Faulkner's treasure chest of golf jewels

'Bobby Locke was my idol, you see. Oh Christ, yes. A wonderful chap. Tough. A bomber pilot. Bombed Monte Casino. Never practised'

It is 50 summers since Max Faulkner won the Open Championship, an achievement not matched by a fellow Brit until Tony Jacklin won 19 years later at Royal Lytham St Annes. And Jacklin didn't win the Open in canary-coloured trousers and shoes, shoes especially made for him by Saxone. Faulkner did. Faulkner waged a one-man assault on post-war austerity.

"During the war I was in Liverpool teaching air crew cadets," he says by way, curiously, of explaining his reasons for wearing flamboyant clothes on the golf course. "And the bloody Nazis came over dropping bombs, so I lay down and the wind from a bomb whistled up my trouser leg and lifted me right off the ground. It did something to my ears, and I spent five days in Fazakerley Hospital. Every morning the nurses brought pretty flowers into the ward, and every night they took them out. It was so grey without those flowers, and I thought 'if I ever get out of this bloody war I'm going to wear some colours'."

Faulkner turns 85 this month and, much to his annoyance, is suffering from familial tremors, a bad dose of the shakes evidently inherited from his father. We meet at West Chiltington Golf Club in West Sussex, where he is life president, and the barman brings him over a pint of bitter not quite full, which he proceeds to sup like a horse drinking from a trough. When he has downed half of it, the shakes miraculously stop and he picks the glass up by the handle. "After a pint and a half I'm cured for five hours," he says. "Otherwise I'm wobbling like hell."

Apart from the tremors, he seems in decent nick, his blue eyes as keen as they ever were, his spirit undiminished by age, in fact possibly enhanced. A couple of days earlier, he tells me, he went to see Sam King on his 90th birthday, and while he was there they phoned Charlie Ward, also pushing 90.

"We're the only three still alive from the 1947 Ryder Cup team," he says. "Sam used to smoke 60 a day and has dropped down to 40. Would you bloody believe it?"

Obligingly, I shake my head in wonder. Around us, the walls are adorned with photographs, regrettably in black and white, of Faulkner in his pomp. He won the British Grand Slam of Open, Masters and Matchplay championships, which (he proudly points out) Henry Cotton never managed. He finished fifth in the 1949 Open, four shots adrift of the winner, Bobby Locke, and fourth in 1950, another four shots adrift of Locke, before winning in 1951, beating Locke by eight. The neat mathematics of this delights him still.

"Locke was my idol, you see. Oh Christ, yes. Wonderful chap. Tough. A bomber pilot. Bombed Monte Casino. Never practised." Golf or bombing? "Golf. He'd say 'look at those bloody silly idiots.' I remember going out for 18 holes, before the 1947 Ryder Cup in Portland, Oregon, Dai Rees and I, and as we started we saw Ben Hogan practising his putting. When we came up the 18th, he was still in the same bloody spot." Faulkner played in five Ryder Cup teams – in those days comprising players only from Great Britain and Ireland – culminating in 1957 when, against all the odds, the mighty Americans were beaten. Moreover, to meet him is to make a connection with golfing history stretching back into the 19th century, for his father, Gus Faulkner, was James Braid's assistant at Walton Heath before the First World War, and Braid finished second in the 1897 Open, before winning it in 1901 and four times thereafter.

"James Braid followed me round in the Matchplay Championship at Walton Heath when I was 17," Faulkner recalls. "And I played with (1902 Open champion) Sandy Herd, in the Silver King tournament at Moor Park. I was 17 and he was 73. I went round in 71 and he went round in 67, did me by four. I was outdriving him by 100 yards, and I'd hit my niblick into the green while he'd hit his spoon, but it was my putt first every ruddy time."

In 1951, at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland, Faulkner's name finally joined those of Braid and Herd on the old claret jug. According to golfing lore, he signed autographs before the tournament, with marvellous arrogance, as 'Max Faulkner, Open champion'. But the story, he insists, has been embroidered by time. "I was walking to the tee to begin the last round – in those days we played the last two rounds on the Friday – and a boy of 12 asked me to sign his ball. He said 'will you put Open champion 1951?' Well, I was six ahead and I said 'this crowd isn't going to catch me.' So I signed it. I won by two in the end. I was cracking up, you see. Finished 5, 5, 4, 5. I could take you now and show you exactly where my ball finished on those last nine holes."

He was paired, in the final two rounds, with the great American amateur Frank Stranahan. "And he was a yapper. I was three ahead with two rounds to go, and he came up to me the night before and said 'Max, it won't take long for me to catch you tomorrow'. I said 'that's just what I want to talk to you about, would you mind not saying anything while we're playing'. He said 'gee, if that's how you want it, Max'. Anyway, the next morning on the first tee I said 'good morning, Frankie' and he didn't utter a bloody word. He didn't say anything until the 16th, when I hit my baffy out of bounds under the barbed wire, then sliced it round and pitched it on the green. He shook my hand and said 'that's the finest shot I've ever seen, congratulations'." Faulkner's winning total of 285 (71, 70, 70, 74), in which he averaged just 27 putts per round with his beloved Pencil Slim putter, earned him £500.

"Plus £500 from Dunlop for using their ball. I'd worked for Henry Cotton as a teaching pro at Royal Mid-Surrey, used to play with Terence Rattigan and those theatrical people, and he took me out for dinner one night, in his Rolls. He said he was changing to Penfold and wanted his staff to change, too. I said 'Then I'll leave, Henry, if you don't mind'. That story got round, so Dunlop gave me £500 for sticking with them." It was a handsome sum 50 years ago, but hardly comparable to the squillions now given to Tiger Woods. Has professional golf changed for the better, I ask Faulkner, a tad provocatively. "I don't watch it," he growls. "I sometimes switch it on to see whether Woods will make a putt, but he never misses, it's ruddy astounding. He's like Bobby Locke. But six hours for a round? It took three hours and a quarter when I won the Open. Can't bloody stomach it. They mark the ball a foot from the hole, then look at it again in case there's mud on it. Where's the bloody mud come from on these modern greens like billiard tables? Then they bend down and look at the putt from this side and that side, to see what the damned line is. I know the line of a putt as soon as I walk on the green."

The net result of all this damned nonsense, as Faulkner sees it, is only a marginal improvement in scoring. "My son-in-law Brian Barnes tells me there's a new ball, a Yank ball, that flies 25 yards further, that they're all getting on the par fives with a driver and a five-iron. In my day it was a driver, a brassie and a niblick. But how much have the scores changed? I had a 61 at North Oxford, and a 63 on the East Course at Wentworth, 50 years ago." He has a point. At Lytham in 1979, Seve Ballesteros won the Open with a total of 283. In 1932 at Prince's, Sandwich, Gene Sarazen won with a total of... 283. That was the first Open in which Faulkner competed, missing the third-round cut by one. "I was 15 and did 77, 78. So afterwards I watched Sarazen instead. Little fella. Swing very wristy. Hit the ball a bloody long way. I remember seeing him hit it out of bounds on the 12th, then it flew back and it had so much hook-spin on it that it ended up where I was standing. I was playing with him at Troon in 1973, when he holed in one at the Postage Stamp. I think that was the last time I played in the Open." He still plays the occasional nine holes, and despite the tremors can easily break 40 on a good day. He still has a good swing, he reckons – "I'm whipping through it pretty nicely" – and can still offer useful instruction.

"I gave the Duke of Windsor lessons at White Sulphur Springs," he recalls. "His golf was bloody awful. But I made him take it round his legs like that Yank, [John] Daly, and he started hitting with a draw. He was so pleased he said 'come in the clubhouse and take a spot of tea with me'. He took his own tea caddy everywhere with him. Priceless bloody thing. Solid silver."

Who had the finest swing he has ever seen? "There was only one. Without any doubt it was Dick Burton, who won the Open in 1939. That was the only swing I ever enjoyed watching. Tiger Woods and these modern chaps slash at it so fast, but that was the finest, smoothest swing the world has ever seen. His hands were a foot above his shoulders on his backswing. No, Woods is not in the same class as Dick Burton. Christ, it was a beautiful swing. But by 1946 he'd lost it. Must have had a bad war."

Faulkner, by now as steady as a rock, starts on a new half-pint of bitter. I invite him to name his dream fourball, the one he'd like to play in for eternity when he gets to those celestial links. "My father, Dick Burton and Hassan Hassanain, lovely fella, Egyptian, killed himself blowing up his cooker. Another bloody marvellous swing. He started playing golf in bare feet on the sand by the Cheops Pyramid, you see, so his feet never moved. Hit from his hips."

Not for Faulkner a fantasy fourball with Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus and Sam Snead, in fact he probably couldn't think of anything worse. "Snead? An ignorant bloody chap. He did me in the 1951 Ryder Cup, a 67 to my 71. I'd been up on any of the rest, Yanks or British, but I was four down. In the afternoon I got him back to two down but he had two ruddy birdies running and did me 4 and 3. Then we went to the North and South Open, where he and I were playing with Dick Chapman, the amateur champion, who stood on the last tee wanting a four for a 68. He teed up the ball and asked if he could wait for a gust of wind to die down.

"I said 'of course, no problem' but Snead walked across, kicked Chapman's ball off its tee, teed up his own ball, didn't bother to address it and hit it up the middle. He wanted a four for a 78, you see. Anyway, he knocked his putt in with one hand, handed his scorecard to Chapman and said 'fill it in yourself, I'm off'. There was a hell of a bloody row about that. I was stripped off having a shower when Snead came in and said 'what did you report me for?' He'd been ordered to apologise, you see. Dick Chapman must have reported him. Well, I'd been a middleweight in the RAF. My dad taught me to box. So I said, 'get out of here before I put my bloody hands round your throat'. Christ, he ran straight out..."

Faulkner chuckles. So much, I muse, for the Anglo-American special relationship. And he has a similarly dim opinion of Nicklaus. Did Faulkner ever play with Nicklaus? "No, I didn't. Didn't bloody care to, either. In Boston one time he came down the clubhouse steps in such a bloody huff that he knocked into me and nearly knocked me into the flowerbed. I thought 'Christ, you rude bastard'. That really made me cross. Because I used to enjoy my golf, have fun. I used to teach the kids in the crowd, and the crowd was so near in those days that you could see the colour of their eyes. "They weren't roped off. I never saw my ball on to the green, you could tell by the clapping whether it was a good shot or not." Those were the days. Or were they? Whatever, an afternoon at West Chiltington with the 1951 Open champion has been one of the pleasures of my interviewing career. Long may he continue to whip through it.