With few members to
look after in the early days there was little to do in the way of
repairs or shop-work and part of my duties entailed tending to the
hot water boiler and keeping an eye on the radiators in the
clubhouse. My pay was five shillings a week (25p). There was plenty
of time for practise and I was able to get out on the course quite
frequently – mostly on my own, as there was little opportunity to
play with members. I was officially scratch by the age of sixteen
and I felt that my game was coming together well, but I had to wait
some considerable time to test it in competition – quite a few years
in fact. Although I enjoyed being at Brancepeth, I began to feel
that my progress as a competitive player was being held back. As for
teaching, there was scarcely enough for Charles to keep his hand in
so I gained no experience to speak of. At times there was so little
to do that I became thoroughly bored and felt that I was wasting my
time and getting nowhere fast.
My best friend was Jack Dawson, one of the locals, who was
apprenticed to a Stonemason and in the same frame of mind. We had
seen a notice in the national press asking for volunteers for the
Canadian North West Mounted Police and we sent off for the
application forms, duly completed them and returned them to the
London Office. We were devastated when they were returned for
parental consent – we had not read the small print. Again my
ambitions were thwarted just as they had been a few years earlier.
Whether or not I would have had the same measure of success in the
Navy or the Mounties as I did in the golf profession is something we
shall never know.
Charles
was a fine player who made his mark in the local events held
throughout Northumberland and Durham, winning most of the trophies
to be played for. He was a courageous man and made light of the war
wound, which shattered his left leg below the knee. It took half an
hour each morning to bandage his leg before putting on the specially
made boots he had to wear. The ravines of Brancepeth were a real and
painful problem to him - nevertheless, it was at his home course
that he had his greatest triumph, winning the 72-hole Northern
Professional Championship in 1930 with a score of 294. In 1935 he
had a round of 63, still the lowest score to be recorded at
Brancepeth at the time of writing, but it was not an official
competition and therefore did not qualify as the course record. Had
he not had the disability I am sure that Charles would have been a
force in major competition.
One
of his pupils was the most famous member of the club, Leonard
Crawley, known as “L. G.” His father was the agent for Lord Boyne,
whose land the course occupied, and the family lived in the ‘big
house’ above the village. L. G. was a Cambridge ‘Blue’ and the whole
Varsity team frequently joined him when he came home to play at
Brancepeth. He was not only one of our finest amateur golfers, but
played cricket for the MCC in the West Indies, for the Gentlemen v
Players at Lords in 1932 and scored several first class centuries.
Guy Morgan, a Cambridge and Glamorgan medium pace bowler, once said
that the only way to bowl at L. G. was to “let it go from thirty
yards and hide behind the umpire”. He was also an excellent shot,
ice skater and tennis player - a real all-rounder. L. G. attained
some of the highest honours in golf and played four times in the
Walker Cup between 1932 and 1947. (It was he who lost those nine
balls in an early match at Brancepeth). This very talented ball
striker was known to accomplish the long carry over the ravine at
the 18th – with his putter!
“Mr Leonard Crawley seems to have all the attributes to make him one
of the players of the world”, wrote the famous amateur golfer,
author and golf correspondent Bernard Darwin, the grandson of
Charles Darwin. (Bernard Darwin was a founder member of Aberdovey,
where Charles had been p pro before he enlisted in1914).
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