THE UBIQUITY OF THE GAME; WITH AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE COMMUNITY OF
GOLFERS, AND A NOTE UPON THE EFFECT OF ST. ANDREWS SPIRITS.
The ubiquity of this game--being the third of the seven wonders--is
remarkable, for it is played everywhere by everybody. No other sport has
ever achieved such universal favour, and we may be sure that none will
ever do so, because, apart from the fascination it exercises upon the
people of different countries and different races, it is so strong in
its simplicity--the stick, the ball, the mark, and, with them being
given, the object plainly suggested. It has already been suggested that,
in its essentials golf being obvious, it must have been practised from
the earliest times. Everywhere the simpler emotions of man are the same,
and so everywhere the game must make the same appeal when it is
understood. So here, strange as it is still, we have a nearly satisfying
explanation. What is yet wonderful beyond it is the fact that the
regulated game with the rules and restrictions that have been agreed
upon and codified by the high authorities at St. Andrews are everywhere
accepted, and even in such embellishments it is the same game
everywhere. Nothing can approach it in this universality. Yet that also
is nearly explicable.
By a process of continuous thought and deduction from observation the
people of St. Andrews, past and present, have gained a code of
regulations which seems most completely to satisfy the requirements of
the case. It has often been urged against the numerous and lengthy laws
we have that they suffer from too many niceties and too many
complications, and that they represent a remarkable evolution of
man-made intricacy from the one simple governing principle that the ball
shall be struck by the stick, and that if the object be not achieved by
the first blow it shall be struck again from the place where it then
lies. In that simple principle there is all golf, and by it the game
must surely have been played at the beginning. But it is the disposition
of man to depart from the most absolute simplicity in the direction of
what he regards as improvement upon it, and therefore bare principles
get covered up with fancy wrappings, while again there is in the human
species an immovable distrust of each other and a tendency towards the
setting up of safeguards and protections--laws. When this is done in
different places, and by different peoples, the results also are almost
certain to be widely different; and with the assistance of time and
further development two peoples might at length produce two games which,
originating in the same basic principle, might be in appearance,
materials, and actions quite dissimilar. Nearly all ball games, indeed,
must have had much the same original principle. Golf, as we know it, has
had its integrity preserved, and has established its amazing
universality because, despite the numerous and lengthy laws, the spirit
of the game has been so completely preserved in them. Between absolute
simplicity, the one natural law of golf, as we might call it, as just
enunciated, and a lengthy, confusing, and sometimes even contradictory
code there can be little compromise, and perfection and completeness in
golfing law are impossible, because no two courses are alike, no two
shots are quite the same, and there can be no end to new situations
until there is an end of the world and man. It sometimes seems that St.
Andrews, indefatigable, pursues an impossible finality, and thereby
makes difficulties for itself. That through ages and generations it has
produced a code of laws, and defined the principles of a game that is
accepted all over the world, and causes the same game to be played
wherever the sun may shine, is not merely an achievement in intelligence
and discernment, but something that suggests a grand inspiration. These
are times of change, when old systems of the world are being abandoned
and new ones being set in their places. It may happen, though it is as
unlikely as it is undesirable, that St. Andrews itself as a governing
body will fall; but nothing that ever happens to the game in the future
can equal the marvel of its foundation and establishment by this
authority and its associates.
* * * * *
It is not without good reason that they call golf the world game now. It
has alighted upon every country, and wherever it has touched it has
seized. The yellow man likes it; the black man in some places has to be
kept away from it, because it is found that he grows too fond of it. One
day when I was golfing at the Country Club, near Boston, they showed me
a most primitive kind of club that was kept with some other relics in a
glass case. It had been fashioned from the branch of a tree, and with
this crude implement a nigger boy in one of the southern states had not
long previously driven a ball over two hundred yards. Other games are
for their own countries, like the country's foods, and they would
neither be suitable nor adaptable elsewhere; but in its nature golf
will do for all, and it has the same subtle attraction for everybody, so
that what was once thought to be the "golf craze" of the British people
only became the craze of the Americans too, then of the French, now of
the Germans and others, and of really everybody. Its qualities and
conveniences make it the only possible world game. At present in some
countries it is confined to a few people of unusual distinction or
circumstances, but it has been found in old and recent history that,
following a beginning of this kind, the game in a new land has never
languished, but that presently it has extended from the pioneers, who
were probably from abroad, to the native people, and from the upper
classes to the middle, and then to the lower. In France at the present
time we see the game being started among the general French, and I have
news that the statesmen have begun to play; yet a little while since the
golf of Gaul was carried on by British only.
Recently some of us were looking over the map of the world for odd
countries that might be golfless, and it appeared then that there were
but four: one being the Balkan States, considering them in the piece,
another was Afghanistan, a third was Persia, and, scattering the
attention over the islands of the earth, one reflected that no golf in
Iceland had been heard of. But shortly afterwards this brief list of
lone golfless places was reduced to one. To a little gathering of
friends one night an adventurous gentleman was describing the
excitements of a day's rough golf that he had had one time when near to
Reykiavik, and, if the course was to some extent made for the occasion,
little enough did that matter then. There were some real holes, and the
pioneer declared one of them to be the longest and most sporting he had
ever played; and we knew he had played some good ones. So Iceland came
into the fold. It was discovered during the recent wars that there was
golf here and there in those worrying Balkans. Then lo! the land of the
Afghans was also delivered to the game, and it was the Ameer himself who
was chiefly responsible, thus emulating the rulers of many other lands.
He had heard of golf, had seen it, realised it, and had been fascinated.
Thereupon he had a short course prepared for him in the neighbourhood of
Kabul, and began to practise with royal assiduity at his driving,
pitching, and putting. Humble, doubtful, and yet loyal subjects observed
this done from a respectful distance, and they wondered. After a little
while they perceived that it was a game, and that the chief of Afghans
invariably sought with his little ball the holes that were placed upon
the course. Being practical people, they conceived that they might turn
the game and their royal master's fondness for it to their advantage,
and thereupon began to deposit in the holes at night such petitions as
they had difficulty in getting placed before the royal eyes by any other
means. They believed that by their new system the Ameer was sure to see
and read what was intended for him. Yet it proved that he was somewhat
angered by this manner of approach, and gave orders that all petitions
found in his golfing holes should be burned unread. The petitioning
parties had not understood how seriously the game he played was taken,
nor the deep effect it had upon the mind and the disposition of the
player, else they would surely have moved craftily and warily with their
prayers, and then they might have gained imperial favour. Had they seen
their ruler miss his drive, foozle his second, put his third into the
pond, slice among the trees with his fifth--even Ameers being penalised
a stroke for lifting from the water--and eventually reach the putting
green in nine, three more strokes then being needed, they would have
been stupid Afghans had they not at a convenient moment taken their
petitions from the holes, or withheld them if they had not placed them
there. But when an Ameer hits a good one from the tee, when his ball
flies fast and straight from his royal brassey (and rulers also laugh
when a topped ball runs a bunker!), when by enormous luck he lays an
approach quite close to the hole, and afterwards the putt is truly
played--why, many an Afghan might pray for the release of a brother from
prison in Kabul, and the brother, pardoned, might be raised to office in
the palace, perhaps to be an executioner. Now, if the petition had been
submitted when the sovereign had done his hole in twelve, the brother
might have died as arranged, perhaps the petitioner also, and who knows
but that the neglectful greenkeeper, for not having seen that all holes
for the day were free of pleas, would not have joined the departures for
another world. Wandering players may look forward now to some future
golf in Afghanistan. Have we not heard of the Shah at the game? If it
cannot be proved, Persia must be left in an Asiatic golfless solitude,
with the gibe against her that even celestial China has her courses, and
that they are everywhere save in the Persia where Omar was, and in fine
worldly philosophy bade us take good pleasures while we may.
Golf's vast ubiquity is illustrated in another case recalled by this
reference to kings who play. Miss Decima Moore of the theatres has a
love for roving far which has led her to many raw places of the earth
for hunting and shooting and adventurous exploration when she has tired
of the footlights and has longed for Nature with no mask at all. Then,
being golfer too, she has wandered with her bag of clubs into many
distant lands, and one morning in London, just back from Central Africa,
she told me of some strange experiences of a golfing woman. She has
played the game up in Uganda, and explained the quality of the play of
King Daudi Chwa, who is a ruler of those parts. Even once before, a
colonial bishop had informed me of the golf of this dusky king. He had
had some holes laid out for himself, so I was instructed, and when not
engaged in duties of his kingly office, which were seemingly not
onerous, he devoted himself earnestly to the reduction of his handicap
and to lowering his record for his private course--upon which strangers
in those parts are always welcome to a game. The bishop said that his
Majesty drove an excellent ball, played his irons well, and putted with
a good instinct for line and length, and the actress backed the bishop's
story. In the region of the Victoria Nyanza there are no Sunningdales to
be found, but the royal course of nine holes is considered a creditable
thing. The king, who was lately in England and played a little here,
will be glad to see any golfers who may go that way, and it may be his
pleasure to call one of his holes by a name of theirs as, with a good
African grace, he called one "Decima" when our English lady played it.
* * * * *
These wandering golfers do bring home great stories, and others send
them. A friend, poor Tom Browne, who is dead, the clever artist in black
and white, sat with me once at lunch in the Adelphi, and we talked of
golf in distant lands and many things concerning it, for in the morning
he was going eastwards to China and Japan. He said he should play as
much as possible, and he did. While at the table he drew a sketch on a
piece of paper and passed it to me with a smile. It was a picture of
himself leaving on a golfing holiday to those very foreign parts, with
numerous bags of clubs, cases of spare clubs guaranteed for all
climates, and innumerable large boxes piled up all round him, each one
labelled "One gross of best balls." Poor Tom always did take his clubs
with him to foreign lands, and on this occasion he made good, as one
might say, on that little sketch he drew at lunch by the places he
played at afterwards, and queer drawings he sent to me of the courses
and the people at them. He wrote from Tien-Tsin that the one they had
there was just outside the town and was a flat plain covered with
Chinese graves, the course being really nothing but one huge graveyard.
"The Chinamen," he said in his letter, "plant their graves anywhere that
suits them, and they consist of raised-up mounds which enclose the
coffins. Off the graves the ball will bounce at all kinds of angles.
Sometimes after heavy rains the mounds fall to pieces and expose the
coffins. The golf club can remove any of these graves by buying them at
four taels a coffin, and when a grave is bought in this way the native
takes the coffin away, buries it somewhere else, and the grave is then
flattened down. Fore-caddies are employed on this course. The 'greens'
consist of baked mud, as is usual in these eastern parts, and are
generally circular in shape. Chinese caddies do not understand the game
and think that the foreign devils who play it are surely mad. They
continually ask the players, 'When will you finish hitting and following
that ball about?' And they have a local rule at Tien-Tsin that 'a ball
lying in an open grave may be picked out and dropped without penalty.'"
This graveyard golf, as I know, is not at all peculiar to Tien-Tsin, for
not long ago I had a letter from a British official at Chiankiang on the
Yangtse River, in which he told me that they had just begun to play the
game out there on a course covered with crater-like excrescences, these
Chinese graves again, and he declared that they made the most excellent
hazards. It should be added for their credit's sake, golfers being
considerate people and mindful of others' feelings, that they carefully
ascertained in this case that no Chinese sentiment was injured by play
in these cemeteries, if they are to be called by such a name. Again, I
recall that a little while since the golfers who have a course in the
Malay peninsula went down to it one morning and found a Chinaman digging
up the remains of a deceased relative from one of the putting greens,
intending to remove them to China; because it is a common thing, as I am
told, when a Chinaman dies abroad, for his people to inter him
temporarily if they can and give him another burial in his native land
when opportunity chances. There has been a great move in things in this
country lately. The Government has changed; the people, according to
some trade returns that I have seen, are taking extensively to smoking
English cigarettes and wearing unlovely English clothes. So it is
inevitable that in their vast multitudes they will one day come into
golf, for a little advancement towards modern ways often leads to
strikes and golf. One fears to think that when China has a championship
her people may compete in such a costume as is favoured by some of the
oldest and best Scottish professionals (and if asked for a name we shall
mention good Sandy Herd as a captain of the class), who always wear dark
trousers and a light-grey jacket to their golf. There must be some
virtue in this unconventional arrangement of tints; for so many of the
great are attached to it.
In other parts of Asia there is golf that is peculiar, especially in
India where it flourishes to the extent of forty or fifty clubs,
including those of Calcutta and Bombay, which are not merely the oldest
in India but rank high in seniority among the golf clubs of the world.
Both were well established before 1860, at which time there were only
two or three in England, and the game was all but unknown in America.
Despite the fact that it was born in 1842 and was really an Indian
offshoot of the famous Royal Blackheath Club, the Royal Bombay remains a
little primitive in the matter of its course. It is a golf course for
one part of the day and something else for the remainder, and it is
perhaps the only course in the world which is dismantled daily. The fact
is that it is situated on what is called the "maidan," an open space
near to the European business quarter, and the golfers, having no
exclusive possession of it, are not allowed to play after half past ten
in the morning and are required, when they have done, to remove their
hazards. This obviously necessitates unconventional obstacles, and the
club has had to resort to movable screens, varying from four to ten feet
high, which are put up when play begins and taken away again when it is
finished. Having become accustomed to this sort of thing it ceases to
annoy, and in Bombay the course is considered good and sporting, and the
greens are well attended. Then up on the hills at Darjeeling there is
the highest golf course in the world, for it is situated at an elevation
of more than eight thousand feet above the level of the sea on the
abandoned cantonment of Seneshal. Scenery often does not count for very
much with golfers, and the better the golfer the keener he is on the
game and the less does he care at times about the surroundings of the
course. Yet, as I am told, it would be a dull poor soul that was not
moved by the views from the Darjeeling course, with Mounts Everest and
Kinchinjunga, both nearly thirty thousand feet high, in one direction
and the plains of Bengal in another. But perhaps the most curious of the
Indian courses is that of the Royal Western India Club, upon which is an
idgah, or kind of temple, some thirty feet in height and fifty long,
with bastions at either end and minarets in the middle. This idgah
serves the double duty of club-house and a hazard also, for it has to
be driven over from the tee on the way to the eleventh hole, and many
are the marks on its walls that were made by balls that were hit too
low. The course has another peculiarity in that it possesses seventeen
holes only, no amount of ingenuity being enough to scheme out an
eighteenth on the land available, so one of them has to be played twice
over to make up the usual eighteen. This club has its course at Nasik,
and mention of the idgah reminds one that the Royal Bangkok Club of Siam
used to have an old and very imposing Siamese temple for a club-house. A
little while since, when travelling northwards from Marseilles through
France, I met, in the restaurant car of my P.L.M. train, an officer just
going home on leave from India, and he assured me that he had found no
place in the country where there was no golf, and he gave me some good
examples of the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the golfers there. Thus at
Multam, for the betterment of their sanded putting "browns" they keep
them oiled all over, so that the ball runs evenly along them, and at a
reasonable pace. There is an attendant to each green, who smooths over
the track that is made by every ball when putted. And my companion told
me also that in the season at Gulmurg in Kashmir, where they have two
courses, there is such a crowd of golfers that it is difficult to
arrange starting times for all of them.
As one would expect, the game is played in Japan, and there is a highly
flourishing club at Kobe, whose course is on the top of a high mountain
at Rokkosan. It is a splendidly interesting course when reached, with
views that can only be second in magnificence to those of Darjeeling;
but for the occasional visitor the chief pleasure would seem to lie in
the reaching, rather, perhaps, than in golfing on it afterwards, for the
players have to go by rickshaw to the foot of the Cascade Valley and
are then carried up the mountain slope by coolies for an hour and a
half, when at last the tees and bunkers come to view.
Thus it is indicated what great work must have been done by the pioneers
of golf. They have been fine adventurers and explorers. In their
strength of purpose, their resourcefulness, their enterprise and daring,
and in their joy of doing beginnings, they have had some of the burning
zeal and the quick inspirations of the voyagers of Elizabethan time.
They too were discovering a world anew. When a golfer reaches a place
afar where there is no course, his first and most natural impulse is to
make one. Sir Edgar Vincent, keen player, told me once how he and that
most distinguished amateur and ex-champion Mr. J. E. Laidlay, had a
considerable hand in the starting of golf in Egypt, where it is now as
well established as the Pyramids and Sphinx. Sir Edgar went to Cairo,
and with him took his clubs, but on arrival found there was no course
whereon to play, and there was Laidlay disappointed in the same way. So
they twain obtained shovels and other implements of labour, enlisted the
service of native helpers, and went out into the desert, making there
the first golf course of Egypt. But theirs was not the distinction of
hitting the first golf ball in that ancient land. Long before then a
Scottish golfing minister did it. There is no better enthusiast than
these ministers, about whom the best stories are told, as of the worthy
who was left muttering the Athanasian creed in the lowest depths of
hell, being the bunker of that name on the old course at St. Andrews,
and the other who felt he would have to give it up because he played so
ill and was so much provoked--not give up the game but alas! his
ministry. And so the Rev. J. H. Tait, of Aberlady, went for a golfing
holiday to Egypt long before the two gallants who did the spade work
there, lumbered himself up to the top of the great Pyramid, and then,
feeling in his pocket, curiously enough discovered an old golf ball
there. To tee it up, to address it with the handle end of his umbrella,
and to despatch it earthwards to Egyptian sand with the thwack of an
honest east-coast swing, was the labour of no more time than would be
needed to recite a verse of Psalms.
A whole book having been written on Australian golf we may leave it
unconsidered here. Hardly an island but there is a links upon it. The
other day, when I had myself but just come back from foreign golfing
parts, I was mated for the game on a London course to one who told me he
had only then returned from Fiji, where his last game was at Suva and
was a foursome in which the local bishop, the attorney-general, the
chief trader, and himself were engaged. He explained the part that was
played by _mimosa pudica_, being the "sensitive plant," in the golf of
the Fiji islanders. When this herb is touched by anything, its leaves
droop and close upon the object, and, _mimosa pudica_ being all over the
fairway of the course, balls would be too often hidden and lost but for
the agile caddies who are sent in front to watch for them. In these days
one is hearing frequently of travellers' tales like this.
Spain having been captured by the game, as I shall relate in time, there
is little need to dwell upon the other conquests of golf in Europe. In
Germany it is fast advancing, and the German Golf Association, which
publishes a German Golf Year-Book, is an enterprising body. The Kaiser
has encouraged the game, and has given land for it. At Baden Baden they
have given the most valuable prizes to professionals; at Oberhof, in the
Thuringen Forest, there has been made under the guidance of the Duke of
Saxe-Coburg one of the nicest courses a German need wish to play upon,
and the girl caddies in pretty uniform are the most picturesque alive.
In Norway and Sweden, in Denmark, and nearly everywhere there is golf,
and much of it. It flourishes in Italy, as is to be shown in a later
chapter. Even in Russia you may golf. Both St. Petersburg and Moscow
have their clubs and courses, and the Mourino Club, belonging to the
former, has its place near a small village some dozen miles from the
capital. The golf is good for Russia, but one does not quickly forget
the roughness of the road in reaching it. And down at the bottom of that
side of the map there is golf at Constantinople too! The game is done on
the _yok maidan_ just outside the city, _yok_ being Persian for "arrow,"
and _maidan_ the word for "plain," the fact being that it was on this
land that the sultans and their suites in days gone by were accustomed
to practise archery, and there are still on the plain many stone pillars
erected to the memory of great shots that were made. The
English-speaking colony had some difficulty to gain permission to golf
on this ground, and, having no exclusive rights in the matter, are
harassed by many worries. It is used largely for drilling soldiers, and
is described as being "a favourite resort for Jews on Saturdays, for
Greeks on Sundays, and for Turks on Fridays." The golfer may need to
delay his stroke while a long string of camels passes through the
fairway, and again he may have difficulty in persuading a party of
Turkish ladies, closely veiled, taking the sun on one of the putting
greens, to retire therefrom for a little while. Yet the game is much
enjoyed by the officials of foreign Governments in Constantinople, and
the turf on the _yok maidan_ is good.
In the rich remembrances of the game there is little that is mournful;
but one sad moment comes when I read a letter reminding me that golf
was once played "farthest south," where man does not abide save briefly
for exploration and adventure, where there is eternal ice and snow.
Captain Robert Scott, the glorious British hero of the Southern Pole,
whose friendship I enjoyed, was a golfer too. One of many letters of a
personal kind I had from him, just before he set out on his last
magnificent but fatal expedition, was addressed from the Littlestone
Golf Club. He asked me to send to the ship a certain piece of golfing
literature, believing that "members of the expedition would read it with
interest and, I hope, with benefit to their handicaps!" He had taken
some clubs and balls up there into the Antarctic on his previous
expedition, when farthest south was reached. On one of the last days he
spent in London I had some talk with him on different matters, and we
joked about ways of playing Antarctic shots. We were in his office in
Victoria Street then. "Good-bye!" he said in parting, "And you must come
to meet me on my return!" And if none met him coming back, yet we know
the game he played.
* * * * *
The fact that there is golf nearly everywhere on earth will make it
appear to some minds, reasonably too, that here is a convenient
diversion for those travellers who like this sort of thing, something
with which they can fill up time when held up for a while in a distant
country and being impatient or weary. True, golf is good for that; but
the unsophisticated who imagine that this is the full relation between
travel and the game, and that this is the function of the courses
everywhere, suffer from a poor delusion, which is expensive.
It is a modern necessity to the traveller. In these days we are a people
of wanderers; railways offer cheap journeys, steamships carry us over
seas at little cost, hotels are good and comfortable; and why should
those who like and have the hours not be always roaming and seeing the
open world? But travelling sometimes has its inconveniences and its
tedious days. Some wanderers unconsciously exert themselves towards
loneliness, and they do not love it when they have it. The joy of
meeting with a friend when one is half a globe away from home! With all
the travelling that is done in these days there has come a great
increase of loneliness. Golf has been set to destroy it. There are still
people who travel and do not golf, but they are fewer daily, and as each
new travel-golfer is established he wonders how he lived and moved and
was moderately well contented and satisfied before. His travelling was a
plain occupation then; now it makes more emotion and thrill, and,
positively, it is more educative. There was a time, when I was very
young, when I did not golf as I travelled abroad, partly because there
were few courses to play upon and no golfers to play with, for it is
only in recent times that the game has been established in every country
in the world; and as I look back upon those days it is hard to realise
that they were in this present life. They should have belonged to some
other existence, which in the course of time and nature was given up, a
reincarnation having followed ages after.
The traveller who is golfless has often no friends at the places that he
visits. Some men and women have good capacity for making them at each
hotel they stay in; others have not. In any case these acquaintanceships
are exceedingly thin; the people do not really know each other;
oftentimes they say not what they think, and they have no common
interest. This kind of friendship with all its making of artificial
conversation is poor stuff at times. The golfless wanderer in his
travelling does one of two things; either he does hardly anything at all
or he goes to see the sights; and one suspects that much of the peering
through the gloom of dark cathedrals and the lounging in picture
galleries is done merely for the killing of time, and for the formal
recording of places that have been visited and sights that have been
seen. Some travellers are happiest when they have done their business
with the churches and the local castles and may leave by the next
train--one day nearer home and still working well!
The case of the golfing traveller is very different. He has friends in
every big town in every country, and all await his coming to make
pleasure and happiness for him. He needs to scheme nothing in advance;
they are prepared for him always. The automatic management of this real
society of friends is most marvellously perfect. The wanderer, let us
say, is advancing towards a new place--one that he knows nothing of.
From the people about him now he may make inquiry as to which is the
golf hotel at his destination, for often there is one to which golfers
most resort, and, with his golf directory containing the names of all
the golf clubs in the world, and with some particulars and the
secretaries' addresses, away he goes complete and well prepared. His
corny hands and his bag of clubs are his passport to every links. By the
perfect system that we have, every man who is a golfer and a member of a
golf club is _ipso facto_ a travelling member of nearly every other golf
club in the world, and is admitted to full playing and other privileges
without delay on paying the trifling fees of temporary membership,
sometimes with even less than that. And one golf club seems very much
like another--just a branch of it; the atmosphere is the same, and the
men are the same. The stranger reaches his new destination, in England
or in India, in France or in America; he registers at his hotel; and as
soon as may be he seeks direction from the manager or the hall porter
as to the whereabouts of the golf club. There he goes. At once, then, he
is admitted to the local community of players, and they make much of
him. They arrange games for him, surround him with the most hospitable
companions, discover that he and they have many mutual friendships in
different parts of the world, and linger upon other common ground in
their memories of the third hole at one and the seventeenth at some
other place. How the talk goes on! This golfer arrived among the unknown
at ten in the morning, and at four in the afternoon he is tied to as
many good friends as man could need. They invite him here and there;
they take him to their homes; they make much of him. Stranger indeed! A
thin voice of a petulant cynic may be heard again. "Yes," says he, "but
in travelling one does not wish to spend all one's time in playing games
and lounging about golf clubs!" True; and the golfing traveller, though
he likes to visit courses in other countries, and finds it well to have
an object always and something good with which to fill the daylight
hours and keep his health in a well-balanced state, uses the game and
its people to greater advantage than even that. The golf community of a
place is always the most active and the most useful. There are the local
dignitaries, the people of influence and consequence, men who know
everything about the town, and can do most things. They can open doors
that are locked, and take you to the most secret places. And so the
golfing traveller, the first desire for the best of games being
satisfied, always finds that his new friends wish to help him. Perhaps
the ambassador is here, and ambassadors are serviceable men. All wise
people golf a little at the present time. They give their guest letters
of introduction; they tell him how to go about. They do much more than
that, for they get out their cars and take him. Places which seem
unfriendly to others are always friendly to the golfer. There is no
particular community, no society, no association, no brotherhood in the
world that is so real in its effectiveness, so thoroughly practical as
this of golf. A quarter of a million British golfers know that this is
true, and they know the reason why.
* * * * *
From the consideration of this busy world of golf in general it is an
easy move in thought to the one wee spot of it from which it has to a
large extent developed, upon which the great scheme continually hangs,
being the fourth of our seven wonders of golf--ancient St. Andrews. In a
measure I developed this idea at the beginning of the consideration of
golf as the world game; but now for a moment regard the capital of golf,
not as the parliament place where the high statesmen do ponderously
deliberate and with stern visage that befits their lofty authority most
solemnly severally and jointly promulgate various laws and ordinances,
but as the wonder city of the golfing world where one gathers emotions
from a ghostly past, a city where golf is everything and nothing else is
anything, where golf is life. This is the aspect of St. Andrews, and the
only one, in which it is really great. We have much respect for our
rulers. They are wise men, and we believe that they maintain the spirit
of the game better than any other body of men could or would. They are
well born and trained in golf, and the atmosphere of St. Andrews keeps
them straight in the true golfing way. One who lived in an inland
manufacturing town or spent his days in the office of a colliery would
lose his golfing perspective early in middle age. But these excellents
of Fifeshire play a little, read a little, talk much and deliberate,
and the social and intellectual atmosphere keeps them strong in their
golfing sense always. The government of St. Andrews is really one to
respect and have faith in, but it is not the existing wonder of St.
Andrews. When you visit the place, such of these rulers as live there do
not impress you for anything save their good golf, their excellent and
pleasant manners, their keen wit, their fine sense in matters of
intellect, their tolerable aestheticism, their shrewd judgment in
political affairs, their sound advice on financial questions, their fine
epicurean taste, their kingly cellars, their magnificent hospitality,
and their charming women. In nothing else that I can think of do they
excel, and as minor deities, or as a college of cardinals with a captain
for pope, endowed with powers transmitted from a golfers' heaven, they
are failures. They are merely human, very good, and excellently
conservative.
No sort of people make St. Andrews. Only in two circumstances are the
living humans of the place specially interesting. One is on the occasion
of the autumn meeting of the Royal and Ancient Club, when the cannon on
the hill is fired, when the new captain plays himself in with ceremony,
and when all the ancient rites are properly observed until far on in the
night. The other is in the attitude of the people generally towards this
game as a thing of life, their seeming feeling that it is nearly the
beginning and end of all things in this world. This may not be a proper
view, and it is for something of the kind, but yet long distant from it,
that the golfers of the south are chided and ridiculed for their
enthusiasm. That, again, is why the real golfer, heart and soul for the
game, who, if he would confess it, does let it take a larger part of his
life sometimes than is very good for him (but who knows what this fellow
would be doing if not golfing?), feels happy when at St. Andrews, feels
that at last he has come to his real home. For here the people look upon
him just as merely right and normal because he is a golfer and nothing
but a golfer--and a man with a little money to spare. His chief
peculiarity is not that he stammers or is deaf or is a total abstainer,
that he is a peer of the realm or mayor of his town or a professor of
Greek, but that he addresses his ball with the heel of his club or pulls
a little always. The place is attuned to his feeling of life; it is in
sympathy with him. It is either a fine day for the game--as most days
are--or it is no day at all. If we lose our match it does not matter
what the papers say of politics or Germany; if we win it, the papers
matter less. The caddies know that you are a golfer and what is your
handicap; and if you are the real thing that is enough for them. Be not
a golfer at heart or a namby-pamby person hanging to the game, and their
contempt is rarely hidden. In the hotels they know what golf means to
people; the chambermaid on calling you in the morning may tell you the
direction the wind is blowing, knowing that it matters more than any hot
water. The men in the club-makers' shops are sorely concerned in your
domestic difficulties about the length of the shaft of your driver and
your quarrel with an iron. They know what it is; they are kindly,
worldly-wise doctors, who are the constant recipients of the confidences
of poor sufferers. They will try to put you right. All the
advertisements on the walls are of golf; the notices in the shop windows
are of golf matches and competitions. The streets are called after golf,
the taverns have golf names. Yes! golf is in all the air and all the
earth and all the people of this ancient city with its far-seen spires.
But yet even these things do not give to St. Andrews its ineffable
charm; if they are all that the wanderer notices he is not the real man
of the game after all, nor is the splendid quality of the holes on the
old course and on the new enough either, great as is that quality. The
wanderer missed St. Andrews if these things were all that were
discovered. He should understand that here we feel that the Swilcan Burn
is greater than the Dardanelles; Asia is a trifle when we survey the
vast extent of the fifth putting green, and little enough do we worry of
hell when with a fine long shot with the brassey we can carry "the
devil's kitchen" on the way to the fourteenth green. Here the game is in
the air; we breathe it, feel it. And the reason why is because the
spirits are in the air, the spirits of the ancients who at St. Andrews
laid the foundations of this game, served for its traditions, set it up
and shaped it to the good service of men, and gave their stamp to every
inch of this great old course. Do not misunderstand. These men, I do
believe, were often very ordinary simple human beings; they may have
been no better than we are. There is a possibility that they were worse.
They may not have been worthy to be canonised as they have been; but let
us not inquire upon these matters, for we should not peer too closely at
the gods. What matters is that in the first place undoubtedly they were
in at the game before we were, in at it the first of all, were evidently
uncommonly shrewd people, and for their discovery of golf and their
presentation of it to us their perpetual dignity was well won. It
matters also that we have many volumes of good stories about them, and
none that is in any serious sense against them. On legend and anecdote
they win well. And, third, whatever they were, we believe them to have
been these great men, we set them up in our imagination as such, we
recreate them to our fancies and desires, and they seem somehow to
respond.
So we imagine, believe, and are well satisfied, and therefore the
spirits of golf take advantage and seem always to hover in the air of
the old grey city, brooding upon the links, contented that things are
moving as well as they are, and that what they began prospers so finely,
though they wail a little, one would imagine, about what the
rubber-cored ball has done, and the wraith of old Allan Robertson turns
round to the ghost of the elder Morris, murmuring, "D'ye mind, Tammas,
the awfu' trouble that we bodies had wi' ane anither when the gutty ba'
kem hither to St. Andrews, and I caught ye, ma servin' man, ye ken,
playin' gowff, as ye wad say, wi' Campbell of Saddell and wi' the gutty,
and me a maker o' the featheries tae!"
"Aye, I ken weel eno'," croons the shade of Old Tom, "and I'm telling
ye, Allan, man, that I was fower up on Mr. Campbell at the eleventh
hole, and I was playin' ma very best, and wi' ma second shot at the
fourteenth, eh mon alive----"
"Na, na, Tammas, nane o' yer rantin' aboot the shots as ye played at St.
Andrews, when ye spent the best pairt o' yer time ower theer at
Prestwick, and ye never could mak' up a scoor from a' yer ither scoors
as wad come to 56 like mine. Ye ken that, Tom! And dinna forget, ma
laddie, as I was goin' to tell ye, that when I saw ye wi' that awfu' new
ba' as wad ruin every bit body o' us I tell't ye straight, ma man, as ye
must go, and never a bit o' wark did ye do in ma shop again."
And then Tom, good-natured old ghost as he is, and loving his Allan
still, just answers, "Puir Allan, ye always were a cunnin' body o' a
man, and a guid man tae, and fun aboot ye a' the time!"
And all this about ghosts and the times they have in the air over St.
Andrews old links may look like nonsense, but those who do not believe
it, or do not feel that they believe it by mental adoption, have not
been to St. Andrews properly, and do not understand her.
* * * * *
The most utterly non-golfing and sceptical person may be convinced in
another way, by matters not of ghosts and fancies but of laws and
prisons, that St. Andrews is all golf and is not as other places are.
There are laws of the town approved by Act of Parliament, by which it is
made illegal to practise putting on the eighteenth green or to play on
the course with iron clubs only, the penalty for offences in these
matters being a fine or imprisonment. Where else is there a place where
a golfer may get fourteen days for depending for all his long shots on
his driving iron or his cleek? Clearly, the law is made for the good of
the precious turf and the teeing grounds of the old course, and that it
is not law made to be looked and laughed at is proved by the fact that a
Prime Minister himself was once warned for infringing it. One time when
at St. Andrews I made an examination of the complete bye-laws in which
these prohibitions are included. They are embraced in the St. Andrews
Links Act, which was passed in 1894, and in the Burgh Police Act of
Scotland, which was made law two years earlier. The regulations for the
use of the old and new golf courses make up these bye-laws, and they are
twenty-one in number. Following them are four "general regulations for
the whole links as defined by Schedule I. of the Links Act," and at the
finish there is a clause about penalties, wherein it is said that "any
person who shall contravene any of the foregoing bye-laws shall be
liable, on conviction, in a penalty not exceeding one pound for each
offence, and, failing payment, to imprisonment for any period not
exceeding fourteen days." There it is, the law, and it is that last
clause with its sting that gives the point to the whole story.
Now let us look at these bye-laws and see how careful we must be when we
go to the great city of golf, and for what we may be fined a pound or
lodged in a Fifeshire gaol for a full fortnight, during which our game
might go to rack and ruin.
In the first place it is set down that "no person shall play cricket,
football, or any game other than golf upon the golf courses." Surely
nobody who ever went to St. Andrews would wish to play any other game,
but here we have it plainly set forth that the golf of St. Andrews will
bear no rivals, and it must be remembered that the great putting green,
on which the fifth and thirteenth holes are made, is big enough for
several cricket pitches, and also that the large flat space along which
a fairway for the first and eighteenth is situated might be made into
various football grounds. But what sacrilege! It is well that men may be
sent to prison if they ever committed it. Then you may be punished by
law if you do not begin your match at the first teeing ground, but no
doubt some thousands of people in their time have risked chastisement
for this offence. "No player shall, in teeing his ball, raise the turf
of the teeing ground." There is sand there for him who wants it, and he
must not make his tee in the prehistoric way. After this there are some
points of etiquette which are made matters of law. Elsewhere, if we
disregard the etiquette of the game as set forth at the end of the
rules, we are merely told about it by other people and regarded as very
badly-mannered golfers, but at St. Andrews the sovereign or fourteen
days needs to be considered. Thus "no player shall play from the tee
until the party in front have played their second strokes and are out
of range, nor play to the putting green till the party in front have
holed out and moved away." And again, "players looking for a lost ball
must allow any other match coming up to pass them," and "every caddie,
and every player unaccompanied by a caddie, shall replace any turf that
may be accidentally removed by the player's club, and shall press it
firmly with the foot." Then we may be fined or sent to prison if, when
practising, we drive a ball off a putting green, that is, within twenty
yards of a hole, and the eighth clause is that which is known to all
men--"To prevent destruction of the turf of the golf courses, play or
practice with iron clubs alone is prohibited." Also, "no practice is
allowed over the first and eighteenth holes of the Old Course, nor shall
any practice be allowed over any part of the golf courses so as to
obstruct or delay players."
Upon all this, it is enacted that when playing with three or more balls
we must allow those who are only playing two, as in an ordinary single
match, to pass us on being requested to do so, that we must let a match
through if we do not play the whole round but cut in somewhere, that we
must not pierce the ground with any golf club support nor with the flags
from the holes, nor must we drive towards any person without calling out
"Fore!" and waiting until he gets out of range. No man when at St.
Andrews is allowed "to play the short game at the regular golf holes,
except when engaged in a regular game of golf," and, as said, "no
practising is allowed on the eighteenth putting green." There are five
other bye-laws, mostly long, but the only other one which is specially
interesting is that which is designed to preserve the integrity of the
Swilcan Burn, which has played its part so thoroughly and drastically at
times of great competitions. No other golf stream is protected by an
Act of Parliament in the way that this one is, and its high dignity is
unimpeachable. We are warned, under the usual penalty of a fine or
imprisonment, that "no one shall wade in the Swilcan Burn, so far as it
flows through the Old Course, nor shall any one, except players or
caddies in search of their ball, do anything to cause its waters to
become discoloured or muddy." There are surely times when we feel that
we could not do anything to make the Swilcan Burn appear uglier than it
does at those times.
Why a distinction should be made between the "bye-laws" and the "general
regulations," four in number, is not quite clear, but it would appear
that the penalties of fine and imprisonment may be inflicted if the
latter are disobeyed as well as the former. If that is so, we begin to
wonder when we see the warning that "no one shall use profane language
upon the links to the annoyance of the lieges." Let us then hope, for
the sake of the law and our respect for it, that the lieges are not
habitually in the neighbourhood of the putting green when putts are
being missed that should not be. But it is good to see that there is a
kind of general warning that "no one shall annoy or interfere with any
one exercising a legitimate use of the links," which means, of course,
playing golf. We golfers, according to these bye-laws and the Act of
Parliament which supports them, may be sent to prison for doing so many
things that it is excellent to know the common people may be cast there
also if they meddle with us when we play the game in our own good way,
and manage by thought and attention to avoid infringement of the many
cautions which the fathers of St. Andrews have prescribed for our
welfare and that of their dear old course. The Sheriff of Fife has set
it down that he "allows and confirms" these bye-laws, the Secretary of
Scotland has officially approved of them, and the staff employed by the
Green Committee are authorised to see that they are obeyed, especially
those about replacing turf, playing with irons only, and practising at
the first and eighteenth holes. Contemplating these enactments, we
conclude that St. Andrews is the best and proper place for the
upbringing of the golfer's son.