E-mail from Paul Gorry
Member of the Association of Professional Genealogists in Ireland
(The accrediting body for Irish genealogists

REFERENCE ARTICLE ABOUT MAY HEZLET

Hi Gillian,You might like to tell Colin that May Hezlet didn't die in her 80s in the 1960s.  She died at Sandwich in Kent on 27 December 1978, aged 96.
I wrote an article for "Ireland of the Welcomes" magazine in 1999 for the
centenary of May's first victory in the British Ladies' (the week after her
first win in the Irish Close).  Here are the last two paragraphs:

"May's last success in the British Ladies' was again at Newcastle (Co Down), in 1907, when she defeated Florence (one of her sisters) in the final.  Her form in the Home Internationals, which preceded the championship, gave no indication that she was a likely winner.  But despite May losing her matches to England and Wales, Ireland won the series.  Both Violet and Florence were also on the seven-member team.  Little did they imagine that it would be 73 years before Ireland would again be victorious in the series.  The achievements of these young Edwardian ladies were in the dim distant past by the time Irish women golfers recaptured the Home Internationals in 1980.  The Hezlet sisters were figures from history to Maureen Madill (winner of the 1979 British Ladies'), who also grew up near Portrush.  Maureen played a pivotal role in that 1980 victory and the following week she was astonished by a letter she received.It was a message of congratulations from one of the members of the 1907
Irish team to her 1980 successors.  The writer was the ninety-seven year old
Violet Hulton nee Hezlet.
"For most of her final years May had shared Violet's house and, like her,
kept an eye on current golf.  In the late 1970s she moved to a nursing home
in Kent, not far from Deal, the scene of her 1902 British win.  Then in her
nineties, she told her niece Rosemary Hoare how she still remembered a
particular putt she holed during that second victory.  
May died in the winter of 1978, almost eighty years after that eventful fortnight back in 1899.  Violet Hulton passed away in 1982, the last of the vivacious Hezlet girls who would cycle thirty miles for the opportunity to play golf."

Cheers,

Paul Gorry