Wethered only won 9 titles in her career but a quite simply outrageous win ratio means that she is perhaps the most talented female golfer ever...

She may have played in tweed skirts, surgical stockings and stays made from whalebones but Joyce Wethered was quite possibly the best woman golfer who ever lived, and in the words of Bobby Jones, the best golfer ever. A glittering career didn’t seem likely, though, when she turned up at Sheringham in 1920 for her debut appearance in the English Women’s – sorry ‘Ladies’ Championship at the age of 18. She was third choice for her county and only went to keep her friend, Molly Griffiths, company but then thought ‘What the heck’ (or its genteel, 1920s equivalent) and decided to enter.

She reached the final only to be faced with the most formidable woman golfer of the times, ‘Cecil’ (Cecilia) Leitch and it was no surprise when Leitch went six up with 16 to play. But Wethered won, and in the process showed her fiendish concentration – she was congratulated for putting out on the 17th despite the apparent distraction of an express roaring past and replied: ‘Train? What train?’

Joyce liked the English Amateur so much that she won it for the next four years (by the margins of 12&11, 7&6 and 8&7 twice), and then never competed in it again. She also thrived in the more international, and therefore more difficult, British Amateur and won it three times in five years. On the occasions she did not win, she was beaten finalist and semi-finalist and during that half-decade period, those two matches were the only losses she suffered.
And just like that, in 1925 at the age of 23, she retired from competition and apparently played very little golf – but she was to be lured back for one last finale. It was announced that the 1929 Ladies British Amateur would be held at St Andrews, somewhere Joyce had always wanted to play. Not only that, but America had now produced its own formidable woman golfer, Glenna Collette. Joyce looked understandably rusty in the early rounds,. Having played no serious competitive golf for four years, but fought through to face the American in the final. After nine holes she was five down but applied her famed relentless accuracy to claw back hole after hole until she eventually triumphed 3&1.

Her family were then bankrupted by the Wall Street crash and Joyce went to work at Fortnum and Mason selling golf equipment, and thereby losing her amateur status. She recovered though, and in 1937, through marriage, became Lady Heathcote-Amory.