Edward Ray, known as Ted, was Oxhey's professional for 28 years. He arrived in spring 1912 and won the Open Championship within weeks.3,26,27,92
From Jersey to Yorkshire
Ray was born at Grouville in Jersey in 1877.71,419 Wikipedia gives his birthday as 6 April, from the parish register, but Ganton Golf Club, Find a Grave and a 1957 memoir by Oxhey's club secretary give 28 March.71,91,92,95 He learned the game on the Grouville links alongside Harry and Tom Vardon.70,71,419
He turned professional in 1894, worked near St Malo and joined Churston in Devon in 1899.71,419 In 1903 he followed Vardon as professional at Ganton, where he stayed until April 1912.71,92
The pipe, the hat and the big drive
A big man and a huge hitter, Ray often drove into trouble and escaped with bold recovery shots.71,91,420 He played with a pipe clamped in his teeth and a trilby pulled down on his head.92,420 C. K. Cotton, the club secretary in the 1930s, remembered him in plus-fours and praised his delicate putting.91 Cotton later became a well-known golf course architect and helped found the British Association of Golf Course Architects.421
Champion on both sides of the Atlantic
Oxhey opened on 4 May 1912 with a match between its new professional and Vardon, who had laid out the course. Ray won by 4 and 2.1,69 In June he won the Open at Muirfield with 295, four strokes ahead of Vardon, leading after every round.27,70,71
Touring America with Vardon in 1913, he tied for the US Open at Brookline but lost the play-off to the young amateur Francis Ouimet.71,91,422 That play-off became Mark Frost's book and the 2005 Disney film The Greatest Game Ever Played, in which Stephen Marcus plays Ray.71 In August 1920 he won the US Open at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio, by one stroke. He was 43, and nobody older won it until Raymond Floyd in 1986.71,78,79 In 1927 he captained Great Britain at the first Ryder Cup, in Massachusetts, after the chosen captain Abe Mitchell fell ill.71,83
Life at Oxhey
Ray also made and sold his own clubs at Oxhey.1,71 In May 1917 the club's annual meeting reported a fire in the shed used by the caddie master and the professional.76 Ray later wrote that he saved the iron heads but lost his wooden clubs, including a favourite driver.400
"my shop at Oxhey was burned and with it my clubs"400
Ted Ray, Golf Clubs and How to Use Them, 1922
When the News of the World Match Play came to Oxhey in October 1921, Ray lost his semi-final to fellow Jerseyman Jack Gaudin.1,71 In 1930 about 2,000 people watched Bobby Jones and James Braid beat Vardon and Ray by 4 and 3 in a charity four-ball, though sources differ on the exact date.1,84
Through most of his 28 years at Oxhey he worked closely with the head greenkeeper, Sid Baker, whose grandson Don Dunham later gathered much of what is known about him.289
He was still a name worth drawing in his late fifties. Tom Webster, the Daily Mail's sports cartoonist, put him in the paper twice in the spring of 1936. On 19 March, reporting the Southern Professionals at Fulwell, Webster had Percy Alliss round in 67 and the reigning Open champion Alf Perry in 68, and teased Ray for loving to drive anywhere except on to the course itself, starting his game in Middlesex and finishing in Middlesex.423 In April, at the Daily Mail Golf Tournament at Bramshot, he drew Ray going into the rough fourteen times in a round, and noted that the first prize of £500 was a British record.423 The cartoons are not reproduced here, because Webster died in 1962 and they are still in copyright.
What he could do round his own course is recorded in Sporting Life in March 1927. The professional record then stood at 71 to J. H. Taylor, but the paper noted that Ray had beaten it several times and that his best return was 65, which it called phenomenal in any circumstances.10 The 65 never counted as the record, presumably because the club's own professional was outside the reckoning, and the figure that later stood, S. L. King's 68 of 1934, is still three strokes worse.1,10
The same piece catches him playing a shot nobody else dared. The fifth bent to the left round a stand of high trees, and where other players went round them Ray went over, which the writer calls a dramatic shot "that invariably brings disaster to others, as once it did to Abe Mitchell".10 Mitchell was among the longest hitters in the game, and Oxhey had beaten him at it. The article also notes Ray's selection for the team about to sail for the United States, the first official Ryder Cup, which he captained.10
He was also teaching further afield than Hertfordshire. The Scotsman, reporting a tournament at Broadstairs in August 1920, noticed a Japanese golfer named Y. Mishimi who played at Oxhey, had a handicap of fifteen, and reached the semi-finals; he was, the paper said, one of a party of players from the Orient whom Ted Ray had had under tuition.424 That is the only trace so far of a group of Japanese golfers being coached at Oxhey, and it is worth having, because Neil Hamilton recalls that at the outbreak of the Second World War the club banned Japanese membership and involvement. He is looking for the paperwork, and until he finds it that part rests on his memory alone.424,425
Cotton recalled Americans calling at the club just to shake Ray's hand, and Vardon dropping in to talk over old times.91 Ray retired in 1940 after 28 years, and the club marked it at its meeting that April.3,71 Cotton and Ganton say 1941, but the club minutes, The Times obituary cited by Wikipedia and John Swain all give 1940.3,8,71,91,92
Death and burial
Ray died in Watford on 26 August 1943, aged 66.71,91,95 Find a Grave and Golf's Missing Links place his grave in Vicarage Road Cemetery, while Cotton wrote of Watford Parish Churchyard.1,91,95 Vicarage Road is right. Neil Hamilton went and found it, and photographed the stone.426
It was put up by his widow, and it reads: in loving memory of my dear husband Edward Ray, then on a line of its own, between dashes, Ted.426 Who passed away Aug. 26. 1943, aged 66 years. At rest.426 Underneath, added later, also of Edith, wife of the above, who passed away Dec. 4. 1951, aged 80 years, and at the foot, reunited.426 Edith was some six years older than him and outlived him by eight.426
The second of Hamilton's photographs shows the whole plot, kerbed in granite and filled with chippings, with the inscribed tablet lying flat on the grave rather than standing at its head.426 He does not say when he took it, so this is not necessarily how the grave stands today.426 A man who won the Open in 1912 and the United States Open in 1920, and who was the professional at Oxhey for twenty-eight years, lies in a municipal cemetery a few minutes from the course he worked. On 17 September 2021 a plaque marking his birthplace was unveiled at Windsor House in Gorey Village, Jersey.427,428
The council's board at the playing fields
The council's information board at the Ashburnham Drive entrance to the playing fields carries a plan of the 1920 course drawn by John Swain, who lived in South Oxhey from 1953 to 1965.8,12,14 He drew it in 2003, so it is a careful reconstruction rather than a map made in 1920, as Oxhey Golf Club explains.8
The same board credits its photograph of Ray on the 18th green to Neil Hamilton, a local historian of Oxhey.8,14,23 His research lies behind a 1994 history of Oxhey's artisan golf club, and he redrew the course's 1945 hole profiles.1,65