Colin Clarke – Playing tennis for Dolphin

In that period where we didn’t have many courses to teach, me and another guy called Paddy Coolahan, another Instructor there with me, we used to go and play a lot of tennis first thing in the morning. We would turn up, we’d got nothing to do, well we’ll go and play some tennis then, and the Physical Training Instructors, one day, we had probably been doing it for about a month, like nearly every morning we were out playing tennis for a couple of hours and he comes over and he says, “You two guys play a lot of tennis.” We said, “Well you know …” just explained what was going on.

He said, “Right, we’re a bit short for the Dolphin Team, do you want to play for us.” We’d just got recruited by, you know, default because we were just out on the courts a lot. We weren’t any good (laughs).

I remember the very first game we played, we went and played a team from HMS Collingwood, and you may or may not be aware but they have quite a lot of foreign national students that go through the training at Collingwood and HMS Sultan, certainly back then.

They had a couple of International guys on one of the courses we were playing for them and I think they had some guy from Pakistan on the course. I never saw the ball this guy was hitting. It was just flying by me.

Got absolutely annihilated. I don’t think we got a point the whole of the match, because of the quality of these guys that we were playing against, but it was fun.