The Dux Reinvented: Could It Be The Original Returned Servicemen's New Home?

The NZR interviews the Original RSA President Dennis Mardle. He explains why it still needs a home in the social media age and with young returning service personnel.

“That’s enough to get me in trouble,” jokes Dennis Mardle, the Original RSA’s President, in the YMCA cafe on warm Christchurch morning.

I tell him “that’s my goal, getting you in trouble”.

But the discussion is anything but funny, as we traverse how his RSA came to have no home, the challenge of serving the younger generation of return service personnel, and what it would mean to his members to have a home in the building known for decades as the Dux de Lux.

The RSA was located for most of its history at 74 Armagh Street. “And post the earthquake a new building on that site; a quite attractive building [with] good facilities.”

Since its bar and restaurant closed, and the building was sold, the Original RSA, the city’s first, has been homeless. Internal ructions have also muddied the RSA’s rehabilitation.

“The focus is actually going back to our core business, which is not running a hospitality venue. But it’s ensuring that former servicemen and women are supported to the maximum capacity of the RSA and the general public through their generous donations on poppy day.”

“One of prime things we can do is to find our people. They’re notorious for - if they’re not part of an RSA, they just kind of filter into the background, and you don’t know where they are - and we don’t know the state of health and well-being of those people. So that would be for me one of our prime tasks - find our people, ascertain how they are, and then sort out how we can actively support them, either through better assistance to negotiate [with] government agencies or if necessary supply the funding to help them change their lives or change their current conditions.”

A revived venue, alongside the new strategic direction given by the National body, might yet breathe new life into an organisation that is there to serve the country’s service personnel.

“So I think if we were to get space in the Dux, we would be reestablishing a presence back in the city. And when you look around the country, Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin, all have small offices that they operate out of. So they haven’t had buildings for a long time. We were the last of the metropolitan centers to close.”

“When I look further down the road. I think we need to be building very smart technology to allow to allow us to interface with anybody who served anywhere in the country. So rather than just being an RSA that caters to those in the catchment area, we’re able to be accessed by anybody anywhere even globally, who can patch into our website or a Facebook page, download the information. upload their information, and it’s all done, smoothly. So I see an office as an interim step, to ultimately fully digital platform that we can use.”

This is long way from path that they Original RSA had taken before Mardle had taken up the reigns as treasurer of this struggling body in 2020.

“We had an administrative office, a restaurant, and bar downstairs. A bar upstairs, and two conference rooms of sorts and collection memorabilia displayed on the walls”.