Brother Devereux

Brother Devereux was born in post-war London to a family of solicitors and antiquarians – men and women who believed that careful record-keeping was the highest form of respect for the past. His father catalogued legal precedents; his mother collected oral histories from the Blitz. From them, Devereux inherited a conviction that seemed almost obsessive: that if something was true and mattered, it had to be written down, preserved, and passed on with intention. Otherwise it would simply evaporate, replaced by whatever story the next generation invented.

He came to golf relatively late – in his twenties, during university – and not through ambition but through accident. A friend invited him to play a course in Scotland. He was terrible at the game itself but transfixed by what happened afterward. In a small room off the nineteenth hole, an old caddie master was telling stories about courses he had caddied at across the world: St Andrews, Calcutta, South Africa, even a brief stint in Shanghai during the chaos. Other men were listening, asking questions, making introductions between a shipping broker and a retired military officer who turned out to have served in the same cantonment forty years apart. For the first time, Devereux understood that golf was not the game – the 19th hole was.

After university, Devereux became a lawyer, but it was almost an accident. What he really wanted to do was understand how institutions worked: how they survived, how they changed, how they preserved their soul while adapting to new worlds. Golf clubs, he realised, were perfect laboratories for this. He took positions as secretary and consultant at several major clubs, and everywhere he went, he began to ask questions about the 19th hole. Not the physical room – though those mattered – but the custom, the principle, the unspoken agreement that golf was only half the game.

What he discovered shocked him. The custom was almost everywhere – Kobe, Calcutta, Long Island, Edinburgh, London – but it was fragmentary, half-remembered, often on the verge of disappearing. Young players didn't know the rules. Courses were being modernised without understanding that the real modernisation needed to preserve what mattered. And nobody, anywhere, had written it down. The Order, he realised, existed in stories and habits, not in any coherent form.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Devereux began his life's work: travelling to clubs on every continent, sitting with old members, asking meticulous questions, and slowly documenting the scattered customs of the 19th hole. What tied them together? What varied by region or era? Which principles were universal, and which were local adaptation? He created a private archive: photographs of rooms, transcripts of conversations, records of introductions and the outcomes they produced. He was not writing a book – that would be too public – but rather creating a map. A guide. A constitution for something that had never needed one until now.

By the 1990s, Devereux had become something between a historian and a priest of the Order. Older members knew him. Younger ones sought his guidance. He was trusted with the stories that older generations had kept private, the introductions that had quietly changed men's lives, the evidence that the Order was real and had been real for centuries, even if nobody had ever called it that officially.

In his final years, in the early 2000s, Devereux faced a new challenge. The world was changing faster than ever. Golf was becoming televisual, globalised, corporatised. Young people were not gathering in rooms the way they used to. The 19th hole was under threat not from suppression but from irrelevance. And yet, Devereux believed, this was also an opportunity. If the Order could not exist in quiet rooms anymore – if those were disappearing – then perhaps it could exist digitally. Online. In a new form that preserved the principle: gathering, stories, introductions, the belief that a round is only finished when it has been shared in good company.

In 2004, Devereux began conversations with a small group of younger members about creating a digital sanctuary for the Order. Not a website to brag, but a space to preserve the stories, to facilitate introductions, to keep the principle alive for people who might never meet in person at a 19th hole. He was not a technologist – he was in his sixties – but he understood something crucial: that the form could change as long as the principle endured.

In his final act for the Order, in 2005, Brother Devereux handed over his archive to this new generation and stepped back. He died later that year, satisfied that he had done what his parents taught him to do: tend the stories, write them down, and pass them on with intention. He could not have known how prescient his final push toward the digital age would prove. But within the Order, he is remembered as the man who saved it twice: first by writing it down when it might have been lost to time, and second by insisting, at the very end of his life, that it could be preserved by stepping into the future rather than clinging to the past. His last words to the young founders of the digital Order were simple: 'The 19th hole is not a place. It is a principle. Tend it, whatever form it takes.'