One Club Left, 50 Members Watching: Margaret Montgomery at 100

The telling detail in Margaret Montgomery’s account of turning 100 is a heading on a guest list. Speaking to Alison Root for Golf Monthly, she recalled sorting the invitations for her birthday party: “the longest list was the one headed Golf.” The game had supplied people as well as rounds, and those connections remained after she stopped playing.^[1]

At Hexham Golf Club in Northumberland, Montgomery had helped organise the golf that brought members together. She spent seven years as Competition Secretary and also served as Lady Secretary and Lady President. Retirement in 1986 had given her more time for the game; a substantial share went into its administration. Her golfing record includes a handicap of 19, a hole-in-one and a nine-hole competition victory at 96, but the committee posts describe another kind of commitment: taking responsibility for the club’s shared life.^[1]

That involvement makes an interesting counterpoint to her introduction to golf. Montgomery grew up in Scotland, where her local course was reclaimed during the Second World War, and began playing in her late twenties while working as a PA for the Colonial Service in Nigeria. In her recollection to Golf Monthly, tennis was the sport of many other European women around her. She tried golf because tennis did not suit her.^[1]

The putting surfaces there were “browns”, small areas of oiled sand, and she remembered playing without rules or handicaps. Her later years as a competition secretary belonged to a rather different golfing order. The thread between those settings was the company available through playing: first an alternative to the tennis court, eventually a Northumberland club where she would both compete and serve.^[1]

Belonging at Hexham did not mean finding every convention comfortable. Montgomery remembered a hierarchy among the women when she first played there, with younger arrivals expected to mind their manners around the older ladies. She also recalled women leaving golf for bridge at 70. “I never succumbed to that!” she told Root. Her own playing life continued well into her nineties, long past the stopping point she remembered others accepting.^[1]

There was a more difficult return, too. After her husband Roy died, her son Graeme took her out for a few holes the following day, worried that otherwise she might not go back. That episode gives the birthday guest list particular weight: golf was a place she returned to through bereavement, as well as somewhere to enjoy competition and friendship.^[1]

For the centenary tee shot reported by Golf Monthly, around 50 fellow members gathered. Montgomery had given her other clubs to the pro shop for beginners, keeping only a rescue club. She used it with the ball from her hole-in-one at Hexham’s fourth, 35 years earlier. The shot was short and straight, she said, closer to a hockey stroke than a full swing. She had promised at 98 to attempt it if she reached 100. The promise explained the shot; the decades around it explained the gathering.^[1]