THE WEAPONS OF GOLF IN THE SEVENTIES
You could not travel about with golf clubs in the seventies without
exciting the wonder and almost the suspicions of all who saw such
strange things. I am not quite sure that you would not excite almost
equal wonder if you were to travel now with a set of clubs such as we
used then. In the seventies, and in my own teens, I was laboriously, and
with rigid economy, working my way to the possession of a variety of
wooden clubs such as it would puzzle the modern golfer even to name.
There was the driver or play-club--that is understood. Then there were
the long spoon, the mid-spoon and the short spoon: they may be
understood also. But then, besides, between the driver and the long
spoon, making such a nice gradation that it was really hardly to be
distinguished, came what was called the "grass" or "grassed" club. I
hardly know which was the right name. The idea, I think, was that, being
almost of the driver's length and suppleness, but with the face not
quite so vertical, it could be better used when the ball was lying on
the grass--not teed. At the same time we used to talk of a club being
"grassed" with the technical meaning of having its face set back a
little. So I hardly know what the right nomenclature was, nor does it
matter. This "grassed" or "grass" club was rather a refinement: it was
only the golfer who was very determined to have no gap in his armour
that would carry it; but the three spoons were almost _de rigueur_. No
self-respecting golfer could well be without them. It may surprise the
student of history not to find the "baffy" put down in the list; but as
a matter of fact the baffy had passed out of common use by this date. A
few men of the old school, as Sir Robert Hay, continued to play it to
admiration, but the genius of young Tommy Morris had already initiated a
whole school of disciples into the mode of approaching with iron clubs,
so that the baffy was out of vogue. The professionals that came from the
north to visit us at Westward Ho! as well as our resident Johnnie Allan
himself, were all followers and exponents of the relatively new mode of
jabbing the ball up to the hole with the iron clubs and with a great
divot of turf sent hurtling into the air after the ball. Thus the green
was approached; and up to just about the date of which I am writing the
subsequent operations of holing out were always performed with a wooden
putter. There was also a weapon known as the driving putter, which was
just like the ordinary putter save that its shaft was longer and more
supple. It became, in fact, very nearly a short shafted driver, and its
special purpose was to drive a low ball against the wind when there was
no bunker to carry. Of iron clubs there were the cleek, the iron and the
niblick. It was even then possible to go into the niceties of
driving-iron and lofting-iron, but many a golfer thought his set perfect
and complete with a single iron, for all purposes.
Now you will see, from this list, both what superfluities of wooden
clubs it held, according to modern notions, and also what essential
instruments, to our present thinking, were lacking. There was no such
club as a mashie. Young Tommy, ever an innovating genius, is credited
with being the first to use the niblick for lofting approaches, but the
niblick of those days was peculiarly ill adapted to such delicate uses.
It was very small and very cup-shaped in its head. The head was only a
very little larger in diameter than the ball. Therefore it required
extreme accuracy to hit the ball rightly with it and avoid that
disastrous error of "piping"--hitting the ball with the hose--of which
many of us have been many a time guilty with clubs whose relative
breadth and length of blade make such error far less pardonable. The
recognized club for the approach stroke was the iron, the ordinary
"maid-of-all-work" iron, unless you were one of those extra particular
people who had two grades of the iron. And another conspicuous absentee
from the list is the brassey. Such a club was not known, but I can
remember that about this day I became the proud owner of a club just
then coming into vogue under the name of the wooden niblick. Its head,
made of wood, was very short, like that of the iron niblick, for the
purpose of fitting into ruts. It was the original of the "brassey," for
the idea of a rut suggested the idea of a road. There were more roads
then than now, in proportion to the rest of the golfing hazards in the
world--as at Blackheath, Wimbledon, and Musselburgh. And the purpose of
the brass on the club's sole was to protect it from the stones, etc., of
the road when used for play off such unfriendly surface. The brassey was
just the wooden niblick with a sole of brass, and as all wooden niblicks
began to be brazen upon the sole their very name passed into oblivion
and that of brassey superseded it.
I have written here of all putters being of wood; and so they were. But
somewhere, at some time, some inspired craftsman of the mystery of Tubal
Cain must have bethought him, even before this, of making a putter of
iron, for the following reason. In the old Iron Hut at Westward Ho! on
days when the rain kept us in and the time hung heavy, we used to solace
its tedium by bringing out our clubs from their lockers and trying to do
a deal with each other, whether by exchange or by sale and purchase, and
during one of these barterings an utterly unknown weapon was brought out
with the rest of his bundle, by a young Scot of the name of Lamont,
brother of that Major Lamont as he now is, who until quite lately lived
at Westward Ho! and to whom I owe a great deal of the golf that I picked
up as a boy. He was the Lamont of Ardlamont, the estate in the Mull of
Cantyre, which came into fame in consequence of a certain notorious
criminal prosecution in the Scottish courts. The strange weapon which
this younger brother of his unearthed, on that day of rain, was, though
we hardly knew then how to name it, an iron putter. It was inches deep
in rust. Nevertheless, as I handled it, I liked the feel of it. I gave
for it, in exchange, an old and much mended spoon, and it was that iron
putter which I have used for forty years since, which has been copied
countless times, of which the replicas are in many hands and many lands,
and one copy of which, adorned and glorified, used to lie, and may so
lie still, for all I know, on the table on the occasion of the dinners
of the Match Dining Club. At that first date of its resurrection (Mr.
Lamont could give no account of how it came to his possession) it was
greeted with unhallowed laughter, and so too whenever I brought it out
to putt with it. But I used to be rather a good putter as a boy, and
that club is still the best balanced (though its old shaft has been
broken and the new one is less good) that ever came out of a
club-maker's shop, and I soon changed those sounds of derision at its
appearance into a more respectful form of greeting. That was the first
iron putter ever seen in the West, and I believe it to have been the
virtual parent of every iron putter that ever has been seen since.
It was the wooden age of golf clubs, as of battleships, and I hope the
wood of our ships was better seasoned than that of our clubs. Shafts, as
a rule, were of hickory then, as now, though we made strange experiments
of ash, of lance-wood, of green-heart and divers species. For the hard
balls of those days you had to have a certain softness in the heads of
the wooden clubs which is not wanted with the resilient rubber-cored
balls. Beech was the wood for the heads, though apple and other kinds
were tried; but beech, and of a soft quality at that, drove the most
kindly. And if a man were at all a hard hitter, and had a fit of heeling
or toeing, the head of the club was sure very soon to show a crack
across it, which would spread wider at each successive mishit. And even
if you kept hitting the ball "dead centre" every time, a hole in the
club-face would gradually be worn out by that repeated hitting,
especially if the ground were wet and the grass long. Then we used to go
to Johnnie Allan to have him put in a leather face, that is to say a
patch of leather where the face was worn; and this would drive just as
well, except it got sodden with wet, as the original wood. So, with so
many of the clubs made of wood, and not always like the butter used by
the Mad Hatter for watch greasing, the best wood, and the balls so hard
and stony of impact, it is no wonder that golf was rather an expensive
game for a boy whose shillings were not many. Though the ball only cost
a shilling, while the modern ball costs half a crown, the club-smashing
abilities of the shilling's worth made it a much dearer ball, to say
nothing of the longer life of the half-crowner. And just about this date
they introduced a novelty in the balls also--the "hammering," as we used
to call it, that is to say the nicking or marking of the ball's surface,
being done by indentations engraved in the metal moulds in which the
balls were cast. This obviated all that labour of "hammering" the nicks
in by hand, which was the ancient fashion. Yet it was some while before
these "machine-hammered" balls, as we called them, found general favour
with the golfing public, certain Conservatives asserting that the
"hammering" was essential to the right tempering of the stuff of the
ball, while others, like that great little man Jamie Anderson, then at
the top of his game and fame, confessed, with a perfect knowledge that
the reason was only subjective, that "he could na' strike" a
machine-hammered ball. He soon learned to strike it, however, as the
further course of golfing story sufficiently testified.