Today, five golfers – three men and two women – will mark a century-old tradition when they tee off at Delgany Golf Club on the 100th anniversary of the first staff social of the Representative Church Body (RCB) – the civil service, as it were, of the Church of Ireland.
Since 1926, RCB staff members have descended annually on the north Wicklow club for what is known to them all as Delgany Day and which is held to coincide, more or less, with the meeting of the General Synod (which this year took place last week in Newcastle, Co Down).
The first outing was the brainchild of George Booker Butler, a long-serving secretary and chief officer of the RCB, having joined the staff in 1903 as a junior clerk. Long before the advent of teambuilding through the likes of paintball war games, Butler reckoned a mildly competitive golf singles in Delgany, where he was a member, would enhance staff cohesion and morale at the RCB.
And so it has – for 100 years, unbroken save for the two-year Covid hiatus.
Morning singles is followed by lunch, and then there’s an afternoon of four balls in which seasoned RCB golfers are paired with less experienced – for which, read non-golfing – colleagues, of whom 20 are expected this year.
A degree of jolly chaos is almost guaranteed – even if, according to a history of the day written by RCB archivist Susan Hood, despite the best levelling efforts of the handicappers, “a vast number of golf shots [are] played”.
A cup is up for grabs for the singles competition; since 1942 the contested prize has been the Leslie Butler Trophy, wherein lies a poignant story.
Leslie Butler was George and wife Annie Butler’s younger son. He was born in May 1916, lived in Ranelagh, and after attending The High School joined his father in the RCB as a junior clerk, aged 17, in March 1934.
Susan Hood has researched the story of Leslie, and indeed the whole annual golfing outing. According to her, Leslie was a keen sportsman and, on his third attempt, won the competition in 1937.
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But when the second World War came in 1939, he enlisted in Britain’s Royal Air Force, serving initially as a wireless operator, later as an air gunner and reaching the rank of sergeant.
On June 16th, 1941, he was one of a crew of six on board a Vickers Wellington, a long-range mid-sized bomber dispatched as a ferry flight from RAF Harwell in Berkshire, England, to Malta via Gibraltar. On its final approach to the Mediterranean island it crashed into the sea, for reasons that are unclear – but one version of events is that it stalled on its final approach.
All on board were killed: Sgt John Bolton and Sgt Evan Beattie (both pilots), Petty Officer Donald Cameron (an observer), Sgt Cyril Sanders (like Butler, who also died, a wireless operator-cum-air gunner), and Sgt Francis Drake (an air gunner), whose body was never found.
Sgt Butler was buried in Malta’s Naval Cemetery. His military home base had been on the island, at RAF Kalafrana, from where, in May 1941 just before what was then the 15th annual RCB golfing outing to Delgany, he sent a good luck message to his erstwhile colleagues.
“Should I not be with you in person,” he wrote, “I am certainly with you in spirit and I trust that 1942 will see me in your midst once again. May you have a glorious day with plenty of sunshine – and things! Good luck and all the best for 1941.”
The RCB staff replied: “GOOD LUCK LESLIE goes out from all of us this day – God’s speed.”
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But within a few weeks, he was dead.
Despite the family’s strong Church of Ireland connections (Leslie’s elder brother Arthur was ordained and later served as bishop in Tuam, Killala and Achonry, as well as Connor), there is no record of a memorial service for Leslie, though a cabinet of embroidered liturgical colours was presented by them to the Church of St Philip in Milltown.
There was a death notice in this newspaper, then edited by RM (Bertie) Smyllie, a colourful and mildly eccentric man with a strong attachment to Delgany Golf Club, where was he twice captain and where his portrait hangs to this day.
In 1942, the year he had hoped to be playing golf in Delgany, Leslie Butler’s colleagues in the RCB instituted a prize in his name – the Leslie Butler Trophy. It is a pretty silver cup, sporting the RAF wings insignia and the inscription “in proud and happy memory”.
And, in the spirit of gentle competition, contemporary RCB colleagues will fight over it again today.