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It’s a simple church, built using sturdy stone in the middle of the 19th century and it has been a centrepiece of the village of Churt in Surrey ever since. St John the Evangelist, to give it its proper name, has a soaring roof held up by stout wooden beams, a nave and transept and wooden pews that crack and creak and groan. There on a crisp January day they mourned Peter Alliss, one of the most loved, most talked-about golf commentators ever. There were only 18 in the congregation in a church that could hold five times that number and only four in a choir but that’s COVID-19 for you.
Flowers brightened the church. Lit candles burned. Readings were given. Hymns were sung: The King of Love my Shepherd Is was one and another was In the Bleak Midwinter because it was in the bleak midwinter. And the service ended with the haunting song, Panis Angelicus.
Laughter was not far away because it always was with Peter Alliss. “I would say to people that one of the greatest things about my husband is that every single day he made me laugh,” Jackie Alliss, Peter’s widow, said later. “Our house rang with laughter. He would see a sense of the ridiculous in whatever it was. Even when he couldn’t get out of his chair, he would look at me and say, ‘Well, you know you signed up to be a full-time nurse and carer,’ and then he’d laugh. He never lost his sense of humour. It was special to him.”
Humour bonded Peter to his children stronger than glue. On this January day in this Victorian church, Sara, his daughter, read a poem the title of which tells you about the relationship Alliss had with his children. It was titled Daddy Fell Into The Pond. When Peter and his older son Simon got together, mischief was never far away. Sometimes the two of them acted and sounded like a pair of naughty boys. Simon read a poem he had written, often poking gentle fun at his father, entitled I’m Very Famous, You Know. Why? Because that was what Peter used to say jokingly.
Here is one verse:
Life now at Bucklands (the family home) just isn’t the same. We’re adjusting to loss and imagining pain.
The papers, the post still arrive every day. It all seems the same but you’re so far away.
Everything’s changed but the world stays the same. Have I shouted out lately that I hate that you’re gone?
And another:
To win three national Opens three weeks in a row nods to a talented player so many don’t know.
Twenty-one trophies and three PGA Champs. Not bad for a man that the kids know as Gramps.
And a third:
Who can forget that Hall of Fame speech that brought the house down as they rose to their feet.
A final remark to his folks out loud of what he’d accomplished to make them feel proud.
“Mum, Dad look at this lot, not too bad,” was all that he said.
And poor Mrs Weymouth, she got the finger instead.
Later, Simon Alliss reflected on his father’s death: “He has left a big hole in the family. I said everything to him that I needed to say. I had amazing experiences with him. I don’t feel I have been robbed early of him. I used to ring him up every morning at 8 o’clock as I drove to work. I did it to annoy him and, knowing he’d be annoyed, it became a routine. We’d chat for five or 10 minutes and then he’d make it quite clear he’d had enough or Mum had brought him a cup of tea and off he’d tootle.
“But it is much different for Mum so we are just supporting her as best we can, being around, making sure she doesn’t go and end up in one end of the house in her old blanket and slippers, eating a boiled egg once every two days and not turning the lights on.”
When news of Alliss’s death was announced, it prompted a remarkable outpouring of sympathy. Letters and messages of condolence came by their hundreds from America, from South Africa, from many European countries. The BBC sent rose plants. The local flower shop was inundated with orders for bouquets, white flowers at first, spring flowers now. “My lovely florist rang me up and said, ‘You must be running out of vases,’ ” Jackie said. ‘Shall I send on the cards and tell you what flowers they requested so you can thank people? We’ll send a couple of bouquets a week for the next few weeks until we have got them all up to you.’ The flowers have been such a comfort. I didn’t realise that so many people cared.”
“It’s the love for him that has come over loud and clear. People I haven’t heard from for 40 years have been in touch.”
Jackie Alliss
By some reckoning nearly 900 letters and cards had arrived at the Alliss household by last week. Some were simply addressed to Mrs Jackie Alliss, Hindhead. “And as for the e-mails, I haven’t even looked at those yet,” Jackie said, surrounded by the piles of letters and cards. “I knew he was loved by the things that used to come in the mail but I hadn’t realised quite how much he was loved. It has been quite extraordinary. One of the things that has come out in almost every letter I get is the mischievous twinkle he had whenever he was talking. That was Peter wasn’t it? He had such a strong sense of humour.”
If it is in death that we are measured not in life, then by that yardstick Alliss was not just loved but adored by thousands, many of whom he wouldn’t have met and many of whom he had helped in some small way along the way. There was a young man who caddied for him. “You’re much too bright to be a caddie,” Alliss, not much older, told him. “Go back to school and get going.” Now in his mid-70s and a retired lawyer, this man, on hearing of Peter’s death, wrote to Jackie to tell her this story. “Peter and I had kept in contact all those years,” he wrote.
“Isn’t that lovely? Jackie said. “And I never knew it.”
Or the lady in a hairdressing salon in Haslemere who was talking so excitedly about her 21st birthday party that night that she didn’t notice the man having his hair cut next to her, nor pay any attention when he left. Ten minutes later he returned and handed her a bottle of champagne. “We send you lots of love,” Peter said with a smile and a flourish. “Have a lovely birthday.”
“From that day to this,” the lady who turned 21 that day wrote in a note to Jackie, “I watched and listened to him all the time. And I am not a golfer.”
So many letters arrived that the Allisses pondered how to say thank you and, in the end, they had a card printed to send to their correspondents. It reads: “Jackie, Sara, Simon, Henry and their families thank you for all your wonderful messages and loving support. Peter was a very special and much-loved husband, father and grandfather and we all miss him very much.”
“I am sending that to as many people as I can,” Jackie said.
“You know he was in the RAF doing his national service and had to stay on because of some uprising or other. I don’t think he was very pleased. But he remained connected to the RAF and they have put up a memorial stone for him in Staffordshire. It says Peter Alliss RAF and the dates.”
She continued: “They are naming a road after him in Sandwich – Alliss Close. It’s the love for him that has come over loud and clear. People I haven’t heard from for 40 years have been in touch. Which is extraordinary because you think people have gone out of your life. They might say: ‘Oh, that’s sad. Peter Alliss has died.’ But it takes time to sit down and write.”
The early evening of the day he died was enlivened by the sights and sounds of Simon trimming his father’s beard in the kitchen. “We had a couple of hours with him in the chair and Simon waving a towel around,” Jackie said. “Simon was saying, ‘Would sir like a short back and sides and would sir like his nostrils and his ears done?’ It was typical of Peter to say, ‘Don’t be such a silly fool.’ The two of them then had a couple of large Scotches together before Simon went home.”
Jackie remembers that Peter was on very good form at dinner that night. After their meal they watched television together sitting side by side in two armchairs. They did this often. “He was such an old romantic,” Jackie said. “He used to tell everybody how much he loved me and nearly every night, as we sat in those chairs, I would feel him looking at me. He’d say, ‘You’re so lovely. You will never know how much I love you.’
“I always knew he would go before me because he was that much older than me. (He was 89, Jackie is 78). “He didn’t want to discuss death. He wouldn’t talk about dying. All he ever said was, “Well, I am not going on my own so keep me and when you go we’ll go together.”
It was not to happen.
That night before preparing to go to bed Jackie went to walk their two Weimaraner dogs (she has bred Weimaraners for nearly 50 years) and Alliss rose carefully from his chair to start to climb the stairs. Suddenly, there was a thud as he collapsed. Hearing this, Jackie rushed to his side and cradled her husband in her lap. “For me to get there and hold him and say, ‘You’re fine, you’re OK, I love you,’ was fantastic for him,” she said. “But I don’t have any relief from that.”
Today, more than two months after his death, Jackie goes into Peter’s study every morning. “We put the light on by his chair. The flowers are there. It is as if he is still sitting in his chair. We talk to him as we go about the house. I hear Helen (the cleaner) saying, ‘Morning, Mr A,’ when she is going up the stairs. And a few days after Peter died Helen had gone upstairs to clean the bathroom and, moments later, I found her sitting on the bath in floods of tears. ‘I can’t believe he is not there to tease me and pull my leg,’ she told me. ‘I cannot accept that he has gone.’
“That is true,” Jackie said. “He is here. A presence in the house still.”
Asked how she is coping, the response comes with a sigh: “I’m all right. I have good days and bad days. Peter wouldn’t want me to mope about. He’d be saying to me, ‘Come on, buck up, get going. You knew it was going to happen at some point so stop being a pain.’ And he was right.”
She paused and her voice cracked slightly. “But the shock of him going. It was so sudden.”
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