It was not the British Open nor the US Masters. Unlike the manicured fairways of the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews or Augusta National, there was not a blade of grass on the course. To the players, however, this was serious. It was more than sport. It was a small freedom; a form of escape from their World War II prisoner-of-war camp in Germany.
The gallery following the players was dressed mostly in the blue or brown of allied air force personnel. It was not a large gallery. No entry tickets had been sold.
The course layout was unique and ingeniously difficult around sandy wasteland. The longest of the nine holes was less than 100 metres. Most of the fairways were lined by timber huts. The greens were known as browns, carefully tended by Timmy Biden, the head brownkeeper.
Tee markers had initially all been trees, but eventually they came to include tall poles, tree stumps and one incinerator door. Milk cans were used for holing out on the browns.
The event was the Club Foursomes Challenge. The club was the Sagan Golf Club. Sagan was also known as Stalag Luft III.
Aside from the daily struggle for survival, and the constant planning for escape, sport was played to maintain a level of fitness and to relieve the monotony of prison life. Golf became a popular pastime and serious competitions were held.
The Germans viewed the prisoners’ passion for this peculiar game with curiosity and ambivalence, yet welcomed the fact that it kept them occupied and hopefully doing something other than attempting to escape.
Red Cross and YMCA parcels occasionally contained golf clubs and balls (which too often sailed over perimeter fences), but most of the equipment used was all home-made. The rule was that if you wanted to play, you made your own gear. Clubs were mainly fashioned from strips of wood with cloth for the grips. Club heads presented a challenge, but cigarette packet foil – melted down by a rudimentary blow torch fuelled by rendered margarine and poured into a rough mould – did a decent job.
Balls were originally made from leather sewn around cloth, but the results varied widely, and at Stalag Luft III the manufacture of golf balls became a contest in itself with participants determined to make a better ball. Artisans in the camp started using old boot rubber or the bladder of a football cut into thin strips for the golf ball core. The leather of an old football or boot was then cut into the same figure of eight shape as a baseball so that the finished ball complied exactly with the weight (1.62 ounces) and diameter (1.62 inches) specified by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. The two cover pieces were tightly sewn with needle and linen thread, rolled on a table top, then dampened so the ball would shrink. Finally, it was waxed and polished to make it waterproof.
The result was remarkable, with the best productions being true in flight and having a maximum distance of about 70 yards.
. . .
One summer day in 1943, the competitors in the challenge were playing on course number two (the original course had been removed by an irate camp commandant after having been used as part of the notorious wooden horse escape). The main incentive for the competitors was the honour of victory, but internal camp currency was on offer and could be used to buy the strong sprit from the illicit camp distillery.
So the scene was set for 36 holes of foursomes and two separate singles matches. On one team were two low-handicap British airmen, Ronnie Morgan and George Murray Frame. The other team comprised Danny O’Brien, a former Scottish schoolboy champion, and a Tasmanian, Bombardier William (Bill) Sampson, who was also no slouch with a mashie.
Bill Sampson had won the Nettlefold Cup at Kingston Beach Golf Club in 1936 at the age of 17 and was a gifted, versatile sportsman when he enlisted in the army and joined 2/1 Australian Anti-tank Regiment. He had a fine pedigree. His father was an A grade tennis player and had been first club champion, in 1925, at the famous Kingston Heath Golf Club in Melbourne.
Young Bill’s time at The Friends’ School in Hobart had been notable for sporting achievements. He coxed winning Head of the River crews in 1932 and 1933, and set a state under-14 sprint swimming record. In his senior school years he was Southern Tasmanian Schools tennis champion, a member of the First XVIII and First XI, for which he won the batting average in 1935.
He enlisted early, in October 1939, and completed training in Egypt before his regiment, part of the Mackay Force, landed in Greece in April 1940. Its task was to stop a German blitzkrieg down the Florina Valley, near Vevi. The Australians were tired after a long journey from North Africa and not prepared for the European winter lingering in the Greek mountains. This was an one-sided contest. Although supported by Greek and British units, they were unknowingly taking on the might of Hitler’s invading Panzer divisions and SS Leibstandarte, the elite and fanatical Nazi division originally formed as bodyguards for Hitler. Facing the same troops that had torn through Poland, France and Belgium, the Australian and allied forces were handicapped from the start by inferior armaments, poor communications and virtually no air cover. The dreaded Stuka ground attack aircraft had a field day.
For more than 24 hours the allied forces repulsed the enemy, but by daybreak on the second morning fresh snow lay thick on the hillsides and many soldiers stationed in the hills were suffering from frostbite and unable to operate their weapons effectively. Bombardier Sampson, along with nearly 500 allied personnel, succumbed to overwhelming odds and was captured.
After recovering from a dangerously infected leg, Sampson was sent to Oflag XXI-B at Szubin in Poland. Later, anxious to improve his meagre rations, he successfully applied for a vacant position in the cookhouse at the nearby Stalag Luft III, the POW camp for air force personnel, and so returned to playing golf.
Bombardier W M Sampson (top row, far right) at Oflag XXI-B
The team of O’Brien and Sampson won the foursomes two up with a hole to play, to become Sagan Golf Club champions, and continued to play their restricted form of golf until late 1944.
As the Soviet Army was advancing, Hitler gave the order to evacuate POW camps, but delay the liberation of prisoners. In one of the harshest European winters in memory, more than 10,000 prisoners were evacuated from Stalag Luft III. Forced to march hundreds of kilometres with little food, water or accommodation, the POWs were subjected to a horrendous ordeal. Hundreds died of starvation or disease, scores collapsed through malnutrition and exhaustion.
Bombardier Bill Sampson survived the long march with just the clothes on his back and one other, very precious item. Carefully concealed in his greatcoat pocket was his last, beautifully crafted, leather golf ball.
That ball now lives proudly in the Royal and Ancient Golf Club Museum at St Andrews, Scotland, for all the golf lovers of the world to admire, a legacy to those brave and patriotic men who played the game they loved, come what may.
Footnotes
William Marshall Sampson, Tasmanian, architect, quiet and dedicated family man, died in 1971, aged 52. Although not bitter, he had been worn down and defeated by the demands of a constantly evolving and challenging world. He was survived by his wife Barbara and four children. He lies at rest in Hobart’s Cornelian Bay Cemetery.
The author wishes to acknowledge and thank John Strege for permission to reproduce images from his book When War Played Through (Gotham Books, New York 2005).
Craig Sampson was born in Hobart in 1949 and lived for 16 years in Lower Sandy Bay, an area he describes as “a boy’s paradise”. He attended Waimea Heights Primary and Hutchins School before his family moved to Melbourne.
The author wishes to offer special thanks to Ms Elizabeth Ballard and Dr Alex McLaren for their encouragement and assistance in the research and writing of this story.
