JOHN Connolly's business was presided over by bulky "Davey" Bell, father of old schoolmates Andy and Priscilla.

Davey could manufacture pills, lotions and ointments guaranteed to cure anything from a toothache to cancer.

Connolly also had a wholesale wine licence and profitably distributed his wines and spirits packed in comfortable sized bundles to townsmen and "cockie" customers who, not withstanding advice to the contrary, negatived the Biblical instruction "look not upon the wine when it is red, when it givith its colour in the cup; for at last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder".

I am not attributing the following incident to the potency of Connolly's wines and spirits, notwithstanding the fact that he had many convivial friends who in his company during the afternoons and evenings would patronise "Bill" Smith's billiard room at the rear of the old Commercial, and the old room run by corpulent sixteen-stone Henricks brothers, above the Royal (which still stands and seems to smile gleefully as it revives its thoughts of ancient hilarity).

During the spaces between the games of snooker the old boys (our forefathers) at the invitation of John, would troop into the wine cellar to have "one, or two, or three" and then glide out to again exhibit their skill in poking red and white ivory balls with a smooth, long pointed stick, and impressing them in the netted string bags at the corners of the big green baize-covered tables.

It was a hilarious day when the news blew round that good old "Daddy" Wilson, the ginger-whiskered school teacher, had fallen off Connelly's verandah to the footpath and broken his leg.

Hilarious, because we boys realised there would be a respite from strict school discipline and an abatement from the stern "come out here" and the stinging school cane on the the tips of our fingers.

Another good wholesale customer of John's was Doctor Spooner, the old ex-Anglican clergyyman who came to Bega to weave together the tangled remnants of Harris' High School after Harris, who was a civil engineer, had accepted a more lucrative appointment as assayer at Broken Hill.

The doctor was a lavish entertainer, and shifted his school to Bismark House, out Newtown way, where for a time it flourished. But whisky, wine, music and cards never yet, when an income is limited, produced prosperity.

The Bega Pioneers' Museum is managed by the Bega Valley Historical Society.