and the rest of us dressed in our little
grey Darlo suits looking at the camera with innocence, trust and hope
for the future. Unfortunately the future had a lot of hard knocks in
store for Bernie.
His great loves in those early years
included cricket and Danny Kaye who visited Sydney around 1959. Danny
was a very popular movie star/comedian who could sing and dance with the
best of them. He was starring in a movie around that time called “The
Secret Life of Walter Mitty” where he day dreamed about being brave and
famous characters such as a Spitfire pilot. Most of us have done that.
Somehow Bernie got to meet Danny Kaye
and was pictured on the front page of the SMH sitting on Danny’s knee
and grinning like a Cheshire cat. Bernie was on a high at school for
days after that.
I later learned that, tragically,
Bernie’s Mum had died when he had just turned
three. He did go on to High School but I don’t remember much of him in
these years. Later I learned that his father died suddenly in 1963 and
that he left school in 1964.
Bernie was one of the Kings Cross kids
along with Dennis Coleman, Robert Woog and Peter Clark. Occasionally I
stayed with an aunt at the Cross so was almost an honorary “Cross Kid.”
I ran into Bernie rarely over the years.
He attended a few Darlo reunions which he enjoyed immensely and could
remember individual cricket games, batting and bowling stats who we
played and who won. He had a photographic memory for anything to do with
Darlo but life wasn’t kind to him in later years. He told us once with a
mixture of humour and pride he was the original Kings Cross street kid
and survived that experience.
To his great credit Michael Howard kept
in close touch with Bernie over many years and was a great support to
Bernie to the end. Perhaps more of us should have done so as well.
Rest
in peace Bernie. A gentle soul and good friend who has moved on from
this sometimes brutal world to hopefully a better place.
John Gallagher (Class of 1967)
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