Life No.4 - Journalist
Initially writing travel pieces with a golf and wellness angle, for Golf International Magazine she was then taken up by the Daily Telegraph and The Times and broadened her output to profile features and the occasional thorny subject…
Female family journalist link
Perhaps what they hadn’t bargained for is that I was a ‘chip off the old block’. My mother’s mother, whose pen name was ‘Gipsie’ Sherson. She was one of the few female journalists on the Daily Telegraph contributing to the Peterborough column.
A rubber planter’s wife in ‘Malaya’, she had to drop everything and with my mother, returned to London as her husband Dudley was a prisoner of war - and in Changi camp - and they lost everything.
Gipsie approached Lord Bill Deedes - and he gave her a job, and many years later took me to lunch.
My grandfather, Dudley with Mum, one of the last times she saw him.
A Siren call to action…
In 2000 Lewine Mair, the much liked and highly respected chief golf writer of the Daily Telegraph mentioned to me that the R & A (The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews) didn’t have any women members. Everyone in the golf world knew this, accepted it as the status quo and the ‘immovable obstruction’. Although grumblings in locker rooms and 19th holes were rife, no-one was willing to publicly put a voice above the parapet.
The Times liked my idea of combining a punchy article with painting a huge gothic version of the iconic headquarters building at St Andrews with a boiling red sky - and as an ex-soldier, I prepared to get shot down by the governing body of golf!
Appropriately dog-eared and faded but at the time caused me endless “what on earth were you thinking of writing that for?” comments.
I stand, as did The Times, for what is now proven - it just took a while!
2004 times are shifting and to avoid further outrage, the R & A split into two groups of companies. One group who did all the organising and governing and staging of things golfy around the world in 149 countries (except for USA + Mexico).
The other R & A morphed into a private members club.
Roll on 2014, they fast-tracked the first 15 selected women from around the world with the likes of Dame Laura Davies, Annika Sörenstam, and HRH Princess Anne, the Princess Royal (who as we all know loves horses and has absolutely zero interest in golf but has done some promoting of the game) to join the ‘club’. 260 years of male only exclusivity was diluted.
A Happy Union: January 1st 2018 and the Ladies Golf Union (women’s stuff) was put under the umbrella of ‘Big Daddy’ R & A.
2018 they launched the “Women in Golf Charter”. Bodies sign up and do good things to engage, promote and retain the ‘fairer sex’ whacking a ball. Globally 1500 are on the books.
2026 September: 272 years of history are to be whacked down the 1st Fairway on The Old Course at St Andrews as Ireland’s Claire Dowling tees off her one year Captaincy of the R & A.
Claire, I am sure will play the course ‘the right way round’!