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David Healy's Jottings & Reflections.
Scrutton,
Golf, Cars, Royal Melbourne GC, Von Nida & 007.
(Written December 2022)
Over the years my
brother Terry has bought and
sold some fascinating racing and
rare cars.
I remember a magnificent Ferrari that we stored
for
him in our back yard in Chelsea, Melbourne
some decades ago. It
sat there for months and
our young boys pestered me for weeks to
have
a ride, in what for them was an amazing sports
car that
they could brag about to their school
friends. However, when I
relented, we couldn’t
find the battery to kick start the engine
so that
idea went flat, much to their dismay.
Terry
has sold some of the most expensive sports cars in this
country with his focus on rare racing cars
or celebrity owners.
His most recent sale, a few months ago, was a 1967 Ferrari sold
for in excess of $4M. He has a knowledge of these type of cars
that has been widely reported in major dailies and unique car magazines.
Phillip Scrutton
However, it was a story about a 1955 Bentley R Type he sold that
had previously belonged to English amateur golfer Philip Scrutton he
related that piqued my interest as it had a link to golf which
had been my career for half my working life.
In relating the story of the sale of the Bentley he mentioned
a UK golfer, a stolen car, Royal Melbourne Golf Club & legendary
Aussie golfer Norman Von Nida.
What follows is a fascinating
story about a wealthy young man travelling the world in the
1940’s & 50’s playing golf, whilst an amateur, before the advent
of professional sports bodies funding player's as they do today.
Philip Scrutton was a wealthy young individual. In 1958, at
the time of his death, his estate was valued in excess of
£600,000 when average annual earnings in the UK were
approximately £400.
Scrutton was a member at several golf clubs including The Royal
& Ancient, Sunningdale and The Addington. He played Walker Cup
for the UK in 1955 and 1957 and in The Open in 1958 as an
amateur. He finished 4th in the 1953 Italian Open.
The renowned golfing commentator Herbert Warren Wind wrote the
following about Scrutton after watching his 1955 British Amateur
quarter final match at Royal Lytham:
“The more you see of Scrutton, the more
he strikes you as a person you expect to bump into only in
fiction, so much “in character” are the highly individual
manners and mannerisms of this wealthy young man who owns about
eight cars and, in pursuit of a first-class golf game, spent the
winter of 1951 on the winter circuit in America.
Scrutton’s woods, just as you would
expect, are encased in leopard-skin covers. During his match
with Patton he wore an off-yellow sweater with a matching beret
and, in addition to his caddy, employed a retainer to carry a
folding chair on which he could sit when Patton was shooting.
But Scrutton, mechanical as is the delivery of his swing, can
play golf, and he ran clear away from Billy Joe, losing the
first and then winning eight of the next nine holes and, in due
course, the match, 7 and 6.”
In 1951 he also played golf in Australia where he was coached by
golfing trailblazer Norman Von Nida. Much like American Frank
Stranahan whose family wealth enabled him to compete in 200
amateur events across 3 continents during the same era before
turning professional Scrutton’s wealth also enabled him to be an
amateur globetrotter.
Terry with the located Bentley in Australia
Bentley in the showroom in London
After touring the United States where he
featured in the Tam O’Shanter he spent several months in
Australia where he competed in The Australian Open at
Metropolitan, the Victorian Amateur at Kingswood and the
Australian Amateur Championship at Royal Melbourne Golf Club. He
purchased a Jaguar Mark V11 upon arrival.
The night before the first round of the
Open, Scrutton went to the theatre and left his car, doors
unlocked, outside the Hotel Australia where he was staying. When
he got up in the morning of his first round his car and clubs,
which were on the back seat, were missing. Among the clubs was a
2-wood lent to him by Norman Von Nida. He borrowed a set of
clubs and shot 82-76 and missed the cut. It was reported he was
not so worried about the car but was attached to his clubs.
He played the
week after the Open at Royal Melbourne Golf Club in the
Australian Amateur Championship.
In the second round of the Australian Amateur Championship
Scrutton used Von Nida’s clubs, he also had Ossie Pickworth’s
caddy, in his wining match against W. Richardson from Green
Acres. Scrutton was 5 under 4’s when he won the match 5/4.
When the vehicle
was recovered from Maffra in Gippsland, Victoria the golf clubs
with Von Nida’s 2 wood were recovered. The car had been stolen
by a Naval Rating who keen to get to a dance hall in Maffra left
the amateur champ's golf clubs as security for ten gallons of
petrol at a garage in Warragul.
Scrutton was mentioned in Ian Flemings Bond
book “Goldfinger” due to his golfing prowess.
Indeed Peter Masters in his
story "The Inside story of Royal St Georges Golf Club" mentions
that author Ian Fleming was captain elect at St George’s at the
time of his sudden death in 1964, and it was here that he chose
to set the scene for his encounter between James Bond and Goldfinger.
In Goldfinger, Fleming mentions a golfer by the name of
Philip Scrutton, twice a Brabazon Trophy winner, who once took
14 on the 10th hole with its table mountain green at Royal St
George's in the Gold Bowl, a genuine club event – a
moment where fiction met with non fiction.
Scrutton died in a
vehicle collision with an army lorry in 1958. He was 35 years of
age.
He was driving a car in which John Pritchett, a leading
professional golfer, was a passenger, when they were hit by an
army lorry on the A30, just west of Blackbushe Airport,
Hampshire in the UK. Pritchett was also killed. Scrutton and Pritchett had
played together in the 1958 Wentworth Foursomes, losing in the
final.
Scrutton & caddie with the ocelot skin head covers.
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2020
Pandemic Misses
(Written October
2020)
This Pandemic, really its
not a Pandemic's bootlace compared to the Spanish Flu, has
prevented us from so many things. A mother's hug, a wedding, a
funeral. A great friend of mine died in April in Houston and I
watched his funeral service on Zoom from Australia. He was a
friend of over 30 years. An invite arrived for his Memorial
Service to be held in Cedar Town Georgia (his birthplace) at the
end of August 2020 to be held in conjunction with the opening of his
Golf Museum. Doug had assembled an amazing collection of
autographed memorabilia from sports elite over some 30 years and
with Australia being in lockdown I was not able to go and missed
the opportunity to be the only international guest at that
service and event. It went ahead because many of the US States
were back in business. Again I had to watch the event unfold on
the Internet. Tough.
The Doug Sanders Golf Museum sent you an invitation for
The Doug Sanders Golf Museum Grand Opening
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Tap here to Open Invitation
This email is personalized for you. Please do not forward.
Invitation | RSVP | Details | Facebook
Page | Donate
to the Junior Golf Scholarship
How many
of you will get to hold your 80th in Vegas now do you think let
alone
have
anyone turn up? We were there!
%20-%20Copy.JPG)
Doug's
80th in Vegas Click here
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2018
41st
President George HW Bush
(Written Dec 2018)
This one is from the archive. The death of the 41st
President in November 2018 reminded me of an
interesting event in my life and another associated with a then
young Australian at college in the states on a Golf Scholarship
arranged by a friend of mine.
It was in 1976 during a 6 week Golf Study
Tour that I arranged to attend the Doug Sanders Junior
International in Houston, Texas and Doug & Scotty Sanders kindly invited me to
stay at the house with Doug & Scotty. He had the
perfect big boy’s games room and while playing pool and pin ball
his house keeper came in to say Vice President Bush was on the
line. Now even at a young age I knew who VP Bush was. Doug had a
red phone box in the corner of his games room and went in there
to take the call. I thought how cool that is; a red phone box
like superman changed in, and a call from the 2nd most
prominent man I had heard of in the US.
Fast forward a few years and a young Glenn
Joyner who had been in our junior programs in Australia was
attending college in Houston when Doug invites him to the house
for dinner. In walks Clint Eastwood and sits down next to Glenn,
next in walks a tall Texan who introduced himself as
George sat down near Glenn. During the course of the evening
Glenn turned to George and said “What do you do George?”
Classic!
This photo of Doug with George was given
to me more than 30 years ago; taken at the Doug Sanders Celebrity
Classic where Bush became the first sitting President to play in
any PGA Tour event.
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2021
Time to leave the
party or brace yourself for a wild ride
(Written January 2021)
12 years is a long time for a bull market and in the last
financial year we recorded for our self-managed super fund one
of our
best ever performance of 22.39% return.
Stay or Leave, is
it time to reassess your future?
(Written October, 2021)
Now that Melbourne is due to open up this coming week many
people there will be thinking, after being imprisoned for 262
days, about their future as we did in March of 2020.
These times are unlike anything Australians have faced since the
first or second world wars. What would be going through many
minds much like the approximately 46,000 of us who literally took off from
Melbourne without much thought or care about the future but the
real knowledge that Melbourne for a long time will not be where we
want to be.
The unfair loss of freedom, of democratic rights, those rights fought
for by our son and our forebears during wars. It's time to reassess and take
stock.
The catalyst for our impulsive and essentially unplanned exit
from Melbourne to Mildura was to care for my mother but there
was a need also to get out of Melbourne, intense anger even hatred at our
loss of freedom, the very high levels of anxiety and the belief
that the worst of the Pandemic was ahead of us and not behind at
that point and likely even now is still the case. We have lost
confidence that the government can tell the truth.
We had the luxury of being partially retired but still able to
work and had the knowledge that we had planned our finances well
enough that there was little pressure to prevent a relocation.
We also had my mother in age care in the rural Mallee township in
Ouyen and she was experiencing depression due to the long
periods between visits.
We decided that we had the ability to take her out of aged care
and we felt we had an obligation to look after her in Mildura where we had immediate and
extended family. We travelled to Mildura after the first
lockdown, looked at two homes, bought one and then were
fortunately able to relocate in the 2nd week of the stage 4
second lockdown.
To say
Mildura was far more relaxed than Melbourne is an understatement
and while we were concerned about no longer easily able to see friends and family in
Melbourne we have not looked back at our rear vision mirror. While a
loss of catching up with friends and acquaintances cannot be
replaced new friends and acquaintances can be forged by getting
involved in the community.
We found ourselves very quickly exam supervisors at the local
senior school. Stewards at the Australian Alternative Variety
Wine Show, members of gyms, golf clubs and everywhere we wanted
to go was only 5 minutes away.
It was made easier, I admit, by
having a sister living in town. The first time either of us
lived anywhere near a brother or sister. Helen also went out of
her way to introduce us to folk around Mildura and she had
plenty of people she knew being fully vested in community
engagement being a Deputy Mayor of Mildura Rural City Council.
While those our age were looking to do things a little slower
after decades of work, meetings, commitments, stress & pressure
she seemed to be ramping things up. We could only admire her
community & council work.
What was more remarkable was that you could buy a brilliant home in
Mildura for a third to less of the value of a house in
Melbourne.
Sport is also cheap and living costs on a par with metropolitan
Melbourne. What was evident immediately was the booming economy
and how busy local trades were. New houses were popping up all
over the city. You literally had to knock people out of the way
to get into Bunning's.
We were both able to get work both locally and
continue remote consulting in Melbourne with the odd trip down
when able. So not much changed with being able to bring in an
income. With many firms moving to remote worksites or as the CEO
of Telstra Andy Penn said during the week working
from home options can now see rural settings an option and they are no longer the perceived
disadvantage that it was though to be prior to the pandemic.
When I was a young man starting out in life the move to the city
was seen as necessary to finding worthwhile employment and to
accelerate a career, not so now.
Enormous advantages for those in Australian cities and in
particular Melbourne are now available to people of all age
ranges. Less loss of freedoms,
greater flexibility, a more laid back lifestyle, cheaper sports for children and adults, greater community involvement
options, cheaper housing, ability to create work options in the
country or city. I was able to join the local Golf Club for a
fraction of the cost in Melbourne. In fact with the change I was
able to get my own Golf Cart for the warmer weather. A cost I
could not justify in Melbourne.
Cashing up in Melbourne also provides a retirement nest egg for
older Australians and for younger ones gives them an ability to
get into the housing market or buy a much larger property than
you could ever afford in a capital city. What's there to stop
you relocating much like we did?
Only
last week following an online plea by family and friends a Perth
man was found dead after going missing for more than 10 days. He
had trained with my son in the army in Townsville in the 3rd/4th
Cavalry Regiment and was also in the MTF3 out of Townville; an
Australian deployment to Afghanistan in 2011.
This is the emblem you may have seen on
some returned sites of returned servicemen and woman. It means
another casualty, this time at home in Australia and as a result
of not being able to cope.
What made this so tragic was that he went
missing for more than ten days, pleas by his parents for help to
find him, social media posts by family and friends, missing
person posters, a young wife and children and then found dead.
What makes a young person like Brock Hewitt do this?
His poor parents. We assume they had also
gone through this. A phone call in the middle of the night. It’s
about 2.00am, your son is in Afghanistan. Shit who is this! Not
sure how you got to the phone or how you answered. “Mr Healy,
this is Major … calling from Afghanistan “there’s been a
fatality. Your son was not killed, he is safe.” You mumble
appreciation for the officer taking the time to make the call.
You head back to bed and inform Ildi. You hold each other, you
don’t sleep. You just worry. And the next day its major news in
Australia however while you got a late night call somewhere in
Australia you were acutely aware that other parents got a knock
on the door that changed their lives forever. That happened a
number of times.
To get some understanding why most of our
servicemen came back with PTSD and a high suicide rate you need
understand what our young men and woman were dealing with.
Really important to know what a child here and a child there is!
A FAM (fighting aged male) in Afghanistan can be as young as 8!
Running around with guns in their early teens, AK47’s and at 13
to 17 are seasoned fighters having killed many times in
conflict. This was a war fought in a civilian population, not
like the previous wars of army against army. No-one was running
around with signs on their head saying I’m Taliban, I’m not. Do
you know what that type of pressure of trying to avoid shooting
a civilian in that type of war can do to young men and woman?
Commanders succumbed to pressure, instructions to soldiers were
sometimes, careless and reckless.
Knowing this information makes you angry
about the media treatment of our hero Ben Roberts-Smith by
Fairfax and Chris Masters. If you know a returned veteran
look after them. Make it known you don’t appreciate what
that appalling individual Chris Masters did to Ben Roberts-Smith
and his equally appalling cowards in Un-Fairfax Media.
Our son Aaron saw service in Afghanistan
and recorded an articulate, descriptive and emotive War Journal
which was one of the first items received by The Australian War
Memorial from that conflict. It
started what is now an exhibit from that war. We are
proud of his service to his country and while below is all you
get if you search the web we have made his journal more
into a book with emails from
home and photos from his service. This was one of the first wars
in the electronic age where emails came from the battle zone,
while in the earlier wars letters were the only form of
communication, some arriving after the soldier had been killed.
Healy,
Aaron James (Trooper, b.1989) | The Australian War Memorial
Collection relating to the service of 8543022 Trooper Aaron James Healy,
B Squadron, 3rd/4th Cavalry Regiment, MTF-3 (Mentoring Task
Force - Three),
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Having
read the new book by Bob Woodward FEAR the inside story about
the Trump Presidency 6 points summarise my take.
Before I get to those points let me quote
the final paragraph of the book.
“Some things were clear and many were
not in such a complex tangled investigation. There was no
perfect X-ray, no tapes, no engineer’s drawing. Dowd believed
that the President had not colluded with Russia or obstructed
justice.
But in the man and his Presidency back
and forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the
obscuring, crying “Fake news”, the indignation, Trump had one
overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to
say to the President: “You’re a f…. liar.”
Now the points.
1. It’s got to be extremely difficult for a business man
coming into a political landscape, where both parties live on
the premise that everything you believed in while in power you
are totally against in opposition, and succeed. So emptying the
swamp was never going to happen but most sensible people would
dare to dream that it could.
2. The sources from which Woodward forms his story are in
the main media sources who have been anti-Trump.
3. Despite his protestations that he was not a politician
Trump has quickly acquired if Woodward’s quote “Trump is a F…
Liar” is correct the main and key skill displayed by all
politicians, they Lie. In that context then Trump must be
considered is a highly skilled politician.
4.
Bob Mueller does not appear with recent arrests
to be
seeking to really investigate Russian collusion. He is bringing
the might of the FBI down on the FBI’s biggest critic and his
Associates. His arrests have been for lying (perjury); does that
then make Trumps associates as skilled and as corrupt on that
basis as politicians. What is more concerning however is that
Mueller and his team are using threats against his targets
children and families. Does that make him much like J Edgar
Hoover who excelled in blackmail or could you extend that to
make a in a perfect irony, to assert that Mueller is no
different to the KGB. His investigation has taken 20 months and
cost up till September 2018 $25.2Million dollars.
5. While the number of Executive team turnovers appears high
it’s more likely to be that under a businessman than a
politician. A politician would accept poor performance for much
longer than a businessman who wants his team to achieve his
electoral promises. And despite what one thinks of Trump he has
made a real difference to the US economy with record employment
for Blacks and Latinos amongst many notable indicators, major tax cuts and
$100B additional contribution from NATO allies.
6. The
title of the book is “FEAR” and
while we don’t know if Woodward is taking the piss surely he
knows the acronym of FEAR is “False Evidence Appearing Real”.
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"Your either part of the
Problem or part of the Solution"
"
It’s my life; & what you think of me is none of my business."
"If you can dream it & believe it, you can achieve it."
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