Dave O'Brien
HE
TRULY is Mr Social Clubs.
On
Monday Dave O’Brien begins his 25th year as president of the Southampton &
District Social Clubs League.
O’Brien
joined Shirley Warren Social Club in 1951, aged 18, and immediately signed for
the snooker team. The following year he took the captain’s armband.
Apart
from two years National Service in the Army, and an extra year as a regular
because the “pay was good”, he held the position until a foot operation
ended his 51-year reign in 2006.
Now
aged 75, O’Brien, who also captained his club’s cribbage team for 40 years,
admits his whole life has been centred around social clubs.
“That’s
why I never got married,” he laughed.
In
1939 O’Brien’s family moved to a new estate in Coxford and he has lived in
the same house ever since.
“We
moved from Kingsland when I was six because they were going to pull all the
houses down,” he said. “But Hitler beat them to it.”
An
apprentice gas fitter, O’Brien joined the Southampton Gaslight and Coke
Company for a year before taking up a new career as a catering service engineer.
But
his real skills lay in committee life.
He
has served 50 years on the re-named Warren Social committee, now as sports
secretary. Dad Wally was a former treasurer and president.
After
50 years as Warren’s representative at the Wessex Branch CIU and 44 years on
the Southampton & District Social Clubs League management committee, the
former captain of the Inter-Town snooker team is not prepared for his pipe and
slippers yet.
At
the league’s recent AGM, O’Brien was re-elected president for two more
years.
“You’ve
got to have your heart and soul in these things,” he said.
O’Brien,
who rides a 50cc Vespa scooter, won an engraved spoon for the league’s highest
break of 45 in 1971.
“I
don’t play any of the games now,” he admitted. “I prefer staying in and
watching telly.”
In
1959 O’Brien met a lad who had “a bad name down Shirley Snooker Hall for
taking all their money”.
“There
was a knock on the door,” he recalled. “A young gawky-looking nipper with
glasses said ‘I’m Chris Holland. Albert Lee sent me’,”
Holland won his first six league matches for Shirley Warren and played under O’Brien for 48 years. Together they won seven Southampton pairs titles and Holland was Town Champion a record 13 times.
CIU
branch secretary John Wood (left) presents Dave O’Brien with a 50-year
long-service award
from reports by Tim Dunkley Sept/Oct 2008