THE WANDERING GOLFER: BRENDAN MOLONEY
AN EXTRAORDINARY meeting took place at Traralgon in country Victoria recently to discuss the experiences of two golfers who played in a German prisoner of war camp more than 75 years ago.
One of the golfers was Bombardier William Sampson from Tasmania, who was captured half frozen in the snow with his anti-tank regiment in Greece in April 1940; the other was RAF fighter pilot Oliver Green, who was shot down near Tobruk in northern Africa in 1941, nine days shy of his 21st birthday.
Both ended up in Stalag Luft III, a camp for air force POWs at Sagan in Poland, 200 kilometres south-east of Berlin. To ease the boredom of prison life, the golfers in the camp built a rough, nine-hole course, which they played with a few second-hand clubs sent by the Red Cross and the YMCA.
In the absence of balls, they belted stones around the sandy terrain until hitting on the idea of making their own balls and, as the popularity of the game grew, their own clubs as well. The balls were based on the old “featherie” with a leather cover sewn around a stone core wrapped in thin strands of rubber. The leather came from old boots and the rubber was laboriously cut from tobacco pouches with a razor blade.
Sampson was the best of the ball-makers and his only possession when he finally got out of the camp in 1945 was a ball, which he donated to the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews where it remains to this day.
His son, Craig, was married in Britain in 1973 and wrote to the R&A asking if he could see his father’s ball.
“The secretary, Mr Louden, met us, had a look around to make sure no one was watching and ushered in Pamela, my wife,” he recalled. “Women were not allowed in the clubhouse in those days. Afterwards he found me a set of clubs and sent me out to play the Old Course and Pamela caddied. I am very proud of finishing with a birdie at the 18th. I think my father would also be proud and it brings a tear to my eye when I think of it.”
Recently Sampson junior found a copy of “Mezze”, Green’s autobiography, an account of a fascinating life that saw him rise to the rank of air commodore and serve as Britain’s air attache to NATO after the war. This brings to mind the line from a Noel Coward song about “that famous, monumental man, the officer and gentleman”. On a whim, Sampson phoned publisher Graeme Ryan in Melbourne to ask if Green was still alive. The bombardier, who went to university and became an architect after the war, died in 1971 aged 52 and never spoke of his army experiences. Ryan was able to tell him that Green was alive and alert at the age of 94 and living in Victoria. Sampson junior recently met Green, who was able to fill in many of the gaps in the Sampson senior story. As well as being the camp’s best ball-maker, Sampson senior was an accomplished player who teamed with former Scottish schoolboy champion Danny O’Brien to win the Sagan foursomes championship in 1943. This was no flash in the pan because he had won the 1936 Nettleford Cup at Kingston Beach Golf Club in Hobart when he was 17 and was a champion schoolboy athlete.
Stalag Luft III was the setting for the book and movie “The Great Escape” and another notable inmate was the legless air ace Douglas Bader who was shot down over France in 1941 and arrived minus one of his tin legs. The Luftwaffe offered the Brits safe passage for a plane to deliver a spare leg but they declined and defiantly dropped one by a parachute over the enemy territory.
After the war, Green decided to stay in the RAF and flew in the Berlin airlift, survived breaking the sound barrier in a jet fighter and at the height of the Cold War learnt how to drop atom bombs. All three activities were, to use the jargon of the time, pretty “hairy”. To fly beyond the speed of sound (1,236km/h) the early jet fighters were taken up to their ceiling of about 15,000 metres and then pointed vertically at the ground and given full throttle. It wasn’t until they were 3,000 metres from the ground that the air became dense enough for the control surfaces to start working and, hopefully, pull the thing out of the dive. With the 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.
Green shot down two enemy aircraft in Africa before becoming an early casualty of the war on July 7, 1941. His Hurricane fighter hit the desert at 280km/h with the wheels up, skidded to a halt and did not burn. He was able to get out before enemy fighters raked it with bullets but they left him alone. This was a side to the pilots on both sides that sometimes transcended the barbarity and horror of the war.
On another occasion, he recalled in his memoirs, “one of my POW friends, Ted Edwards, had been shot down at 11 o’clock on the morning of 3 September 1939 over the North Sea. He and his navigator were plucked from the sea by the crew of a German seaplane and was told by the pilot: “For you, the war is over.” Ted replied that nobody had told him that it had even started. In this
They never knew, and happily never found out, if the bomb blast would take out the plane and pilot as well.
he was quite right as Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast to the nation, saying that we were at war with Germany, had not begun until 11 o’clock, probably at the very moment that Ted was being shot down.”
Green continued to take his golf clubs with him on postings around the world, including Australia, where he was a regular partner of Don Bradman, and played into his 90s. 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. Woburn became the home of the Dunhill Masters, which attracted fields that included Peter Thomson, Seve Ballesteros, Billy Casper, Gary Player and Johnny Miller. During construction of the courses, Green joined the nearby Ashridge Golf Club and was persuaded to play in the Hertfordshire Championship. He finished in the top-eight in stroke play and advanced to match play, where he was knocked out of 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 retired from Woburn in 1985 when the job became “more book-keeping than course building” and with wife Cecily followed their two sons and daughter to Australia and retired to Paynesville on the Gippsland Lakes where he played at Bairnsdale and wrote his memoirs.
His golfing hero, Peter Thomson, wrote the foreword to his book 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.”