Frank Goldsmith was the Head Mechanist at the Comedy Theatre when I first worked there. He was one of the best men I ever met; warm-hearted and generous, he looked after his crew like a biblical shepherd guarding his flock. He didn’t mind if you screwed something up either, as long as it was only once. He was big and broad, with a large round face that was usually lit up by a huge grin with a faintly sardonic twist on one end. If you want a mental image, try to imagine James Gandolfino and Gerard Depardieux melted together.

He had an incurable hardware addiction, and before every bump-in Goldie would order in a reel of quarter-inch sashcord and countless packets of nails and screws (in those days, they came in green-and-white cardboard packets labelled Sidney Cooke Fasteners Pty. Ltd.) His office in the basement was lined with shelves, all crammed with row upon row of unopened green-and-white packets and under the bench were half-a-dozen virginal reels of quarter-inch sashcord. All this was, in Goldie’s view, too good to use, so ‘quiet time’ was spent sorting out buckets of used screws and straightening bent nails.

He was also one of the funniest men I ever met. Once, Goldie, onstage, called up to someone on the fly-floor, “Hey Pete, throw me a line, will you.”

Now Pete wasn’t the sharpest screw in the bucket and failed to realise that there were two acceptable responses. One was to say, “Who was that lady I saw you with last night?” To which Goldie would, of course, have replied, “That was no lady, that was your mum.”

The other response would have been to lower one end of a rope. Pete chose option three, and picking a coil of rope from one of many, dropped it to the stage, where it landed, still in its neat round coil, right at Goldie’s feet and made a noise that got everyone’s attention.

Sensing an audience, Goldie looked down at the coil of rope. Goldie looked up at Pete. Goldie looked down again, then up, and judging that the moment had been sufficiently milked, said, “Right. Now tie off your end.”

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