Guest Speaker – Lance Boswell A lifelong resident of the Albury area Lance Boswell has been Manager of the Albury Club, our new weekly lunch venue, for nine years.  At last week’s meeting he presented  a history of the club from its beginnings in the 1800’s. The club has a current membership of 500 and Lance was able to pass on numerous pieces of information of interest, including the recorded consumption of whiskey and cigars The Albury Club has been part and parcel of the region’s history since it was created in the 1875 by a group of like-minded businessmen and graziers as a congenial retreat where they could exchange ideas, conversation, and amusements and generally share experiences. Leafing through the pages of the Club’s Centenary publication* is something of a social history lesson. The previously unimaginable idea of having ladies present at Club social events gained ground as younger members returned from WWII, bringing with them changing attitudes and the Club adjusted accordingly. Ladies had to wait until 1968 for ‘modern facilities’ to be provided, so they could comfortably take lunch and be entertained in the ‘Strangers Room’. Many of the present club facilities came about as a result of ideas put down in the Suggestion Book. The leadlight ceiling in the Member’s Bar was ingeniously designed to extract smoke from the room in the ‘good old days’ of cigars and cigarettes. The leadlight panel above the Function Bar area depicts Albury’s iconic War Memorial – a sight the lift operator at the old Mate’s department store building must have seen a thousand times as this was the original home of the panels. It is only in recent years that the Club has hosted functions for non-members, and until that time three magnificent full-size billiard tables had pride of place in the President’s Room. The special supports for these incredibly heavy tables with their slabs of slate can still be seen on the dance floor. The Albury Club continues to provide members, their families and guests with a retreat from everyday life, enabling them to relax in a friendly atmosphere. For some local families this is a tradition that has extended over three, and even four generations so far and is likely to carry on for many more to come.