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Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland
Clubmakers
George Pannell
Royal Club of Belgium
Jackson's register has George Pannell associated with a myriad of clubs yet my own research shows only two in a very long career, his home town club of Littlehampton and Royal Club of Belgium (Ravenstein).

The first record I have of him is playing from Littlehampton in the qualifying competition for the 1904 Open Championship. He is still at Littlehampton in 1909 as the local pro playing in a foursome with Braid, J H Taylor and Ernest Gray. It was announced in March of that year he had accepted the post of professional at the Royal Golf Clubs of Ostend and Tervueren and would be leaving England in a couple of weeks.

The next year, 1910, he is at the Royal Club of Belgium, playing in the Belgian Open. As the pro at Terveuren he numbered the children of King Albert among his pupils. He won both the Dutch and Belgian Professional Championships in 1922 and the Belgian again in 1924 and 1925 but that is to jump ahead.

With the outbreak of war he returned to the UK and played in a charity match at the end of 1914 with Braid, Ball, Duncan, Herd, J H Taylor and Josh Taylor on Wimbledon Common to raise funds for Belgian refugees.

He enlisted in the Rifle Brigade (I can't yet say if it was the 13th Battalion, the Niblick Brigade ). In 1917 he was awarded the Military Medal for gallantry in France.

At the end of the war he wasted little time in returning to Belgium and played in the 1920 Belgian Professional Championship from his former club and was second in the Belgiam Open in 1921. He played in the Open Championship in 1930. He was third in the Belgian Professional Championship of 1939 and the old soldier must have been dismayed to have to leave his Belgian home again on account of war. He played in the £500 Sundridge Park Tournament in 1940 with a set of borrowed clubs. Walking off the last green and signing for a 89 he remarked, 'my own clubs are now in the hands of the enemy'. Surely he did not compete again: that has to be the best farewell epithet to golf I have read.

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