OK so I have given in to the obvious today…. only because I managed to find some simply awesome information from just looking up ‘golf player’ in 1911. Did you know that eight professional golfers lived in England in 1911? Probably – like me – you didn’t. Otherwise, you would have shared this staggering piece of knowledge, surely?
Reggie Bickle, David Duncan, Walter Gibbons, Ethelbert Hopper, Edward John Hubbard, George William Jones , Arthur Alexander Pedler and Albert Victor George Seymour. The South of England appears to be the region for professional golfers to reside, with only one of the eight living north of ‘Watford gap’.
Albert Victor George Seymour was just 24 and living in Kingston on Thames with his wife, Lilian Lucy and son, Bertie William in 1911. In my endeavours to find out more about this character, I quite simply ‘googled’ his name. Interestingly, there was a Sir Albert Victor Francis Seymour 2nd Baronet (1879-1949)…. but that’s not the same person I was looking for. However, one reference leapt out – in Spanish! – detailing Albert’s successes on the PGA tour, no less. Los Deportes.info highlights his highest position of 39th, achieved in the British Open in 1914, just three years after the census was taken.
According to Wikipedia, ‘Golf is a precision club and ball sport in which competing players (or golfers) use many types of clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course using the fewest number of strokes….It is one of the few ball games that do not require a standardised playing area. Instead, the game is played on a course, in general consisting of an arranged progression of either nine or 18 holes. Each hole on the course must contain a tee box to start from, and a putting green containing the actual hole. There are various other standardised forms of terrain in between, such as the fairway, rough, and hazards, but each hole on a course, and indeed among virtually all courses, is unique in its specific layout and arrangement.’
One wonders how different the lifestyle of a professional golfer must have been, back in the 1910s and 1920s, by comparison to the life of sportsmen and women today….
