Maureen’s away this week, so I’m in sole charge of the blog and admit responsibility for this post; perhaps the power has gone to my head……There were plenty of serious topics about but the Ryder Cup will loom large next week; the leaking of the health records of Justin Rose and Charley Hull and their TUEs (therapeutic use exemptions) is part of a story that will run and run; the Solheim Cup is next year but many congrats to Marta Figueras-Dotti on being named as one of Annika Sorenstam’s vice-captains, another great choice (and already one of our q and a’s); and well done to the Ireland team of Leona Maguire, Olivia Mehaffey and Annabel Wilson, who won the bronze medal in the Espirito Santo in Mexico.  They finished just a shot behind Switzerland, who were a whopping 21 shots behind the champions South Korea.

So, of course, I’m going to muse about headcovers or “those little hat things” as a non-golfing friend calls them.  I’m not alone in finding this subject of interest:  the latest newsletter from the LET has a feature called Head Covers On Tour but I’m not proud and I prefer headcover to be all one word even if the computer doesn’t.  Many of them have names and they all have a story and they don’t complain if you drop them or keep them hanging about during a photo shoot.  The main danger came from Meg, the lovely but bonkers collie next door, who likes to attack the fence if she thinks anything is threatening her side of it.  Good thing she couldn’t see the furry animals being snapped.

Headcovers posing in the garden with Kerikeri the kiwi. Meg the collie is behind the fence!

First up is Dornoch, the moose who protects my driver.  He’s a bit heavy and unwieldy so doesn’t get out much but he reminds me of a Canadian friend called Lorne Rubinstein, who once spent a year in Dornoch and wrote a lovely book about it.  Its title is A Season in Dornoch, Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands, and the foreword is by Sean Connery.

Caradoc, a battered old red dragon that I gave to my husband many years ago, covers the 3-wood and reminds me to douse my fiery temper in a way that Dai rarely did his when he was alive.  I get a lot of practice because it’s a club a bit out of my league and is serviceable rather than spectacular, specialising in the sort of worm burners that irritate the hell out of opponents.

My rescue club has a new cover, as yet unnamed, a retro, old-fashioned looking red and white knitted thing with a big pompom and the Ricoh Women’s British Open trophy on it.  I think I’ll call it Woburn because that’s where I won it, in a press putting/chipping comp conducted by Master Professional Luther Blacklock.  I was chuffed to bits and am very proud of it.

The lion with a multi-coloured mane is a John Daly confection that looks after a precious persimmon driver made for me by a craftsman called Peter Broadbent.  I don’t know if I could hit it now, having got used to drivers with heads at least twice the size but I still love it.  And I love the cover because I bought it in Augusta, from John Daly, who was manning his (very posh) stall in the car park of the Hooters just down Washington Road from the golf club that was then run by Hootie (Johnson, the chairman of Augusta National at the time).  From Hootie’s to Hooters was a very hot trek but worth it.

Dornoch, left, with the John Daly lion, right, and their respective drivers

Lastly but by no means least there’s Gilly the Galah, a pretty ghastly creation that sheds vile pink fibres every time he’s touched.  He still squawks if his beak is pressed but he has pride of place near my front door because our inimitable captain Jayne Fletcher bought us all one when we reached the finals of the Mail on Sunday.  It’s a fantastic team competition that attracts entries from several thousand clubs and is fiendishly difficult to win.  We (Whittington Heath) were beaten by Farnham from Surrey in the final at El Rompido, in Spain – Sale and South Moor were the other semi-finalists – and we all had a ball.  So Gilly, named after the Spurs (and Dundee) legend Alan Gilzean, is, quite simply, the greatest!

Gilly the Galah

Well, I can’t believe it.  Two working lifetimes of stuff – or most of it – disposed of to a good home.  As we sorted through the seemingly endless boxes crammed with papers, Maureen said, often, “Why on earth would anyone want that?”

“They’re archivists, Maureen.  They’ll take anything.  They’re worse than me.”  That may or may not be true of the keepers of the British Golf Museum in St Andrews but I really needed my sister to keep me on track and stop me from reading and keeping every last bit of paper.  “Did you NEVER throw anything away?”

Dai, who had the gall to accuse me of being the hoarder, had kept virtually everything, not least because it was a valuable research tool and very necessary when we wrote Beyond The Fairways.  One tattered sheet showed the book was going to be called Over The Humps And Hollows, A Golfing Odyssey, a title much dearer to our hearts but since Ping were kindly providing financial backing, Callaway’s putter could hardly get top billing.  Ulysses be damned.  The reviews were good, the sales less so and one Dutch publisher called it, “Almost a classic.”  Lots of memories.

On and on it goes

Apologies to all social historians but out went all the pittance slips from The Birmingham Post and Golf World, endless invoices and expenses claims, testimony to the days when golf writers were sent further afield than the sofa and the Sky subscription.  There were letters aplenty to and from sports editors and I couldn’t throw away the one from Tom Clarke of The Times that started:  “Dear Patricia, Welcome back from the South Seas.”  Indisputably a classic.

Dai was an inveterate collector of islands so we’d been to The Marquesas – no golf there – on the Aranui, a copra boat, picking her up in Tahiti, where we did play golf with a lovely woman called Tiare.  She’d once travelled to play in the French Championship and wrapped in waterproofs and woolly hat met Cecilia Mourgue d’Algue in the first round.  A long way over to go out.

Box after box after box

We also played golf on King Island; Norfolk Island (that’s a very long story which involved the amazing Maiseys from Robin Hood in Birmingham, Solihull to be exact); Cruit Island; Waikaya;  Barbados (bought by Ian Botham in an auction); and the Isles of Scilly, to name but a few.

Enough people liked our stuff to keep us going over the years, although there was one critic who commented on one of our submissions thus:  “This copy was not written by me and I have to say it doesn’t meet the standards I would expect from a prestigious golf publication.  Frankly, sections of it do not appear to have been written by a native English speaker.”  Another classic.  As were the expletives from Dai, a Welshman born in Crewe, who was incandescent.  I did the re-write and completed the assignment

Not so exotic now.

There were too many obituaries:  Alister Nicol; Jan Blomqvist; Angela Uzielli; Bill Johnson; Rhonda Glenn; Dick Taylor; Bill Blighton; Liz Pook; Phil Sheldon; Neil Elsey; Georgie Hart; Peter Dobereiner; Marian Carr; Michael Williams; Maureen Garrett; Peter Corrigan; Bev Norwood; Joan Rothschild; the list goes on and on.  But you know what, sad though it is that a lot of them died far too young, my goodness, it’s the laughs and the fun that remain in the memory.  I’m smiling between the tears as I write this and I’ll still be smiling when the tears have gone.

Finally, heartfelt thanks to all at OCON (Owens Conveyor Company) in Aldridge for storing my stuff for so long and saving it for the nation (or a small bit of the golfing nation).  Without your generosity, patience and forbearance,  I’d have had to chuck it all on the tip – or taken it to BIFFA next door.  Thanks again.

My saviours, a top team.

Thanks Shane, good job! Safe journey north.

On Thursday 8th September at approximately 08.15  I witnessed Patricia waving farewell to the courier of choice of the R&A.  The van sped Fifewards containing archive material acquired over the working lifetimes of two golf writers, its destination the Heritage Department of the Royal & Ancient aka The British Golf Museum.

Parting is such sweet sorrow!

Patricia, who numbered The Times, The Glasgow Herald and Golf World magazine amongst her clients, and her late husband, Dai, who was the golf correspondent of The Guardian and, before that, of The Birmingham Post, had acquired mountains – and I mean MOUNTAINS – of, well, STUFF.  We dispatched over 100 boxes northwards – research notes, articles, photographs, posters, tournament paraphernalia,  scorecards, yearbooks, letters, travel documents – all told the story of writers who criss-crossed the globe over a forty year span – and, wait for it, got words (and lots of them) into the newspapers.  That barely happens now.

Smiling Irish eyes

Take last week’s European Senior Women’s Amateur Team Championships.  Not a word in any of the papers that I saw.  So, thank goodness for kirkwoodgolf.co.uk – the go-to website for all female golf results, be they professional, amateur, home or abroad.  That’s where’ll you find the photo above – enough to gladden the heart of any Irish golfer waiting on tenterhooks for news.Well played guys!

Last month madillgolf.com chatted with Gillian Kirkwood, the founder of the website that bears her name. We hope you enjoy it.

And well done, too, to Patricia for the physical and emotional effort involved in the cataloguing and organising of so much material.  Of course, we did come across some hilarious reminders of good times in the past.  As an indulgence, one of my favourites is reproduced below, written by our late and very great friend Bill Johnson.

You couldn’t make it up!

The Madills have always been fond of Peter Alliss.  As a commentator you’re either loved or loathed, people are rarely indifferent.  We, a household of wordy smart aleck golf tragics, loved Alliss, who had a wonderful eye and way with words and a wicked sense of the ridiculous.  He was also helpful, replying in his own handwriting to viewers who felt they knew him.

In 1972, just before I headed off to university in Edinburgh, Mum wrote to Alliss asking him if he could recommend a decent coach in the area.  He wrote back suggesting John Shade at Duddingston, father of the famous Ronnie, who had a rugby international’s clutch of initials – RDBM – and was known as Right Down the Bloody Middle.  John had less success with me but we laughed a lot and Maureen came over and learned a lot and won the Ladies’ British Open Amateur Championship at Nairn in 1979.  So, thank you Peter.

When I worked at Golf World magazine in London in the early 1980s in a streamlined editorial department consisting of Peter Haslam, the editor, engaging, enterprising and globe-trotting; Neil Elsey, the skilled deputy editor, who died far too young; Dave Oswald, the art editor, a talented but irascible Scot who is now besotted with his allotment; and me, the dogsbody with licence to learn.  One of my tasks was to write Alliss’s column and that was an education in itself.  He’d send in his thoughts on cassette and the transcript would meander hither and yon, covering life, the universe, everything, with a bit of golf thrown in.  It was never dull but often led to swearing (the Oswald curse haunts my language to this day) and it was only a few years later that I realised what wonderful training it had been.  Knocking Alliss’s musings into readable shape and making it sound like him was a skill that was hard won.  Thank you Peter.

Mo and the Master at the mike

A lot of years later, when Maureen started working with him and the rest of the incomparable BBC team, he couldn’t have been more supportive of a raw, broadcasting rookie.  He’d always loved the Irish – the late, great Christy O’Connor, Himself, was a close friend – and Maureen, who was keen to learn, was astute enough to know that she was in the presence of a master.  Alliss, observant and improvisational, was astute enough to realise that she always did her homework and they became allies.  Thank you Peter.

Alliss is quick-witted, with an eye and an ear for the bon mot but he is also master of the pause, a skill learned from his years as apprentice to Henry Longhurst.  Radio abhors a silence – my God, has the line gone down, has the presenter died? – but telly has the pictures and each one is worth a thousand words, isn’t it?  People coming from radio have to learn that you don’t have to witter on when the pictures can do your talking for you.  “It was a privilege to be next to him,” Maureen said.  “I particularly remember the Women’s Open at Sunningdale in 2008; it was Annika’s last appearance and she was coming up the 18th, with everyone applauding and all the emotion and Peter just held up his hand to me and stopped me trampling all over a very special moment.  He knew it didn’t need any words.”  Thank you Peter.

As well as listening to the Alliss Q and A with Maureen, search out the speech he made when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2012.  He was a very good golfer, who played in eight Ryder Cup teams and once won three national Open titles in a row (not the big one, admittedly) and he became a giant of a broadcaster.  He left school early and has never forgotten his last report from the formidable headmistress Mrs Violet Weymouth, a short, stout Welshwoman who was a chain smoker with a nicotine-stained chin.  “Peter does have a brain,” she wrote, “but he’s rather loath to use it…..I fear for his future.”

Ah, the wonderful Mrs Weymouth…

His Hall of Fame riposte ends with the gesture doing the talking.  Classic Alliss.  Revenge is sweet.  Thank you Mrs W.