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FIFTY YEARS OF GOLF
[Illustration]
_First Published in 1919_
[Illustration: The writer, the first English Captain of the Royal and
Ancient, buying back, according to custom, the ball struck off to win
the Captaincy.]
FIFTY YEARS OF GOLF
By
HORACE G. HUTCHINSON
LONDON:
PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICES OF COUNTRY LIFE,
20 TAVISTOCK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C.2 AND BY
GEORGE NEWNES, LTD., 8-11 SOUTHAMPTON STREET,
STRAND W.C.2. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PREFACE
(_Written in 1914_)
I agreed to the suggestion that I should write these reminiscences,
mainly because it seems to me that circumstances have thrown my life
along such lines that I really have been more than any other man at the
centre of the growth of golf--a growth out of nothingness in England,
and of relative littleness in Scotland, fifty years ago, to its present
condition of a fact of real national importance. I saw all the
beginnings, at Westward Ho! of the new life of English golf. I followed
its movement at Hoylake and later at Sandwich. I was on the Committee
initiating the Amateur Championship, the International Match, the Rules
of Golf Committee and so on. I have been Captain in succession of the
Royal North Devon, Royal Liverpool, Royal St. George's and Royal and
Ancient Clubs, as well as many others, and in these offices have been
not only able but even obliged to follow closely every step in the
popular advancement of the game. I do not mention these honours
vaingloriously, but only by way of showing that no one else perhaps has
had quite the same opportunities.
Possibly I should explain, too, the apparent magniloquence of the phrase
describing golf as a "fact of real national importance." I do not think
it is an over-statement. I use it irrespective of the intrinsic merits
of the game, as such. When we consider the amount of healthy exercise
that it gives to all ages and sexes, the amount of money annually
expended on it, the area of land (in many places otherwise valueless)
that is devoted to it, the accession in house and land values for which
it is responsible, the miles of railway and motor travel of which it is
the reason, the extent of house building of which it has been the cause,
and the amount of employment which it affords--when these and other
incidental features are totalled up, it will be found, I think, that
there is no extravagance at all in speaking of the golf of the present
day as an item of national importance. At least, if golf be not so, it
is difficult to know what is.
It is because I have in my head the material for the telling of the
history of this rise of golf to its present status that I have ventured
to write these personal reminiscences, and underlying them all has been
the sense that I was telling the story of the coming of golf, as well as
narrating tales of the great matches and the humorous incidents that I
have seen and taken part in by the way.
POSTSCRIPT TO PREFACE
(_Written in 1919_)
Reading the above "foreword," and also the pages which follow it, after
the immense chasm cleft in our lives and habits by the War, I find
little to modify as a result of the delay in publication. What does
strike me with something very like a thrill of terror is the appalling
egotism of the whole. I can truly say that I feel guiltily aware and
ashamed of it. I cannot, however, say that I see my way clear to amend
it. If one is rash enough to engage in the gentle pastime of personal
reminiscence at all, it is difficult to play it without using the
capital "I" for almost every tee shot. I will ask pardon for my
presumption in plucking a passage from one of the world's great
classics, to adorn so slight a theme as this, and will conclude in the
words of Michael, Lord of Montaigne:--"Thus, gentle Reader, myselfe am
the groundworke of my booke: it is then no reason thou shouldst employe
thy time about so frivolous and vaine a subject."[1]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS 11
II HOW GOLF IN ENGLAND GREW 17
III OF YOUNG TOMMY MORRIS AND OTHER GREAT MEN 23
IV THE SPREAD OF GOLFING IN ENGLAND 29
V THE WEAPONS OF GOLF IN THE SEVENTIES 35
VI HOW MEN OF WESTWARD HO! WENT ADVENTURING IN THE NORTH 41
VII GOLF AT OXFORD 47
VIII THE START OF THE OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE GOLF MATCHES 53
IX GOLFING PILGRIMAGES 59
X WESTWARD HO! HOYLAKE AND ST. ANDREWS IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES 65
XI FIRST DAYS AT ST. ANDREWS 71
XII THE BEGINNINGS OF THE AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP 77
XIII ON GOLF BOOKS AND GOLF BALLS 84
XIV THE FIRST AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP 90
XV MR. ARTHUR BALFOUR AND HIS INFLUENCE IN GOLF 96
XVI THE SECOND AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP 102
XVII THE FIRST GOLF IN AMERICA 108
XVIII HOW I LOST THE CHAMPIONSHIP AND PLAYED THE
MOST WONDERFUL SHOT IN THE WORLD 114
XIX JOHNNY BALL AND JOHNNY LAIDLAY 120
XX A CHAPTER OF ODDS AND ENDS 126
XXI A MORE LIBERAL POLICY AT ST. ANDREWS 132
XXII THE FIRST AMATEUR WIN OF THE OPEN CHAMPIONSHIP 138
XXIII GOLF ON THE CONTINENT AND IN THE CHANNEL ISLANDS 144
XXIV ABOUT HAROLD HILTON, FREDDY TAIT AND OTHERS 150
XXV THE COMING OF THE THREE GREAT MEN 156
XXVI THE REVOLT OF THE AMAZONS 162
XXVII THE MAKING OF INLAND COURSES 168
XXVIII VARIOUS CHAMPIONSHIPS AND THE WANDERING SOCIETIES 174
XXIX THE COMIC COMING OF THE HASKELL BALL 180
XXX AN HISTORIC MATCH AND AN HISTORIC TYPE 186
XXXI THE INTERNATIONAL MATCH 192
XXXII HOW MR. JUSTICE BUCKLEY KEPT HIS EYE ON THE HASKELL BALL 198
XXXIII THE AMATEUR CHAMPIONSHIP OF 1903 204
XXXIV TRAVIS'S YEAR 210
XXXV HOW GOLF HAS GRIPPED AMERICA 216
XXXVI THE END OF THE ROUND 223
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Montaigne's Essays_, Florio's translation.]
ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
The writer, the first English Captain of the Royal and Ancient, buying
back, according to custom, the ball struck off to win the Captaincy
_Frontispiece_
Borough House, Northam 12
Mr. Peter Steel driving the gravel pit at Blackheath 13
At Pau: the oldest of non-Scottish Golf Clubs 16
Captain's Medal of the Royal North Devon Golf Club 17
The Ladies' Course at Pau, in the Days of the Crinoline 20
Miss Cecil Leitch 21
Westward Ho! 26
An Old Hoylake Group 27
An Old Westward Ho! Group 32
Thomas Owen Potter 33
"Old Tom" 70
Douglas Rolland and Archie Simpson 71
John Ball 80
A.F. Macfie 81
A.J. Balfour 100
Crawford 101
John Ball, as a Yeoman 120
J.E. Laidlay 121
The Chasm on the Old Biarritz Course 144
Arnaud Massy 145
J.E. Laidlay, John Ball, junr., Horace G. Hutchinson, and P.C.
Anderson 150
H.H. Hilton 151
Freddy Tait 154
J.H. Taylor 156
Harry Vardon 157
James Braid 160
Horace Hutchinson and Leslie Balfour Melville 161
Amateur Championship, St. Andrews, 1901 174
Amateur Championship, St. Andrews, 1895 175
Old Leather Ball, etc. 180
Gutty _v._ Rubber Core 181
The Amateur and Professional Sides at Sandwich in 1894 186
"Fiery" 187
Walter Travis 210
Charles B. Macdonald 211
FIFTY YEARS OF GOLF
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNING OF ALL THINGS
I believe it is a little more than fifty years really. I do not mean to
imply that I have been for that length of time actively engaged in the
serious pursuit of the golf ball, but I expect that I began to take
interest in what I understood as golf about the age of four. At that
time my father was at Government House in Devonport, as General in
Command of the Western District, and my Uncle Fred, Colonel Hutchinson,
used to come there and tell us of some game, the most wonderful in the
world, that he had lately learned to play when he was in Scotland, as
Adjutant of the Fife Militia. He lived at Wemyss Hall, in Fife, and used
to ride over to St. Andrews, breakfasting _en route_ with Mr. Bethune of
Blebo, and taking him on along with him, for a round or two rounds.
I used to hear a great deal of talk about this wonderful game, between
my father and my uncle, the former having scarcely a more clear-cut idea
of what it was like than I myself; but I can well remember his
attempting to give some description of it, in my uncle's absence, to a
friend, and hearing this remark: "A man knows his own weapon, that he
uses in the game, and it is as important to him to have the weapon that
he knows as it is to a billiard player to have his own cue. And they use
several different kinds of weapon at the game, for strokes of different
strength."
All that seems quite credible now; but it hardly seemed possible of
belief in the South of England in the early sixties. I even knew what
the weapon was called--"a club"--for I often asked my uncle about it,
and he tried, with poor success, to make me understand its character;
for I tried, in turn, to describe it to one of the orderlies, who was a
particular friend of myself (or of my nurse), and he made me what he
thought fitted the description. It fitted the name of "club"--for it was
much like what the cannibals, in our boys' books, were depicted as using
on the heads of their victims; but when I showed it to my uncle he shook
his head sadly. It did not appeal to him as having any likeness to the
delicate works of Hugh Philp, that master club-maker, with which he was
familiar. Still, I did beat a ball about with it, and thus began golf.
When I arrived at the age of five, we went to live at a house called
Wellesbourne, in North Devon, about halfway between Bideford and
Northam. Westward Ho! in those days did not exist. There was one
farmhouse where all the houses of the watering-place now are. The very
name belonged only to Charles Kingsley's fine book, and was only taken
for the name of the place a year or so later than this. Captain
Molesworth, to whom English golf was to owe a big debt, lived at a house
called North Down, just at the entry into Bideford, and it was in this
house that Charles Kingsley was living while writing _Westward Ho!_ That
is the story of how the name came to be given to the place, and Borough
House, by Northam, was about half a mile from our Wellesbourne. This
Borough House, since restored, is where Mrs. Leigh, with her sons Frank
and Amyas, were placed by the novelist.
[Illustration: Borough House, Northam, in 1855,
where Mrs. Leigh and her sons Frank and Amyas, the heroes of Kingsley's
_Westward Ho!_ lived. (It has since been entirely reconstructed.)]
[Illustration: Mr. Peter Steel driving the Gravel Pit at Blackheath,
with forecaddie in distance.]
The Reverend I.H. Gossett was Vicar of Northam, and related to the large
family of Moncrieffes, of whom there were several resident then at St.
Andrews. About that time one of its members, General Moncrieffe, came on
a visit to his relative, the vicar of Northam, and from that chance
visit great events grew. For Mr. Gossett, as it was likely he should,
led out General Moncrieffe for a walk across that stretch of low-lying
common ground known as the Northam, or Appledore, Burrows, to the famous
Pebble Ridge and the shores of Bideford Bay; and as they went along and
reached the vicinity of those noble sandhills later to be known to
golfing fame and to be execrated by golfing tongues as "the Alps," the
General observed: "Providence obviously designed this for a golf links."
To a man coming from St. Andrews it was a fact that jumped to the eyes.
It was not for a clergyman to stand in the way of a design so
providential. Mr. Gossett was a very capable, effective man: he had a
family including some athletic sons for whom a game such as described by
General Moncrieffe seemed likely to provide just the outlet which their
holiday energies would need. He threw himself heartily into the work of
getting a few to join together to make the nucleus of a club; but that
first of English Golf Clubs, next after--very long after--the fearful
antiquity of Blackheath, and absolutely first to play on a seaside
links, did not involve all the outlay on green and club-house without
which no golf club can respect itself to-day.
Clubs and balls--"gutty" balls, for the feather-cored leather-cased ones
had already been superseded--would be sent, as needed, on General
Moncrieffe's order, from Tom Morris' shop at St. Andrews, and when that
was done all was done that was needed for these little beginnings of the
seaside golf of England. The turf grew naturally short, and the
commoners' sheep helped to check any exuberance. The course, as designed
by those primitive constructors, acting under the advice of General
Moncrieffe, started out near the Pebble Ridge, by what is now the tee to
the third hole. Those pioneers of the game did not even go to the
expense, in the first instance, of a hole cutter. They excised the holes
with pocket knives. The putting greens were entirely _au naturel_, as
Nature and the sheep made them. Assuredly there was no need for the
making of artificial bunkers. Nature had provided them, and of the best.
Besides, were there not always the great sea rushes? It may be
remembered that the old golf rules have the significant regulation that
the ball shall not be teed "nearer than four club-lengths" to the hole.
That indicates both a less sanctity ascribed to putting greens of old
and also a less degree of care lavished on teeing grounds. There were no
flags, to mark the holes; but the mode was for the first party that went
out on any day to indicate, if they could discover it, the position of
the hole, for those coming after them, by sticking in a feather of gull
or rook picked up by the way. If, as might happen, the hole was not to
be discovered, being stamped out or damaged by sheep beyond all
recognition as a respectable golf hole, this first party would dig
another hole with a knife, and set up the signal feather beside that. In
this period of the simple golfing life it goes without the saying that
no apology, or substitute even, for a club-house gave shelter to these
hardy primitive golfers. The way was to throw down coat, umbrella, or
other superfluity beside the last hole. They were safe, for two good
reasons--that they were not worth stealing and that there was no one to
steal them. And it is to be supposed that in those good old days there
was none of the modern "congestion," of which we hear so much. Golfers
and their needs, in England at all events, were alike few and simple.
The Club was instituted in 1864; therefore it has now passed its
jubilee; but I, unhappily, have to look back upon many of those early
years as so many periods of wasted opportunity. That same Uncle Fred who
had condemned the club of the cannibal, gave me my first true golf club.
Years afterwards an anxious mother asked him, "At what age do you think
my little boy should begin golf: I want him to be a very good player?"
"How old is the boy now?" my uncle asked.
"Seven," the mother replied.
"Seven!" he repeated sadly. "Oh, then he has lost three years already!"
I was given a club long before I was seven, but our house was two long
miles from the course, and miles are very long for the short legs of
seven. There were the fields, but though it is reported of Queen Mary
Stuart that she found agreeable solace in playing at golf in "the fields
around Seaton house," I did not find golf exhilarating in the fields
around Wellesbourne House. But the atmosphere of golf was about the
house. The Golf Club prospered, as golfing prosperity was rated in that
day of small things. The extraordinary news went abroad that it was now
possible to play the game of Scotland on real links turf in this corner
of Devon. Men of renown, such as Mr. George Glennie, Mr. Buskin, and
many besides came from the ancient club at Blackheath, and stayed for
golf at the hotel recently built at that place which had now received
its name from Kingsley's book. Sir Robert Hay and Sir Hope Grant, the
former one of the finest amateurs of a past day and the latter more
distinguished as a soldier than a golfer, came as guests, for golfing
purposes, to my father's house. My two brothers, both in the Army and
from twelve to nineteen years older than myself, played a few games when
home on leave. I was too young to take any part in a match, but not too
young to listen to much talk about the game and to look with profound
veneration on its great players.
[Illustration: At Pau: the oldest of non-Scottish Golf Clubs.
Sir Victor Brooke (driving). Colonel Hegan Kennard.]
[Illustration: Captain's Medal of the Royal North Devon Golf Club,
showing the old approved way of driving with the right elbow up.]