Cantabrians Abroad /
Dickie Cullimore, travelling the world with Bacardi
Twenty years on from a life-changing night as a young Canterbury law student, Dickie Cullimore
is living his best life in bars around the world.
Maybe he should have been scared, but he wasn’t. ‘When you’re 19 you don’t think anything bad will happen to you, so even going through that I didn’t think there was going to be a bad outcome,’ says Dickie Cullimore. We’re reminiscing in a speakeasy-style bar near his home in North London. ‘That’ happened 20 years ago: ‘that’ was a heart attack. A potentially life-ending event which became a life-changing one.
The week he spent recovering in Christchurch Hospital in September 1999 is a bright demarcation in Dickie’s life. Nowadays he’s the Global Brand Ambassador for Bacardi, the world-famous spirits giant that’s still family-owned and traces its own life back to founder Don Facundo Bacardi Masso buying a rum distillery in Santiago de Cuba in 1862.
From his London base, Dickie travels the world representing the Bacardi business and family, connecting bartenders with their brands, delivering training sessions about rum, and overseeing the prestigious Bacardi Legacy competition where top bartenders across the globe compete in regional, national, and international rounds to showcase new cocktail creations.
‘I think I’ve travelled to 50 countries in the last four years,’ says Dickie, who’d just jetted back from visiting
Bacardi headquarters in Puerto Rico and was soon heading off to Amsterdam for this year’s Bacardi Legacy global
final. ‘My role is very project-based, but as far as the trade and bartenders are concerned, Legacy is probably the most impactful part.’
Bacardi’s own rich legacy traces back 157 years to a colonial town perched on Cuba’s southeast coast, looking across the water to Caribbean neighbours Jamaica and Haiti. While the family’s proprietary methods and recipes have survived since the 19th century, their original location did not. The Bacardi family fled Cuba in 1960, explains Dickie, when the Castro regime nationalised many industries; they had to start afresh in Puerto Rico.
Dickie’s own fresh start followed his hospitalisation 20 years ago.
His love of public speaking that he’d developed as a boarder at St Bede’s College had led to law school. He began 1999 as a sports-loving second-year student at Canterbury University. How quickly and unexpectedly life can swerve. ‘All I remember is that day Canterbury got beaten by Northland in the NPC,’ says Dickie. ‘I had some Northland mates and it was the first time they’d beaten us in a long time; then I had my heart attack that night. That changed everything. It was after that I got into bartending.’
His friends rushed him to Christchurch Hospital, and contacted his parents who came straight down from Blenheim
that night. ‘They wanted to move me to private, but everyone told them the best cardiologists in the country were at Christchurch Hospital,’ recalls Dickie. ‘So I spent a week in a room with five other patients, really old guys. One was a captain in the Salvation Army, one was the first sales manager for Bendon Lingerie in the South Island, but all these men had lived really rich, unusual, exciting lives. In hospital they were visited and surrounded by all these people who really loved them, and that made a really massive imprint on me. I decided I wanted to really live life, and asked myself “What could I do that would be fun and I could get paid for?” and I thought bartending would be really cool.’
Deciding he could either do a polytech course or just call up places and offer to work for free to learn the trade, Dickie plumped for the latter. ‘This was before the internet really took off, so I just went through the Yellow Pages and started calling bars,’ he says. ‘Some that I’d been to, some that I thought were pretty cool. It was like the eighteenth place I called when I finally got it. But each call I made I learned something, like not to call during lunchtime.’
He started out at Sneakers Sports Café on the corner of Cashel and Manchester Streets, and within a week or so was on the paid roster. He took to bartending like a duck to the Avon, and threw himself into not just learning to satisfy customers and serve great drinks, but entering flaring competitions (think Tom Cruise in Cocktail). Dickie practised by twirling old spirits bottles part-filled with water on the grassy backyard of his student flat in Ilam.
‘I was lucky, I had some great mentors early on: Jimmy Summerfield, from a flair point of view, and Guy Randall,’ he says. ‘I won my first competition in 2000, a small one, did well in a few, but my first big national win was in 2003, which got me to the world finals in Spain.’
Over the next decade Dickie worked in a variety of local bars including Sticky Fingers, di lusso, and the Dux de Lux – bartending, managing, helping create cocktail lists, and opening new venues. By 2007 he had a piece of his own nightclub, Double Happy on Cashel Street.
‘The crazy thing is so many of those places aren’t around anymore,’ he says, taking a sip from his beer. ‘I stayed in Christchurch after the earthquakes, it was an incredible year. Double Happy was within the red zone. I was bar manager at the Dux, which also closed. Fortunately earthquake insurance covered me. I was lucky enough to work with one of my mentors Jimmy Summerfield to open Flying Burrito Brothers in a new Northlands location – there was such a need for places for people to go. After that we opened Dux Live in Addington. The first two months I worked every day but one. I lived near the train tracks so every time a train went past that rumble made my shoulders tighten and my jaw clench.’
A passionate Cantabrian, Dickie was eventually lured away by a job with Bacardi in Auckland, which included launching the Legacy competition into New Zealand, and then led to him stepping up to the Global Brand Ambassador role in 2015. He sees his role as a conduit between a triangle of the marketing team, sales team, and bartenders and consumers.
‘For years people have asked me “What is a brand ambassador?” and I’ve never really had a good one-line answer, until recently,’ says Dickie. ‘I was at a conference in Puerto Rico and someone said “Advocacy, we empty the bottles,” and I thought that’s bloody genius.’•
Dickie practised by twirling old spirits bottles part-filled with water on the grassy backyard of his student flat in Ilam.