During the weekend of 11 and 12 March, 2023, the Bogan Gate community celebrated 125 years of settlement.
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On the Sunday morning, retired Parkes funeral director and monumental mason, Bob Cock, delivered a presentation outlining the unique qualities of the Bogan Gate War Memorial and four face town clocks.
Bob informed the assembled listeners of the excellent quality sandstone tower built upon a very hard stone platform; the same stone used to construct the pylons of the Sydney harbour bridge.
During his presentation, Bob noticed the original copper lightning conductor was missing, and afterwards told Memorial Hall president, Ron Umbers, that if lightning were to strike the unprotected tower, the result would be devastating, and the sandstone and engraving could not be replaced.
After the 125-celebration weekend ended and the dust had settled, a search began for someone who knew something about lightning conductors.
Eventually contact as made with Rowan Falconer and James Hayward from a company in Sydney called Tercel International, with expertise in the lightening conductor area.
They were asked if they could travel to Bogan Gate to install a lightning conductor to the War Memorial tower, not their usual type of job, and they were disappointed to hear someone had removed the original copper conductor.
To complete a one-off job like this was going to be expensive so the community started to raise funds for the project using items donated by the Parkes RSL sub-branch via Paul Thomas.
James, the projects manager at Tercel, needed images of the memorial to see what would be involved in the job and after lots of emails and phone conversations agreed to provide a quote to carry out the necessary work to replace the lightning conductor on the War Memorial tower at Bogan Gate.
Christmas 2023 was fast approaching, and James suggested that with current work booked in, he could not do the job until February 2024, when they were booked to do work in Dubbo.
The new year rolled around, and it was a very nervous wait as Bogan Gate unofficially received 380mm of rain (15 inches) between November 24 and January 17, including lots of lightning strikes to trees in the area, but thankfully Murphy wasn't around, and the War Memorial escaped harm.
By February, the Hall committee still hadn't received a quote from Tercel and when James phoned to book in February 28 as the day for the job, he made an incredibly generous offer.
He and two other Tercel staff would provide travel, materials, and labour to replace the missing lightning conductor, free of charge, a gift to the Bogan Gate community if we could provide the elevated work platform to reach the top of the tower. Kennards chipped in with a discount on their cherry picker hire and on February 28, James, Lloyd and Harry from Tercel arrived and happily replaced the conductor as planned, without charge.
When the job was finished, the boys jumped in their van and headed back to Sydney leaving a positive lasting impression for their goodwill towards our small community.
The Bogan Gate community will gather at 6am on ANZAC day around the War Memorial in Hutton Street for the dawn service followed by breakfast in the Memorial Hall, the interior freshly painted by the Acret Group from Forbes.
Bunnings have kindly donated two barbeques to the Hall to help provide breakfast for the 200 plus expected locals and visitors.
