Marjorie Thunder and Mary Davies
Marjorie THUNDER and Mary DAVIES
How many of us thank our mothers for introducing us to the fascinating, frustrating, endlessly challenging game of bridge? For both Marjorie and Mary this is how their bridge playing years began. With that introduction came a skill and interest that has lasted them a lifetime.
Marjorie has just celebrated her 90th birthday and as we talked, she reminisced. Born in Tasmania she moved to Perth as a teenager, boarding at MLC. Her best memory of those years is when she and Val Bandy won the State Girls Tennis doubles in 1938. When school years were over Marjorie moved to Bunbury still much absorbed with tennis and another interest, the piano, until she met and became engaged to a Warwickshire man, Pat Thunder. Pat was a torpedo bomber in the RAAF and when he went off on active service, Marjorie’s father suggested she should get a job. She spent the next five years working at the ABC in Perth then she and Pat married in 1944 making their home in Pearce for six months after the war.
Pat’s mother taught them both to play bridge, a popular social game since the 1930s. It was rubber bridge, played at home with friends on a Sunday night. Marjorie was busy with family and charity work. For years she helped regularly at the Paraplegic Library in Shenton Park and was much in demand for fundraising fashion shows where she mostly modelled hats, a very important part of the wardrobe of well-dressed women of the time. It was not until the 1970s that she took the plunge and joined a bridge club, the WABC.
From then on, bridge began to play a major part in Marjorie’s life. Partnering friends like Ada McDermot and Jean Vincent she improved to the point where in 1985 and 1986 she and Dolly Masel were in the State Women’s team and the following year she represented WA again, this time playing with Mary Davies. Marjorie did more than just play bridge. She contributed hugely to WABC as a hard working and reliable reliable member of Council for nine years. In 1995 she was made a Life Member. Mary and Marjorie became regular partners playing Precision then Matchpoint Precision which is still their preferred system.
Mary is a born and bred West Australian whose life seemed to move along on a fairly even keel until she met, fell in love with and married an American submariner in 1944. Very soon afterwards he was killed. The US Navy offered to take her to the United States but the opportunity had to be taken very quickly. With only eight hours notice she packed her bags and spent the next two years in her husband’s home country, meeting his family and friends. She’d always had a bit of a travel bug so she decided to make the most of being there. For 12 months she got to know a lot of the States, travelling around on a Greyhound bus ticket and becoming reacquainted with many of the friends she’d made as a driver in Perth for the US navy before she married. It wasn’t easy to get back to Australia and eventually she managed to find a berth on a rather disreputable cargo ship sailing via Panama.
Once home Mary met up with old friend John Davies. They married and had three children so for some years, domestic duties and, like Marjorie, charity work for organisations such as the Cancer Foundation, kept her busy. Mary enjoyed a game of social bridge and couldn’t resist when free membership of the West Australian Bridge Association, then housed in Kings Park Road, was offered to those who took somewhat expensive lessons from visiting bridge guru Tim Seres. But it wasn’t until WABC bought the Anglican Church Hall in Dalkeith as a permanent base that Mary began to play regular and serious duplicate. Dorothy Kelly suggested they try the new Precision system and Mary’s game blossomed. She and Dorothy made several State teams then, when Dorothy was ill, Mary teamed up for several years with Lilya Kochinski, a fine American player, continuing to win major events and becoming a Grand Master. She is always a force to be reckoned with in any game of bridge and continues to enjoy her regular games with Marjorie. They take it all much less seriously today but it gives them a great deal of enjoyment.
As I talked to Marjorie and Mary about their partnership they mentioned the names of people they’d known and played with at WABC over the years. Quite a few of them appear on our club Honours Board. Names like Ailsa Ruse, Dorothy Kelly, Heather Booth, Dolly Masel, Min Freedman, Ada McDermott and Mabs McCulloch and many more kept dropping into the conversation as Marjorie and Mary remembered good times and good friends at WABC over many years. Both agreed that perhaps the best thing about playing bridge is that you make lifelong friendships. Perhaps that’s something most of us would agree with too.
Published in March 2012 Edition of Trumps Plus
