Every organisation that lasts a century has one person the record keeps circling back to. For the Old Boys' Association, that person is J. G. Nowlan.
Nowlan took on the Association's books around 1910, and by 1914 the magazine records him combining the Honorary Secretary and Treasurer roles in one pair of hands. He then simply never put them down. Through the Great War, when the Association's work turned to recording Old Boys answering the call to enlist; through the Depression; through a second war and the post-war boom, the AGM minutes of year after year carry the same quiet line: Hon. Secretary & Treasurer: J. G. Nowlan.
At the 1948 Annual General Meeting, re-elected once again, Nowlan noted it was the fortieth time he had accepted office. The Association had already begun to grasp what it owed him: that same meeting marked the J. G. Nowlan Testimonial Fund, and the President presented him a cheque for £388 raised by the members — real money in 1948, and raised for a secretary, which tells you everything about how the Old Boys regarded the man.
He served until his final illness. When he died in 1950, the retiring President, Commander N. S. Pixley, told the AGM that it was due to Nowlan's unselfish efforts that the Association "stood second to none in the Commonwealth," and asked those present to stand as a mark of respect. The meeting voted a gift of £50 to Mrs Nowlan, and recorded its thanks to Vivian Burris and his wife, who had carried the work through Nowlan's illness and after his death.
The Association did one more thing: it put his name on a bursary. The J. G. Nowlan Bursary appears in the record from 1950, so that the man who spent forty years serving Old Boys would go on quietly serving Grammar boys he never met.
No president, no committee, no event in the OBA's 128 years has matched that stretch of unbroken service. In an Association whose motto is Nil Sine Labore — nothing without work — J. G. Nowlan is the proof.
Sources: School Magazine transcripts (1914 office bearers; 1948 AGM and Testimonial Fund; 1950 AGM tribute, gift and bursary), Magazine Archive, this collection.
See also: the year-by-year office bearers roll, where his name runs for four decades.