The Founder: How Les McIntyre built the Raiders

He came up in the Depression. He made a profit for Queanbeyan Leagues Club in tents on the bowling green. He made the Raiders a thing. He is the club's foundnig father, Les McIntyre.

IN COOMA IN 1915 John and Mary McIntyre welcomed their sixth child and called him Les. John ran a travelling sideshow while Mary was from a family of Wallaces who pioneered white settlement of Jindabyne. One of Mary’s uncles, a one-armed fellow they called ‘Wingy’, built ‘Wallace’s Hut’ at Falls Creek in the Victorian high country.

“Not a bad effort to build a hut with one arm,” John McIntyre’s grandson John McIntyre told The Canberra Times. “Les came from tough stock.”

The McIntyres moved to Queanbeyan and the Great Depression happened and 13-year-old Les left school to be a mechanic. He also delivered newspapers, worked as a projectionist at the Star Theatre, drove a truck, drove a bus, and ran an SP book.

He explored and panned for gold. He’d go fishing for dinner as much as pleasure on the Goodradigbee River. For fun he played reserve grade for Queanbeyan United.

He built ‘McIntyre’s Hut’ by “carting in building materials piece by piece in an old Land Rover on a dodgy road,” wrote journalist Megan Doherty. The hut was a haven for Les and his family until January of 2003 when a lightning strike kicked off Canberra’s great conflagration.