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Recently, when I tuned on a TV programme called Salvage Hunters: The Restorers, my eye lit on a row of eight carefully crafted old golf club lockers which, it turned out, had been stripped from the Cathkin Braes Golf Club in Glasgow, Scotland. The restorers had picked them up at jumble sale for £80, but by the time a woodworker had linked two of them with a bench made from sections of one of the left-over lockers, he had created something estimated to be worth more than £1,000.
It turned out that Cathkin Braes had given 100 lockers to a disposal company who, in return, did not charge to take them away. But why did the club get rid of them in the first place?
“We needed to move on,” explained club manager Bill Bain. “The old lockers were full of character but they didn’t work any more. They weren’t big enough to accommodate a modern golf bag.”
Just as many wonderful old courses have been rendered redundant for championship purposes because of their lack of length, so thousands of stunning old lockers have been unable to cope with those shiny big bags ...
The club went on to build a handsome, if expensive, new extension which could accommodate (wooden) lockers one and a half times the size of the originals. Meanwhile, a couple of members reflected Bain’s feelings when they asked for the doors to their old lockers.
Belle Robertson, the famous Scottish and Curtis Cup golfer, did the same when they altered the changing rooms 10 years ago at Buchanan Castle Golf Club. A golfer with a penchant for French polishing, she loved the feel of the unvarnished surface on the door’s biscuit-coloured and untouched inside and, after giving it an application of her finest polish, hung it on her garage wall while she decides where it might fit in her Campbeltown home.
At Shady Oaks in Texas, they have kept Ben Hogan’s double-locker, moving it into the professional shop when the great champion died in 1997. Everything in that locker is as well-organised as was Hogan’s golf. The clothes are neatly pressed and hanging on coat-hangers as opposed to a peg. His familiar white hat is perched on a hook on the inside of the door, while his golf shoes, bearing their trademark 13th stud, sit on a shelf at the top. Some pain-relieving creams are still there, no doubt prompting visitors to recall that life-threatening car accident in 1949 from which the great man somehow contrived to recover.
At Latrobe Golf Club in Pennsylvania, the old painted wood locker for Arnold Palmer’s father, Deacon, remains where it was, complete with brass nameplate and the lock still intact – never opened and its contents undisturbed since his death in 1976. What visitor to the club will fail to mutter an awed, “That must have been Arnie’s dad’s locker,” and wonder what’s hidden within.
Players left messages in old lockers, and maybe still do. In 1970, when Tony Jacklin was leading the field going into the last round of the US Open at Hazeltine, he was in the locker room, as were the press. In Liz Kahn’s book, “The Price of Success,” Jacklin recalled: “They were asking me what I’d eaten for breakfast and things like that. And while all that was going on, I opened my locker door and saw this sign saying, ‘Tempo.’ I knew at once that it was from Tom Weiskopf.”
Going back to that Aladdin’s lamp situation of new lockers for old, we know what to blame – technology. Just as many wonderful old courses have been rendered redundant for championship purposes because of their lack of length, so thousands of stunning old lockers have been unable to cope with those shiny big bags which were designed to fit trolleys and buggies instead. Modern bags also must accommodate big-headed clubs, balls, waterproofs, the equivalent of a larder of food to last the five hours of a modern round, bottles of water, the manufacturer’s name in big print and often the player’s name besides. When Nick Faldo was knighted, he had SIR NICK FALDO writ large across his bag.
Now for a golf club to have found the answer to this unfortunate turn of events. Some of the members of Prestwick have done what we should all be doing in going back to carrying one of those little leather or leather-like pencil bags and playing with just a handful of clubs.
“Our clubhouse was built in 1868 and our lockers were installed in 1882,” said Ken Goodwin, the club’s secretary. (He found GGP a note recording the purchase and installation of the club’s 90 lockers at a cost of £350 in 1882.)
Prestwick did not have the scope to extend their clubhouse and what happens today is that they have a bag drop area for those with bigger bags. And if golfers prefer not to use it, they take their clubs home.
Lockers at Prestwick often will be handed down from father to son, with sign-writers coming in to update the gold lettering on hand-painted green plates above the lockers. “Lockers,” says Mark Alexander, the award-winning golf photographer, “tell you so much about a club and its members.”
For another club sticking with a lovely touch of the past, what about the New Zealand Golf Club in Surrey, England? Locker-owners at that club never die out; they merely have their names crossed out. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the late author who will forever be associated with Sherlock Holmes, currently has eight names below his.
And it goes on, with the whirligig of time contributing to the stash of stories and secrets behind every locker-door of a certain vintage. And long may the tradition escape the salvage hunters.
Top: The gentleman’s locker rooms with the original wooden lockers in the clubhouse at Royal North Devon Golf Club in England
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