COLLECTIBLES AND MEMORABILIA PART 24: John Hanna tells Gary Moranhow he has amassed his collection through hard graft
WE DON'T know of any cases of golf collecting being the cause of divorce but the hobby-cum-business can be so all-consuming that the spouses of collectors, usually the wives, are well advised to develop an interest or, at a minimum, an understanding of the passion.
Mavis Hanna can't really gripe about the time and resources her husband, John, has put into his hugely impressive collection which spans many areas of golfing collectibles and ephemera. After all John says it was travelling around with Mavis, who dabbled in antique and ceramic dealing, that got him into the collecting game. "I was driving her all over England and Scotland looking for stuff so I decided that I'd better start looking for something myself!"
In the 20 years since, John has become one of Ireland's premier collectors, has been captain of the British Golf Collectors Society and won the society's President's Award for his contributions to their quarterly journal, Through The Green, for which he has written his "Irish Musings" column for over a decade.
It's easy to draw an analogy between Padraig Harrington on the playing side and Hanna on the collecting side. Harrington readily portrays himself as a player without the outrageous natural shot-making of a Phil Mickelson but who has maximised his talent in every way (mostly through intelligence and hard graft) to have matched Mickelson's tally of three majors and to be snapping at his heels in the world rankings.
Hanna hasn't amassed his collection with a massive budget which allows him to blow away the opposition at auction but he has put in his hard graft too, ferreting away in antique shops, house clearances and latterly the world-wide web and occasionally coming up with a major of his own.
A perfect example came at a house clearance auction in St Andrews in the mid-1990s. It helped that Hanna and his wife, whose families are both steeped in the game, kept a flat there for several years and spent much of the summer at the home of golf.
Hanna, who has a slightly mischievous sense of humour, was grafting as usual, looking through a couple of book cases of mainly science and geography publications. His eye fell on a small book wedged between two larger volumes which turned out to be an autograph book from the 1930s. There was never anything surer than that a closer inspection by Hanna would follow and inside he found a perfect Bobby Jones signature along with that of Roger Wethered, the man Jones beat in the 1930 amateur final at St Andrews to take the first leg of his Grand Slam.
Charles Hezlet, the first Irishman to play in the Walker Cup, was another of the golfers included and the book also contained the signatures of the famous English opening pair Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe and veterans of first World War including General Haig.
Hanna hoped nobody else would notice the book (he may even have wedged it in a little further) and when bidding started he had to fight off only one opponent to claim the whole lot for €32. The Jones signature alone was worth a healthy four-figure sum!
Mavis got him started on golf-related postcards as well and Hanna now has over 3,000 different issues including 188 from St Andrews alone. In 2002 he authored Golf Greens of Ireland - A Nostalgic Look, which is a collection of over 50 rare period photographs of courses throughout the country with historical notes. There is a fine photograph of the Royal Dublin clubhouse before it was destroyed by fire in 1943 and another commemorates the British Ladies Championship of 1903 at Royal Portrush won by Rhona Adair, who later became president of the ILGU.
Hanna can also thank his wife's hobby for bringing him on many visits to the Spode pottery and porcelain factory shop in Stoke-on-Trent. He spotted a few hand-painted golf plates which he was told were the work of one of the company's top specialists, a deaf-mute by the name of Ken Pickens. Using sign language, Hanna managed to strike up a relationship with the artist and he has bought several more of Pickens' beautiful one-off creations on subsequent visits.
Perhaps his most cherished item among a collection of thousands is a 1908 GUI Seniors Cup winners medal. That was the year Malone won the blue riband of Irish team golf and as a former Malone captain and author of the club's centenary, Hanna was fairly desperate to get his hands on it when it came up at auction. Unable to attend he left Mavis with bidding instructions but his maximum price turned out to be too low.
Missing out on the medal gnawed away at him to the extent he contacted the dealer who had bought it and finally secured the gold and enamel medal with an improved offer of "several hundred pounds sterling" which he reckons is the most he has ever paid for an item.
The woman he outbid at the St Andrews house clearance was a bit upset not to get her hands on all the science and geography material and asked Hanna post-auction what exactly he had wanted from the lot. When it was only the autograph book she paid him back his €32, plus the buyer's commission.
Seems that just like the great players, the great collectors make their own luck.
