THE Space Invader fortune we’ll get to - and the pub rebellion, the plane crash, the Pancake Kitchen period and the million-dollar lottery win.
This story starts with trays of Dandy icecreams.
Those little tubs with the wooden spoons set up Michael Forshaw and his family for life in Australia.
A job for kids, said the man at Sydney’s Easter Show.
“I said: “I’m just off the boat from England ’n’ I need a job; do ya pay? The fella said ‘Well, yeah’, so I said: ‘Well, why don’t you gi’ me a try?”
His grin, his smarts and his appetite for work have stood him in good stead since he and wife Carole handed over 10 quid to bring themselves and their two children away from a comfortable life in England and across the oceans to an aircraft hanger.
They got to Sydney in 1967.
The deal with the icecreams was vendors paid 50c a tub and charged the punters a buck apiece.
“This was a really good deal,” Michael says, with relish.
“Only, I didn’t have any money. I got up to the back of the truck, in line with all these kids, and this fella leaned down and put a tray ’round me neck, ’n’ asked me for the money ($15). I said: ‘I don’t ’ave any.’ ’E says ‘Right, get that (tray) off’. So I give ’im me watch. I said:
‘’Ow’s that? I’ll sell these and then come back ’n’ get me watch.”
Ten minutes later, it was back on his wrist.
“Everyone else’s just standin’ around on street corners, lookin’ a bit gormless, so I went to the arena proper and right to the very top. Hot, it was, ’n’ I got up there sweating, out of breath … stood there for a second, regained meself, then shouted: '‘Icecream!’
“Sold the lot, just like that.
“By the end of the first day, these guys had a tray waitin’ for me, ’n’ I’d hear ’em sayin’: ‘The bloody Pom’s back.’ I’d just say ‘Thanks mate’, put me money down, and away I’d go again.”
Taking only the right change, Michael made about $400 a day.
His lips split and his ears fried - despite wearing zinc - but the times were made for someone like Michael.
He’d come from harder times.
Raised near Liverpool’s docks, much of his first three years were spent in a huge air raid shelter under his street.
Michael’s earliest strong memories are of the aftermath of war: “The bombed out buildings and me father comin’ ’ome … this giant taxi comin’ down the street ’n’ this bloody big bloke getting’ out ’n’ walkin’ into our ’ouse!”
Liverpool’s economy was ruined and in the ‘50s the dole queues were long, but Michael’s always had a knack for finding work.
He did time in the merchant navy, then got on as a trainee chef at a big hotel in nearby Southport. In Southport he met Carole. Like Michael, she’s the industrious type. Then she was making valves at a factory during the day and taking tickets at the cinema of an evening.
Soon after they started seeing each other Michael moved on - he got himself a job as a cocktail waiter at the grand old Grosvenor in Chester.
He had wheels, though - an ex-military motorcycle. It was a peculiar, shaft-driven Sunbeam with a tendency to lean to the right … it was meant to have a sidecar. Without the side ballast, no-one could master the bike but Michael. As he does, he turned problems into plusses.
So, the young barman nipped back and forth between Southport and Chester, keeping Carole on her toes with his nifty line of chat.
“Michael was just nice,” she says.
The pair of them were barely 20 when they started living together above another Chester pub.
Michael was 22 when made publican of a new place, The Vault, at Middlewitch (one of three villages, close together, where alleged witches were burnt in the Middle Ages).
He was the youngest publican in great Britain, and scant respect for silly old rules.
The Vault, under Michael and Carole’s management, was the first place in Britain to sell discounted liquor. It was also the first to advertise the price separate to the government tax - illegal, but fabulous for business.
Middlewitch’s policeman took no action, but asked them to serve people as quickly as possible, as the queue ran up the street.
The ruse got Michael into hot water with the Publicans Association.
It was reported in the local paper that: “Complaints about price reductions at the off-licence shop attached to Mike’s pub at Middlewitch, Cheshire, were reported to the association’s area meeting and 18 publicans voted unanimously in favour of his expulsion.”
“Best advertising we could’ve got,” Michael says, with a belly chuckle.
They made the telly and all.
“We never had a till in them days, just a drawer; and the drawer got full really fast,” Michael says. “So we got an empty box, and just put it under the counter. We just kept filling these boxes up. It got so Carole couldn’t go upstairs to feed the children, so we phoned up for my mother to come down, and her job then was straightening the money out and looking after the kids while we worked all day. And we just piled it in.”
They’d been at the pub a year when they saw an advertisement for emigration to Australia, featuring Queensland palm trees. It was a day when the gas fire in their quarters couldn’t keep ice from forming on the inside of the windows.
Over a cup of tea, they agreed to invest the tenner.
The two of them were in Australia House in Manchester the next day. A year later they got word that their boat was leaving in four weeks’ time.
And they were on it.
Tripping across Egypt by land, while their ship passed through the Suez Canal, exhausted their nest-egg. So the Forshaws were starting again in Sydney.
They lived in the hanger at Matraville, with 2000 others, for two years.
After Michael’s spectacular nine-day run with the icecreams, Carole got a job in a cigarette factory and Michael a job on the FJ production line at Holden Motors.
The Holden job lasted two days.
“He got the sack because he was putting the screws in the wrong way,” says Carole, chuckling merrily.
Michael can laugh too, now.
“You had to sit in the boot, lie back and, with one hand, pull the rear lights to you and, with an air-gun (in the other), tighten them up,” he says.
“Well, the air-gun was only so long and this damn thing (the production line) just kept on movin’, and I’d only have one screw in and (horrified intake of breath) I’d jump out ’n’ run to the next one, so all mine were goin’ ’round with one screw or half a screw, or sometimes you’d stick it in, from the outside, jump in and … too late! So it’d get to the other end and they’d say: ‘No rear lights on this.’ ”
After that he got a job as a cocktail barman, and everyone was much happier.
Two years later they’d saved enough for a family holiday to South Australia, plus some.
They found they liked the place, and found a delicatessen for sale near Norwood Parade. In the space of 72 hours they drove back to Sydney, packed their possessions and drove back to Adelaide.
The children, Linda and Anthony, coped.
“It was $7000 to buy the deli, and we had $7000,” Michael says.
Simple.
Once they’d worked out what fritz was (not a German soldier), and what Durex was (a condom in England; something with which to cover books Australia), it was plain sailing.
Carole ran the deli and looked after the chldren, seven days a week.
Meanwhile, seven days a week, Michael demolished buildings with another fella. One night a week he’d bake bread at nearby Tip-Top. Plus, on Tuesdays and Fridays, he’d cook at Pancake Kitchen.
He’d help out at the deli where he could.
After a year at Pancake Kitchen - the legendary, maple syrup-soaked eatery half-hidden in Gilbert Place - he was made manager.
“I’d come back from a day with Cloudy (the demolition fella), black as the hobs of hell, jump under the shower, put my blues on, get my clean apron, say hello and goodbye … and Carole would close the shop at nine o’clock and get the kids organised and off to bed,” Michael says. “Then I’d come home at about two o’clock in the mornin’. And we’d open the shop again at seven.”
Carole also managed to take on a bank agency, and win an award for it.
Three years down the track, over a cup of tea, they decided they’d had enough of the deli.
They sold it and bought a house at Semaphore.
Carole started managing Pancake Kitchen during the day; Michael still ran it at nights.
Two years on they had another chat over a cuppa and left.
“We had a big swimming pool at home, and we just enjoyed life for a little bit … although we’d always enjoyed life,” Michael says.
During that break they started up Adelaide’s first service station ice business. Then they went to Sydney for two years, running a new pancake restaurant at The Rocks.
Here’s the story of the plane crash: In 1975, Michael’s boss took him to Queensland in a little Cessna - to have floats put on in place of wheels. It was a lovely trip - as the photos attest - until a stoppage appeared in the aircraft’s fuel line as they flew back over the mountains to Sydney.
As they wobbled straight for a garbage truck, it looked bad.
“What saved our lives was a series of trees that’d been burnt some years before. The first one, which grabbed us, slowed us down, then the second one and the next one, the next one, the next one … then we went nose-first into the ground and fell back down a bit.”
They both walked away.
When their contract was up the Forshaws returned to Adelaide and started running Berties. They were there for three years. Then they bought Troika Snack Bar in Hindley Street. This was 1982. A year later the fish and chip shop next door was closed by the health inspectors and the Forshaws took over the lease, put doorways through from the Troika and established the city’s first video game arcade.
This was Kaleidoscope.
All they had, to start with, were black-and-white Space Invader machines.
A draconian dress code discouraged young trouble-makers and encouraged businesspeople and professionals to spend up big.
Then Kaleidoscope opened 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Business went ballistic.
When they decided enough was enough, they sold to the company that supplied the machines.
Next they put game machines in Adelaide’s chicken shops, cinemas and delicatessens, at the same time buying and running a small takeaway shop in the pre-development East End Market.
When The Empire Strikes Back hit the cinemas, the games business went mad.
“We’d put these milk crates with all these bags of coinage in them on a trolley and Mike would wheel them into the Harris Scarfes lift (next to Hoyts, in Regent Arcade) and people would get in with him, we’d press the button … and nothing would happen,” Carole says.
“Mike would say to the people: ‘Sorry, you’ll have to get out, it’s too heavy.’ So they’d be grumbling. Then, still nothing.
Mike would say: ‘Carole, you’re going to have to get out. Here y’are.’ He’d take some bags out and put them by my feet and say: ‘Back in a minute’ ”.
And she’d wait, patiently, with $400 of 20c coins at her feet and a bunch of irate people standing around her.
After three years they sold the games business and went into catering - Top Dog Hot Dogs and the Great Aussie Barbecue. In a big day at the cricket they’d each do 1500 servings, with two people helping each of them.
“We were very quick,” Michael says.
“The trick was that at 13-year-old, I was workin’ in a kitchen, and it was fast. You never wrote things down. They used to come over the tannoy - because we were down below. ‘Roasts - five roasts - three beef, two lamb.’ Then the sauces. ‘And smoked salmon …’ etc, etc.
“As it’s coming over you’re preparing it. When they’d finished talkin’ the light would go red. You’d pull down the spring button and say: ‘Right.’ As long as they heard that.
“It was fast, fast, fast, fast.”
Then they bought the Pancake Kitchen, to go with the catering business.
After nine years, their daughter bought the lot.
Ill-health forced Michael into semi-retirement - hence the sale - but Carole ran Pancakes at the Port full-time until they sold it a few months back.
Now they own the icecream place around the corner.
Many years ago, Friday night fish and chips with the family at the Port was the Forshaws’ big treat. They’d all sit and look and eat, roughly in front of where they now live.
The couple are in a financial position, after all those years of making their own luck, to be pioneers at Port Adelaide.
“People are hearing about Newport Quays, and they’re thinkin’ it’s here now, and it’s not here now and it’s not goin’ to be here now for quite a few years,” Carole says.
For the developers, it’s the old chicken and egg quandary.
The café and restaurant developers want more residents in the area, and vice versa. Michael and Carole will be well-placed when it does happen.
Finally, we should mention that million-dollar lottery win. It wasn’t really a million-dollar win - there were 10 division one winners and the Forshaws were in a syndicate of 10.
Still, you’ve got to be in it to win it.
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