It is 50 summers since Max Faulkner won the Open Championship, an achievement not matched by a fellow Brit until Tony Jacklin won 19 years later at Royal Lytham St Annes. And Jacklin didn’t win the Open in canary-coloured trousers and shoes, shoes especially made for him by Saxone Faulkner did. Faulkner waged a one-man assault on post-war austerity.
“During the war I was in Liverpool teaching air crew cadets,” he says by way, curiously, of explaining his reasons for wearing flamboyant clothes on the golf course. “And the bloody Nazis came over dropping bombs, so I lay down and the wind from a bomb whistled up my trouser leg and lifted me right off the ground. It did something to my ears, and I spent five days in Fazakerley Hospital.

Every morning the nurses brought pretty flowers into the ward, and every night they took them out. It was so grey without those flowers, and I thought ‘if I ever get out of this bloody war I’m going to wear some colours’.”Faulkner turns 85 this month and, much to his annoyance, is suffering from familial tremors, a bad dose of the shakes evidently inherited from his father. We meet at West Chiltington Golf Club in West Sussex, where he is life president, and the barman brings him over a pint of bitter not quite full, which he proceeds to sup like a horse drinking from a trough. When he has downed half of it, the shakes miraculously stop and he picks the glass up by the handle “After a pint and a half I’m cured for five hours,” he says.

“Otherwise I’m wobbling like hell.”Apart from the tremors, he seems in decent nick, his blue eyes as keen as they ever were, his spirit undiminished by age, in fact possibly enhanced. A couple of days earlier, he tells me, he went to see Sam King on his 90th birthday, and while he was there they phoned Charlie Ward, also pushing 90.”We’re the only three still alive from the 1947 Ryder Cup team,” he says “Sam used to smoke 60 a day and has dropped down to 40. Would you bloody believe it?”Obligingly, I shake my head in wonder. Around us, the walls are adorned with photographs, regrettably in black and white, of Faulkner in his pomp. He won the British Grand Slam of Open, Masters and Matchplay championships, which (he proudly points out) Henry Cotton never managed. He finished fifth in the 1949 Open, four shots adrift of the winner, Bobby Locke, and fourth in 1950, another four shots adrift of Locke, before winning in 1951, beating Locke by eight. The neat mathematics of this delights him still.”Locke was my idol, you see Oh Christ, yes Wonderful chap Tough A bomber pilot Bombed Monte Casino Never practised.” Golf or bombing? “Golf.