THE WANDERING GOLFER:
BRENDAN MOLONEY
GOLF recently lost one of its most ardent adherents and amazing characters with the death of Oliver Green, a war hero and retired RAF air commodore, a day short of his 98th birthday.
Although dismissive of his own ability, he became a scratch player who took his clubs to war and went on to build golf courses in Poland and England and a practice putting green in his adopted Australia.
The Polish course was at Stalag Luft III, the German POW camp 160 kilometres south-east of Berlin, where he spent four years after being shot down in his Hurricane fighter near Tobruk in North Africa on July 7, 1941. Beneath this nine-hole sandscrape layout (pictured below) was a network of tunnels named Tom, Dick and Harry used in the Great Escape that inspired the book and the movie.
He was what Noel Coward called “that monumental man, the officer and gentleman” whose small stature, impeccable manners, strong moral code, pleasant demeanour, pukka accent and sense of humour disguised the fact that he had shot down two enemy aircraft while a baby-faced 20-year-old. After the horrors of the war and prison camp, from which he escaped twice only to be rounded up by the Gestapo, he stayed in the air force, flew in the Berlin Air Lift during the Cold War and learnt to drop atom bombs.
As noted at his funeral, these exploits put one in mind of James Bond but there was a big distinction. Bond was not real. Green, Oliver Green, seldom shaken or stirred, was. Furthermore, he knew Ian Fleming, the former naval intelligence officer who created the Bond character. When he too took to writing Mezze, his autobiography, he had to submit the manuscript to the spooks at MI 6 to make sure he had not let any official secret cats out of the bag.
It is a wonderful look at many of the great and some of the idiosyncratic events of the 20th Century. A fellow POW was Douglas Bader, the famous fighter pilot who continued flying after losing both legs in a previous crash. His first words to Green in the camp were: “I wasn’t shot down, old boy. Some bastard ran into me.” The Luftwaffe offered the Brits safe passage for a plane to deliver a spare tin leg, to replace the one he had to leave behind while escaping from his burning Spitfire, but they declined and defiantly dropped one by a parachute over the enemy territory. Another of his exploits was breaking the sound barrier in a military aircraft which he described in the jargon of the 1950s as “pretty hairy”. To fly beyond 1,236km an hour, the very basic jet fighters were taken up to their ceiling of about 15,000 metres, pointed vertically at the ground and given full throttle. It wasn’t until they were 3,000 metres from the deck that that air became dense enough for the control surfaces to start working effectively and, hopefully, pull out of the dive. With an atom bomb, the technique was to release it, do half a loop, flick the wings over at the top so the aircraft was no longer inverted and get the hell out of there. They never knew, and happily never found out, if the bomb blast would take out the plane and pilot as well.
Amid the carnage of World War II Green saw glimpses or humanity that bring a lump to the throat. The officer who captured him after a week in the African desert, was a German count named Metternich who took him back to his tent, helped him clean up and gave him some Haig Scotch before apologising for handing him over to the Gestapo. Accounting for his perfect English, he said he had recently completed his degree at Cambridge and was sad to be at war with his British chums.
After the war, Green continued to take his golf clubs with him on postings around the world, including Woomera in Australia, and he was a regular golfing partner of Don Bradman. He left the RAF after 35 years in 1974 when the Duke of Bedford offered him the role as managing director of the company that built the two courses on his Woburn estate in Buckinghamshire.
During construction he joined the nearby Ashridge Golf Club and played in the Hertfordshire county championship, where he was knocked out in the first round by “a lanky youth of 17 who astonished the members by propelling the ball prodigious distances with a pronounced, high, wristy swing”. The kid was Nick Faldo and it was his first decent win.
Green’s golfing hero, Peter Thomson, who outlived him by only five days, wrote the foreword to ‘Mezze’ and concluded it with the words: “Had his passion taken him into the church, he would have certainly made archbishop. Had he been drawn into politics, he most certainly would have been made Prime Minister. But fate decreed that he spread his influence across a wide spectrum. That makes him outstanding amongst us. Salutations are in order.”