Writing Bill's biography was like writing a history of golf in Victoria from the mid 1920's to the early 1960's.

The book contains many rare high quality photos that were part of Bill's private collection.

Bill won 3 Victorian Amateur titles over 4 decades and he won 3 South Australian titles during the 5 years he was there after the Second World War.

Three agonizingly close defeats in the Australian Amateur were Bill's only regrets. In fact he made the semi finals an astonishing 8 times.

His record at Commonwealth Golf Club is legendary - 19 club championships and 44 years of pennant golf at the highest level. And he had to defeat some pretty good players in many of the club championship finals. As the book points out, perhaps his two greatest wins were his last victories - in 1959 against the long hitting Bruce Devlin and in 1963 against Eric Routley who was in the midst of his 5 Victorian amateur titles.

The biography also tells of Bill's reminiscences of playing exhibitions with the world's greats - Gene Sarazen, Walter Hagen and Bobby Locke and there is a whole chapter devoted to Bill's former clubmate, the enigmatic Harry Williams.

The head of British Tubemills, Ernest Butten was so impressed with Bill that he invited him to England for a year in 1964. The so-called 'Butten School' was established in the hope of generating a new English golf champion. There Bill taught trainee professionals the best of which was Tommy Horton.

After Bill retired from competitive golf he became scorer at almost every major golfing event in Australia - professional and amateur alike. He helped found the Veterans golfer organization, represented Australia in the winning team in a senior world cup for amateurs and was awarded an MBE for his services to the golf industry.

Bill died in 1997, two years after I wrote his golfing biography.

Postscript: In June 2012 Bill was posthumously elected into the Victorian Golf Hall of Fame.