The woman Jones called the greatest golfer ever

In 1935, she undertook a tour of America. Her father refused to let her go until she agreed to have a chaperone

This coming Saturday would have been the 100th birthday of one of the finest golfers ever to wield a mashie-niblick. She nearly made it, too. Joyce Wethered was 97 when, as Lady Heathcoat-Amory, she finally departed for the celestial clubhouse.

Unlike some of the earthly clubhouses she came across, she doubtless found that women were welcomed.

A couple of days ago I spoke to Penny Woollams, property manager at Knightshayes, the grand house in Devon where Lady Heathcoat-Amory lived. She recalls asking the old lady whether she was ever inconvenienced in those less enlightened times, prior to a game of golf, by being barred from the clubhouse. "Not at all," she replied. "I simply stood in the car park and warmed my hands on the radiator of a Rolls-Royce."

She took everything in her elegant stride and was a marvellous golfer by the standards of any era. All her obituaries quoted the great Bobby Jones, whose own centenary comes round in February.

In 1931, a year after he had won the Grand Slam, Jones played against her at St Andrews. They drove from the same tees and eventually he prevailed. But she had been two up with three to play, and Jones said that, apart from his superior strength, he had never felt so outclassed. Asked whether there had ever been a better woman player, he said in his rich Georgia drawl: "I am very doubtful if there has ever been a better player, man or woman."

In 1935, because times were hard, Wethered undertook a tour of America to promote Wanamaker's golf supplies (her father, Penny Woollams reports, refused to let her go until she agreed to take a chaperone).

She played 53 exhibition matches in America and established 36 course records, but the most memorable was another match against Jones, at East Lake, his home club in Atlanta. There is a wonderful account of it in the most precious book I own apart from The Boys' Book of Soccer 1971, a battered edition of The Bobby Jones Story by O B Keeler, who was Boswell to Jones' Dr Johnson.

"Miss Wethered played magnificently," Keeler wrote. "The gallery was charmed beyond expression to see the two greatest golfers of this generation playing all they knew at every shot in gallant and generous complement to one another."

Whatever happened to galleries charmed beyond expression? Golf has acquired so much, not least a little more enlightenment regarding gender equality (at any rate, the sign at one prominent club that declared "No dogs or women", in that order, has been removed). But along the way the venerable game has lost its poetry.

"The ball was lying well and she essayed a half-blast with the niblick," Keeler wrote, of Wethered's shot from a greenside bunker. I would love to essay the occasional half-blast with a niblick myself, but sadly the only niblick I know is a bar of that name in St Andrews from which, the last time I passed, a vomiting reveller was being ejected.

Anyway, Wethered finished with a 74 that day at East Lake, and Jones beat her narrowly, 2 and 1. "It was the opinion of the British critics, when they speaking candidly and not for publication, that if ladies had been included on the British Walker Cup team, Miss Wethered would have been playing number three," Keeler continued. This hypothesis was echoed by Henry Cotton, who reckoned her to be the straightest player he had ever seen, matched only by the six-times Open champion Harry Vardon.

She was born into a golfing family; her elder brother Roger finished in a tie with Jock Hutchinson in the 1921 Open at St Andrews, then dithered over whether he could stay for the 36-hole play-off because he had promised to turn out for his village cricket team.

The best-known anecdote about Wethered herself concerns the final of the 1920 English Ladies' Championship, at Sheringham on the Norfolk coast. While she was putting for victory on the 17th green, a train puffed past on the adjacent railway line. Afterwards, she was asked whether this had disturbed her concentration. "What train?" she asked, guilelessly. And they say Tiger Woods has focus.

She won four more English Ladies' Championships, and four British Ladies' titles, before retiring from competitive golf in 1925. However, she emerged from retirement in 1929, because the British Championship was back at her favourite venue, St Andrews. She was also tickled by the prospect of playing against the mighty American champion, Glenna Collett, which she did, in the 36-hole final. Wethered was five down after the first nine holes. But still she won, needless to add.

In 1937, incidentally, she married Sir John Heathcoat-Amory. A two-handicapper himself, it is said that he would not propose until he had beaten her at golf. Whether she deliberately fluffed the odd half-blast with a niblick during the course of his triumphant round, history, alas, does not record.

b.viner@independent.co.uk