As the diligent, highly respected archivist and curator at Glasgow Golf Club, Nevin McGhee has spent many a year leafing through this, thumbing through that, and cataloguing, evaluating and preserving a bit of the other.

In many ways, such a noble duty is a delightfully serene endeavour that would make Constable’s painting of Wivenhoe Park look positively action-packed.

“I would tend to get people saying, ‘I think my grandfather was a member at the club, could you tell me if he ever won anything?”, chuckled McGhee of these fairly routine requests.

All this changed, of course, when the Glasgow club’s B-listed clubhouse at Killermont was ravaged by a devastating fire back in 2018.

Having been used to gently rummaging through the archives, McGhee was suddenly faced with a desperate guddle in the blackened ashes.

“I was on holiday in France at the time and when someone sent me a photo of the flames coming out of the roof, I feared the whole place would be a wreck,” reflected the 80-year-old Northern Irishman. “I never thought I’d be confronted by something like this. It was a disaster zone.”

The damage was considerable, but the recovery and restoration of cherished trophies, paintings, pictures, memorabilia and various other artefacts and antiquities was a mighty act of salvage akin to the raising of the Mary Rose. McGhee was at the forefront of this sizeable task.

“There was one painting from 1831 which I had acquired a couple of years before the fire,” he explained. “It was Glasgow from The Green, with golfers in the distance. But there was no sign of it. I got pally with the site foreman and got a hard hat and went into the clubhouse with him. I knew where it had been hanging.

“In the rubble and general blackness on the floor, I saw a corner of it. I guess it had been blown off the wall by the force of the hose. I carried it out of the clubhouse like a newborn baby.”

For the next few months, the phrase ‘handle with care’ just about became the club’s new motto. "I spent a lot of time wearing blue gloves,” added McGhee of this delicate undertaking at one of the world’s oldest golfing institutions.

“It was a real labour of love. I finished up working full time for a year with a whole range of very, very talented people who performed various restorations. And I had to find these different people too. You think a painting is just a painting but someone who restores oil paintings doesn’t restore water colours.

“Our oldest silver club, the original from 1787 with silver balls for each captain, was badly blackened. Something from inside the grip had melted in the heat and had trickled down the outside of the club.

"I kept a wee sample of the stuff that had solidified. The painstaking work that went into the restoration was remarkable. You wouldn’t know anything had been through such devastation when you look at everything now.”

The great fire of Killermont is just one chapter in Glasgow Golf Club’s rich and redoubtable history which McGhee has documented in his award-winning book, ‘Anent the Golf’.  

Taking its title from the subject matter of the minutes of the Burgh Council meeting in 1760, McGhee charts the club’s complete history, from those formative days on Glasgow Green, Queens Park, Alexandra Park and Blackhill through to the development of a second course at Gailes in 1892 and the move to Killermont in 1904.

“I think we’re pretty unique in that we have two courses and two clubhouses 35 miles apart,” added McGhee, who has been a member for some 35 years and still plays three times a week. “I carry a full set of clubs too,” he said with a defiant chortle.

McGhee’s efforts, both in chronicling Glasgow Golf Club’s history and aiding the salvage operation, were recognised during the week of July’s Open when he was awarded the Murdoch Medal by the British Golf Collectors’ Society.

In the realms of golf heritage, it’s the equivalent of being handed the Nobel Prize for Literature. “To be nominated by my peers makes it very special,” he said.

McGhee started his working life at the Ballymena Telegraph, moved on to BBC Northern Ireland and arrived as a sports producer at BBC Scotland in 1978.

“Just in time for Ally’s Army setting off for Argentina,” he recalled. That, of course, was an infamous World Cup campaign that would go up in smoke.

Perhaps the sobering experience stood McGhee in good stead for what he would confront at his beloved Glasgow Golf Club?