At 100 years old, Bob Sinclair still has his sense of humour, plays snooker three times a week with his mates, and cooks his own dinner.
“Well, you have to do something,” he says and confesses his success with snooker “comes and goes”.
“We aren’t professionals; we just enjoy the company.”
This week, Bob celebrates his 100th birthday at Arvida Oakwood’s retirement village where he has a self-contained apartment, and spends time playing snooker along with being a regular at indoor bowls.
Once a week, the snooker group head along the road to Club Waimea to compete on the full-sized table and share a few stories that may or may not be completely true.
He was born a century ago in Yorkshire, England, on an estate known as Bramham Park where his father milked the cows.
He recalls walking to school in the snow, cars crank started, and his mother making a meal out of six pennies worth of mince.
By the time he was 18, World War 2 was underway, and he joined the Navy, working as a radio direction finding (RDF) officer at a time aerials were turned by hand. For four years he travelled “everywhere” with the Navy, mostly on submarine control in the Indian Ocean and for 10 months laying mines in the Denmark Strait.
With the war behind him, Bob left the army in Australia where he stayed for four years before heading to New Zealand with plans to join its Navy. It was not to be though. On his first night in a New Zealand YMCA, he was attacked in his sleep with a razor and instead of the Navy, he took time to recover on a friend’s farm.
It changed his career path and eventually, he became a sharemilker in Northland, milking 75 Jersey cows until the early 1960s when he moved to Auckland to work in the timber industry.
He headed south to the Richmond retirement village seven years ago to be closer to family, but now he is on his own.
At 100, his life is busy though, between snooker and bowls he “takes an interest in rugby – like when the Blues won”.
He’s keen on cricket too and played social cricket for several decades.
He says in 1955 he witnessed New Zealand cricket’s “all-time low” when 11 batsmen mustered just 26 runs against England at Eden Park.
After 100 years, he says the advice he would give others is simply to live life.
“You’ve got to have an interest in life itself,” he says.
“You take it all for granted. One day comes after another and you don’t realise the days are going by.”
This week he gets to celebrate his birthday with a morning tea at the retirement home and will probably share a few tales collected over a century of life.
A game of snooker is likely to be on the cards, too.
