Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland: Clubmakers

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Clubmakers

George Heron
Peterhead
Like his brother Gilbert, George made the transition from farm worker to greenkeeper. Gilbert and George, eh?, artists of the turf. Indeed, George went further, establishing a clubmaking business with his son, also George. Like Gilbert’s son, Gilbert, George’s son George(!), was a talented playing professional. George snr played also, in the Scottish Professional Championships of 1912 and 1913 and having to scratch from the 1914 event.

At the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Gibson, in his birthplace of Logie Buchan in 1892 (alyhough a brief obituary in the P&J has him born in Birness, Ellon), George was described as a ploughman. In the 1901 census for the parish of Cruden he is listed as a golf course keeper.

He was attached to the Peterhead club. The club’s history says the first nine hole course on the Craigewan links was laid out by Willie Park jnr in 1892. The Aberdeen Journal of 27 July 1907 claims the town had a three hole course from around 1820 until 1870 when interest in golf seems to have faded. Fifty years of playing the same three holes will do that to you. The paper claims that after obtaining land in the early 1890s, ‘about ten years ago [i.e. ca, 1897] the nine hole course was laid out, under the supervision of Willie Park, the two Simpsons [presumably Robert and Archie] and George Heron - the professional attached to the course’.

Not only does this account not tally with the club’s current history, it does not tie in with the account of the new professional, George Thomson, arriving in May 1919 because of George Heron’s continuing ill-health. At that time the Journal claimed George had been there for 18 years. The club thanked him for his ‘long and faithful service’, awarded him an honorarium of £25 and extended the sympathy of the members. The official record is ambiguous. Yes, he had been in Cruden since the late 1890s as his youngest daughter, Ann, had been born in Cruden in December 1898, whereas the older children were born in other parishes, but his occupation is shown on the birth certificate as labourer rather than golf course keeper. He laid out something, whether the 9 hole course or the eighteen, or both, as George jnr spoke about it in America. Perhaps he gilded the lily but Herbert Warren Wind, who really should have known better, wrote in Sports Illustrated in 1955 that Heron snr had laid out Cruden Bay. There is a grain of truth in this, however, as George Heron was certainly the greenkeeper there in 1899, the year after the course opened and commended in the press for the condition of the course when Andrew Kirkaldy and Ben Sayers played an exhibition match over it in September 1899.

He died at home in Peterhead on 6 July 1940.

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