Charles William Thomson, born 1st April 1910 at Rothesay Mews, Edinburgh, son of Charles Thomson, a groom and his wife Margaret Ross. The following year Charlie moved with his parents to North Berwick.

From the age of eight, Charlie caddied on the West Links during the school holidays and when he gained his first class caddie badge at the age of twelve years he was in great demand. Charlie regularly caddied for two former amateur champions Leslie Balfour-Melville and Robert Maxwell, and among the professionals, Arnaud Massy, George Duncan, and Ben Sayers Snr.

In 1924 Young Ben Sayers offered Charlie an apprenticeship as a club maker at five shillings for a fifty hour week. In an interview Thomson said that when he started with Sayers in the workshop beside the first tee on the West Links there was not a machine in the shop, every operation was done by hand.

The wood block which was a persimmon wood had to be cut down to near enough the required size with a bow saw, then had to be rasped, filed and scraped to the correct size after which we cut out the sole near to the face about an inch wide, and fitted in a piece which was made of rams horn, glued and pegged to hold it in place. That was for the driver heads but for the brassie, baffy and wooden cleeks, as they were known in those days, we also fitted a brass piece which covered the whole sole.

The wooden shaft, which was made of hickory, was fitted to the head, then glued and left to dry for twenty-four hours. It was then cut to the required length, planed, filed and finally scraped to the required thickness and whip, after which, along with the head, was sandpapered using three grades of sandpaper.

The next operation being to stain the head and when dry, hand polished with a pad made of muslin and cottonwool. Next the shaft was stained with pitch and oil and finally polished. The final operation being gripped, string on the neck, stamped Ben Sayers on the head and a final polish all over. The first petrol driven machine was installed in the workshop in 1927, it was a sand-paper machine for the wooden heads. The steel shaft appeared in the UK in 1929 and took much of the skill out of club making.

In 1934, Ben Sayers decided to move from the property at the first tee on the West Links to larger premises in Forth Street and opened a shop selling golf equipment in the High Street. The company was producing three hundred and fifty clubs per week and Sayers was investing in new machines such as for cutting out inset faces, sole plates, drilling the hole to fit the shaft into the heads and cutting machines to cut the shafts to the required length.