Going clubbing

Among the wide-ranging exhibits at The Firs are Elgar’s golf clubs (above) – weapons of sporting combat that, by most accounts, the composer wielded with little success on his various visits to

The Worcestershire Golf Club. On one occasion, his wife Alice describes in her diary how her beloved has come home dejected from a particularly miserable 18 holes while, in 1903, the magazine Punch took great pleasure in imagining Elgar hitting a shot so wayward that it flew right off the course and into a passing train carriage. Fore!