SAMUEL RYDER

His name is one every golfer knows and yet, in 1897, as Samuel Ryder approached his 40th birthday living in a humble terraced house in St Albans and never having so much as swung a club in anger, the idea of him establishing one of sport’s most famous global contests would have seemed frankly deranged. Back then he was, according to his eldest daughter Lucy Marjorie, “the laughing-stock of all the business men in St Albans”.

Ryder lived at the top of Folly Lane with his wife and daughter, and spent the days making ‘penny packets’ of flower and vegetable seeds that were stored in a shed in their back garden. Every Friday, according to the St Albans Almanac, they would lug their home-made seed catalogues a mile down the road to the general Post Office, so that eager subscribers could receive them in time for their Saturday half-day holiday. It was a revolutionary idea which struck a cord with amateur gardeners everywhere; out of these little seeds a mighty business grew.

» Samual Ryder Pt.2