During the weekend of March 11 and 12, 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 clock.
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.
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.
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,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.
The Bogan Gate community will gather at 6am on ANZAC day around the War Memorial in Hutton Street for the dawn service.
