They commemorated Harry Vardon, one of golf’s greatest heroes, in a moving, simple ceremony at a church in North London yesterday. Seventy years to the day after Vardon died, flowers were laid on his grave at St Andrew’s Church in Totteridge, prayers were said and readings from the Bible made against the force of a vengeful wind that cut the 12 celebrants to the quick.

Peter Howell, a tall, angular man, laid a wreath beneath the headstone of the man who won six Opens between 1896 and 1914 and the 1900 US Open, a golfer who was one of three men known as The Great Triumvirate, who dominated golf 100 years ago as Tiger Woods is dominating the game today, a man who gave his name to the most common way of gripping a golf club. Earlier, Howell, 81, had read a passage from the Book of Revelations, his voice faltering and his eyes beginning to fill with tears.

Why? Because Howell is the illegitimate son Vardon knew but could not publicly acknowledge because of the strict social mores of the time.

Howell is the product of an affair between Vardon and a singer named Gladys Matilda (Tilly) Howell at the time that Vardon was in a childless marriage to Jesse. Tilly, a singer with only occasional employment, was forced to give up Peter to her sister and brother-in-law to bring up.

“My mother was tall, more angular than Harry and had dark brown eyes,” Howell said. “She loved me and it was a long time before I recognised the loneliness she had. She was beholden to everyone. I looked forward to her visits because she brought me a present. I knew she was my mother because she told me. She said my father was dead.”

Howell remembers being visited by a tall man who would hug him and bring him presents. That man was Harry Vardon, but it was not until 1944, when Howell was 18 and about to join the Fleet Air Arm, that the family secret was revealed to him. “My mother told me who my father was in Malvern, where she was working as a hotel housekeeper. She was weepy. It was difficult for her. She explained why she had to keep me a secret.”

Discovering the identity of his father was difficult for Howell. “I had gone through years of being kept a secret,” he said. “My first thoughts were negative. I didn’t want it blasted around. Someone who is not acknowledged all his young life and now is acknowledged. That is weepy stuff.” And at that, tears began to form in Howell’s eyes again.

The ceremony took place at a church near South Herts Golf Club, where Vardon served time as the professional, earning the equivalent of £2.25p each week. It righted a wrong.

Coming on the day it did meant that Peter Howell was able to acknowledge publicly the father he never knew. With his head bare and his trousers flapping in the wind, he stood on the muddy grass and listened to the tribute given about his father on March 20, 1937 by J. H. Taylor, another member of The Great Triumvirate. “It is my considered judgment that Harry was the greatest of all,” Taylor wrote. “To know him was to love him.”

At that, Howell’s back stiffened and his head rose. Surely what was causing him to do that was his sense of pride.