One family ‘Christmas do’ was held at Gol Gol (at William Frederick Wilkes' hotel), with Gran Minogue there. The star item was the entry of the plum pudding, all aflame with some warmed brandy. Because the kitchen stove wasn’t big enough, and heaven knows it was enormous, this enormous pudding was steaming off in a huge camp oven outside in the back courtyard, covered over with vines in the summer. There was the pudding in the calico pudding cloth waiting to be dealt with. And when Gran Minogue and William went outside to collect it, tragedy indeed - it was gone. Only the water in the pot. No pudding! Well there were substitutes with fruit salad, cold custard, or icecream and vanilla wafers. They filled the bill for a while, but the mystery was indeed deep. What happened to the pudding?

About 4 pm the bar opened for business and one of the first customers was Red Malone - a great big brawny Irishman, a well known character in the district, a bit of a prize fighter, but overall an alcoholic. When sober he had a heart of gold, and a big touch of the Blarney.

He was suspect number one but when he was among the first customers paying for a beer, William didn’t have to examine the sixpence, and it was sixpence for any sort of glass then, to see definite and undeniable blobs of plum pudding attached to the edges.

Red had stolen the puddin', taken it down to the river bank and broken it up for the money he knew it would contain.

William of course attacked him – not physically, but little Gran came out to the rescue and said ‘ah the poor fellow he needed a drink but he was too proud to ask for it. God and all of us must now be good to him. If he thieves anything else by the holy living God I’ll have the law on him, and let him dry out and get over this awful business of drinking too much.’