PHILOMENA GARVEY:IRELAND'S MOST successful amateur woman golfer handed in her last card the week before the Irish Open championship arrived at her beloved home village of Baltray, Co Louth. Philomena Garvey, who blazed a trail for Irish women golfers, died of a heart attack aged 83 on May 5th.
There was an unmatched tally on Philomena Garvey’s lifetime scorecard. She won the British Open Amateur ladies championship in 1957 at Gleneagles, on her fourth attempt at the title, beating Scotland’s reigning queen of golf Jessie Valentine. In 1955, Phil won the Worplesdon Mixed Foursomes at her first and only attempt; her partner for this celebrated matchplay fixture in the English golfing calendar was Philip Scrutton from Sunningdale. In 1951, she was picked for a European team to compete for the Weathervane international trophy against a US professional side at Sunningdale during which Babe Zaharias, the celebrated American golf, athletics, track and field champion, narrowly beat her.
Garvey won 15 Irish close amateur championships, starting in 1946 when she was 20 and finishing in 1970, as winner at Royal Portrush, whereupon she retired from competitive golf. She had made six Curtis Cup appearances for Britain and Ireland against the United States, and would have made more except that she declined to play when the team badge was restricted to the Union Jack in 1958. In this she was supported by team captain Daisy Ferguson (Royal Co Down) and the Irish Ladies Golf Union.
Phil rejoined the international team when the emblems of the four countries – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were reinstated. She played on two winning Vagliano trophy teams, a biennial competition pitching the amateurs of Britain and Ireland against a European selection.
She was a formidable competitor – she never lost an Irish close final – and her rivals knew the best hope of beating Phil Garvey was to eliminate her in the qualifying rounds. Described by her peers as a powerful striker of the ball with woods and irons, she was one of very few women golfers of her time to use the inter-lock grip.
The Daily Telegraph golf writer Lewine Mair wrote of Garvey: “Perhaps the strongest club in her bag was a concentration so intense that she would not even be aware of low-flying aircraft”. Recently she told a reporter that she always paid close attention to studying the layout of the course in advance, and she felt that gave her an advantage over other players.
Phil Garvey was born in the Co Louth village of Baltray in 1926, the youngest of a family of six children – four boys and two girls. The family lived within chipping distance of the famous golf course which this weekend hosts Ireland’s premier golf tournament.
From early childhood, the children of James and Kathleen Garvey were around and about the golf course.
All her siblings played golf: brother Kevin won the East of Ireland golf championship in 1942, having been runner up to Joe Carr the previous year, and another brother Des, who died in 2007, also played off a low handicap. Phil’s last surviving sibling Molly died earlier this year.
Phil Garvey attended school in Drogheda and worked for a while in the Irish Sweepstakes office in Ballsbridge, Dublin. After a few years she moved to the sports section in Clerys department store in Dublin city centre, and she supported herself by working there for much of the rest of her life, taking unpaid leave in the summer months to concentrate on her golf.
It is curious to think that a person whose métier was the wind-tossed links golf courses spent her working life in an artificially-lit shop basement, but if it irked, she didn’t let it show. She got on well with Mary Guiney, widow of the founder of the modern Clerys, who ruled the store with a rod of iron. During this period Phil lived in the south Dublin suburb of Clonskeagh, but home was always Baltray.
According to a forthcoming book on Phil Garvey by Paul Garvey (not related), in 1948 the Royal and Ancient, golfs ruling body, questioned her amateur status as she was working in Clerys, selling sporting goods. In February 1949 they ruled in her favour, as she was not actively selling golf clubs and the department store were not promoting her to this end. Later she turned professional briefly from 1964 to 1967, probably too late to gain any value from it, and she resumed her amateur status in 1968. But she made it into the history books as Ireland's first professional woman golfer, and she had the accolade of a regular column in the Dublin Evening Herald.
Phil’s shop manner could appear forbidding but she made sure the youngsters who came to her with their pocket money to buy “pitch and putt” clubs got the same careful attention as the middle-class women who hoped that some of the Garvey magic would rub off on the expensive bag of clubs they bought from her.
Phil Garvey was not married and had no entourage to accompany her to matches, unlike today’s golfers who travel by helicopter with a retinue to look after their needs. She just took her clubs out of the boot of the car, and got on with it. She was very focused during tournaments and did not socialise much, nor did she exchange small talk with the gallery, as the more gregarious of her playing contemporaries, Christy O’Connor snr and Harry Bradshaw, did.
She never overcame her shyness. Phil’s niece Eileen Garvey describes her aunt as a shy woman with a good sense of humour who never wanted any fuss. “She liked people to know who she was and what she had achieved – her record was never beaten and while she had a wonderful natural ability she worked very hard on the game – but she hated it when anyone made a fuss.”
As a young golfer Maureen Madill encountered Phil in the 1970s, after she had retired from play, but was acting as a selector. She described her as “a teeny weensy bit scary” but very helpful to the young golfers, helping them to improve their strokes. Madill went on to win the British Ladies Open in 1979.
Up to recently she was walking and driving her car but in the last year she stopped driving because of the osteoporosis which had made cruel inroads into the fine physique which had served her so well on the golf course. She used a wheelchair for hospital visits and other longer outings.
Though she could no longer play, she enjoyed watching golf and other sports on TV, making full use of her satellite dish to keep up with competitions all around the world. Her peers in the Irish Ladies Golf Union made her a life vice president and when she died, described her as Ireland’s most successful female amateur golfer.
“She was so looking forward to seeing Padraig Harrington, Darren Clarke, Rory McIlroy, John Daly and all the world class golfers this weekend in Baltray. We were planning to take her in her wheelchair,” said her niece Eileen. Sadly it was not to be.
Philomena Garvey: born April 26th, 1926; died May 5th, 2009