What's going on at the Cashmere Club?

Saturday, 12 July 2025

Last year, the Cashmere Club sold some of its crown jewels: 3000sqm of prime riverfront land in suburban Beckenham. The deal, for around $2 million, should ease the club’s catastrophic debt levels and revitalise a fading institution. But numerous former members and staff say the club’s problems run deeper than its finances. Is the once ‘elite’ club of Christchurch really being ‘run into the ground’? MICHAEL WRIGHT reports.

Even now, no-one can say exactly how the Cashmere Club got itself into such a state. Late last year, when it sold a chunk of its land to developer Brooksfield to be turned into apartments and townhouses, it was on the financial brink. It had been there for years. In 2020, the year it increased its already prohibitive $1.1m bank loan to a suicidal $1.7m, the board noted in the annual report: “Such a position is not an overnight phenomenon but happens incrementally over a period of several years.”

Its decline was, in part, the story of suburban clubs everywhere: Mid-century strongholds of rugby, racing and beer that held little appeal to Gen Xers and Millennials the way they did to their parents and grandparents. In the 2000s, dwindling membership and financial strain left many facing a stark reality ‒ adapt or die.

But the Cashmere Club suffered from its own affliction as well. It was mired in debt of its own making and, according to more than a dozen former workers and members spoken to by The Press, plagued by a culture variously described as toxic, cliquey, unwelcoming and moribund. All the while controlled by a core membership resistant to change.

“I tried to do host responsibility,” one ex-staffer said. “The push back was from the older group of guys that would just want to sit there and get pissed as much as possible.”

A new era

The Cashmere Club has undoubtedly turned a corner. On a Thursday afternoon, just before the after-work crowd arrives, president Andrew Webster, chairperson Stephanie Stock and general manager Murray Davies explain: the Brooksfield deal was tough, but necessary. “If we didn't sell any land, there was going to be no Cashmere Club,” Davies said. It can now pay down debt and, hopefully, trade its way to profitability.

The problems sheet back to before the earthquakes, when the club borrowed more than $1m for a refurbishment. That put its total bank debt at nearly $1.5m and while it slowly paid off principal for the next few years, it also started registering some eye-watering losses ‒ $21,000 in 2018, $230,000 in 2019, $307,000 in 2020. The Sydenham Rugby Club, which had long used Cashmere for after-match functions, went elsewhere. A deal with Canterbury Squash to build courts on the club’s land was not the money-spinner some hoped. Punters stopped showing up.

“The patronage was dropping off,” Davies said. “All of a sudden it was, like, you could throw a cat and not hit somebody. Our service level wasn't great. Our supply level towards the end…was very poor. [The building] was leaky, cold and uninviting.”

Around this time, the board took over day-to-day administration of the club with a view to cutting debt. Webster, Stock and Davies, though long associated with the club (Davies was president until 2015), weren’t actively involved in this. They came on board in 2022.

“What we walked into was a lot worse than what we thought it was,” Davies said. “One of the biggest accounts was Lion Nathan. I think we [owed] like $87,000 and most of it was more than two months, three months old. You can imagine what that was leading to.” On top of that there were IRD penalties, crippling interest payments and brief loss of the club’s gaming licence because it didn’t supply audited accounts.

“The damage had been done,” Davies said. “The previous two and a half years had created a lot of financial pressure, and what [they] were trying to do obviously wasn't working.”

Intense meetings with BNZ followed to secure a temporary extension to their overdraft and satisfy the bank that they had a plan to trade out of trouble, Davies said. The land sale last year was the culmination of that. As well as cutting debt there are plans to reconfigure the car park and catch up on “significant” deferred maintenance, particularly the chronically leaky roof.

“We're quietly confident that what we’ve done…will leave this place in a nice, profitable situation,” Davies said.

Stock went further: “I'm incredibly proud of what we've achieved. We wouldn't be here today [otherwise].”

‘Stopped the bleeding’

Ben Austin was the club chairperson prior to Stock and the others coming on board. He tells a somewhat different story. Much like how the current leadership bristled at hearing the litany of criticisms of the club’s atmosphere ‒ Webster: “You’ve got to speak to the people that do drink here.” ‒ there are numerous versions of the Cashmere Club’s financial woes.

In Austin’s telling, the parlous 2022 books were nothing on the catastrophic 2019 ones. He saw his job simply as “stopping the bleeding”.

“Just for context,” he said, “In 2020 all the creditors were overdue by a quarter of a million dollars…Everything was essentially put under payment arrangement.”

As Covid-19 loomed, they too had to plead their case to the bank and secure more finance. Cashmere’s historical debt, Austin said, was a “cancer”. “The club would have closed the day [Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern] closed the country. That’s a fact. It was not a going concern.”

Expenses were soaring, but basic standards weren’t being met. “It was unreal,” Austin said. “You should've seen where the kegs were stored. People could have died in there. We spent like $50,000…so that people didn't risk their life doing their job.”

“I wouldn't say that the club was in the best position [in 2022], but it was in a 50 per cent better position than before Covid.”

In this environment, temporarily losing the gaming licence was something of a calculated risk. Pokies are the lifeblood of clubs, but Austin said the board had to first unpick a mess of other issues. For example, the office safe wasn’t compliant for the level of cash it was holding. “The insurer had notified us that if we got robbed, we wouldn't have any insurance,” Austin said. “So I had to go out and find them a safe. Just real 101 stuff.”

The 2022 accounts were audited, he said, but later than usual. It was more important to get it right than meet a deadline. “We wanted to get [the licensing process] tidied up properly, so…we kind of had to break it to fix it, if that makes sense. That probably sounds horrible for someone from the outside, but if you don't, you just create that systemic issue and you perpetuate it.”

All the while, he said, there was opposition from the membership. Including to a land sale, which he first suggested at an AGM before he stepped down as chair.

“There was just such a resistance. They just didn't want to give up anything they felt was theirs.”

‘Get me out of here’

Amid this turmoil, the Cashmere Club has faced another reckoning. Numerous staff, board and general members ‒ current and former ‒ told The Press the financial malaise had crept into the club’s culture. In one sense, the two go hand in hand: ‘out of stock’ signs on beer taps and faulty pokie machines not being fixed will eat at morale as well as the bottom line. But many felt it had become a problem in its own right. Members spoke of heavy drinking, substandard food and staff playing the pokies on shift (Davies firmly denied this. Workers were only allowed to gamble at the club outside shifts, he said).

“I just felt that I needed to move on,” one former staffer said. “I didn’t want to…It was like your family [but] I felt that I had to put myself first. I was under a lot of stress to try and keep that place afloat.”

“The Cashmere Club was elite back in the day,” said one ex-member. “It was the club of Christchurch. Now, there’s people on this side of town that go to [the Richmond Club]. Their courtesy bus goes down Colombo St.”

“I saw a humongous decline in the way it was operating,” said another. “I took my old man down there for a beer maybe six months ago and he said, ‘Get me out of here. This is not a place I need to be’…He’s been a member for 20 or 30 years.”

As they heard these quotes, and many more, Davies, Stock and Webster shook their heads. The club today is not the one it was even a couple of years ago, they say. Membership at $35 a year is increasing ‒ up nearly 1000 from a nadir of about 1800 in 2022 ‒ and so are functions.

“The figures speak for themselves,” Davies said. “It's a good place to be. If it weren't, then our revenue would be dropping…The ones that have made those comments probably don’t come back here to see the improvements.”

Like the contrasting narratives on the finances, the critics will beg to differ. But soon there won’t be much room for interpretation. When titles are issued for the Brooksfield development, the Cashmere Club will get the balance of its payment and all the talk turning the club around must become action. There will be no more chances and no more excuses. One former board member summarised it in a way everyone could probably agree with:

“God, I hope it goes OK.”