Those photographs of the burning clubhouse of Oakland Hills Country Club near Detroit struck an eerie chord in my mind. Almost exactly 21 years ago, the night of 30 March 2001, a fire started at Royal Mid-Surrey Golf Club in Richmond, southwest London. It spread quickly. In 25 minutes, less time than it takes to play a couple of par 5s and a par 3, little was left of the building. Observing the wreckage, a past captain said mournfully: “£5 million worth of kit and caboodle was destroyed in 25 minutes.”
I visited a few days later and wrote in The Times of London: “Gaunt steel girders point to the sky and a few external walls are left standing. Bits of paper flutter in the wind, others are caught in the hedge. In the wreckage lie hundreds of sets of mangled golf clubs. Distorted trolleys are parked outside the temporary pro’s shop.”
Fires and golf clubs seem to go together like balata balls and birdies. Glasgow Golf Club, founded in 1787, is said to be the ninth-oldest in the world. The clubhouse was gutted when a fire broke out in September 2018. Luckily staff were able to save one of the original Calamity Jane putters used by Bobby Jones and also the Tennant Cup, the prize in the oldest amateur stroke-play event in the world, created in 1880. Three months later, Macrihanish, the famous Scottish golf club on the Mull of Kintyre in the west of the country, lost its clubhouse to a fire. More importantly, the steward and his family, who lived above the premises, lost their home. Earlier this month, the clubhouse at the Beaverbrook Golf Club in Leatherhead, 20 miles south of London, was burned down.
A member of Royal Mid-Surrey eloquently described this feeling: “It is not just the clubhouse that we mourn but the photographs, the history, the paintings and the trophies. It’s like losing a part of one’s soul.”
Why are golf clubs going up in smoke? Arson is suspected in some cases, but at Beaverbrook it is thought that the fire started in the electrics under the roof. In older golf clubs, it might be that some of the structure is of wood, making the building a bit of a tinderbox.
Storm damage can be repaired and so can vandalism, and in the case of a burglary the goods might be recovered. By many standards, such acts, while unwelcome, do not rate as high on the scale as a fire. Discovering that the chair you sat in last Sunday has been reduced to ashes, that the locker room where you changed your shoes for the past 30 years, that your tankard that hung behind the bar and marked your win in a club competition 20 years ago, are no more is the very opposite of impersonal. It is personal.
The point is not to mourn the physical structure of the clubhouse, because that can be re-created. It is to remember that inside Royal Mid-Surrey’s historic clubhouse there had been so much that was important to golf, and much of it had gone. There were 128 cups and trophies on show. All went. So too did the hole-in-one book where members wrote about their aces. J.H. Taylor, one of the Great Triumvirate, was the club’s pro for 50 years and a portrait of him was lost, as was a painting of Sir Henry Cotton, one of only five professionals in the club’s 110 years. A member of Royal Mid-Surrey eloquently described this feeling: “It is not just the clubhouse that we mourn but the photographs, the history, the paintings and the trophies. It’s like losing a part of one’s soul.”
One photograph was of Sir John Nott-Bower, a commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a past captain of the club. Driving home one night he was stopped by a constable and asked his name: “My name is Nott-Bower,” the commissioner said. To which the young policeman replied: “I don’t care who you are not. I want to know who you are.”
A personal experience. My father and mother each captained Stinchcombe Hill Golf Club in Gloucestershire, and I was proud to take their grandchildren, my children, into the clubhouse and show them the boards with the names L.C. Hopkins and M.E. Hopkins followed by their respective years of office on a wall. Making a copy of the wooden original in case of fire is not difficult, but how many clubs have had the foresight to do it? Likewise, copying photographs and storing them in a vault. How many clubs have done that?
“The natural order of things is actually to be destroyed, not to persist. History doesn’t magically perpetuate itself. It has to be cared for, conserved and passed on.”
Golf historian David Normoyle
And, by the way, do the honours boards always have to be made of wood? Wood burns. At The Berkshire Golf Club near Ascot, west of London, there are glass honours boards with the names attached neatly. They are in vertical columns, so they look like blinds and strikingly different. I thought about them for a few minutes before deciding that actually, they looked rather good. Formby and Wallasey in the northwest of England, and Royal Porthcawl in south Wales have dozens of photographs of past captains lining the clubhouse walls. Wonderful to look at. Great history. Are there copies?
Welwyn Garden City Golf Club, where Nick Faldo took his first lessons, had a burglary in the 1950s and officials realised they had no record of what had been taken. Cue Dick Lister, one of the oldest members. Entirely from memory, Lister typed out on flimsy paper a document recording such details as had been recorded in the club’s annals – the first club professional’s wages and his holiday entitlement, for example. He also described the routings of the holes and the club’s social activities down the years. Vintage memorabilia. Priceless historical stuff.
David Normoyle, the eminent American golf historian, advises clubs on their memorabilia and how to display it. “I try and tell people that just because they cannot understand it (a club’s history and memorabilia) doesn’t mean it is not an asset,” Normoyle said. “It is the heritage of a club, shared by every member. They each have a responsibility for it. It is as much the responsibility of the board as the clubhouse, the course. My high school biology teacher taught me that 99.9 percent of all species that ever existed are now extinct. The natural order of things is actually to be destroyed, not to persist. History doesn’t magically perpetuate itself. It has to be cared for, conserved and passed on.”
Top: Firefighters battle a massive fire at the Oakland Hills Country Club on February 17, 2022.
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