On 11 August, Jeanne Bisgood, who in 1952 played in the first GB&I side to defeat the Americans in the Curtis Cup, is throwing a party at Parkstone Golf Club, where she has been a member for 80 years, by way of celebrating her 100th birthday. Although she had three falls in January, there were no broken bones and she did what you would expect of a petty officer in the WRNS in keeping calm and carrying on. As, indeed, she did when anything went awry on the golf course.
“I’ve been so lucky with my health,” she said a couple of weeks ago. To give an example of her fuss-free attitude to life, she was 93 when she went over to Ireland to watch the ’16 Curtis Cup at Dun Laoghaire. There was a coach to take guests back and forth from the official hotel and, on the occasion it failed to put in an appearance, she hopped aboard a local bus.
For a brief summation of her working life, Bisgood, went to Oxford to study history and left after her first year to join the WRNS at Stanmore, one of six outstations deployed for Bletchley Park’s Enigma codebreaking operations. She and her sister code-breakers were told not to talk about the experience for another 30 years and, as far as Bisgood knows, every one of them honoured that arrangement.
It never occurred to Bisgood to go back to Oxford – “I wanted to get on with the rest of my life” – and, when she departed the WRNS, she trained as a barrister. At the same time, she worked on the golf she had learned from her father, a wealthy stockbroker and a Somerset County cricketer who had installed a tennis court and a putting green in the family garden.
l-r: Mary McKenna, Kathryn Phillips, Jeanne Bisgood (Team Captain), Belle McCorkindale Robertson and Dinah Oxley, ahead of the 1970 Curtis Cup match
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Post war, golf made “a proper return” in 1946 and, in 1951, Bisgood won the first of her three English championships, with her reward a place in the following year’s Curtis Cup at Muirfield.
She will never forget that week. In those days, women’s amateur golf attracted much the same attention as the men’s and a sizeable corps of golf writers was to hand for what they assumed would be one more resounding American victory. (Since 1932, the Americans’ unbeaten run had known nothing more upsetting than a halved game at Gleneagles in ’36.)
With Muirfield one of the most famous all-male venues of them all, it goes without saying that there were a handful of quirky…
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