David Graham began his career at Kenmore Hospital as a nurse when he was 17 and worked there for decades in the wards. A colleague taught him bridge when he retired, and today he is the Goulburn Bridge Club’s games director, and refers affectionately to the club as his ‘ward’. Photo: John Thistleton.
Goulburn Bridge Club members no longer see themselves as an elite club and are not as strictly policed as they were back in the club’s early history.
After formative years of social games the Bridge Club formed in 1970. Its membership over those early years comprised of doctors and solicitors’ wives, pharmacists, accountants, plumbers and schoolteachers.
These days the club’s games director, David Graham, is a former nurse and taxi driver, who says the club’s early exclusiveness turned some people off joining.
He joined in 1999 and remembers a clock timing the players and a games director back then, a woman who was a stickler for the rules. The laws were more severe.
Extremely competitive players were likely to round on someone slow bidding in a game of duplicate bridge, accusing them of signalling to their partners.
“That bought a passive-aggressive air sort of thing,” David said. “Over the years the laws have been modified and to produce more equitable results.”
A more social atmosphere prevails these days. “We are still competitive, but there is a lot of chatter and things that would not have gone on when I started playing bridge in 1999,” David said. “I’m forever shooshing and saying, ‘Don’t tell the next table what you have just done because you are going to be playing it next,’” he says with a chuckle.
The club’s 40 members who include retired nurses, real estate salesmen and secretaries realised the stifling order had to change.
As does the World Bridge Foundation which is to review its 93 laws.
“Over time they have seen that being too pedantic and too aggressive with our laws have turned people away,” David said. “A lot of laws up until 2017 have been watered down. They are all designed to prevent anybody from cheating, as all laws are and are designed to achieve an equitable result.”
Goulburn Bridge Club rents its own rooms in a light-filled building in Robinson Street, with the main room filled with small tables and chairs and the technology to facilitate well run and well attended games each Thursday.
If you have played euchre or five hundred, chances are you will pick up bridge in a short time and have someone like David at your side helping you along the way. He has taught almost a quarter of the club’s members.
“I used to love playing five hundred and euchre as a kid,” he said. “My mother Joyce was a mad five hundred player and I was the baby of our family, so I had to go everywhere she went. Sometimes I slept under the card table while they played.”
Engrossed in their cards, bridge players meet twice weekly in Goulburn. Photo: Goulburn Bridge Club.
His father Henry and Henry’s identical twin Ted both had the same occupation as wash-out men on the railway, rode their bikes to work and dressed the same. They too would play five hundred until late in the night at friends’ places.
Just like Henry and Ted, bridge is a game for partners. All the clubs play duplicate bridge.
“With bridge itself, all 52 cards are at play,” David said. “You have 13 cards, your partner has 13, and the evil ones as I call them (opposing team), have 13 each.”
An excellent way to exercise the mind, bridge rewards players for thinking logically.
“Dr Susanne Storrier once said bridge was mandatory for first-year medical students to teach young doctors logic,” David said. He said successful players had the ability to concentrate, albeit not too much, otherwise it could be off-putting for the three others at the table. A good memory helps too.
“There are ways of improving your memory by the way you play your cards,” he said. “You can manage your memory far better keeping in mind who is putting out what cards.
“Anything that keeps you adding up, acting logically, socialising with like-minded people, it is all good for your brain, and good for your body, I think,” David said.
“I don’t subscribe to ‘play bridge and you won’t get dementia,’” he said. “Charles Goren, who was one of the most famous bridge players in the world and wrote millions of books, died of dementia.”
But the game is addictive, stimulating and Goulburn members enjoy the socialising as they work through games that average seven minutes to complete. Over the morning, and on Saturday afternoons, they play an average of 27 games.
Find out more about the Goulburn Bridge Club or get in contact via their website.
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