FRANK Sinatra’s career was in the doldrums in 1953. “Difficult to believe,” this paper’s Entertainments Editor, Andrew Young, recorded many years later, “but the audiences were about as sparse as his hair in those pre-transplant days. Having been the object of the hysterical love of millions of pubescent American bobbysox girls in the war years, he was then at the in-between years. In fact, the party could have been over. The audiences at his Scottish gigs were not turning out in droves.” His Glasgow Empire show fared slightly better, though.

Sinatra was a keen golfer and as his Dundee concert coincided with The Open at Carnoustie, he ventured there to cheer on Ben Hogan, the great US golfer, telling reporters that “all America is rooting for Hogan.” Hogan, indeed, won that year, at his first attempt.

“Frank was ... prepared to sit up half the night in his hotel talking about [golf],” Young wrote in 1994. “The fact that he was happy to appear in odd places, like a dance-hall in Ayr, was attributed to the fact that the Open was being played at Carnoustie.”