It was the Saturday before Christmas and revellers were “going for it”, spirits were high and the booze was flowing.

Meanwhile, father-of-four Richard Howard and his wife Eva and their children were returning from a beauty spot in Newport, where they had eaten dinner in the car.

About 10pm they parked opposite the family home in Malcolm St, about 500m from the surf club.

Mr Howard said he was going to the club to use the toilet because their house was in the middle of a renovation and had no working bathroom.

He told his wife, who was feeding their 18-month-old son Michael in the car, he would be back in a few minutes and afterwards they would get a coffee together.

Their other three boys, Phil, 13, Tim, 8, and Lew, 6, went into the house.

She waited in the car for two hours but he never returned. It was the last time she saw him alive.

Mr Howard, 46, who could “swim like a fish”, was found fully clothed with his car keys still in his pocket, floating off North Narrabeen Beach the next morning, December 23, 1962.

Those who had been sleeping off the excesses of the party at the surf club, spotted the body 100m offshore about 6.15am and 20 board riders went out in the surf to try and locate it.

An inquest a month later was unable to furnish the family with any answers, with Coroner

John Loomes recording an open finding. He said Mr Howard “died from the effects of drowning but how or by what means he came to be drowned the evidence adduced does not enable me to say”.

Strangely a cut on the forehead was not mentioned in the coroner’s report, although his wife and eldest son Phil saw the body and never forgot it.

Now 55 years on, Mr Howard’s youngest son, Michael, 56, who only remembers his dad through precious photos in the family album which he has shared with the Manly Daily, has started investigating the circumstances of his death in a bid to solve the mystery.

He hopes the retelling of the story after all these years may encourage those who were at the party to come forward with information that might help piece together his father’s last moments.

Mr Howard told the Manly Daily he did not know whether his father suffered an accident, took his own life or was the victim of something more sinister.

“It’s become a bit of a mission to find out what happened,” said Michael, a pilot and father of five who lives in Wagga Wagga. “The more I dig, the more questions I have.”

Michael said he never got much information from his late mother, Eva. She never remarried and was too devastated over the loss of her husband to even erect a proper gravestone.

She is now buried alongside him at Mona Vale Cemetery and their sons have made sure they have a headstone.

Michael said that as children, his mum would explain his father’s death by saying: “He went to the beach and never came back.”

“I guess it was her way of simplifying it for a child,” he said.

But in police statements taken at the time, Michael discovered some fascinating new details.

In it his mother said her husband had left the car in his “usual good spirits” and that he told her he would be back in “a few minutes to take me for a cup of coffee”.

She said that while waiting, “I could hear the sound of a party up at the surf club and at one stage I heard a woman scream.” She later changed her statement believing the scream to be that of her husband.

She said she waited in the car for about two hours before putting the baby to bed and taking one of the boys to the club to find him.

“It was quite dark and there were quite a number of people on the parking area in front of the surf club and at the side and they were all very drunk,” her statement read.

When she couldn’t find her husband, she went home and fell asleep.

One theory was that Mr Howard, a non-drinker, had taken a bottle of wine he had bought for his builder up to the surf club, had an accident and fallen into the water or gone for a swim.

But his wife later found the missing unopened bottle of wine in the caravan and blood tests showed no alcohol was in his system.

Another thought was that rows over money pushed him to take his own life. His wife said in her police statement that on the night he went missing they had rowed over how to spend their Christmas money, but that squabbles over money were of “little importance as we often had such arguments” and they “had quite sufficient for our immediate financial needs”.

She also rejected the idea her husband had taken his own life.

However, to add to the mystery, a neighbour and former nurse Iris Vaughan’s statement suggested he may have been under pressure.

She lived nearby in Lagoon St and felt Mr Howard, a friend, who mowed her grass, had been working too hard and “looked on the verge of a nervous breakdown”. Despite this, she also did not “consider him a person who would contemplate suicide” as he was “devoted to his home and his children”.

The final part of the mystery is how the body ended up where it did.

Long time surf club member Kenny Holmes said in his police statement that the body must have come from the rocks at the north of the beach, due to the rising tide that morning.

“..the tide was rising and this causes a circular current in this area running out past the rocks on the northern end of the beach, out to sea and then back towards the beach to the south ... the current movement in this area is well known to club members and we call it The Alley.”

However, Michael has surfed at North Narrabeen for many years and believes the body would not have gone far and must have been on the sand and taken out by the outgoing tide.

According to the tide forecast, high tide was at 5.05am on December 23.

Since unearthing the statements and tidal forecasts for that night, Michael has tested a few theories out and has even floated in the surf to see which way the currents would take him.

“I did not go far,” he said.

“I just don’t think his body would have gone in off the rocks.

“I also don’t know how he came to have a cut on his forehead.”

Michael, who was too young to know or remember his father, hopes this story may jog people’s memories and solve the mystery that has troubled the Howard family for 55 years.

“For my brothers who all have memories of dad, it’s still raw after all these years,” Michael said.

Contact him at how42@icloud.com.