I t’s late morning at Edgbaston Golf Club on Saturday November 5, 2022. I’m standing in a medium-sized room on the ground floor of this fine red-brick building surrounded by golfing collectibles and memorabilia and the men and women who collect them.
Robert Chadwick, captain of the British Golf Collectors’ Society, has just declared the weekend-long collectors’ fair open and the gathered members Hickory are catching up with old friends, checking out each other’s exhibits and no doubt eyeing up items they might quite like to add to their own collections. Some are dressed slightly eccentrically, others less so.
There are golfing artefacts and collectibles of all kinds – old clubs and balls, books, trophies, medals, paintings, programmes, stamps, postcards, ornaments and much more. Whoever the golfing equivalent of Aladdin…