Brora Golf Club mourns the death of popular captain
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IN the space of just four months Brora Golf Club lost a second much loved player when, following a very brief spell in Raigmore Hospital last weekend, past captain and life member Roy Wood sadly passed away on Monday.
Roy was known to all as “The Butcher” as he took over his father-in-law’s Brora shop in the early ’80s after training as an engineer with Ferranti in Edinburgh where he met and married Ack MacDonald’s daughter Marilyn in 1965.
Originally from Wakefield in Yorkshire he came to golf late in life but became one of the best loved captains the club has had, serving on the management committee before being elected as captain in 1994 and 1995, followed by a five year term from 2001 to 2006.
His popularity was sought out by visitors from afar and although he eventually gave up his role as Golf Week secretary and in recent years, due to his weakening health, his visits to the clubhouse were not so frequent, every year Golf Week visitors continued to ask after him.
While life member Hugh Baillie, who left us in May, received his life membership for administrative service to the golf club over a span of 60 years, Roy Wood was made a life member for his personality, popularity, competition organising and the Golf Week.
His own golf never aspired to the scratch category but as Hugh Baillie used to say, only two members can make others fill the clubhouse windows when playing the 18th hole, Roy and Jim Miller – to see if Jim could make his regulation par three and to observe Roy on his Sunday morning visit to the old Links Hotel or the minister’s manse!
Working a six-day shift in the butcher’s shop, Sunday was his only day for golf. For a Winter Alliance in Caithness, he never missed crossing The Ord even when the snow gates were closed and at Brora our lasting memory was while we sat in the clubhouse bar on a winter’s morning, Roy’s caddy-car tracks could be seen in the snow making their way to the first tee and then down the first fairway.
He would lose golf balls by the score but that was no problem to him. As soon as the thaw came, the late Donnie White would go out and find them and trade them back for a pound of mince or a fry of sausages!
Who will replace him? They don’t make these characters nowadays.
