Pam Barton of England occupies the sliver of golf history in the interval after Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen among men, and Glenna Collett Vare and Joyce Wethered among women, departed or were departing the scene, while Byron Nelson, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Patty Berg were in their nascent stages.
From 1936 to 1939, Barton arguably was the best female golfer in the world, a true international at a time when few men or women traveled abroad in search of titles. She won three of what were then the women’s majors (the British Ladies Amateur in 1936 and 1939, and the 1936 U.S. Women’s Amateur). Barton’s death aboard a Royal Air Force Tiger Moth on November 13, 1943, at age 26 deprived her of a probable hall-of-fame career, and deprived golf of a global star in the postwar years, when women’s professional golf was finding its footing.
A week after Barton’s death, The Observer paid homage to the “sturdy, short, trim-balanced figure (a feminine type of the Hagen-Jones stature), the flash of sunlight on the reddish-brown hair.” Decades later, another idyllic snapshot appeared. “A merry young woman with a wide smile, her winning ways were universally admired,” is how the late Rhonda Glenn of the United States Golf Association described Barton in a 2010 profile, noting that during the 1936 U.S. Amateur final, “Barton and a few friends sang songs to ease the tension as they trudged down the fairways.”
However sunny these depictions, Barton was much more than a pretty English lass who happily wandered golf courses until meeting a tragic end. Her story is much more complicated, and interesting. Her death was not (as widely assumed) heroic, but rather was a result of a dalliance with a British pilot. Also, Barton was a young woman who wanted to make money from golf, an unpardonable sin in 1937 but the norm after the war.
Pamela Espeut Barton was born on March 4, 1917 in London, the daughter of Henry Charles Johnston Barton, a tea merchant, and Ethel Maude Barton. She was raised in the upper-middle-class neighborhood of Barnes. Pamela and sister Patricia Mervyn Barton (older by two years) went to school in Holland Park. When Pam was 12, she and Pat went for a lesson with J.H. Taylor, the five-time winner of the Open Championship (after both sisters achieved local prominence, Pat did a great favor to copy editors everywhere by using her middle name for the rest of her life). As great a golfer as Taylor was, the lesson was unsuccessful. “He hadn’t a clue how to teach,” said Mervyn (who died in 2000) much later.
The girls were referred to Archie Compston, with much better results. Compston was not only a formidable golfer in his own right (finishing second to Jim Barnes at the 1925 Open Championship, and famously beating Hagen, 18 and 17, in a scheduled 72-hole challenge match in 1928), he was an intimidating presence. He stood 6 feet 6 inches and possessed a booming voice. “He had us hitting balls until we were flat on our faces,” Mervyn said.
The lessons with Compston bore fruit. In September 1931, Pam made her first appearance in the British Girls Amateur Championship at Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire (where the match in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger was filmed). At 14, she was the youngest in the field and lost her first match on the 20th hole. The next year, she advanced to the quarterfinals.
Pam was 5 feet 5 inches, with a stocky frame, freckled and with auburn hair. As an adolescent, she could outdrive most women (at the time, a 200-yard drive for a woman would have been long). She improved all aspects of her game. In June 1933, Eleanor Helme, the first prominent female golf writer, declared of Barton: “If she meets with the right admixture of success and failure, and keeps her head steady through both, within the next three years she should, beyond doubt, reach the very first flight.” Later that year, in the third round of the Girls Amateur, 16-year-old Barton faced a familiar foe: Mervyn. Beating her older sister on the 19th hole was a bittersweet experience that reduced Pam to tears. She lost in the semifinals to eventual champion Jessie Anderson of Scotland (later three-time Ladies Amateur champion, twice under her married name Jessie Valentine).
Barton reached “the first flight” faster than Helme predicted. In May 1934 – at age 17 – Barton lost to Scotland’s Helen Holm in the final of the British Ladies Championship. In July, Barton won the French Women’s Open Golf Championship at Le Touquet. As a reward, Barton was named to the Great Britain and Ireland Curtis Cup team. In September, Barton and her teammates crossed the Atlantic on the ocean liner The Duchess of York, first stopping in Toronto to play matches against Canada before continuing by train to Washington, D.C.
The 1934 Curtis Cup was hosted by the leafy Chevy Chase Club in Maryland, just across the District of Columbia line. Barton became an instant hit in America. The Washington Evening Star’s W.R. McCallum raved about Barton, “whose swing is just about as near a mechanical thing as we have ever seen.” Playing in the first foursomes match in a rainstorm on the opening day, Barton and her partner, Molly Gourlay, halved Virginia Van Wie (who recently had won her third consecutive U.S. Women’s Amateur championship) and Charlotte Glutting.
“Pam Barton was the gallery’s favorite,” the Washington Daily News observed. “The 17-year-old British star … drew all the ohs and ahs from the bystanders… Socking a nice ball far down the fairway, the redhead turned and mopped her eyes …” However, the next day, Barton was no match for Leona Cheney, losing, 7 and 5, in singles as the United States won the competition, 6½-2½.
In 1935, Barton again advanced to the final of the Ladies Championship, at Royal County Down in Northern Ireland. Once more, she faced Mervyn in the semifinal. Mervyn stood 5-down with six to go, when she won the next four holes to reduce the deficit to one. On the 17th hole, Mervyn drove into a bunker and Pam was safely in the fairway. After taking three shots to extricate herself, only to land in another bunker, Mervyn conceded the match.
The 36-hole final against Wanda Morgan of England brought Barton unwanted attention. Right before the match, she fired her young caddie, George Murphy, who had carried her bag all week, without giving any reason. This caused a revolt in the caddie yard. About 30 of Murphy’s friends followed the match and expressed conspicuous delight with any shot that advantaged Morgan. After 18 holes, Morgan led, 2-up, and the caddies continued their loud demonstration outside the clubhouse.
In a peacemaking effort, Doris Clark, the leader of the governing Ladies’ Golf Union, paid Murphy what he would have received had he worked, and addressed the assembled caddies. “You have put Miss Barton off her game, and I want you to be sporting and stop this business,” Clark said. “The caddie has been given his money for the game, and he is satisfied.” She appealed to Murphy to use his influence. “What the other chaps do is no business of mine, but I am satisfied now that I have got my six shillings,” Murphy said. Irish stalwart Pat Walker walked among the caddies. “Come on, like Irishmen, be good sports,” she implored the caddies. There was no further commotion during the second 18, and Morgan closed out the match, 3 and 2. Afterwards, Barton told a reporter that she was not affected by the “barracking.”
In late August, while Vare was beating Berg in the final to win her sixth U.S. Women’s Amateur, Barton joined four other British women Down Under to compete in the Australian Women’s Amateur. One journalist marveled at her length but criticized her tendency to cut shots. “She plays the ball right forward off the left toe, and at the address has the left shoulder and left hip pointing away out left,” stated an Australian piece written under the pen name Back Spin. “Honestly, I’m surprised that a girl who has spent two hours a day under the expert eye of Archie Compston for months at a time should be guilty of such an elementary error.”
Despite her quirky swing, in qualifying Barton set a women’s course record of 78 at Royal Melbourne. She advanced to the quarterfinal before losing on the 23rd hole to Australian Betty Nankivell.
This set Barton up for her career year of 1936, when she was all of 19. She worked with Compston to eradicate a loop in her swing that caused shots to stray from the intended mark. In early May, Barton played the Curtis Cup again, at Gleneagles in Scotland. She lost a close match to Glutting as the United States and Britain halved, 4½-4½. Later in May, every member of the American Curtis Cup team (including Vare and Berg) joined Barton at Southport for the Ladies Championship, in an attempt to take the title to America for the first time. In the first round, Vare suffered a shocking loss to Glutting, while Barton narrowly won her match. The next day, Barton won easily while Berg was upset.
By the semifinals, all of the Americans had been defeated. Barton breezed through her semifinal to advance to the final of the Ladies Championship for the third straight year. Her opponent was 24-year-old Bridget Newell, from Derbyshire in the Midlands, and with an interesting background. The daughter of a judge, Newell was an excellent golfer (she was named to the 1936 Curtis Cup team but did not play). She had a bookish demeanor and in fact several years earlier had passed the Oxford entrance examination but declined to attend. Instead, Newell followed in her father’s footsteps and became a barrister and the youngest magistrate in England (in June 1937 she became ill at a tournament in Turnberry just before the Ladies Championship and died).
On a chilly, windy day, Newell was no match for Barton, who was 3-up after 18 holes. Early in the second round, Barton lost her cool and snapped at a movie camera operator, whose device made a loud sound as she was attempting to hit a bunker shot. Barton lost the hole but by the 28th hole her lead was comfortable enough to generously concede Newell’s difficult short putt for a halve. Barton closed out the match on the 31st hole to win her first Ladies Championship.
In July, Barton crossed the English Channel to try to win a second French championship, at La Boulie. She came up just short, advancing to the final before losing to Jessie Anderson on the 37th hole.
As a result of competing against each other in two Curtis Cups, Barton and Charlotte Glutting had become close friends. Glutting urged Barton to travel to America for the 1936 U.S. Women’s Amateur at Canoe Brook Country Club (South Course) in Summit, New Jersey. Older than Barton by seven years, Glutting lived with her parents in nearby South Orange and invited Barton to be their guest. Barton had enjoyed her 1934 trip to America and accepted the challenge, the only British woman to enter. No non-American had won the title since England’s Gladys Ravenscroft beat Marion Hollins in the 1913 final.
Barton’s desire to hold the British and American titles simultaneously is evidenced by her departure from London more than three weeks before the start of the tournament. In Southampton, Barton boarded the M.V. Britannic and she arrived in New York on September 13. She ventured to Long Island to join the gallery at the men’s U.S. Amateur at Garden City Golf Club (won by John Fischer), playing in her mind each shot she observed. Upon arriving in New Jersey, Barton shot 78 in a practice round at Canoe Brook, three better than the women’s competitive record held by Glutting.
Soon after her loss in the British Amateur, Vare joined Van Wie, the 1932-1934 U.S. champion, in retirement. Hence, the press considered Barton and Berg the favorites. Both won their first two matches, as did Glutting. However, Berg and Glutting were eliminated in the third round. Barton won her quarterfinal match easily. In the semifinal, she faced 22-year-old Marion Miley. Like Barton, Miley would suffer an untimely, tragic death when she and her mother were murdered in 1941 during a nighttime burglary in their apartment at a country club in Lexington, Kentucky. Barton took the first two holes with birdies and never trailed, winning, 3 and 1.
Barton’s opponent in the final was the formidable 29-year-old Maureen Orcutt. A patrician Mayflower descendant who lived in nearby Englewood, Orcutt lost in the final of the 1927 U.S. Women’s Amateur and played on four Curtis Cup teams. She also won 10 Metropolitan Amateur championships from 1926 to 1968, the last at age 61. All the while, Orcutt also was a golf journalist for numerous publications, including The New York Times from 1937 to 1972 (she died in 2007 at age 99).
On October 3, 1936 – while the New York Giants beat the Yankees in Game 3 of the Subway Series at Yankee Stadium – 4,000 attended the final. Barton was 2-down after 11 holes of the morning round before squaring the match on the 17th. On the par-5 18th, she hit a poor third shot, but then chipped in from 47 feet for a birdie to take the lead. In the afternoon, the outcome was never in doubt. Barton birdied the first two holes and was 6-up after 30 holes, before closing out the match by sinking a 30-foot birdie on the 15th hole to win, 4 and 3. She became the first woman to win the American and British titles in the same year since Dorothy Campell in 1909. Only two later accomplished the same feat, none since Kelli Kuehne in 1996.
As momentous as 1936 was for Barton, 1937 was disastrous. It started in March when a book, “A Stroke a Hole,” was published under her name. It was part of the Blackie’s Sports Series, which offered instructional books about lawn tennis, bowling and other sports. The book had a mutoscope-like feature where, by flicking the pages, the reader could see Barton’s golf swing in motion.
Barton was 20 years old and not of the ladies-who-lunch crowd to whom the governing R&A catered. At the time, there was no outlet for women to play golf professionally, other than in scattered exhibitions. In entering into the venture, Barton ignored that earlier the R&A ruled four-time Ladies Amateur champion Wethered and three-time champion Enid Wilson forfeited their amateur status after profiting from books (neither contested the ruling, and both retired from competition).
Predictably, Barton received a letter from the R&A informing she would lose her amateur status if she received remuneration for the book. She had understood the venture was permissible under amateur rules. “The whole thing has taken me by surprise, and I am still unsure what course to pursue,” she said. In September, Barton reported she had been “inundated with requests” to give the proceeds to charity, “but I shall most probably take the money myself.”
While the matter was under advisement (during which Barton did not receive royalties), things did not go any better on the golf course. In June, she went to Turnberry to defend her Ladies Championship title. On the ninth hole of her third-round match against Holm, Barton was injured while hitting a brassie shot. She had a noticeable limp thereafter and lost, 5 and 3.
The stress of the book debacle impacted Barton. “Two months ago Miss Barton suffered from nervous breakdown,” The Sydney Morning Herald reported in September, “which accounts, perhaps, for losing the title of British champion at Turnberry in June, and her defeat in the French championships in July.” The article also noted Barton was suffering from appendicitis. She did not return to America to defend her title.
Early in 1938, Barton announced she would forgo receiving money from the book in order to maintain her amateur status. Roland Allen of the Evening Standard wrote: “If Miss Pamela Barton wrote a thriller, a novel, a travel book or a history of the wild life in Richmond Old Deer Park in a dozen volumes she could take the money – which is the only urge for most of us to write books – and make her choice of the golf championships in which she played. She has written a book on golf. She must give whatever profit there is to charity or agree to be labelled as a professional golfer. She has decided to give the money away. It is queer that the amateur definition should be strictest in the game where there is the least necessity for it. There is no money to be made as a golf sham amateur in Great Britain. There is not enough money.”
Barton had a quiet year in 1938. In May, she lost to Ireland’s Clarrie Tiernan in the third round of the Ladies Championship, 5 and 3. In early June, she lost in the final of the French Open to Simone de la Chaume, wife of tennis and fashion icon René Lacoste, 2 and 1. In July, Barton gave up her place on the Curtis Cup team to attend Mervyn’s wedding, and passed on the U.S. Amateur, too. But in late September she had the best nine of her career at the English Women’s Championship. In the third round, on the first green she discovered her putter was not in her bag. Using a 2-iron to putt, Barton bogeyed the first but birdied the second. After her putter was delivered, she eagled twice and was 7-up on her opponent at the turn before winning, 8 and 7. However, Barton lost the next day on the third extra hole.
In June 1939, only 70 women entered the British Ladies Amateur at Royal Portrush, the smallest field in years. Only one was not from Great Britain or Ireland. “World events, the urge for national service, and considerations of distance and travel, are the chief factors which have operated against a bigger and more cosmopolitan gathering,” reported the June 11 edition of The Observer.
After defending champion Holm withdrew due to a family illness, Barton became the favorite. She advanced to the final without serious challenge. None of her first four matches made it to the 18th hole, and only one lasted beyond the 15th. In the final, she drew Jean Marks of Ireland, who had beaten her more heralded countrywoman Tiernan in the semifinal. Barton was 2-up after the morning round and increased her lead to 3-up after 29 holes. Marks rallied, winning the 30th and after that Barton went 6-4-6 to narrow her lead to 1-up. However, Barton won the 34th and halved the 35th to win her second Ladies Championship.
On July 25, a photo of Barton appeared in English newspapers showing her wearing a Brodie helmet while taking part in exercises with the Volunteer Ambulance Service, of which she was attached to a London station. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain recently had reaffirmed that Great Britain would intervene if German troops invaded Poland. Despite the near-certainty of war, Barton sailed July 28 from Glasgow to attempt a second amateur double at Wee Burn Club in Darien, Connecticut.
Barton shot a 4-under-par 70 in a practice round at Wee Burn on August 15. After defending champion Berg withdrew while recovering from an appendectomy, Barton was installed as the favorite. In the first round, Barton putted poorly but still won, 4 and 2. In the second round, her opponent, Ellamae Williams of Chicago, leading by one after 17 holes, drove out of bounds on the 18th hole to force extra holes. Barton won with a birdie on the 19th to set up a match with her old friend Glutting. Again, Barton benefited from her opponent’s unforced error on the 18th.. With a chance to win, Glutting hit two good shots on the par-5 before hitting into a bunker, sending the match to the 19th hole. This time, Barton’s luck ran out. After Glutting drove up against a stone wall, she chipped out and hit a 6-iron to within 2 feet. Barton missed a 12-footer for a par to lose what would be her final match in a major competition.
Great Britain already was in a state of war when Barton returned to England. She took her post with the ambulance corps in Fulham, London. During the so-called Phoney War, her duties consisted mostly of participating in drills.
On May 10, 1940, the war heated up as German troops marched into the Low Countries and Winston Churchill was installed as prime minister of Great Britain. The British Open and Amateur championships, the English Football League, and most top sporting competitions were suspended or sharply curtailed for the duration of the war. However, limited sport continued for its morale-boosting value. On August 17, 1940, during the height of the Battle of Britain, when German bombers were undertaking night raids on her home soil, Barton played in a War Relief Fund mixed foursome charity match in Fulwell with Enid Wilson, one of a number of such exhibitions to which she gave her time.
Early in 1941, after recovering from a minor injury suffered in an accident while driving an ambulance during the London Blitz, Barton joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was commissioned as a wireless operator. “There is a golf course near, but Pam is not often seen there,” reported a September 1941 dispatch. “She is too busy.”
In 1943, Barton was stationed at RAF Manston in the northeast of Kent. Barton’s love life had been a blank slate, but it is now known she had become romantically involved with Angus Ruffhead, a dashing fighter pilot.
On the morning of September 1, 1943, Joan McDonald, an 18-year-old member of the WAAF, was killed in nearby Westgate-on-the-Sea after being thrown from the RAF truck in which she was riding from her billet. Five other young women were injured. Flight Officer Barton identified McDonald. At the inquest into McDonald’s death, Barton lamented, “No seats were provided for the girls. They either had to sit on the floor of the lorry or stand.”
Only two months later, Barton would meet her own tragic end. On November 12, 1943, she and her beau, Ruffhead, attended a dance at the RAF base in Detling. The next morning, without authorization, Barton and Ruffhead boarded a Tiger Moth for the short flight to Manston, where Barton was scheduled for duty. Due to pilot error on Ruffhead’s part, the plane crashed into a petrol tank during takeoff. Barton died instantly. Ruffhead survived but was killed in action over France on January 6, 1944.
On November 16, 1943, Barton was buried with full military honors at St. John’s Cemetery in the seaside town of Margate in Kent. All of Great Britain mourned.
Barton would have been 29 in 1946, when championship golf returned after the end of the war. That year, the first U.S. Women’s Open was held in Spokane, Washington. American Patty Berg, who was one year younger than Barton, also served in uniform and was a professional when she won the inaugural Open. Had she survived the war, Barton almost certainly would have turned pro and established a foothold in the U.S., where she loved to compete and where she was widely admired. When the LPGA was formed in 1950, all 13 of the founders were Americans. Zaharias (who was six years older than Barton) and Berg dominated in the LPGA’s early days until Zaharias was stricken with cancer. Barton would have added an international presence and hastened the development of women’s pro golf.
Instead, Pam Barton will forever be remembered as a young amateur. Her legacy is the Pam Barton Memorial Salver, awarded yearly to the winner of the British Ladies Amateur Championship.