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It was in that tournament that one of golf’s ‘strange incidents’
took place. At Dollymount’s short 12th hole Bobby Locke’s tee shot
appeared to be covering the flag, but when he reached the green the
ball was nowhere in sight. His caddie removed the pin to look in the
hole and the ball dropped from the furled flag to land a few inches
from the cup. Bobby tapped it in for his birdie. Reg Whitcombe, who had lost the play-off to his eldest brother Ernest the previous year, succeeded him as champion and completed a rare (perhaps unique) record for a national championship. The trophy had now been won by all three of the Whitcombe brothers. (Charles had won in 1930). In the days when there were few spectators and no cameras watching, caddies (the wrong sort) were in a position to influence the score or result of a match, with the hope of boosting their earnings. Some would carry a ball, to be dropped through a hole in the pocket when the time allowed for searching for a lost ball was nearly up. I remember in one tournament I drove into the rough and was on the point of returning to the tee, when my caddie found the ball lying in the open. I always marked my ball with the point of a tee-peg - and the ball was so marked, but there was no way, in my view, that it could have finished in that spot. After consulting my playing partner I played the ball, but the incident spoiled my concentration and I scored badly from then on. When I finished I told the caddie that he would not be required for the next round and reported the matter to the tournament secretary. No action was taken, but I was very wary of strange caddies after that. Max Faulkner had an eccentric caddie known as ‘Mad Mac’, who wore a raincoat but no shirt. When asked to read a putt he used a pair of binoculars without lenses and was known to advise Max to “Hit this putt slightly straight, sir”. On another occasion Faulkner’s caddie consumed a bottle of brandy and collapsed by the side of the green. Max dragged him behind a gorse bush and left him to sleep it off. Perhaps the strangest caddie of all was the one employed by Henry Cotton, when based at the Waterloo Golf Club in Brussels. Louis was Cotton’s regular caddie and was always very reliable. He cycled to tournaments, sometimes as much as 70 miles away but was never late, so Henry was rather surprised one day when he failed to turn up and thought that something must have happened to him. “So it had”, recounted Henry in his book This Game of Golf, “but not the sort of happening I had envisaged. It seemed he lived alone with his widowed mother and, following a row with her over some money and a girl he was going out with, who did not meet with approval at home, he had picked up an axe and killed his mother. He was sent to prison for life”. It was quite a shock for Henry who regarded himself very lucky not to have got into an argument with him while he was carrying his clubs. Another character to caddie for Cotton was Ernest Hargreaves, who carried for Henry and his wife Toots. He was a Yorkshireman who had been Walter Hagen’s caddie in the 1929 Ryder Cup match at Moortown. He went on to carry the Haig’s clubs when he won the Open that year at Muirfield and received a huge bonus when Walter handed him his winner’s cheque for £75, something the Haig had famously done before when he became the first native born American champion in 1922. In those days some players would employ a ‘forecaddie’ to spot their ball and Hargreaves was to perform this duty for Henry in several Opens in the thirties. He became Henry’s valet and butler and was to co-write a fascinating book about his experiences with his two remarkable employers called Caddie in the Golden Age. In it he told of the notebook he prepared for Hagen, with pictures of each hole including bunkers and distances from landmarks alongside the fairways. Walter was probably the first player to have a ‘course planner’, now available in almost all pro shops. Such aids were frowned upon in those days. Despite his laid-back attitude to golf, the Haig was meticulous in his preparation. In the ‘golden age’ of the great liners there was much prestige for the Nation and the Lines if one of their ships held the ‘Blue Riband’ of the Atlantic for the fastest crossing. On August 31st Queen Mary docked at Southampton having regained the Riband for Cunard-White Star on her 6th Atlantic round-trip voyage with an average speed of 30.63 knots. Following her retirement many years ago, she has been permanently docked at Long Beach California as a floating Hotel and Conference Centre. What a pity that we could not find a berth for her, as we did for the retired Royal Yacht Britannia. Joe Ezar was not on board the Queen Mary on that voyage. In that last week of August he was one of a small band of professionals who arrived in Sestrieres, the Italian winter resort 6000 feet up in the Alps not far from Turin (scene of the 2006 Winter Olympics). Also in the party were Henry Cotton, German Open champion Auguste Boyer and French Open winner Marcel Dallemagne. They were there to play in the Italian Open (the first significant tournament held at high altitude), which Cotton was to win, but it was the performance of Joe Ezar that has entered the record books. Joe was playing better than he had on previous visits to Europe and even beat the almost invincible Open Champion, Alf Padgham, that year in a 36-hole match. Henry wrote of the ‘amazing golfing NEXT |
