Even with three Weimaraners and a parrot for company, Jackie Alliss feels the absence of the inimitable, irrepressible Peter so acutely that it sometimes stops her in her tracks. It is 17 months since the Voice of Golf passed away, here in the bucolic Surrey house that became his sanctuary, depriving his family of a presence that cannot possibly be replaced.
“He was a very big man, in all senses of the word,” Jackie reflects, the radio playing softly in the background on this midsummer’s morning. “If he came into the kitchen, you knew he was in the room. That’s the biggest thing about him going – it’s the sheer missing of him. I discovered that grief, when it happens, is exhausting.
“It keeps hitting you at the most unexpected times, like standing in the aisle at Sainsbury’s. Suddenly, I have to walk out. I’m only just getting to the point where I can go to places where I would have gone with him, because it doesn’t feel right to be without him. Golf was his world, and I was one step behind, in a way. It’s hard, coming to terms with life now. But you don’t have a choice.”
So ebullient was the Peter Alliss spirit, his avuncular energy just as powerful at home as it was in the BBC commentary booth, that not even the parrot was immune to the sense of loss. “After Peter died, the parrot lost all its feathers,” says Jackie. “It was literally almost bald. I rang the vet and demanded, ‘What’s happening to my parrot?’ She asked whether Peter spoke much to it. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Well, it’s fretting,’ she explained. ‘It’s grieving, because Peter’s not there.’”
A palpable sense of him, though, pervades every room. His study has been kept exactly as it was the day he died, with books on Bobby Jones lining the shelves and a painting of St Andrews mounted on the wall behind his desk. His life, which ended two months shy of his 90th birthday, constituted a vast golfing tapestry. It was only the infernal restrictions of the pandemic that prevented the extravagant send-off that was his due, with his funeral, held at the local church near Hindhead, attended by just 18 people.
Not that Alliss – whose final book, Reflections on a Life Well Lived, is serialised in The Telegraph this week – would have objected to such an intimate commemoration. Jackie smiles: “He would tell me, ‘Don’t you bother with a big funeral. Just put me in a box and put me away.’ He made no plans, he left no instructions.” But in St Andrews on Wednesday, on the eve of the 150th Open, she will finally feel, in her own words, as if she is closing the circle. For at the city’s university, where Peter once received an honorary doctorate, everybody from Jack Nicklaus to the casual fans reared on his witticisms will converge to toast his memory.
On the back of the order of service is a picture of him with his dogs as puppies: an image seldom glimpsed by his public, but one that his widow holds dear. The ceremony will conclude with a montage of his greatest hits – of which there are many, from the “he’s gone ga-ga” remark about Jean van de Valde, to his description of Tiger Woods’ 81 at Muirfield as akin to seeing Pavarotti with laryngitis. “That will be the last thing they see, Peter Alliss laughing and joking,” she says. “They’ll all go out with smiles on their faces.”
Even as his wife of 48 years, she discovers it is his levity and humour that endure. “There wasn’t a day when he didn’t make me laugh. He didn’t like rows, he wouldn’t fall out if I was cross about things. It wasn’t worth it for him. Not many things irritated him, if I’m honest. Although he hated bad manners.”
Sometimes, you wonder if Alliss’ off-the-cuff repartee could have survived the hair-trigger sensibilities of today, when a commentator is only ever one faux pas away from oblivion. He came perilously close a few times, not least at St Andrews in 2015, where he embroidered footage of Kim Barclay, watching her husband Zach Johnson line up his putt to win the Open, with the words: “She is probably thinking: ‘If this goes in, I get a new kitchen.’”
It is an episode Jackie recalls with wry amusement. “Bernard Gallacher’s wife, Lesley, rang me about four days later and said, ‘If Bernard had won and offered to buy me a new kitchen, I would have been thrilled to bits.’ There are always a few woke people who take it the wrong way. It wasn’t meant, in any way, to denigrate women. That wasn’t in his character. He loved the ladies, and they loved him. There was never any malicious intent – it was just how he saw it.”
Take the moment, too, when a shot of Jackie appeared on screen at the 2013 Open, prompting Alliss to herald “that beautiful woman who lives with me – a Rottweiler with lip gloss”. “I used to call myself that,” she says. “But when he said it, the weight of the press came down on him. I had women’s magazines ringing me up: ‘Mrs Alliss, you must be furious, would you like to write an article?’ I just said: ‘Go away. That’s my husband.’”
For every person pretending to be outraged by the non-PC elements of Alliss’ whimsy, there were many more who not only cherished his folksy ramblings, but who remembered his kindness off the course. In the bleak months that followed his death, Jackie was comforted by a mailbag of 900 letters, some giving her a new-found appreciation of the man with whom he had spent almost half a century.
“I knew that he was loved, I just didn’t realise how much. I had letters from people I had never met. One man said that he had caddied for Peter when he was 20. He decided he didn’t want to study any longer. Peter said, ‘No, you have to get an education.’ And so he did. ‘Your husband kept in touch with me all these years,’ he wrote. ‘I ended up qualifying as a lawyer, and I just retired as a lawyer.’ I wouldn’t have done any of that if it hadn’t been for Peter.
“Or there was the young woman who had been at the hairdressers in Haslemere. She was telling everyone how it was her 21st birthday and she had a big party planned. Peter, who had been sitting next to her, went out and came back about 20 minutes later with a bottle of champagne, saying, ‘Have a lovely party.’ She told me in her letter: ‘I don’t play golf, but I’ve listened to him all my life. I feel as if I know him – and I’m distraught that he has died.’”
The timing of Alliss’ death, from a stroke one evening in December 2020, is recalled by Jackie with piercing clarity. For all the profound sense of shock, she has found herself soothed during the fraught months since, by the circumstances in which the end finally came. “He died as he lived,” she says. “He had been watching TV, pottering about. I had been shopping in Guildford. I came back and he said he needed his beard trimmed.
“Our son, Simon, did it for him. They then sat in the other room and had a couple of large scotches together. We had supper, we watched the news. And then Peter said to me, ‘I think I’m going to bed.’ He got to the stairs, I heard him call my name, and that was it. The last thing he saw was me.” Difficult as the story is for her to relate, it helps, crucially, to comfort her. “It was,” she says, confidently, a “great way for a great man to go”.
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