Bill and Edna Chandler

Bill and Edna Chandler first met at the Royal Melbourne Show, where they were both exhibiting Clydesdale horses. Edna grew up on a small farm, where her father bred and later showed Clydesdales. Bill initially came to the Show to work as a farrier for another exhibitor.

As a teenager, Edna was only allowed to stay overnight at the Show with her horses if her friend stayed with her. She remembers:

Well we camped in little dog-boxes, and there were no showers or anything, you just went up to the toilets, and there were hand basins, or you brought a dish down into the locker and sort of did the best you could.

When Bill first asked Edna to go out with him, she was interested, but insisted her friend come along with them. ‘Well, you asked to take me out for tea’, she recalls, ‘and I said – and I laugh about it now – “My friend will have to come.” Because I knew perfectly well that we were expected to stick together’. Undeterred, Bill took them both to tea and the rest, as they say, is history.

Bill and Edna exhibited Clydesdales at the Royal Melbourne Show and shows around Victoria for a number of years, but they both remember the competition at the Royal Melbourne Show fondly. ‘All got on well together’, says Bill, ‘the whole lot’. Edna agrees, adding ‘there was a lot of camaraderie amongst the exhibitors’.