LADDIE LUCAS | SANDY LODGE GOLF CLUB, HERFORDSHIRE | AUGUST 7, 1954
If you are looking to compile a list of unsung heroes of the pre- WWII amateur game, then there would be few people higher up the pecking order than Percy ‘Laddie’ Lucas.
Lucas was, quite literally, born into golf, having breathed his first breath in the clubhouse at Prince’s Golf Club in Kent in 1915.
Growing up on the Kent links, where his father served as the club secretary – having co-founded the club – the left- handed Lucas soon became a master of the links art.
After his father died in 1926, the family moved to Hertfordshire, where the 11-year-old Lucas became a junior member at Sandy Lodge.
A schoolboy champion at 16, he made his name on the world stage when, aged just 19, he won the silver medal for the lowest amateur score in the 1935 Open Championship held at Muirfield.
After graduating from Cambridge, he worked as a sportswriter for the Sunday Express, where he stayed until the outbreak of war, when he volunteered for the RAF as a pilot.
And it was Lucas’s intimate knowledge of Prince’s Golf Club’s subtle undulations that probably saved his life in August 1944, when his Spitfire was hit by enemy fire while coming home from a raid.
Reluctant to bail out, he spotted Sandwich Bay at the same moment as his engine died. Gliding in, and keeping the clubhouse as a marker, he managed to miss the second, fourth, 12th, eighth and ninth fairways before landing belly-up out of bounds just short of the shore.
Typical of the man, he recalled being very unhappy at the state of the greens and joked about his continuing inability to hit the ninth fairway.
After the war, Lucas captained the Great Britain & Ireland Walker Cup team in 1947 and 1949, before turning his hand to politics, serving as the Conservative MP for Brentford and Chiswick from 1950-59.
Becoming disillusioned with government, he moved into sports administration, working firstly for the Greyhound Association at White City, and then with the Sports Council.
He took early retirement in 1975, and began writing again, completing a compelling autobiography, Five-Up, and The Sport of Princes (Reflections of a Golfer).
At the time of his death in 1998, aged 73, hewas vice-president of the Golf Foundation and the Association of Golf Writers.
The rather bizarre picture shows Lucas, then aged 39, playing the course at Sandy Lodge Golf Club wearing a blindfold.
Despite this self-imposed handicap, he managed to shoot 87 with the aid of a guide – a score that most of us would be proud of with 20-20 vision.
Prince’s Golf Club, where Lucas’s love affair with golf began, continues to honour the great man each year by hosting the Laddie Lucas Spoon, a competition open to juniors aged between eight and 13, which takes place in April.
It has proved the starting point for many a promising golfing career; a legacy that is fitting for someone who gave so much to the game.