Hunter Valley Training Company foundation chairman Milton Morris remembers it well. 

And more than 60 years later, Mr Morris has been named honorary life member of the club, much to his ­surprise and delight.

He did not know he would be presented with a plaque on Thursday afternoon and asked the Mercury why we were summoned to the Hunter Valley Training Company offices at Rutherford.

The Mercury did not want to spoil the surprise so we played along.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

Without giving anything away, and because team Mercury are ­familiar faces, Mr Morris started to sing to us, the 1939 Vera Lynn hit, with his arms outstretched: “We’ll meet again, don’t know where don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again one sunny day.”

Ushered into the board room, Mr Morris was congratulated for his 60-plus years as swim club patron, by Brad Roe and Trevor Wood of Maitland Swimming Club.

Mr Morris’ stories never fail to capture the attention of his guests and so it was with his tales about swimming.

“These are great people, wonderful operators,” Mr Morris said of the Maitland club. These are good, decent people, top notch, always accommodating to me, doing the right thing and people I will always walk with.

“Swimming was the one thing I was good at. I was not interested in football, I would take swimming and surfing any time.

“The old Maitland baths was always a bit squeezy in the middle of summer. I really liked one-time Mayor of Maitland, Noel Unicomb, and he couldn’t swim.

“His wife Daphne asked me what was the one thing we could do for him. Noel had been a farmer all his life and had paddled in a river now and then.

"So I was asked to join the mayor and his wife [and Mrs Morris who was also a non-swimmer] at the pool. We jumped in and we found out we could float all right.”

Mr Morris, 91, fondly retold the story of his swimming adventure with a 1933 Olympian and one-time mayor of Singleton Neil McNamara.

“Well it was decided to have a race against the Olympian and Neil wanted to do some practice laps each day.

“I could manage all right and Neil thought he wasn’t too good so we would do 20-metres at a time.

“I had a good pair of shorts I liked for swimming and surfing. 

“On the day we were standing there waiting for the show to start, ready, boom, into the water, I was making my way and down came my shorts and I couldn’t pull them up.

“I told Neil to stay with me, but he wanted to do well, and we finished a dead heat. I had time to pull up my shorts in the pool and we were right.”