I dearly love an after-lunch round of crazy golf.
Ideally lunch by the sea in Brittany; platters of fruits de mer perched on tripods, snuggling on beds of crushed ice, glistening bowls of aioli, baguette, litres of Muscadet and a lettuce leaf. Then, perhaps, a smallish Armagnac and wager on the outcome of the golf match. I learned my lesson in Lisbon playing with Robert; the ice creams were on me.
The stakes were higher when Euric Goldfinger and James Bond crossed clubs (I’m sure that’s not right but I only play crazy golf) in an iconic golf sequence filmed at Stoke Park – in the novel the match is at St George’s, Sandwich. Ian Fleming was keen on golf and literary geeks opine this was his inspiration for Goldfinger’s hornswoggling at golf – pronounce it as you will (g not h). This geek wonders if Fleming got the idea from a real golf match?
“That same month, while in Berlin on business, Ernest Tennant had been invited by Ribbentrop, whom he had not seen for a year, to tea at his ‘immense Schloss’ in the hills at Sonnenburg, some thirty miles east of Berlin. Having sent him a car, the foreign minister was waiting dressed in white cotton plus fours and flanked by a Scottish golf professional and two caddies on the imposing front steps of his recently acquired eighteenth-century house. Ribbentrop challenged his alarmed friend to a round on his private nine-hole course. Though naturally sportif, Tennant had not picked up a golf club for thirty years, as a lion had badly mauled his arm before the Great War. But he overcame his disability and lack of practice to win each of the first five holes. Ribbentrop then behaved in a way Tennant later realised had been ‘rather revealing’, losing his temper, hitting all his balls into a distant wood and stalking home in a rage. The Scottish golf professional, foolish enough to celebrate the British victory, was sacked shortly afterwards.” (Coffee with Hitler; the British Amateurs Who Tried to Civilise the Nazis, Charles Spicer)
Charles Spicer may be cross that this extract does not do his debut book justice – if so he’s right. I will try to do better next time.
In J.F. Powers’s novel The Morte d’Urban, there is a round of golf played for high stakes between Fr. Urban Roche of the Clementines (an order invented for the novel) and Father Herman Feld, acting for Bishop O’Connor of Great Plains, Minnesota (a see likewise invented), the stakes being a retreat center on which the Clementines have perhaps imprudently built a nine-hole golf course. Morte d’Urban appeared in 1962, four years after Goldfinger. On the other hand, parts of the novel appeared in American periodicals before the novel itself came out, so one would have to know more about Powers than I do to say whether he learned from Fleming.
Deep pools of ignorance occupy the space where others have brains and I’d never heard of J F Powers. What a break to have a new author to enjoy, thank you.
Well done on your letter in yesterday’s FT (‘Golf reveals a man’s cloven hoof like no other sport’) but why no mention of Ribbentrop? He may not have cheated like Goldfinger but was equally odious and his dress sense was execrable. I look forward to reading Coffee with Hitler.