“People were very upset.” One member, Sir Stanley Simmons, now in his 80s and once the Queen’s physician, protested. “There were ructions,” one attender told me. The number is lucky in China, although not so much at Wentworth, since three-quarters of the members stood to lose their memberships altogether. To make things exclusive, Yan Bin wanted to issue just 888 debentures. He began rewriting his speech.Įven if all the members could afford this – a remote possibility, since the club was home not just to multimillionaires and CEOs, but also estate agents and dentists – not everyone would get back in. Fleming, whose manner is so mild it’s hard to ever imagine him yelling “Fore”, was shocked. Peter Alliss, the BBC golf commentator, complained that Reignwood was “bringing an Asian philosophy to Britain”. A “barmy” decision, Michael Parkinson, the chatshow host and a longtime member, had told the Mail on Sunday, which had scooped the details two days earlier. On that morning, having already drafted his speech, Fleming was in his dentistry clinic when he received the email.īrace for change, Wentworth wrote to Fleming and his colleagues, outlining its planned announcements at the AGM: a wild increase in membership fees and the number of members drained from about 4,000 to just a few hundred. The club had recently been bought by a Chinese firm, Reignwood Consulting Ltd, and an annual general meeting was scheduled for the 20th. That year, Fleming was captain of Wentworth, an old, prestigious golf club in north-west Surrey. Like all exiles, Michael Fleming remembers when his separation from home soil began: 20 October 2015, a Tuesday.
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