MAGAZINE 2022-23
The great Triumvirate had become significant in the later years of the 19th century; they were superstars of the late Victorian age of sport. When the first playing of the Open Championship arrived at Hoylake in 1897, surely Harry Vardon, J H Taylor or James Braid would win the Gold medal and become The Champion Golfer of the year?
Professional golf with these three at the helm had eclipsed the great Amateurs John Ball, Harold Hilton and the fast rising Lieutenant Freddie Tait. The pros had won the three previous Championships; it was accepted by the great golfing experts, (yes, they had experts even back then) that this would continue.
But no, it was Harold Hilton, a local man born in West Kirby, a village neighbouring Hoylake, who took the honours. The experts thought if it was to be an amateur triumph then the local hero John Ball would be the one.
Harold had a nail biting wait to find out his fate. In the early days, the players went out in the order they started and not with the best scorer teeing off last. On his way to the first tee, Hoylake’s professional Jack Morris whispered to Harold, “No more than a 75 please, Mr Hilton.”
He did score a fine 75, but then endured a nervous two hours, prowling around the clubhouse, playing the odd game of billiards, and then word came that James Braid required a three on the last hole to tie.
Harold rushed to the home green to see Braid’s approach shot pass inches from the hole, only to keep rolling some 20 feet past. The putt was a tough one, too tough, and Hilton knew then that he was to be successful.
Mighty celebrations took place in the new clubhouse before Harold strolled back to his home in West Kirby with the trophy under his arm.
Five years later the Championship was again played at Hoylake and surely there was no doubt that this time one of the Triumvirate would be successful.
James Braid arrived on the Wirral as the Open champion, but by way of fate Sandy Herd played a practice round with Hoylake’s hero, the legendary Johnny Ball, who advised him to try the new, rubber core Haskell ball. He tried one on the 15th, couldn’t believe how far he drove the ball, and never went back to the gutta.
Sandy purchased four balls from Jack Morris, and went on to win by a single shot from Harry Vardon.
James Braid again arrived on the Wirral as the Champion Golfer, and again people mused that a member of the Triumvirate would conquer the Hoylake links.
The number of entries had greatly increased and half the field played two qualifying rounds on the Tuesday and the other half on the Wednesday. The successful players would play two rounds each on the Thursday and Friday.
The first qualifying day was extremely wet, but Arnaud Massy led the way with rounds of 73 and 74. This beaming Basque from La Boulie was the leader after two rounds, with J H Taylor on his heels.
The popularity of the Open was increasing with good crowds having travelled to the links using the train from Liverpool.
It was neck and neck going into the final round with J H Taylor a shot ahead, but his poor start enabled Massy to gain a lead he did not lose. More than 4000 spectators followed his route to victory and saw him carried by his fellow professionals to the presentation ceremony.
During the championship Arnaud’s wife of Scottish origins gave birth to a daughter and, showing their delight at his winning, the happy couple named her Mademoiselle Hoylake Massy.
Hoylake’s fourth Open, but were the great Triumvirates now too old to win here?
The answer was a solid ‘no’ as J H Taylor, playing some of the best golf in appalling conditions, won with plenty to spare. This was his fifth Open win, levelling with Harry Vardon and James Braid. Taylor was indeed fortunate to even qualify as he needed a putt of seven feet which he managed to sink after giving himself a strict telling off.
”Well Taylor my lad, there’s only one place for this and that is the bottom of the hole.”
He survived the cut and then coped brilliantly with some of the toughest, wildest weather anyone could remember. His second shot to the Briars next to the Leas School was described by Bernard Darwin “as if drilling a hole through the wind, hovering over the flag and dropping within a foot from the hole.”
Taylor won by eight shots, a mighty win by a mighty champion. We are delighted to have one of the Triumvirate on our honours board. The following year, just before the start of World War One, Harry Vardon won his sixth Open Championship, a record he holds to this day.
An American invasion was now in full swing with Walter Hagen coming to Hoylake and picking up the second of his four Championships.
But there was intrigue surrounding his win. The qualifying round was at Formby, but Walter and Jim Barnes arrived late on the train from Liverpool. For some reason the officials put up quite a fuss and it’s been said that Hagen was allowed to play, but not Barnes. In fact, with research I found out he was disqualified after two rounds of the main competition.
With just the final round to play, Hagen was level with Earnest Whitcombe, the oldest of the three Whitcombe brothers, and only three ahead of J H Taylor. It was a tense afternoon and, arriving on the 18th green, Hagen needed to get down in two from the far end.
He left himself with a five foot putt for glory. There were 10,000 spectators on the course when, in his own words, “I stroked the ball…gently but firmly; it righted the last turn, straightened out and headed for home! I threw my putter into the air and never saw the ball or the putter again. But I sure saw that British Open Trophy.”
My father told me that in 1930 the British sporting public was captivated by two smallish men from foreign lands: the great Australian cricketer, Don Bradman, and the extraordinary golfer from Atlanta, Bobby Jones.
For the first time sport was on the front pages of the national newspapers. Bradman as all cricketers know was a sensation, flogging the English bowling to all parts of the kingdom; whilst Bobby Jones arrived with so much expectation that even the hardest pressed hack had no problems making an interesting story out of his considerable achievements.
When he arrived at Hoylake he had spent a few days in Paris after his win at St Andrews in The British Amateur Championship. There was a gap of three weeks and he needed a change of atmosphere - where better than Paris? Arriving back in England he and his wife stayed at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool.
The qualifying course was Wallasey, a course that Jones really appreciated. In the clubhouse there is a painting of Jones, as there is at Royal Lytham and Royal Liverpool. But the Wallasey one is actually signed by the great man. The tournament proper went smoothly for Jones until the last round when he had two extraordinary incidents. The first of these was at the Far hole (the 10th in the present Open) when he hit his second to the left of the green some ten or fifteen yards down the slope. The happenings of the next few moments caused much wonderment to the spectators and officials alike. He felt that a four would give him a good buffer ahead of the rest of the field. His first chip was underplayed, not quite reaching the putting surface, and to compound his problems he left the second approach ten feet short of the hole. He still had this putt to make par but it slid by a foot from the hole. Later he recalled that he felt a bit unsettled and hurriedly tapped the next one - and it did not go in.
The whole incident was so unbelievable, yet supremely simple. Bernard Darwin, following Jones, said that a nice old lady with a croquet mallet could have saved him two strokes. Jones had to gather himself, recalling that: “If ever a person could be made groggy by a blow entailing no physical consequence, I had been made so by that seven.”
Through this daze Jones was determined to press on conservatively but firmly, which he did, playing level par to the sixteenth where he aimed for a birdie, but hit his long approach into a greenside bunker. His ball was placed on the wall side opposite to the hole. It was not a splash out but required a sharply descending blow. What to use? He had been given by Horton Smith a concave sand wedge. At St Andrews in the Amateur he had used it to hack out of gorse bushes but never from a bunker.
He prepared for the shot. He dropped the club behind the ball so that contact would be made above its centre. Out it came precisely as intended; the ball trickled slowly across the green, tickled the hole and stopped two inches beyond.
Jones settled down, now back in control of his thoughts, and won the Championship with two shots to spare on Leo Diegel. The vast crowd went mad, they had taken him to their hearts, and Bobby Jones received the Trophy from Jeffrey Beazley, a member of that well known Hoylake golfing family.
When the players and press heard that Hoylake was being stretched to 7,078 yards, it was declared that golf was becoming a game of endurance. The reigning champion Alfred Perry declared that the “course is too severe, but the best man will win.”
The secretary, Major HC Forbes-Bell, added that “our object all along has been to produce the best golfer of the year; that is all.” It is interesting that in those days the home Club had such a great influence on the set-up of the Open course.
The winner was Alfred Padgham from Kent, a man with a tranquil and unruffled temperament. “He was the right man to win, everyone rejoiced to see him do it,” wrote Bernard Darwin in The Times.
At this time he was Britain’s top golfer, having been runner-up the year before. A Ryder Cup player on three occasions around this win, he was virtually unbeatable in 1936. Two things prevented him from world recognition: not many British professionals travelled across the Atlantic - and then came the Second World War.
Alf Padgham had other talents, notably as a motorcycle trick rider. Most of his family were fearful of an accident, but his father encouraged him to continue, only for a wise uncle to step in and hold sway.
These were the early days of Henry Longhurst as a writer. He asked all those who questioned the length of the Hoylake links to: “Wait and see. We waited, we saw, and we were conquered. Hoylake, as it played during the Championship, turned out to be the finest test of golf in the world.”
Bernard Darwin concluded, “If ever a course was in great order, it was Hoylake. As to the management of it, that may be taken as read. Hoylake knows its business.”
This Open got off to an inauspicious start for its winner, without a ball being struck. When Fred Daly and fellow Irishman Harry Bradshaw presented themselves for accreditation, they were approached by a commissionaire: “We’ve no tickets,” he said, “so off with both of you.”
Said Fred: “We were humiliated and felt like a couple of Irish navvies grubbing around for some labouring work. The day was saved by the Hoylake professional, Old Cyril Hughes, who took us out for a practice round. Afterwards Commander Roe, the R&A Secretary, sorted out the confusion. He was a lovely man.”
Years later, when he was appointed an Honorary Life Member of the Club, Fred mentioned the incident, but by now “I had fallen in love with Hoylake and everything associated with the Club.”
On his final hole, Fred walked all the way to the 18th green to assess his second shot, and returned to hit a perfect ball that passed within inches of the hole and guaranteed his victory. At last, an Irishman had won The Open. On receiving the Claret Jug he said, “It’s nice to be taking this trophy back to Ireland. Perhaps the change of air will do it good.”
You may be surprised by Fred’s winning score of 21 over. For The Open of 1947, par at Royal Liverpool was set at 68 - which was the course record at the time.
When he arrived at Hoylake, Peter Thomson had won the two previous Championships at Royal Birkdale and St Andrews. Only three men had the same record before Thomson, and nobody since. Quite something.
Fifty years after his remarkable victory we had a special lunch for him at Hoylake on the eve of the return of The Open in 2006. He was asked how many golf books he had written and he replied “not many,” confirming the impression that he did not find the game of any great difficulty.
This was to be Gary Player’s first Open and one of Henry Cotton’s last. At the time we knew little of Gary but Henry Cotton was still a major name in the world of golf. He played a lovely round before the event with the Captain of Hoylake, John Graham. Well, according to John it was lovely playing with the Maestro, who told stories and gave tips - until his wife ‘Toots’ appeared and the fun stopped. Nonetheless, it was a marvellous experience.
This Champiomship was not regarded as one of the greatest, but as Peter Ryde explained in The Times on July 7th, “Yesterday in the suitably historic surroundings of Royal Liverpool, Thomson became the first golfer to win three in a row since Bob Ferguson in 1882. He had a tricky front nine during his final round but a good putt on the eighth for a par settled him, and requiring level fives over the last five holes he was as good as home.”
The next week, John Graham, whose family had lived in Hoylake for over 100 years and who was known locally as “that golf man”, was stopped in Hoylake by an elderly lady who congratulated him on winning The Open Championship. “Yes, I saw a picture of you in the papers, being presented with the winner’s cup. Well done!” With that she continued on her way. John admitted he never told her the truth, but it was a nice way to conclude his year as Captain during the year of an Open.
Roberto De Vicenzo had been trying since he was runner up in 1950 to win the Open. Around the world he had won over 250 tournaments but a Major had eluded him. The new triumvirate of Palmer, Nicklaus and Player were now in residence at the high table of world golf.
However, Palmer did not make the journey, but few people in British golf would ever criticise Arnold as it was he who first entered in 1960 and so resurrected the credibility of the event when many top Americans refused to make the effort.
Back in July 1967 it was a most emotional last afternoon as Roberto received the Open Trophy. Pat Ward Thomas wrote: “The moment that will outlive all others is of the last sunlit fairway, and Vicenzo, the look of an Emperor about him, moving towards the reception which for sustained warmth and affection is unequalled in my memory.”
Tim White, who later became Captain of Royal Liverpool and a fine golfer, told me that grey suited, rather subdued members had tears in their eyes. It was a wonderful evening at Hoylake as the sun set, and some of us were in the Green Lodge pub around the corner from the course marking his triumph in our own way.
Roberto was staying at the home of former Captain Roy Smith where he celebrated what many had considered unlikely, if not impossible. As Roberto left late that evening he slapped Roy on the back and said, “Ow zat, amigo? I just come back to see my friends and I win ze bloody championship!”
The Open returned to Hoylake after a 39 year gap, and the weather was magnificent: a heatwave, fast running fairways, perfect greens, strategically placed bunkers, far fewer than on any other Championship links.
The field of players was of the highest order - all the top contenders were here. But at that stage in his career Tiger Woods was a country mile ahead of any other golfer. He had been virtually the top ranked player since his arrival on the professional scene ten years previously.
He arrived as the reigning Champion but had had a terrible setback when he lost his inspirational father a few months before the tournament. Could he hold it together? Well if anyone could, it would be Tiger, the toughest, most determined golfer in the world. He had rented a house near the course and a neighbouring lady who did not know a golf ball from a ball gown knocked on his door and without realising who he was, apart from being a golfer, offered some freshly grown tomatoes. “What a nice and polite boy,” she told her friends. “I hope he does well.”
Well? He did do well, very, very well; apart from a late surge from a few rivals he cruised to a wonderful win.
Only after realising the magnitude of his victory did he end up in his caddie’s arms crying his heart out in recognition of his father’s influence on his life, a gesture that was quite out of keeping with his usual cold, calculating and magnificent golf.
Could Hoylake again match Tiger? “Surely not,” came the reply. We waited, we anticipated and we were rewarded with the magnificent Rory McIlroy from Northern Ireland.
Again the weather was fine and sunny, though the organisers took note of the weather forecast for Saturday afternoon and decided that the third round would be a two hole start to make sure all the players would complete before the storm due about 5pm.
They were right, play ended at 4.30, and half an hour later the greens were flooded. Rory’s only true challenger was Adam Scott from Australia who played marvellous golf but probably had the worst of the weather on the Friday, playing into a strong breeze.
Rory kept a good lead from the time he went in front on the first day. We all thought he was cruising to the championship, especially after the third round when he finished with five 3’s on the last six holes.
During the last round Sergio Garcia found his form, but Rory’s first three rounds had done the trick. He became the third home grown Irish golfer in seven years to win the Open, joining Padraig Harrington and Darren Clarke. What an accomplishment for the island of Ireland and its small population.
Rory was only twenty six years old and the possibilities before him seemed legion. With tongue in cheek he told the home crowd that he was a Manchester United supporter, which received some good-natured booing from a mainly Liverpool audience. He then threw his ball into a packed stand where one lucky punter caught it - and allegedly sold it on eBay for $30,000.00.