Joe McCartney (Fortwilliam, Ormeau, Holywood and Cliftonville)

"Big Joe", as he was commonly known was one of the longer hitters on the Irish professional circuit in the thirties and forties. Born c. 1907 he started his golf as an assistant to Charles Pope at the Fortwilliam Golf Club in County Antrim before joining Ormeau Golf Club as a resident professional in 1930.

As far back as 1927, the then twenty-year old Fortwilliam player, was challenging for the Ulster Professional Championship at Lisburn, when in a surprise upset in the semi-final he beat Harry Hamill (Ormeau) to set up a final match against Syd Fairweather, but lost comprehensively by 5 & 4. The format for the Championship was a thirty-six-hole qualifier with the four top players competing for the title in a matchplay format.

In 1930 he retained the Ulster Professional title at Belvoir Park, which he had won the previous year and also won the Irish Professional Championship at the Castle Golf Club with rounds of 74, 74, 73, 70; the final round breaking the course record. Despite this he had a poor showing in the Irish Open at Royal Portrush that year. However, these wins together with a victory in the Robinson Cup, a professional and amateur competition played off scratch, secured his place as outstanding golfer for 1930.

 

Following his victory at the Castle Golf Club the scribes were already heralding this new prodigy as;
"a master of every golfing stroke………his driving is prodigious and seldom off the line………a worthy successor of Michael Moran; for no better golf has been played in the Irish Professional Championship since the little man from Dollymount passed away in the battlefields of France."

Despite qualifying for the 1931 Open Championship at Carnoustie in 1931, he failed to make the halfway cut due to some poor driving. However, McCartney again returned to form at the Irish Professional Championship ("IPC") being played at Portstewart when in the first round he was one of the parties posting a course record 70, a score which was lowered the following day by Hughie McNeill, the Portrush player, with a 69. Not to be outdone McCartney raised the bar by lowering the record to 68 and by doing so equalled McNeill's score for the four rounds. The thirty-six-hole play-off saw the two players still inseparable after eighteen but by the final hole McCartney had a three-stroke lead by the final hole with the difference down to McNeill's poor putting. McCartney won £25 for this victory and with hotel and travel expenses he came away with £22, his biggest paycheck to date.

Extract: Portstewart Golf Club 1894-1994 (Bill Rodgers)

In the Ulster Championship in 1932 he was to beat John McKenna (Armagh) by 6 & 5 for his third victory: McKenna playing out of Armagh where he was assistant to James McKenna one of the pioneers of early professional golf was later to join the Douglas Golf Club and was together with Bradshaw and Daly considered to be the best of the post-war crop of professional golfers in Ireland. That year McCartney was placed third in the IPC at Dollymount down mainly to taking too much off the eleventh costing him three strokes which in the end was the difference between him and the eventual winner Hughie McNeill. The Irish Open at Cork was probably his most successful challenge for the title, finishing fourth; even Henry Cotton was five shots further back.

In the IPC at Castlerock GC in 1933 McCartney finished fourth behind James Adam, the Royal County Down player, and at the Irish Open at Malone GC finished fourth again. McCartney took his fourth Ulster Professional Championship played at the Royal Belfast Golf Club again by a margin of 6 & 5 against J. Hamill (Bangor).

By 1934 the depression was affecting the Ormeau Golf Club and they had to make cut-backs, according to their centenary book, the cutbacks included the amalgamation of the house steward's and professional role. The upshot of this was both parties in those jobs left. McCartney took up a position at Holywood, County Down. Joe didn't play in the IPC in 1934 and joined McNeill and Fred Smyth who were absent through illness. In 1935 McCartney returned to the championship at Belvoir Park and displayed a return to form when he was leading at the halfway mark but some dire putting left him in fourth place when the championship ended.

In 1936 a headline appeared: A 59 by J McCartney at Holywood which consisted of nine threes and two twos covering the second nine in only twenty-seven strokes. This was an ominous sign before the IPC was to be played in Galway the following month. McCartney won his third and final IPC title at Galway Golf Club in 1936 with rounds of 71:71:70:69 by four strokes from P.J. Mahon who went on to win three consecutive titles between 1937 and 1939. After this followed the Daly/Bradshaw era.

McCartney didn't play in the Irish Open Championship in 1934. In 1935 he shot 309, eighteen shots behind the eventual winner Ernest Whitcombe. Big Joe didn't play in the Irish Open in 1936 or 1938 and in 1937 he finished joint seventeenth on 298, fourteen shots behind eventual winner Bert Gadd.

In 1937 the IPC was played at Portmarnock, which was playing more than 7,000 yards and, according to Irish Golf, proved too severe a test for many. Joe finished joint second with scores of 71:76:86:75 behind P.J. Mahon who had scores of 71:74:78:75, a ten stroke margin between first and second. McCartney's third round seems to have been his undoing.

In the 1939 season Syd Fairweather (Malone) was to be Big Joe's nemesis as he pipped him by four strokes in the Ulster Professional Championship at Malone with Daly in third place and the potentially more lucrative qualifying place for the £2,000 tournament. The latter was as a result of a defeat by one stroke in a four-hole play-off at Lisburn. McCartney recorded a victory that year in the Hermitage Amateur-Professional foursomes when he partnered C J McMullan (Knock) defeating the Royal Dublin pairing of P.J. Mahon and John McLaughlin. During the event McCartney displayed some prodigious driving to secure the final 4 & 2 victory. He was well down the field in the IPC for 1939.

For the next few years McCartney seems to have limited his competitive play and in many if not all cases didn't enter for the PGA or Ulster Professional championships.

In the 1943 IPC, Bradshaw went down to the wire before securing the title at Dun Laoghaire. In the final round of the IPC McCartney was on fire or as "JP" would later write: "was treating the big gallery to a most entertaining display of golfing fireworks". He started his round 3,4,3 and by the sixteenth was five under fours alas a six at the seventeenth undid all the good work and a wipe-your-feet-at-the-hole putt on the last meant he failed to take Bradshaw into a play-off. Bradshaw scored 67,74,65,71 to McCartney's 68,70,70,70 and a fourth IPC slipped through his fingers.

In 1944 at Hermitage he was placed fourth, as an unattached player, in the IPC behind the "usual suspects" (Daly, Bradshaw and McKenna). In 1945 he was placed fifth with J McLachlan prising his way into the inner sanctum of the usual suspects.

From 1944 to 1946 he was unattached after leaving Holywood, but around May 1946 he was engaged as the resident professional at Cliftonville. By this time Daly, Bradshaw and McKenna had taken over as the leading golfers in Ireland. In the same year, Daly beat McCartney by 2 & 1 in the semi-final of the Ulster Professional Championship and managed only joint eleventh in the Irish Open Championship, twenty-two strokes behind Daly who was resident professional at Balmoral at the time. McCartney later finished seventh in the Irish Professional Championship, again behind Daly this time by fourteen strokes at Clandeboye Golf Club.

The beginning of the 1946 season saw McCartney and Daly lock horns in a titanic struggle for the Hoey Cup. Eoin McQuillan in his book, The Fred Daly Story, considered McCartney Daly's "strongest" rival in the Northern events and recalls the events of this thirty-six hole event which continued for a further forty holes (i.e. seventy-six holes in all) before a winner could be decided. In order for Daly to get into a play-off with McCartney in the first instance he needed to shoot a course record sixty-seven over the Fortwilliam course, an old hunting ground for McCartney. Fading light meant the finale was delayed until later in the week; when the game resumed it attracted a huge crowd for what was in effect a provincial event. In the end Daly won by two strokes but according to McQuillan: "The Final 18 holes is one of Fred's more vivid memories" probably in no small part for the revelry which followed the event.

In 1946 the Irish Dunlop £500 tournament at the Castle Golf Club was the biggest prize-money event that had taken place in Ireland at the time and represented a very lucrative season finale if you could take that the winner's purse home. McCartney got out of the blocks quickly by shooting a course record 69 (five under par) but a 75 in the afternoon left him two shots behind McKenna and Daly. The Irish Times wrote of his round: "McCartney, who, in his usual serene manner, amounting almost to nonchalance, went out in 38… and back in 31", the back nine consisting of five birdies. In the end he couldn't keep up the level achieved in the first round and a 77 and 75 for the final two rounds left him in fourth place behind the "usual suspects". The following year the tournament was a matchplay affair where he lost in the third round to McKenna in a closely fought match.

1947 wasn't all bad news for McCartney who in the month of August breached a fourteen-year gap by winning the Ulster Professional Championship at Belvoir Park and went on to take the Willie Nolan Memorial Cup at Newlands. In the latter event he showed a clean pair of heels to both Bradshaw and McKenna.

For the remaining years into the mid-50s McCartney would remain tantalisingly close to the top echelons of Irish golf but lacked the consistency of Daly or Bradshaw.

 

Photos courtesy of Barrie Robinson

John Letters was a Glasgow based golf club manufacturer who started making clubs as far back as 1918. The Company became an acknowledged leader in the their field in the late thirties and after the post-war era, when, with the help of Fred Daly in 1948 they developed their famous "Master Model" range. It wasn't uncommon for the hard-working Letters to make to trips to Belfast to meet the leading professionals and discuss developments in the sports equipment. It was uncommon for the Company to develop a "personal model" for a professional to their own specifications and for their own use. In all likelihood the clubs pictured above are either a prototype or a production model to McCartney's own specifications with the letters above the "Personal Model" stamp denoting the owner's initials.