📍Grouville, Jersey JE3, Channel Islands
1870 – 1890“I was born in Grouville, on the east coast of Jersey, in May 1870, one of eight children of Philip Vardon, a gardener, and his French-born wife. Our cottage stood near Grouville Common, by the sea, and when I was about seven some English visitors laid out a golf course across the common, which became the Royal Jersey Golf Club. All the boys of the neighbourhood were enticed into carrying their clubs, and that was my first introduction to the game. We were poor, and my father did not encourage golf. My brothers and I made our own clubs from blackthorn branches and played with marbles, laying out a few rough holes of our own. At twelve I left school, and at thirteen I became an apprentice gardener, and for years I played only occasionally, on holidays. Yet the boys of Grouville, my brother Tom and our neighbour Ted Ray among them, became known as the Jersey School of golfers. When I was twenty, Tom, who had gone to England as a professional, wrote to say what money could be made, and in the spring of 1890 I left the island to become greenkeeper at Studley Royal, in Yorkshire. I won the Open Championship six times, a record still unbeaten, and the US Open in 1900. The overlapping grip I popularised is now called the Vardon grip, used by most golfers in the world. Grouville and the Royal Jersey Golf Club remember me as the island's most famous son.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today