A CHAPTER OF ODDS AND ENDS
In 1886 my father took a house at Eastbourne, and I was no longer at
Westward Ho! as constantly as before, although a frequent visitor there
at the house of Claud Carnegie. He and I used to have many matches on
terms that are rather to be commended as a means for bringing together
two players of different handicaps. We used to play level, but I had to
give him five shillings before starting and at the end he paid me back a
shilling for every hole that I was up. It came, of course, to the same
thing as giving five holes up, but it is rather a more amusing way of
stating these odds. The five shillings puts me in mind of a very much
more gambling match that was played about that time, when I was at
Hoylake. There was at that date a very festive company of Edinburgh
golfers going about the various links under the leadership of old Mr.
Robert Clark, who edited the great book on golf. There was Sir Walter
Simpson, who also wrote a great golf book and was the son of the doctor
who discovered the blessed uses of chloroform, Hall Blyth, Valentine
Haggard, Cathcart, Jack Innes, and a few more--all, I fear, except Hall
Blyth, gone over to the majority.[4] Five of these warriors started out
one day at Hoylake to play a five-ball match, for a fiver a hole,
and--this was the prudent stipulation of Mr. Robert Clark, in his
ancient wisdom--they were to settle up at the end of each hole. The man
who happened to fall into bad trouble would thus have to part with four
fivers on the putting green, so it must have needed a well-filled
notebook to make a man sure of living through to the finish without
bankruptcy. I had suggested that a six-ball match would be really more
fun than a five-ball, and that I was willing to make the sixth; but the
well-meant suggestion was not taken in good part. I forget the ultimate
result of the encounter.
Naturally I was at Eastbourne a good deal, as I had no other home than
my father's, and I arrived just at the time of the first laying out of
the original nine-hole course there. Mayhewe was the most active of its
originators, and he and I planned it together. It implies no reflection
on the designers of the later eighteen-hole course to say that the old
nine-holes were better than any of the later developments. It is a very
different problem laying out nine, and laying out eighteen holes on
almost the same circumscribed piece of ground; for the later additions
to the area do not amount to a great deal.
It is amazing to me now to think how ignorant we were in those days of
the proper treatment of inland putting greens. We could plan the rest of
the course well enough. But the great idea was to keep on rolling and
rolling and rolling--the heavier the roller the better--until we had the
surface just round the hole so slick that if there was any gradient at
all the ball would not stay near the hole even if you placed it there by
hand. There was (there still is) a green called "Paradise"--and no
green was ever named more aptly according to the classic principle of
_lucus a non lucendo_. If you were below the hole, and below it on this
green you were sure to be, because the ball would not rest above, you
might putt up to the hole, and if you missed the hole the ball would
come trickling down to you again, and so you might go on putting "till
the cows came home." By which time there might probably be a little dew
which possibly might allow your ball to come to rest in the hole's
vicinity. But long before that you would have come to the conclusion
that golf, on Paradise green, was not a good game. One device used to be
to cut some jagged raw edges to stick out on the ball's surface, before
driving off the tee for this hole. Thus jagged, the ball would not fly
properly, but it was better to lose a shot, owing to this jaggedness,
through the green, than to lose twenty on the putting green. On the
rough edges of its scars the ball would come to rest even in Paradise.
However, this is a picture of that green at its most grievous worst. It
was not always thus, and on the whole the course, with its drives over a
great chalk pit and over the corners of one or two high woods, gave us
great fun and was not a bad test of golf. Peter Paxton was the
professional, a humorous little fellow and a wonderful putter on those
tricky greens. I remember, when he sent us his credentials, he added the
comment "and, Sir, I drink nothing stronger than cold water." I liked
the "cold," as if he feared that water with the chill off might go to
his head. He grew braver later.
This course at Eastbourne, be it understood, was technically of the
"inland" kind, though at the seaside. It was of the chalk-down soil;
and it was among the first of the new supply of inland courses which the
ever spreading vogue of golf demanded. Still we looked on these inland
greens as giving us at best only a poor substitute for the real game. We
had yet to learn of what inland soil, cleverly treated with an eye to
golf, might be capable. The only inland Club which was at this time of
any weight in the general golfing councils was the Royal Wimbledon,
which had seceded from the London Scottish, building itself a club-house
at the opposite end of the common. Some of the golfing leaders of the
day, such as Henry Lamb and Purves and others, made this their
headquarters, and there they were already hatching schemes which were
ultimately to lead to all that great development of golf in the East
Neuk, so to say, of Kent, and at first were to take form in the St.
George's Club and links, at Sandwich. Purves, with characteristic,
energy, was scouring the coast of England in these years, looking for
links as by Nature provided, and it was here, at this point, that he had
his great success. Of course there was much palaver and indecision, as
well as prolonged negotiations with the landowner--or his trustees,
seeing that Lord Guildford was then a minor--before any real move could
be made; but when it was made it meant a very great deal for London
golfers and gave an immense drive forward to the already fast booming
boom of English golf. In 1886 Mr. Du Maurier, the _Punch_ artist, was at
St. Andrews, already, as I remember, in large goggles and having trouble
with his eyes, and he then drew a picture of "the Golf Stream," as he
called it--a succession of pilgrims of all sorts, sexes and sizes,
making their way to St. Andrews. Will it be believed that this was the
first golfing picture in _Punch_; that it was the very first mention, as
I think, of golf in a comic paper? What would _Punch_ do to-day, we may
ask with wonder and dismay, if all the humorous opportunities which golf
gives its artists and its writers were withdrawn from them? They would
feel impoverished indeed. A year or two later, when I was editing the
Badminton Book on Golf, Mr. Harry Furniss showed me a letter he had just
received from Mr. Frank Burnand, then staying at Westward Ho! and then
editing _Punch_. Harry Furniss was, and is, a golfer; Frank Burnand was
not. "I think you would like this place," wrote the author of _Happy
Thoughts_--"there are fine golfing sands (_sic_) here." Therein he
expressed an even happier thought than he knew, for Westward Ho! at that
moment happened to be suffering from a considerable drought, and a heavy
gale had scattered the dry sand far and wide out of the bunkers, so that
"golfing sands" gave rather an apt description.
The Badminton Library of Sport was then coming out, volume by volume,
and delighting all to whom Sports and Pastimes made appeal. I do not
wish to bring too great discredit on a very eminent firm of publishers,
but it is a fact, sad as it is true, that when I first waited on them,
obedient to their summons, in Paternoster Row, and they broached to me
the subject of a golf book in their series, they made the very shocking
suggestion that it should be included in the same volume with other
Scottish sports, such as skating, curling and perhaps tossing the caber.
They did not know, they said, when I met them with some mild
expostulation, whether the game was "of sufficient importance to carry a
volume to itself." I must do them the justice to say that they quickly
saw and repented of their error, and I believe that ultimately the golf
volume did better than any other in all that popular series.
While I was doing some of the writing for this book, Sir Ralph Payne
Galway was writing the Shooting volumes, and we were both staying with
poor John Penn at his house in Carlton House Terrace. One night John
Penn asked Mr. Purdey, the gun-maker, to dinner, to talk guns with Sir
Ralph; and these two sat long over the dessert, after the rest of us had
left the table, talking of loads and bores and so on. The next morning,
while we were at breakfast, a four-wheeler drove up to the door, and Sir
Ralph, looking out, said in dismay, "By Jove, John, I believe that under
the influence of your champagne I must have ordered a whole 'bus load of
guns from Purdey." We looked out, and the four-wheeler was filled, from
roof to floor, with guns. It appeared, however, that they were not all
on order, but had merely been sent round by Mr. Purdey for inspection.
This, however, is not golf; nor was Sir Ralph then, I think, a golfer,
in spite of the good service he has since rendered to the dynamics of
the golf stroke and in spite of the excellence of the "P.G." ball.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: Re-reading this, in 1919, even Hall Blyth's name has to be
added to those that have gone.]