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By chance, the 2019 Open Championship annual publication showing Shane Lowry with his Claret Jug was lying on a table next to a couple of my old spoons from Edgbaston Golf Club. Though you might be wondering why I had a couple of hickory-shafted clubs lying on the table, the spoons concerned were the kind you still can get for winning a golf club’s monthly medal in the UK.
Though a silver teaspoon can hardly justify a mention in the same breath as a Claret Jug, there are major champions who might well remember the first time they were handed one. Or, in Dame Laura Davies’ case, not handed one. As a 12-year-old, Davies won the ladies’ medal at what was then her home club, only to discover that the ladies’ section did not allow juniors to make off with either spoon or sweep. When the tearful youngster told her mother, the latter gate-crashed the next ladies’ committee meeting. “Laura will be having her spoon, if you don’t mind,” she announced. It had immediate effect.
When times got tough, many golf clubs swapped solid silver for silver-plate. Yet not too many years had gone by when an old friend by the name of Ann Booth – a player with the tidiest short game you ever saw – seized the chance to start a “back to silver” business. Her sales pitch to club captains and secretaries was perfect – she would express surprise/horror that a club as upmarket as theirs would resort to silver plate. Almost at once, she had a hundred or so clubs clamouring to return to the real thing.
Though a silver teaspoon can hardly justify a mention in the same breath as a Claret Jug, there are major champions who might well remember the first time they were handed one.
Booth gave up when the grandchildren came along but, today, there is a company selling shiny new medal spoons in Edinburgh for anything up to £40 a go.
At the same time, there is a site on eBay devoted to second-hand spoons. One way and another, it makes for unutterably sad viewing, what with their prices – sometimes as low as £6 – doing nothing to reflect the sentimental value they might once have enjoyed. Who knows? In some cases it may have taken a holed 30-foot eagle putt at the 18th to clinch the deal.
Presumably, unthinking relatives of deceased spoon-winners will have applied a dash of Silvo tarnish guard to the cutlery and packed it off to eBay to get a bit of loose cash.
Not, mind you, that I can afford to be overly critical. I once meted out some unforgivable treatment to a couple of my spoons. I had let them loose in the kitchen sink and they duly disappeared into a hazard which was the equivalent of Hell Bunker – a Tweeny. (It is known in the U.S. as a garbage disposal.)
“A Tweeny in your sink,” says the advertising blurb of today, “gets rid of your food-waste quickly and hygienically.”
It says nothing about what it does for teaspoons, but in my experience they emerge as mangled wrecks
Lewine Mair
E-MAIL LEWINE