On the eve of the much-anticipated 2017/18 Ashes Series, Old Paradian Paul Luby (1980) has forwarded this glorious photograph of his late father and fellow Old Boy Barney Luby (1943).

Barney, the then proprietor of Heidelberg’s Shell Service Station at 19 Burgundy Street, can be seen working the scoreboard with the fall of Les Favell's wicket in the first innings of the Third Test between Australia and England in Sydney in January 1959.

The image accompanied an article headlined Around The Driveways, which appeared in an in-house magazine distributed by Shell, the company which owned service stations like Barney’s on the south-eastern corner of Burgundy Street and Rosanna Road, diagonally opposite Warringal Park.

The article reads as follows;

At Makin’s Junction Service Station, Heidelberg, Vic., salesman Barney Luby, a keen cricket fan, was following the Australia-England Test Cricket series closely when he got the idea of providing a score service on the station driveway. So he fitted up a board borrowed from the local Rosanna Cricket Club, installed a portable radio, and he was in business. Many customers studied the board, even those who were listening to the Tests on their car radio, and passing traffic slowed down to see how the game was going. One bus driver who passed the bus station many times each day made a point of passing on the score to the passengers as he passed the station. It would be no good to ask Barney if the scoreboard sold extra petrol – it’s impossible to tell with any accuracy – but he does know the board created good public relations; it attracted new faces to the driveway, and many people had the Junction Service Station brought to their attention by it.

Paul, whose older brothers Martin (1979), Anthony (1972), Mark (1969) and uncle Brian Luby (1953) all attended Parade, stumbled onto the article during the clean-up of a unit his mother Joan was vacating - and as he said: “None of us in the family had read the article or seen the photograph before”.

“I think it was just a case that Barney had the radio going in the station and thought that because not many people had radios in their cars, they could check out the score when they stopped by the station," Paul said.

“So he used to pop out of the station to update the scores at the end of each over.”

Barney, who operated the station with George and Perc Makin (whose son Julian (1986) is also an OP), also happened to be President of the Rosanna Cricket Club, so the scoreboard was in safe hands.

As Paul said, “Barney loved cricket . . . and the chance to do something a bit different also.”

For the record, the Third Test ended in a draw, but Australia, led by the late Richie Benaud, won the five-Test series 4-0 – which would have pleased Barney no end.

To view a 13-minute highlights package of the ’59 Third Test on youtube, click here