It was intended that I should follow my father as a schoolmaster, but as it fell out I preceded him as a golf Pro!
After very few years of school-teaching I decided that any talents I had lay elsewhere and being by then a pretty good amateur golfer
I obtained the job of 8th Assistant at Queen's Park, Bournemouth.
I was then twenty-two. After a short period at Bournemouth I moved to Barton-on-Sea, and from Barton to St. Cloud in 1913. My long
period at St. Cloud was interrupted by the first World War (when I served in the Royal Naval Air Service) and at least broken again by
the second. It was at St. Cloud that I developed my ideas about the game and built up my experience as a teacher of it.
Though I have never had the physique required for the hard mill of championship golf I have won three International Open
Championships, the Belgian in 1923, the Swiss in 1924, and the Dutch in 1927.
My brother Aubrey is thirteen years my junior. He joined me at St. Cloud when he was seventeen, with a fine athletic record at
Victoria College behind him.
Shortly after he also joined the R.N.A.S. and we both returned to St. Cloud early in 1919. In our first four-ball match together
there we played the two top Americans in the Inter-AUied games. The Yanks won the tournament, but Aubrey and I halved our match.
The best Aubrey has done in the British Open was second to Bobby Jones at St. Andrews. He holds the record for the French Open
having won it five times; he has also won the Belgian and Dutch titles several times and the Italian once.
By winning the Daily Mail tournament, the Glasgow Evening Herald meeting at Cleneagles and the Roehampton show, he played himself
into the British team in three matches against the Americanstwo of them for the Ryder Cup.
It is also not to be forgotten that Aubrey holds the world's record for a single round. His 61 was done at St. Cloud in a French P.G.A.
tournament against the American Ryder Cup team.The tournament was won by Horton Smith, Aubrey following him in second place.
Aubrey holds many course records, but I suppose the most curious one is that he has never played a shot over the course on which
Harry Vardon learned his golf though he was born in the parish in which the course lies, and indeed no more than a mile from the house in which the Vardons were born!
That was at Grouville, on the east of the island, and before Aubrey reached golfing age our family had moved to the other end of the
island, where characteristically enough my father proceeded to build the Le Moye course with the help of his family and a few
friends.
Cutting greens out of that magnificent natural golf terrain was my first introduction to golf architecture.
Aubrey and I toured the Argentine together. We were in fact the first visiting Pros to do so and the first to play that dynamic
golfer Jose Jurado.
I have always considered that the tournament that Aubrey won there against the best of their Pros and in most difficult and unfamiliar
conditions, one of his finest feats.
On Learning Golf Introduction: Part 2
