Subscription fees
A reminder that subs are due. The annual fee is £50 but it jumps to £60 if you haven’t paid by the 31st May. Bank account details:
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ACCOUNT NAME: Association of Golf Writers
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Pick Your Pro 2026
The AGW’s annual boost to the piggy bank of Elliott Platts is ready and awaiting your entries. It costs a mere tenner, is administrated in fine fashion by Mark Garrod, and generates a lot of frustration fun throughout the year. Entry form and rules attached with the email. Please join in!
Jeremy Chapman
Talk of Elliott’s soothsaying leads nicely to Jeremy Chapman, the golfing sage of the Racing Post. 2025 marked Jeremy’s retirement and also 50 years as member of the AGW. “I lasted out until I was almost 84, a goodly innings,” he told me. A tremendous effort and it’s wonderful to hear that Jeremy is still writing about his other great love (musicals) and still landing a betting coup or two (these days focussing on the likes of SPOTY, Eurovision and Strictly Come Dancing). Please feel free to contact Jeremy (or myself) with a few memories and to congratulate him on reaching the half century. Consider the bat raised, Jeremy, and that a packed house is given you a standing ovation. (Mixed cricket and theatre metaphors all mine not Jeremy’s.)
Bryan Potter
As noted in a recent email, member Bryan Potter died before Christmas at the age of 82. Bryan kicked off his sporting career as a footballer with Bury Town before turning his hand to reporting on the game. He would then go on to cover both the Open and Ryder Cup from his Suffolk base. His son Neil sent a lovely photo of Bryan. As always, if you have memories of Bryan, please send them on for the next newsletter.
Charlie Briscoe-Knight
And finally, John Hopkins has been in touch to let us know that photographer Charlie Briscoe-Knight has passed away. John writes:
Though he was not a member of the AGW he was a familiar figure at golf events, mainly in Europe, down the years. He lived near Walton Heath Golf Club during most of the summer months and retreated to Monterey in California in the winter. It was sad to hear from Linda, his wife, that he had died, aged 79 ½, over Christmas.
I first met him at the 1985 US Open at Oakland Hills, Detroit. I was there for the Sunday Times; he was there after attending a motor racing function. I remember that his card said he was from Zoom Photo or some such. He was beginning the process of exiting his motor racing work and moving into golf. We became good friends, being of similar age and backgrounds. I called him Baldy because he was; he called me Hoppy because so many people do.
Either last summer or the summer of ’24, I had him to play golf at Huntercombe, my club just outside Henley-on-Thames, and we had a nice day together. He was a better golfer than I am and had a swing that looked as though it had once been quite good.
“He was undoubtedly a lover of the game and was very involved in the publication of the European Tour’s Volvo Yearbook, sadly no more,” Dave Cannon, the game’s leading photographer, said. “Whenever I was covering an event at Walton Heath, where he was a member, I’d see him there with a camera round his neck. He certainly knew golf and was a pretty decent golfer, too.”
At John Collard’s funeral early last year, held first at a crematorium in Putney and afterwards at Royal Mid-Surrey golf club, I remember thinking how appropriate Charlie looked in a golf club environment and how comfortable he was when in conversation with an elderly man. Afterwards I asked him who that man was. “No idea,” he replied.
These are characteristics I remember about Charlie. He said “gotcha” a lot when listening. He was very enthusiastic. He would tell me inside stuff about goings on at Walton Heath, a golf club he loved but was saddened at the things that had happened there in recent years. He always carried a camera and was prone to whipping it off his shoulder and lining up a shot or two. He was very good at thinking up stories about golf courses he could photograph. He and Linda had recently been to Lofoten Links in Norway, the most northerly links golf course in the world.
“Although our paths didn’t cross very much, when they did I always found him an extremely affable guy who always had time to talk,” Chris Turvey, the golf photographer who works for Rolex, said. “He was a super nice guy.”
“We were just talking about a train journey in Europe to mark his 80th birthday,” Linda wrote in an email. “In early December he was able to play golf at Cypress Point. It was a glorious, warm, sunny day and he walked 18 holes carrying his clubs. He said he was in golf heaven.”
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