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Bernie Quayle's
Wonderful World of the Wireless
Early Career Choices
page 2

In 1963 I spent a week at home on holiday on the Island. The very first casino in Britain had just opened and I spent most nights there. I became "friendly" with one of the cabaret dancers, Maureen (Mo) At the end of the summer season, we met up again in London. A friend of hers had been dating Brian Jones who had just landed a recording contract with his band, the Rolling Stones. On their first tour of England the Stones were packaged with American stars including Ike and Tina Turner, Bo Diddley, The Everly Brothers and Little Richard.. Mo and her friend went to the opening night after show party.

One of the Everly brothers was playing piano and everyone having a good old sing-along. The two started singing Everly Brothers songs and they so impressed the head of Decca Records, he signed them up. They recorded as "The Other Two" and immediately went on tour themselves. The backing band they were given were the Nashville Teens and later, the Strawbs. Numerous gigs followed and as I had a car, I was called on often to take them all over the place, acting as their road manager. One trip took us up to Birmingham for the TV show "Thank Your Lucky Stars" The Small Faces, Sonny & Cher made their first TV appearances on that same show.
I lived a very hectic life style for about six months but got to meet some of the biggest names in the British pop scene as they were just starting out. When I went home on holiday in the summer of 1966, the peace and tranquillity of home was just what I needed. It was so good to get away from the pressures of life in the fast lane of London. So good in fact, I immediately resigned from Bear Brand.

I returned to London to work my notice and was back living with my parents in August that year. I had no job and have to admit to being a bit lazy about finding one. Eventually dad said I'd better find work if I wanted to continue living there.
A school for croupiers was being advertised, I went along and got the job, working 9 to 5 overnight, 6 nights a week.
The casino had moved from the Castle Mona to their new Palace Hotel and was being run by Crockford's of London.

I was taught to deal roulette and blackjack but my first night in the actual casino proved a disaster. I am a
little colour blind and kept mixing up the different coloured chips. From then on, I only dealt blackjack,
until a solution was found. They put me in the team that operated tables on cruise ships and they made
sure that the chips had different designs as well as different colours so I wouldn't mix them up.

I did a couple of short trips out to the Canary Isles, and the good thing was the fact that we had passenger cabins - not stowed away in the crews quarters - quite luxurious in fact. Then came the big one, a Voyage around Africa on board the good ship Andes of the Royal Mail Lines, scheduled 10 week trip. Again we were in passenger cabins and whenever the ship entered territorial waters to dock, we were not allowed to operate the tables. This meant I got to do most of the shore excursions. The team was Ricardo Anselmi, director, dealers, Dave Howard, David Kaneen and myself. Ricardo was a keen home movie maker and persuaded me to upgrade my standard 8 camera to the new Super 8 format when we docked in Madeira. For the rest of the trip, I would film Ricardo with his camera, and he would film me on my new toy. That's Ricardo and I dressed for dinner on the Andes. learned a lot from Ricardo and ended up with a one hour documentary of all the ports we visited on that voyage. I have included a seven minute extract here: . The music and title are not from the original film, the quality of the sound wasn't good, this film is my link to radio.