Bill Elliott

To Jersey and the Royal Jersey Golf Club; my first visit to any of the Channel Islands, first flight since late 2019, first after-dinner speech for three years and first time I’ve stood up to talk not wearing my own jacket or shirt. Fun? You couldn’t make it up.

I should have made this speech at the club’s annual men’s black-tie dinner in April 2020, but something got in the way both then and the following April. A couple of months ago, the club’s affably efficient general manager Darren Attwood contacted me to ask if I was still up for dressing up and standing up at this dinner at a club founded in 1878, where Ted Ray and Harry Vardon honed their skills as young golfers. Of course the answer was “yes, absolutely”. It was time to get out again, to fly again, to re-engage with the world, or at least visit Jersey for the first time.

But travelling is not quite as easy as it was before Covid. At least for me on this trip it wasn’t. I headed off to the joy that is Terminal 5 at Heathrow on the Friday of a bank holiday weekend. It was good to see an airport again, but not so good to see that thousands of others were doing the same thing. Security was rammed. Worse still it seemed to be largely staffed by people learning how to do the job.

Finally through this rigmarole, I helped a young mum with a crying baby make sure she got back all her stuff – I know, I’m virtue signalling here, but it’s true. Unfortunately, nobody helped me make sure I got back all my stuff and when I got to Jersey and prepared for the dinner, I discovered my dinner jacket, formal shirt and two polo shirts hadn’t made the trip, leaving me with a bow-tie and black trousers. I was all set to join a male strip act, but the men’s dinner at Royal Jersey, not so much.

Fortunately, the club captain, another affably efficient chap called Phil Bolton, offered me his dinner jacket – the club captains wear blazing red tailcoats – plus a white shirt. Great. Not so great, however, was the fact that Dubliner Phil is an athletic type, finely honed and far too slim. The jacket looked okay if I didn’t attempt to button it, but the shirts were several inches short of meeting in the middle. “No problem” said Phil when I threatened to start crying. “My son’s bigger, I’ll get Jamie to bring one of his.”

Jamie’s more ‘manly’ physique meant the shirt fitted, the dinner was terrific fun and the speech went down okay too. I managed to get an early laugh when I admitted I was largely dressed for the evening by those famed local gentlemen’s outfitters, The Boltons.

Club tradition dictates that next day everyone plays in a special comp and it was new to me. Whatever your handicap, you play until you run out of strokes and that hole is your ‘tombstone’. Whoever finishes furthest or with the most strokes retained wins. I made it to the 13th hole and was quite pleased to get that far.

But what a course this is. Squeezed into a relatively small area, it is challenging and quirky and contains a brilliantly impressive 18thcentury fort to the side of the 1st fairway, with German gun emplacements to the other side where the sea stretches away to France. Indeed, the course was turned into a minefield during the war, at which point members rather wisely decided to take a break. Mind you, when the wind blows it’s still quite a minefield.

The club, meanwhile, is warm and welcoming. Thanks to security I needed to buy a golf shirt and club pro James Evans handed one over and refused payment. His kindness seems typical of this place and I look forward to returning fully clothed and hopefully on a warmer, calmer day.

Next time, of course, I shall try to be more diligent at T5 security. It turns out that while I accidentally mislaid my gear, Heathrow’s skilled operatives have apparently gone a step further and managed to lose it altogether. Ah well, onwards and very much sideways.

“I was all set to join a male strip act, but the men’s dinner at Royal Jersey, not so much”