Simon Westerman (Chair of Tyler Hill Bridge Club Kent) takes a whimsical ramble of the brief history of Crawley Bridge Club:
Crawley Bridge Club was formed in March 1972 and appears to be very much the brain-child of Joe Gibson and Paddy Bronte-Hearne who were to take the roles of treasurer and secretary. The former was a local bank manager with 41 years’ service to Barclays, as well as being both chair and subsequently vice-chair and treasurer of Sussex County Bridge Association, while the latter was the chair of Crawley Conservative Association, a keen trade unionist, and an air traffic engineer.
Most of the work in setting up the club was undertaken by these two, with the secretary splashing out 14p on 100 envelopes as well as purchasing 40 two and a half penny second class stamps. He also made 5 phone calls at 2p per call, and somehow in those days, their arithmetic made this £1.28. But what is 4p among bridge players?
He was also responsible for publicity, which led to the following advertisement appearing in the Crawley and District Observer in January 1973:
The secretary was replaced the following year by Mr W.J.Morgan, but Bronte-Hearne remained active within the club.
Ten years later the same paper was boasting that Crawley had the best bridge players in Britain: the club had sent two teams to the Isle of Man British Bridge League Congress, taking both first and second places. Tad Jasko and David Clifton, both members of the first team, also won the open pairs competition. Tad Jasko, a winner of the Sussex pairs competition in 1974, was also a member of the club’s founding committee.
In trying to work out why two teams from Crawley should travel to the Isle of Man, there appear to be two connections:-
The first is that Paddy Bronte-Hearne played hockey for Ballamona Rovers in 1956; the second is that the club’s first secretary wrote a dissertation while studying for a Masters in Energy Resources Management at South Bank Polytechnic. The title of this rather esoteric work, submitted in 1986 and held in the Manx National Heritage Library and Archives is 'The contribution that can be made by wind turbine generators to the Isle of Man electricity supply’.
'To cement the obvious relationship between these isolated facts it seems that we only need to look at a poster produced for the Manx Hockey Association leap year celebration party at the Palais de Danse in Douglas in 1932.
In 1984 Crawley entered a team in the Sobranie Challenge, playing Henfield at home.
The event was Jeremy Flint’s greatest success aimed at the rank and file of players who would not normally enter the world of tournament bridge. This event easily outstripped the official tournaments in terms of attendance, prizes, publicity and treatment of players and was greatly enjoyed by the vast number of players.
The club was proud of its champions in 1985, when Mick Carrington and Dave Clifton won the Sussex pairs, an event Dave Clifton went on to win on a further three occasions over the next 14 years, and Pauline and Martin Pool, John Wallace and Simon Whitehouse won the Henfield Candles, a Swiss teams event with a mere 58 teams participating. This strange sounding competition was initiated in 1975 in Henfield Village Hall by the now defunct Henfield Duplicate Bridge Society and in both 1994 and 1996 had 62 teams playing. It is now organised by Sussex Contract Bridge Association but in 2024 had just 14 teams supporting it.
In 1986 Crawley entered the first edition of the Epson World Simultaneous Pairs, with some 60,000 players in 83 countries. The local winners were Dave Clifton and Alan Litchfield.
In August of that year Joe Gibson died suddenly, aged 60, just after having retired from the bank.
In the following decade, the club made up between five and eight tables at its Wednesday and Friday sessions, but these numbers were to decline and by the second decade of this century the club was averaging about four and a half tables for its sessions. In autumn 2014 the numbers started to rise again with a small incremental increase each year to some 6 or 7 tables until covid struck. A cadet night was introduced on Mondays in September 2018, and this helped spur numbers.
Yet again, to show that bridge keeps your mind active, Paddy Bronte-Hearne passed away in 2017, aged 93, and Tad Jasko died at the age of 95 in 2022.
Simon Westerman, April 2025