#03 |Bordeaux, France (1978)

ESSEX - BORDEAUX

tour memories of Father Ninian McNamara

It was the journey out to Bordeaux which stays in my mind; the ship docked at Le Havre at 5.30 am on Holy Saturday.

At 6.00 am, bleary -eyed, bearded and bloated, we were sitting in our bus when the order came to start engines; the driver turned his key and a piston broke and went through the side of a cylinder.

At 7.00 a.m. our bus was towed ashore by a tractor and left on the quayside of Le Havre, which was not only not open, it had no intention of opening as it had gone on holiday for Easter.

A small whip round to provide Mr. Bruton with money for the telephone and by 9.30am, a coach had been found but the driver (a surly, suspicious,  Portuguese  man) wanted cash up front - £400 before we could depart.  

Another whip-round; it was as well that we had Tom Daley with us; he lent us his betting float on the strict understanding that he would have the cash returned before the first race on Easter Monday and, a little later than expected we left for Bordeaux.

Our first opponents had us worried; they had just won the National Championship of all the private schools in France and we thought that we would be very hard pressed. Fortunately, they did their pre-match warm-up propped against the bar of a lot-tat cafe. More sober if not more skilful, we won easily. 

Perhaps we should not have started our tour on Good Friday, nothing went well. Somehow we had mixed up the dates; our French hosts were all booked up to go on their Easter holidays the day before we thought we were due to leave.

So we started our journey home with the prospect of spending a night in the bus.

At Blois we parked for the night in a sand-pit beside the River Loire; we decided to lighten ship; another whip round was organised to raise the price of hotel rooms for the night.

Unhappily Tom Daley had not had much success with the horses and his funds were so reduced that we could only raise enough for two double rooms and one single room.

I was lucky I had the single room but the memories of those who spent the night on that bus run the gamut from the hilarious via the indecent to the traumatic.