Pete “Balcony” McTorry

Full Member
Age: 69
Nationality: Scottish (Special Forces Clan)

Every golf club has a Scottish bloke with a moustache who claims he was part of the SAS team which stormed the Iranian Embassy back in May 1980, and our man is Pete “Balcony” McTorry. Despite the secrecy surrounding this crack team of elite soldiers, McTorry has no problem telling anyone who’ll listen that he “…abseiled down from the roof, smashed a window, lobbed in a brace of flashbangs and double tapped two of the bastards before they knew what hit them”.

With such a successful line of bullshit so entrenched, it is no surprise that Balcony also claims he was approached to be a consultant on the Lewis Collins film “Who Dares Wins”, and that “I drank Bodie under the table night after night, and then taught him how a real Professional deals with Johnny Foreigner”.

When questioned a little more about his antics with British Special Forces, McTorry simply points to a third-rate tattoo of a dagger on his arm and gives a Connery-esque wink with a well-practised “Thatsh all you need to know shun”.

Decent golfer, great company too, though on May 5th, 1980, he was, just like almost everyone else, watching the snooker final.

Andy “Uncle Andy” Biggs

Clubhouse Assistant
Age: 58
Nationality: English

One or two people at Russet Grange truly have their finger on the pulse of the club. Andy “Uncle Andy” Biggs however takes things much, much further. He has it hooked up to an ECG machine and MRI scanner. If it has happened, is happening, or is going to happen, Biggs knows about it. Biggs is no busybody though, far from it. He watches, he listens, he reads and he keeps it all to himself.

You know that bloke who worked with your Dad, the fun one who you had a big shed full of home brew, motorbike engines and jazz mags? The one who you thought was your uncle but it turned out he was just a bloke married to someone that your Dad fancied and kept making excuses to visit? That’s Andy Biggs.

You want someone to come in at 6:00am and churn out breakfast for a society of 40 hungry Cornishmen? Biggs’ll do it. Looking for someone to run the bar because a recently-employed floozy just changed her Facebook status to “it’s complicated” and stayed in bed and cried? Andy is your man. Perhaps you need a volunteer to drive around in a buggy and sell beer and pasties at a charity golf day? Biggs will come in on his day off and put in a 14 hour shift.

Andy Biggs, one of the good guys.

Curly “Pubes” White

Full Member
Age: 49
Nationality: Ginger

Possibly the most ginger man ever to have lived, worsened by the fact that his natural hairstyle would look more appropriate in the bollocks region, but even with this particular life-hurdle he is unbelievably successful with women. There’s rarely a visit to the club without a new doe-eyed bimbo in tow, and despite White’s 49 years of age, each “plat du jour” tends to be of the twenty-something age group, with a lack of any mental capacity another common and unsurprising trait.

Pubes works as a mechanic at the local Audi dealership, so it is only a mild exaggeration when he tells a potential conquest that he races cars for a living. Many a local lass thinks that she’s slept with the ginger Lewis Hamilton, later to discover that the bloke who serviced her car yesterday is the same one who serviced her lady garden last weekend.

White is an average golfer, being far more interested in the social aspect of the game than anything else. At the 2014 club championships he put a buggy in a ditch when a well-shaken can of Thatcher’s Haze exploded in his face.

Maureen Welsh

Social Member
Age: 61
Nationality: Anglo Irish

Should Maureen Welsh appear in an episode of “Friends” it would be called “The One with the Doormat”. She’s the woman who everyone pretends to like but nobody would ever invite to a barbecue. She’s single (natch) and whilst she has never told anyone that she has at least 10 cats living with her, it is widely assumed she does.

If you need badges sewn onto 30 junior golf shirts or someone to act as a starter on Pro-Am day at 6:00am in the pissing rain, it’s Maureen you should ask. She would do anything for anyone and the world doesn’t deserve her.

Our hero says she “struggles with her weight”. What she actually means is that she struggles to walk past Greggs, and let’s be honest, buying one doughnut is foolhardy when five are much cheaper. She’s been a member of Slimming World since 1988, her huge bulk and frankly shocking BMI would suggest that her membership hasn’t been what you might call successful for her. On the other hand it has been a Godsend for Slimming World.

Maureen has been on the club’s social committee for 20 years, she doesn’t play golf for health reasons, all 27 stones of them.

In 2012 she got stuck in a lift at a Travelodge in Sunderland for over seven hours. When her rescuers asked why she didn’t press the alarm button she replied “I didn’t want to make a fuss”.

Alex “The Taxi” Barnes

Status: Greenkeeper
Age: 50
Nationality: Jersey, just like the potatoes

“An empty taxi turned up and Alex Barnes got out”. A twist on an old adage applied to various dullards throughout the years and Barnes is as dull as they come. Once he’s told you that “he cuts fairways as well as greens”, and “you wouldn’t believe how much these mowers cost” you have heard his conversational repertoire.

Because he is about as interesting as skirting board, making up stories about him has become somewhat of a game at Russet Grange, with “John Barnes is his half brother”, “Both of his bollocks are on the right” and “He bought his Citroen Saxo from Bonnie Tyler’s next door neighbour” being popular falsehoods.

Early mornings mean early to bed, so Barnes isn’t one for pubs and clubbing, though he does play darts on a Thursday as he gets Fridays off. Like all dart players he once took on Eric Bristow in an exhibition match, but unlike most, he won a leg as Bristow fell asleep.

When doing his job he listens to language courses on his phone, a useful skill which allows him to tell the natives of Spain and Germany that he cuts fairways as well as greens…

Barnes has been married twice. His first wife drowned in a Basildon lido, his second wife continues to try and drown herself in boxes of Sainsbury’s Merlot.

Liam “Flange” Heron

Intermediate Member
Age: 21
Nationality: Land of the Stud

With a birdie surname you might think that Heron could play a bit of golf, but far from it. Out of all of the members with any degree of bladder control, he is by far the worst player. It isn’t for lack of effort or investment though, he’s spent thousands in lessons and equipment, so Club Professional Guy Botton adores him.

One of the reasons for his lacklustre performance on the course is that he’s normally spent the previous night “in flagrante” with his partner of choice, of which there have been many. In other words, far from leaving it all out on the field, he’s left it all in the bedroom with nothing left for the field.

Indeed, our Liam lists “shagging” as his main hobby on his Facebook page, and he’s not what you might call “picky”. Plenty of Fish, Match.com, Grindr and countless other dating sites have young Heron’s profile there for all to see.

And as is always the case in stories like this, our hero once left his unlocked phone on the bar for all to see, and see it they did. Many, many pictures of various young and not so young ladies, some single, some bethrothed or married to others, including a rather fruity image of sent to him by Julie Boseman accompanied by a not-so-subtle caption about “losing his balls in the rough”.

Liam Heron. Crap Golfer. Good Lad.

Pam “Cleavage” Cleaver

Bar Staff
Age: 52
Nationality: Irrelevant

A barmaid nicknamed “Cleavage”. Hmmm, it does appear that 1970 wants its chapter back, but there is no doubt that Pam Cleaver’s moniker is well-deserved. When wearing her customary low-cut tops it looks like the semi-finalists in a Telly Savalas lookalike contest have taken up residence.

In truth it’s not all shits and giggles, at least not until she’s had a little bit of Vodka with her cornflakes, and then life is one big party. In fairness though her love of a drink isn’t allowed to get in the way of work so she sticks with a rule of never letting a member buy her one before 10:00am (9:30am on weekends).

There is a general understanding that Cleaver has “got something on the chairman” otherwise her drinking would have seen her dismissed years ago. The “something” is that she’s been banging him for the best part of ten years, and when he goes to his Masonic meetings he’s actually going to spaff his beans at the local Travelodge for twenty minutes of all-too energetic sex before rocking up slightly flustered and completely ‘spent’ at the Lodge.

Cleavage isn’t entirely sure who her father is because her mum was one for “free love” in the 1960s and 70s, so chances are she’s from the seed of a rock star, a roadie, or any one of the 300,000 male hippies who attended the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970.

Chris “Trip” Hazzerd

Full Member
Age: 57
Nationality: English

Chris Hazzerd is a bit of a ‘Jack the Lad’, who by his own admission has “Seen more pussy than a vet doing overtime at the Cats Protection League” To look at him you can’t really imagine how he manages it, but manage it he does.

Just like Liam “Flange” Heron, Widdle idolises Guy Potton, spending much of his spare time in the Pro-shop showing him WhatsApp messages he’s received from some of the fillies he’s been balls-deep into that week.

Widdle made a few quid in the mid 1990s selling houses on the Costa Brava to Daily Mail readers, who then wrote to the very same newspaper when the houses didn’t actually materialise. He blames the Spanish government, and to be fair, there is now an eight lane highway where Widdle once promised “Your dream home from home in the Spanish sun”.

With the proceeds from selling non-existent holiday homes he bought himself an XR3i and a hair transplant. His current squeeze is a 58-year-old hairdresser who Kevin Pudgett described as: “…looking like a failed souffle”.

Sarah Shaw

Full Member
Age: 60
Nationality: English

The epitome of the lady other ladies love to hate but want to be. Shaw is 60 years of age, looks 50 at most, acts like she’s 40, and as Guy Botton subtly speculates “…probably humps like she’s 30”. Shaw is the person the white Range Rover Evoque was invented for and runs a pilates class at the club which, unsurprisingly, is very well attended.

In the 1980s she worked as a model and actress, the highlights of her career being an appearance in the Sun newspaper’s “Deidrie’s Photo Casebook” where she spent five days of pictorial loveliness, dressed in her undies, worried that her flatmate was turning her bisexual. (She earned an additional £100 when she sold the knickers she wore on the photoshoot to former club chef Tony “Bacon Rolls” Royce).

She also had a bit part in the James Bond film “A View to a Kill”, appearing as a rather saucy looking stable lass.

Shaw divorced her first husband when he got spotted pulling out of the childminder’s drive just ten minutes after pulling out of the childminder. Later in life she widowed when her second husband, a French millionaire businessman, died under suspicious circumstances whilst playing boules.

Jenny “Vasquez” McCulloch

Full Member
Age: 45
Nationality: Currently Danish

Obviously every golf club has a body-building marshal arts specialist lesbian vegan, but few can boast one who spent a decade teaching close combat skills to the men of the South African Special Forces. Many at the club assume she can open a bottle of San Miguel in quite a special way. None has ever dared asked.

McCulloch chose her own nickname after watching the shaven-headed killing machine in “Aliens” go full hard-ass before being ripped to shreds, but don’t be fooled, she’s about as Spanish as Dolph Lundgren eating Haggis in an igloo whilst wearing a sari.

She’s not been playing golf long, in fact she only took it up when taking on a new identity back in 2018, a move that was probably a wise one. Mercenary work is risky at the best of times, but when you are personally responsible for the deaths of at least five of Kosovo’s most notorious crime syndicate it’s probably wise to become someone else, at least until you’ve got your handicap down a bit.

Reg Bollard

Full Member
Age: 81
Nationality: Nobody cares

If Reg were one of the Mr Men he would be “Mr Horrible Bastard”. As you would expect he gets on well with Les Hamill. He’s Geordie, so the misery does come fairly naturally, especially when you consider that he spent 45 years working on the shipyards of Tyneside before ill health forced him to retire. He tells a tale that this was due to “bone problems” and that’s partly true. His gaffer told him he was a “bone idle wanker”, gave him six weeks’ money and told him to fuck off.

Whatever tale of woe you can conjure up, he’s got a bigger one, and he usually blames Margaret Thatcher for them. Whenever there’s a wake in the clubhouse, Bollard will be around, feeding off the grief like an Ethiopian seagull ravaging a discarded fish supper.

He’s not one for buying a round of drinks, or much else for that matter. He claims to have never bought a golf ball in his life, and his current set of clubs came as a result of haggling with a widow of a member at one of the aforementioned wakes. He’d done a “cracking deal” on some nearly-new Callaways before the vol-au-vents and crab paste sarnies had been scoffed.

To supplement his income in the 1970’s he worked security on a few nightclubs in Sunderland, and whilst he likes people to think that his rather misaligned nose is the result of one too many fights, it was actually the result of a Newcastle Brown Ale influenced collision with a patio door at his sister-in-law’s council house.

Edna Troggle

Unsocial Member
Age: 79
Nationality: English

Best mates with, and also arch enemy of, Joan Painter, Troggle is, to be blunt, an odious old bag who can’t stand young people, the middle-aged, fellow geriatrics or almost anyone else. She’s another one who is a social member, but if there were an “unsocial member” category she would not only be in it, they’d make her President.

She’s rather racist is our Edna, it’s just how she was brought up, and when Howard started appearing in adverts for the Halifax, she moved her mortgage in protest. She’s not keen on homosexuals either, and refers to another local club as being “for woolly woofters” because a gay man was recently appointed chairman.

Troggle made the national press in April 2014 when she ran over a lollipop man twice with her mobility scooter, breaking his ankle in the first collision and then his collar bone when reversing into him when trying to turn round. The incident took place as she was riding home after an afternoon on cheap sherry at the local bingo hall.