Email from Bill Hogg
wbhogg2018@outlook.com

 

Can anyone help us trace Bill McHardy?

 

Dear Colin

 

I trust that you are hale and hearty and still keeping busy with your GolfView website which I log-into regularly for news of what’s happening in the local golf  scene, given down here in leafy Blairgowrie I am somewhat detached from NE golf these days!

 

My reason for thinking about you today is that I am due to meet up next week with a Cameron Blyth who was a member of Murcar Golf Club when I was a junior there in the late 1950’s prior to my joining Royal Aberdeen, mainly for reasons of practicality as being only around 12 years old then in the days before too many folk had access to motor cars, it was rather a long trek out to Murcar from the west-end of Aberdeen via two buses ending with a long walk down the farm road to finally reach the club!

 

Cameron is now aged 87 and I remember him well from back then he would have been in his mid-20’s.    He left Murcar in the early 1960’s when his career in the food supply industry took him down to Dunfermline where he has been ever since and has been a member of the main local club there at the Pitfirrane course, a fine parkland course with nice view over the nearby Firth of Forth.

 

We happened to meet up at his club a couple of months ago for the first time in around 60 years through a mutual connection and had a grand time reminiscing on the characters of the day then at Murcar such as Jack Booth, “Chapper” Thomson (Muriel’s father), Bill Connon among many others incl the club pro Bill McHardy, a most promising tour player who qualified for the Open a couple of times and had some further success locally but never progressed quite as far as his talents deserved .   

 

As well documented in the excellent Murcar Centenary book published in 2009, Bill eventually left Murcar in 1959 to further his career as a club pro, moving first to Brough and then to Hayling Island on the south coast before then moving overseas to the Middle East, then the Philippines before ending up in Queensland, Australia.

 

My query to you is if you have any way of finding out if Bill McHardy is still hopefully alive and well in Australia as he would now be aged 84 and despite various searches on-line, I can find no information on his whereabouts since 2009?   

 

Any information would be appreciated so that Cameron and I can resume our reminisces of happy times spent at Murcar back in those now far-off days!

  

Bill Hogg