GOLF
We actually had a picnic going on in front of one of the greens when we’d only been open for two days, and they were still doing it even though golfers were out playing!
”
from then on. Everyone was furloughed straight away. It was a really difficult period, and we managed to get people back gradually as lockdown progressed, but it was really tough to try and keep the place viable over those few weeks.”
With all the team furloughed, Thorpeness essentially lost an entire spring. Dry weather helped by slowing the growth of grass but, as a consequence, wetting agent and other programmes fell behind. Despite the course reopening on 13th May, the greenkeeping team wasn’t back to its full complement of eight until towards the end of July. This meant a massive effort from the guys on the course to get it to as good as it could be, but circumstances were made more difficult with failing machinery that itself almost brought work to a halt. “Initially, there were only two of us back, so me and one other for two or three weeks, and then we gradually got back to our full staff of eight. The guys who were here have obviously done amazing work, and we were back to as good as we could expect to be by mid-June, after opening on May 13th, so around a month from then. At that point, we had four back full-time, so things were getting easier; we were still in the process of getting our machinery package back on the go. We had some old bits of kit that wasn’t exactly doing us any favours, but Ernest Doe are great, and they lent us quite a few bits and pieces, and that helped us out a lot.” “We had kit which was broken down that we couldn’t get away to get fixed at that
42 PC December/January 2021
point. So it was a case of, at one stage, we were down to one machine for a little while. Nothing could get fixed, and other kit was unreliable, and it felt like there was no way out of it. We had a moment of that, and when I was speaking to the management at that point, I was explaining we were literally one machine away from us being able to do nothing. That’s how close to the wind we were from being totally redundant in that sense.” “We would have been doing stuff by hand, and that would have been it. We never quite got there thankfully and, again, Ernest Doe stepped in and gave us a couple of machines, but in terms of taking stuff away and getting it serviced, it was never going to happen during that period. To be on a much better footing in that way inspires confidence because, if the worst came to the worst and there was another lockdown, at least we’ve got what we need. We’ve also been in discussions, and we’ve been making sure we have materials in for projects through the winter now, so we don’t have to buy anymore, and we’ve got everything we need and I guess everybody has been doing things like that. That’s a comfort for me because it’s good to know we’re not going to be in a bad situation with machinery or materials, if we were to be locked down again.” Like a lot of courses, Thorpeness hosted their fair share of golf during the first lockdown. In July, they had record-breaking green fees by the 21st of the month which,
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