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 The three other Wirral professionals who finished just behind me in the Irish Open - Wallasey professional Bill Davies, Dick Burton of Hooton (the club that once lay on land now partly occupied by my present club-Ellesmere Port) and Jimmy Adams, then at Royal Liverpool, were my regular travelling companions at that time. Jimmy was a jovial character with a ready smile and when Bill drove us he often ribbed him about his driving. “Take your foot off the brake”, he would tell him, although his normal speed of 55/60 mph was quite fast in those days. When Jimmy reached the News of the World final against Percy Alliss, Dick and I each sent him a telegram saying: – TAKE YOUR FOOT OFF THE BRAKE. We did this quite independently and were completely unaware of each other’s intentions. The advice did not help him and he lost the match. He was known as the champion runner-up in those days.  Maybe better advice for Jimmy would have been to put the brake on
his swing. Long backswings were common then but Adams was
double-jointed and his was longer than most, as long as John Daly’s
is now, although Jimmy was not so long off the tee as Daly is; the
equipment did not provide such great assistance as it does now of
course. Like Daly, Jimmy was on the ‘chubby’ side but could take his
left arm back beyond his head and still keep it straight. Jimmy
thought that he could keep the club swinging that way “If I try to
curtail it, I feel that I am swinging in two pieces”, he said, “But
the average golfer would be better off with a shorter swing than
mine”. How true that was. You need remarkable flexibility to swing
the club like Adams and Daly. As Henry Longhurst, put it in his
inimitable style: “If some of us were forced into such a position by
a complicated system of pulleys, joints would be cracking all over
the place and we should be in the infirmary!”I played with Henry Longhurst in the inaugural Addington Foursomes in 1933, when Jack Mitchley was unable to make the trip. I had a successful partnership with Jack at that time and many felt that we had a good chance, but I had drawn a good substitute in Henry, who was a talented player and was to win the German Amateur in 1936. He loved the Addington and considered it to be the finest inland course in Britain. We were three down with three to go against Tom Pierpoint (Prestbury) and F. McGloin from West Kent, but the Times reported that we saved our bacon with “spectacular heroism”, eventually losing at the 21st. In 1937 I was to have the honour of being chosen to illustrate the golf swing in Henry’s book, simply titled Golf, which sold for 6 shillings. In his words the book was an attempt “to dissect the methods of the masters for the benefit of the everyday golfer, to weed out their idiosyncrasies and extract the elementary basic principles to which they all conform”. The book caused a furore at the time because, as an amateur, he was not supposed to gain financially from anything to do with a sport played solely for enjoyment. The R & A chose to turn a blind eye and eventually bestowed honorary membership upon him. NEXT |
