IT WAS sad to hear of the passing of Ronnie Mandeville, the former West Herts Golf Club professional. Another good man gone, Ronnie was 90 and could remember the days when the club’s professional was not allowed in the club house and members did not stand at the bar for drinks but sat down and rang the table bell for service.

“It was very confusing with so many bells ringing,” he recalled.

A former pupil of Parkgate Road, Ronnie made clubs with hickory shafts back in the days when club professionals were the only source when buying clubs. He was well-loved and respected at the golf club, a man with an unassuming manner, a Buckinghamshire burr and gentle humour.

He told me once about the days when there was a flasher on the course. The lady captain stormed back to the professional shop one morning, breathlessly asserting that she had encountered the flasher on the second fairway. Ronnie jumped into the golf cart and sped up the fairway, inquiring if the lady could describe the man.

She had to admit she did not. “You see, I never looked at his face,” she replied.

Ronnie moved into West Herts after the Land Army girls, who were housed in the club house during the war, had left. In those days sheep grazed over the course. Just imagine that. Nowadays it is hard to keep large carp in municipal ponds because they are in demand for the supper table, let alone sheep wandering over the local golf course.

I documented Ronnie Mandeville’s life, observations and career in a series in my column back in 2003. Some 18 months later, I passed him outside the club and inquired after his health as I went to my car. Coming back to the club house, Ronnie appeared to be waiting for me on the steps.

“You’ll have to excuse an 85-year-old but I know you well,” he said with measured politeness. “However, who are you?”

The next and indeed the last time I saw Ronnie, he recognised me when we bumped into each other at the shops in Baldwins Lane. He asked after our lives in France and revealed he had just had a cancerous tumour removed from his lung. He had given up smoking many years before.

“I asked the surgeon how long it had been there, and he told me six months. Just goes to show,” he said.

He left me in deep reflection, I had smoked my last mini-cigar at West Herts Golf Club on New Year’s Eve 1987 and within a couple of years thought the possibility of lung cancer was receding with every passing year.

Ronnie had ceased teaching by the time I had taken up golf, so he narrowly missed one of the greatest challenges of his life, teaching me to hit the ball straight. By then he had long been established as honorary club member (awarded that in recognition for his services back in 1953).

He appreciated the improvements in golf equipment but wondered as to the cost of continually updating golf courses to provide a challenge. He illustrated the point, seven years ago.

“Years ago the 7th hole at West Herts was a men’s par 5. If I got on the green with a driver and a four-iron, they would talk about it in the bar for a week.

“I’m 83 now and if don’t get on the green with a driver and a six-iron, I would go and see the doctor.”

One of the things I enjoyed about meeting him was that he had an anecdote for everyone and everything Watford. Just an item in this newspaper’s Nostalgia Page would spark him off.

Yes indeed, another good man gone.