WESTWARD HO! HOYLAKE AND ST. ANDREWS IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES
In 1882 I left Oxford, with the intention of reading for the Bar, and
actually did go so far as to eat a number of Inner Temple dinners at the
extraordinary hour of six o'clock. I do not think they are quite
digested yet. I had been suffering from a series of severe headaches all
through my last year at Oxford and perhaps the dinners put a finishing
touch on them. At all events the doctors advised me to give up all
reading for a time--an instruction which I have observed rather
faithfully up to the present. Their very wise counsel gave me all the
more time for golf--the rules were not quite so many and headachy then
and a man could play golf, or so it seems to me, with a lighter heart.
Perhaps it is only because the heart had less weight of years to carry
on it then, but it strikes me that the game and its players had more
humour. I do not mean that they were more witty; but greatly because
they were so immensely serious and solemn and earnest they were more
amusing. Their tempers were more tempestuous, their language was
infinitely more picturesque. At Westward Ho! I am inclined to think that
there were some with special gifts of the kind. We had many old Indian
officers, with livers a little touched, and manners acquired in a
course of years of dealing with the mild Hindoo, and because the golf
ball would not obey their wishes with the same docility as the obedient
Oriental, they addressed it with many strange British words which I
delighted to hear and yet stranger words in Hindustani, which I much
regretted not to understand. But a sight that has been seen at Westward
Ho! is that of a gallant Colonel stripping himself to the state in which
Nature gave him to an admiring world, picking his way daintily with
unshod feet over the great boulders of the Pebble Ridge, and when he
came to the sea, wading out as far as possible, and hurling forth, one
after the other, beyond the line of the furthest breakers the whole set
of his offending golf clubs. That the waves and the tide were sure to
bring them in again, to the delight of the salvaging caddies, made no
matter to him. From him they were gone for ever and his soul was at
rest.
Of course he bought a new set on the morrow, so it was all good for
trade and Johnny Allan. It also afforded a splendid spectacle to an
admiring gallery. Really we have lost much at Westward Ho! even if we
have gained much, by the bringing of the Clubhouse across the common. It
was delightful, after golf or between the rounds, to bathe off that
Ridge, or sit on it and watch the sea tumbling.
There were more "characters" in the golfing world in those days. Who is
there now like the Chieftain at Hoylake or like Mr. Wolfe-Murray and
many more at St. Andrews? But Hoylake, more than the others, had its
humorists not so strictly of the unconscious type. There was great fun
in the musical evenings in the Bar Parlour of the Royal Hotel--bar
parlour sounds a little ominous, but I never remember seeing a man in it
who could not talk straight nor walk straight out of it--and some of the
golfers had great voices. Tom Potter, well-known with the Free
Foresters' Cricket Club, was honorary-secretary of the Club, then and
for many a year, and he was a fine singer. There was "Pendulum" Brown,
singing about "The Farmer's Boy," and ever so many more; and these
evenings were the occasions for great match-making. Mr. Brown, nicknamed
Pendulum, by reason of something clocklike about his swing, on one
night, unlighted, so far as I remember, by a moon, but with some stars
in the sky, backed himself to play the five holes round the field, then
and there, in an average, I believe it was, of fives. Whatever the bet
was, I know he won it easily, and also that he did those five holes in
several strokes less than he took for them in the competition, played in
broad daylight, the next day. The only stipulation he made with the
gallery that turned out to see this nocturnal performance was that they
should be silent for a moment after he drove off, so that he might hear
the ball pitch. The night was very still and he seemed to get the place
of the ball with wonderful precision by the sound of its fall. I know
that his putting was extraordinarily good--far better than an averagely
good putter's daylight putting.
There were many mirth-makers at Hoylake, besides the song-makers. Of
this number were Alec Sinclair, with a fund of anecdote that never
failed and was very seldom guilty of vain repetition; George Dunlop,
bubbling over with wit and always ready to make a good after-dinner
speech, and a crowd more.
At St. Andrews the fun of the fair was less hilarious; there was less
noise about it; but there were some witty and many amusing people. My
first host there, Logan White, was the very best of company in himself;
there were George Young and Mr. Hodges of a most sardonic humour, and
very many with that sly and dry sense of fun which the Scot calls
specifically "pawky."
Also, there was Old Tom Morris--"born in the purple of equable temper
and courtesy," as Lord Moncrieffe, I think it is, well describes him. It
would be a mistake to picture Old Tom as a witty man, or even as a
clever man, unless a tact and temper that never fail be the very best
kind of cleverness. But we do not find any very witty or pungent sayings
attributed to Old Tom. It was his rich nature, with its perfect
kindliness and charity, that made him so lovable, and such a valuable
possession to St. Andrews in reconciling the golfing interests, which
ran with counter currents, of the Town and of the Club. As a peacemaker
he had no equal. I, deeming myself wronged by some infringement of
golfing rule or etiquette on part of another, might go to Tom--would go
to him as a matter of natural course--and pour out my woes. He would
listen with a charming smile in his old eyes under their bushily arching
grey eye-brows, and when I had done he would take his pipe out of his
mouth and say, "Ou aye." That was all, but it was enough to convince of
his perfect sympathy. Then, from the big window of the club, or from
Logan White's house on the links, I would see that wicked man, my late
opponent, go up to the old man--for the scene was always that eighteenth
green, just before Tom's house, where he would usually stand and smoke
his old clay pipe after his two daily rounds were played--and there I
would see exactly the same smile of sympathy for my opponent's
recounting of his woes likewise, and at the end the pipe being withdrawn
from the mouth; and I might know, though I might not hear, that
precisely the same two words were being given for his sufficient
consolation likewise--"Ou aye." So we both went away from him greatly
comforted and in a disposition to make it all up again before the sun
should go down on our wrath.
Old Tom was good enough to give me his friendship from the very first
moment I came to St. Andrews, prompted thereto, as I think, largely by a
comment that one or two of the old stagers made to him that my style was
not unlike young Tommy's. I am sure that even at that time this must
have been a comparison not quite just to that great young player of old,
for although it is more than likely that I have cherished very many
illusions in regard to my golf, I am quite sure that I have never been
so deluded as to deem my style either good or graceful. But the
criticism was endorsed by Tom and gave me a place in his heart. There
was another point in which he gave me praise (he could give no higher)
for a likeness to his talented lost son:--"Ye're like Tammie--ye'll tak'
a' as much pains over a short putt as a long yin." Anything that had to
do with a short putt touched the dear old man in a very sensitive place,
for he was the worst short putter, for a great golfer, that ever was. It
is known that Mr. Wolfe-Murray once addressed a letter to him, when on a
visit to Prestwick, "The Misser of Short Putts, Prestwick," and the
postman carried it straight to Tom. His own way was, in his sheer
terror of missing the putt, to get done with it as quickly as possible,
and often he would just go up to the ball and hit it in a nervous hurry,
without looking at the line at all, so that he hardly gave himself a
ghost of a chance of holing. He had a way, too, of dragging back the
ball, with a quick movement of his putter, the moment it had missed the
hole, to try the putt over again, and this habit had such possession of
him, that I am quite certain I have often seen him snatch the ball back
long before it came to the hole at all, and even, sometimes, when it
would have gone in had he not done so. Once, but once only, I saw him
beat his putter on the ground so hard after a missed putt that the shaft
broke. I think it must have been sprung before, for he did not really
give it such a very severe strain, but of course that was quite
overlooked, and the joke served for many a day to tease the old man
with--as "Tom, what is this I hear? Getting in such a rage that you're
breaking all your clubs! Awful!" The poor old man would smile
despairingly and generally solace himself with some quotation from his
dearly loved poet Burns. "Scotland wi' a' thy faults I lo'e thee still"
was his most favourite text for consolation.
[Illustration: "Old Tom."]
[Illustration: Douglas Rolland and Archie Simpson (driving.)
(Archie was younger brother of the Jack Simpson mentioned in this
chapter.)]