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 My brother Charles took up his first professional
appointment at Market Drayton from 1909 to 1912 when the course was
at nearby Adderley. The records from that period have been lost and
the club were not aware of this, but their history does record that
one of my recent predecessors was a nephew of Harry Vardon. He had
been appointed in 1925 as professional/greenkeeper and given
responsibility for the design of the club’s new course for which he
was paid £2.10s (£2.50) a week. When the course was finished he was
to revert to £2.00 per week; adapting a phrase, this must have been
the ‘price of fame’, as my wage was £1.10s (£1.50) – a cut of 50%
from my previous job, but I had the benefit of profit from the ‘sale
of golf balls and other golf appliances’ and the repair of clubs.
Wage inflation for pros was very low over a long period. History
records that Old Tom Morris had received 15s per week when he moved
from St Andrews to Prestwick in 1851 and forty years later Sandy
Herd’s pay was a pound a week when he went to the West Lancashire
club in 1891. (Exceptions were pros like George Duncan and Abe
Mitchell who were employed by wealthy patrons. When he became
personal coach to Samuel Ryder Abe was on £20 per week-a huge amount
in the twenties). When Vardon had completed most of the work on the
Market Drayton course he suffered the indignity of being given a
month’s notice for financial reasons. Another extract from the
history of the club gives a good indication of conditions at that
time: “We can say with some certainty that the club continued in a
similar vein, hiccupping from one financial embarrassment to
another”. I was very sad when I became another victim of the
financial crisis as, in spite of the difficult conditions, it was a
happy club and I really enjoyed my time there. The course has been
extended to 18 holes since my day and the 2nd on the old 9-hole
course is now the 10th. The club has named the hole –: Gadd’s Gem. A
great honour and a thought I treasure.
One of the sporting headlines of 1928 was the football goal-scoring
feat of the Everton F. C. Centre-Forward Bill ‘Dixie’ Dean, who was
born in Birkenhead on the Wirral and loved to play golf with local
pros like Harry Rimmer of Bidston and Bill Davies, the Ryder Cup
player from Prenton and later Wallasey. In biographies by Nick Walsh
and John Keith, we are told that Dean had begun at the age of 12 by
earning additional pocket money as a caddie at the exclusive Wirral
Ladies Golf Club and was soon displaying his natural ball sense,
getting down to scratch in his late teens, despite playing
'cack-handed', ie gripping the club left hand below right. He won a
number of tournaments arranged for professional footballers and was
also a winner of the now defunct Wirral Amateur Championship; many
who saw him play thought that he would have been successful as a
golf professional. The star of Everton’s First Division
title-winning side was one of the most powerful ever headers of a
football and possessed a fierce shot in both feet. In the 1927/28
season he scored sixty goals in thirty-nine league matches - a
record that still stands and will probably never be beaten. Dixie
would be worth his weight in gold now, but the days of the
multi-million pound transfer were a long time ahead. (Arsenal
doubled the transfer record that year when they paid £11,500 for
Bolton’s David Jack).
In 1929, the year that Wall Street crashed and George Duncan
captained Great Britain to a first Ryder Cup victory over Walter
Hagen’s US side at Moortown, my brief stay at Market Drayton came to
an end and I replied to an advertisement for a pro/greenkeeper at
another Shropshire club – Bridgnorth.
[The town was to have an unexpected claim to fame in 2005 when it
was revealed that Hitler apparently chose it as the location for his
HQ when his planned invasion of Britain was completed]
I was short-listed for the job and requested to attend an interview
and to bring my clubs as the committee wished to assess my playing
ability. On the day I found that I was required to play a match
against another young applicant, a kind of ‘trial by combat’. We
teed off and I hit a real ‘corker’, which left my opponent 50 yards
behind – and ran out of fairway. I think it must have unsettled him
a bit and I had an easy win. After the match I was invited back to
the Secretary’s house for tea and was told that the job was mine -
good old-fashioned courtesy! My retainer was again £1.10s per week
and I operated a very limited bar in the pro’s shop - a little hut
at the back of the corrugated iron clubhouse. Once installed, I
found myself facing more hard graft. At small clubs the equipment
was invariably basic and here the fairways were cut with a 24-inch
motor mower. Just imagine how long it took to mow a 480 yards long
fairway with a mower two feet wide. In my second year it was
up-graded to a 36-inch machine with a trailer seat – almost luxury!
Pro/Greenkeepers were the norm back then and were still around until
the sixties, but nowadays the average club has half a dozen
greenkeepers to do the job I did on my own – and ‘space age’
machinery to do it with. Once the course work had been dealt with
you were available to play or teach, although there was not a great
demand for either, which was just as well as spare time was very
limited. Most of mine was spent practising.
In 1930 I went up from Bridgnorth to Hoylake to watch Bobby Jones
play in the Open at Royal Liverpool and to meet my brother George,
who qualified for the championship and played all four rounds. Jones
was the best golfer I ever saw; with his stylish, smooth, rhythmical
and graceful swing generating remarkable power from his hickory
shafts. Despite this incomparable talent he was never comfortable
during championships, chain smoking on the course and suffering from
a nervous stomach. Sometimes after a championship he would be
physically sick on returning to the clubhouse. He started the final
round well enough but at the par five 8th hole I saw him fluff two
chip shots and thin a third. Bernard Darwin was also watching and
described it thus: “Mr Jones hit a fine tee shot, and followed it
with an almost equally fine brassie, and lay towards the left within
some twenty-five to thirty yards of the green. His third, which just
reached the green, was worthy of a ten-handicap player not at his
best; his fourth, very short, was worthy of an honest, full-blooded
rabbit; his fifth would not have got him a club handicap; and his
sixth was reminiscent of an L.G.U. thirty-six”.
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