DOWN MEMORY LANE

Jeremy Ellwood heads to Edgbaston GC to speak to members of the British Golf Collectors' Society and find out more about the organisation

- Jeremy Ellwood

It's late morning at Edgbaston Golf Club on Saturday November 5, 2022. I'm standing in a medium-sized room on the ground floor of this fine red-brick building surrounded by golfing collectibles and memorabilia and the men and women who collect them.

Robert Chadwick, captain of the British Golf Collectors' Society, has just declared the weekend-long collectors' fair open and the gathered members are catching up with old friends, checking out each other's exhibits and no doubt eyeing up items they might quite like to add to their own collections. Some are dressed slightly eccentrically, others less so.

There are golfing artefacts and collectibles of all kinds - old clubs and balls, books, trophies, medals, paintings, programmes, stamps, postcards, ornaments and much more. Whoever the golfing equivalent of Aladdin is, this would most definitely be his cave.

But how did The British Golf Collectors' Society (BGCS) come into existence? Before proceedings got underway, I sat down with Chadwick to find out more. It was started 35 years ago by a number of keen golf historians and collectors in this country who were members of the US-based Golf Collectors' Society. They decided there were enough of them over here to justify a separate body, and for the first ten years were essentially a collectors' club "with the aim of promoting interest in the history and traditions of golf, and collecting items associated with that history". But they then started playing the odd game of hickory golf and that side has taken on a life of its own, becoming a major part of the society's activities and calendar.