Bob Gilmour goes back over his life now he has turned 80

Bob Gilmour turned 80 on 25th June and his Avenel friends Mark and Deb Roper gave him a birthday lunch that Sunday. He was asked to talk a bit about his life and he wrote this down to share with the Nagambie Community Voice readers.

I was born Robert Clive Gilmour on 25th June 1943, to Clive and Joyce Gilmour; my friends call me Bob.

My earliest recollection as a child was living in Nagambie behind the paper shop. Dad had the Nagambie Newsagency a er being discharged from Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital a er being a patient there for several months in 1943. e same year I was born.

I knocked around with Bruce Parris and Robert Hiddleston, the chemist’s son. I remember being on Glass Square with Bruce when some big trucks and caravans arrived. We were delighted to see vehicles of a circus coming into town from Queensland. When circuses came through Nagambie they always stopped, put up the big top and we kids enjoyed the show. I saw my rst elephant on Glass Square. Sometimes it was a rodeo going through. Early in my life I wore leg irons. I remember mum putting me to bed and changing my shoes into a special pair of shoes which I wore to bed. My legs were ne to the knees but then bent out to the le and to the right. e irons were supposed to straighten them.

Mum and Dad worked in the shop and I roamed Nagambie on a 3 wheeled tricycle. One day I found a bundle of old letters and I had fun putting them into people’s letter boxes. My parents had the experience of customers coming into the shop and returning their love letters written to each other when dad was in the army in Queensland. My mother decided to employ someone to do the cooking and to look a er me. She found Mrs Altman, who lived in Robinson Street. I called her Alty. I would meet her on her way to work on my tricycle. We became dear friends and she came to my wedding in 1968.

I was taken by my Dad one day to the Nagambie Bush Nursing Hospital and Doctor Rutter took out my tonsils. ey plonked my little baby brother on my bed there and he wet my bed.

I can’t explain the horror I experienced one Sunday morning when Dad announced we were leaving Nagambie to live with Grandma in Ascot Vale. I was a Nagambie kid! I didn’t want to live in the city. My mates Bruce and Robert- I wouldn’t see them again.

I was dragged out of Nagambie to live in Ascot vale, then Pascoe Vale South and then Essendon. I lived in this boring city and went to Essendon High school. ings improved when I was about 11 years old. I joined the Scouts-1st Essendon. I went up to senior scouts, then Burke and Wills Rovers 1st Essendon then I became a cub leader. I rock climbed and hiked all over Mt Bu alo, in the rover scouts.

Over the years we lived in Melbourne Alty would come to stay with us and I would take her to the Saturday a ernoon matinee at the Progress eatre in Coburg. We would line up with all the other kids until the manager would come out to inspect the queue and he would notice Alty and run up to us and take us straight into the picture theatre.

A er leaving school on the 5th of December 1960

I joined the CMF (citizens Military Forces) a transport unit. (Now the army reserve.) I was 17