Herb’s Royal Gloves
VIEWPOINT
by Eldon Griffiths
What does a pair of black leather gloves belonging to an English nobleman have to do with a 95-year-old Orange County feed merchant who not long ago fell off the roof of his garage, badly bruising his head and contusing his nonagenarian spine?
The short answer is golf, which is the only one of a raft of New Year resolutions that I’m hoping to pursue seriously in 2004.
The 95-year-old is my neighbor in South County, Herb Nootbaar, who’s still playing his age at El Niguel Country Club. The gloves were made in Scotland for Nigel, the Sixth Baron Wolverton, who lived in a 29-bedroom mansion built by the original Marquis of Queensberry in the Bury St. Edmunds constituency I represented for 25 years in the House of Commons.
Nigel Wolverton was descended from a family named Glen who made their fortune as East Indian spice merchants and slave traders to Virginia (before the Royal Navy suppressed this). Their bank, William Glen’s, financed the canals that were built across England in the mid-l8th century and two of the world’s first railways, the London Midland & Scottish line, now the backbone of the British rail system, and the Metropolitan line, now underground as part of the London subway system.
One of the early Glyns was elected as a Member of Parliament in the County of Dorset, where he built one of England’s most imposing stately homes on a 4,000-acre estate. His services to Great Britain were recognized when Queen Victoria conferred on him the title of Baron Wolverton, named for a junction where his company built railway coaches.
Successive Lords Wolverton were soldiers, investors and sportsmen who wagered heavily on bare-fist boxing matches, shot big game in Africa and joined the tea magnate, Sir Thomas Lipton, in founding the Americas Cup yacht race.
They also,and here’s the first clue about how those golf gloves ended up in Orange County,raced their horses on the springy turf at Newmarket, a small town in the county of Suffolk made famous by two merry monarchs, King Charles II in the l660s and King Edward Vll in the early l900s, who kept their mistresses, as well as their racehorses, there. To amuse himself between race meetings, Freddie, the fifth Lord Wolverton joined 18 other golfers in founding one of the England’s earliest golf courses alongside the racetrack.
Nigel Wolverton,stay with me, I’m getting there,grew up in Queensberry House. When World War II broke out, he volunteered for the British army. There were gasps of surprise when the young man who had just inherited the title of Sixth Lord Wolverton appeared in the House of Lords wearing the uniform of a lance corporal, the first time that a non-commissioned officer took his place in that august body.
Promoted to captain, Lord Wolverton was sent to the United States to help procure the
big guns that Britain imported from America before the U.S. entered the war.
While in Washington he became an admirer and friend of this country. We got to know one another when I was elected as M.P. for a constituency that included Newmarket, which by then was home to 27,000 U.S. airmen serving at the bases from which President Reagan launched the U.S. raid on Libya in l987 (which Wolverton and I strongly backed).
Many times when I was invited to formal dinners at Queensberry House, I would borrow one of his Lordship’s half dozen tuxedos. They weren’t the greatest fit,and that’s the second clue as to why his gloves ended up with Herb Nootbaar. For the sixth baron was a giant, 6 feet 6inches tall. His hands were the size of spades and needed gloves specially made to fit them.
For Lord Wolverton, like his father, was a golfer. As life president of the royal Newmarket links club, he frequently urged me to play there, but I never did. Then, when Wolverton died, he left me his golf clubs, custom-made for a man of his size. Again, I never used them. Instead they were thrown into a crate with the other impedimenta that accompanied Betty and me when we moved to OC in the late 1980s.
One day, I showed those dusty old clubs to Herb Nootbaar. In the pocket of the golf bag he found a crumpled-up ball of black leather: Lord Wolverton’s gloves. Not just a left one, which is all most golfers wear but a pair, kept supple and pristine by whale oil!
Those gloves fit Herb Nootbaar perfectly. Because Herb, too, is a giant, 6 feet 6 inches tall with spade-sized hands.
Herb has now fully recovered from that l8-foot fall off his garage. Teeing off in New Year matches, he’s hoping,nay intending,once again to shoot his age. Chances are that he’ll succeed, because those magic gloves already have brought old Herb good luck. Two days before his 95th birthday, he amazingly passed his driving test and was issued a new driver’s license that will keep him on the road until he’s 101!
Perhaps that will be the time, November 2008, to urge Queen Elizabeth to make him Lord Nootbaar of Orange County! Looking down from the golfers’ big bunker in which all of us one day must lie, the Sixth Baron Wolverton would, I’m sure, be one of the first to cry, “Aye aye.” Happy 2004.
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Re Michael Stockstill’s Dec. 15 letter:
Mr. Stockstill may have been inspired by JFK (as I was at the time) but he misses the point of my column, which was to contrast the media’s treatment of two very different celebs, Michael Jackson and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As for the Windsors, no family anywhere is the subject of so much media gossip, speculation and scandal mongering as the British royals. If Kennedy’s private life had received even a tenth of the scrutiny that’s regularly applied to Prince Charles, the halo ’round JFK’s memory would look more tarnished. More like Bill Clinton’s, perhaps.
Griffiths, a resident of Laguna Niguel, is an author, lecturer, journalist and former member of the British House of Commons.
