65 Bowman

post WW2 house/shop example Caloundra, home of Cord Surfboards in the 1960s

David Lascelles - "My parents owned a hotel at Caloundra (home of Moffat Beach, great pointbreak) and I did a little work there but really wanted to be in the surfboard business. It was all very young then and the rest of the boys were all working at Hayden’s. They made good boards, didn’t earn much money but had a good lifestyle and plenty of time to surf. It was during this period that I started to get a feel for the surfboard industry and learn how the boards were being built"

by Cord founder David “Humphrey” Lascelles”

So there was a bit of a group of us starting to form by this point. Most of the guys were working at Hayden’s and I was doing a bit of work at the oldies pub in Caloundra but mostly just going surfing. At that stage our main local break was a reef break called Moffatt Beach and on a good big day it was a hell of a wave. Still with only six or eight people ever surfing. During the winter when the swells were there and the winds were offshore there would only be a couple of us, braving the wind chill without the technology of wetsuits in our old faithful boardies. Moffat Beach back then would hold a good ten foot wave no problem and surfing it on big boards was always a handful. Chops (Lascelles) started his surfing at Moffat and by ‘62 or ‘63 he was dropping into some pretty serious waves. And he was only about 3 foot tall so these were big lumps of water to him! And then there was Ben Bendall or “Pa” as we all called him. He was so good to all of us and none of us would have got into surfing as much as we did without him and “Ma”. They looked out for us…

rounded profile chamferboards, photos Roger Todd 2013

Cord Surfboards, image courtesy Tom Conwell, posted on Facebook Caloundra- The good old days- The 80's April 2015

This board shown above was at the Mal Club's Fun in the Sun Comp in 2006 with a write up by David Lascelles