GOLF ON THE CONTINENT AND IN THE CHANNEL ISLANDS
In 1890 I took rooms in London, near a studio, and begun the serious
study of anatomy and sculpture, with the idea of taking up sculpture as
a profession. It was an idea which conflicted a good deal with the
whole-souled devotion to golf. But following an attack of influenza, I
went out to Biarritz in the winter and there found some of the most
curious and amusing golf to be played that a man could meet with--up and
down immense cliffs, in lies that were unspeakably bad, and yet, withal,
the whole making, by some extraordinary means, not only an interesting
species of golf, but also a species that has produced some fine players.
Massy was then a boy there, going out in the sardine boats when he was
not at golf, and thus gaining a perfect indifference to stormy weather
which has been very valuable to him in his after life at golf. The
storms on the Basque coast are not to be beaten: they are scratch, or
even _plus_, as tempests.
Then Lord Kilmaine gave that Cup for foursome match competition between
Biarritz and Pau, which has been the occasion of grand fun every year
since. We had a terrific match on the first occasion of its playing.
Eric Hambro and I--he was only a boy then, though a big one--played
Johnny Low and poor Bobby Boreel, for Pau. We were any number of holes
up--I forget how many, but the result looked a dead certainty--and then
at one hole we put three shots running out of bounds. That was the
beginning of our undoing. Hole after hole slipped away, and I know that
it was only by a kindly dispensation of Providence that we even halved
that match, which we had reckoned as safely in our pockets. And in
playing off the tie, I think (I am not sure) that we were beaten.[6]
[Illustration: The Chasm on the old Biarritz Course.]
[Illustration: Arnaud Massy.]
But the result of these matches mattered little. What did matter was the
admirable fun we had out of them, the going and coming, to and from Pau
and Biarritz, the entertaining, the mutual compliments, the eating and
drinking. All the amenities of the match were so pleasant; for, with the
foursome for the cup, was played, at the same time, a team match, of
sides representing the two places. Some humorous incidents nearly always
occurred to make us all happy. After I married, my wife, walking in the
gallery, would often hear delightful comments on my play and other
qualities, and one or two of the most pleasant of these were culled in
these Pau and Biarritz matches. On one occasion I had Roller, the old
Surrey cricketer, as my partner. He was not playing with very great
confidence, and my wife overheard one man in the gallery say to another:
"Old Roller seems a bit nervous, doesn't he?" To which the other
replied, "Well, you'd be nervous, too, if you were playing with Horace
Hutchinson." "Why?" asked the first man, innocently. "Because he's got
such a devil of a temper" was the reply. That is the sort of comment
which it is most unfortunate that a wife should overhear.
A failing common in our family is that of going white-haired at a
comparatively early age. I began to put on that "crown of a virtuous
life" when I was no more than sixteen. Partly on that account I have
usually had the credit of being some years older than I am, and the
golfing reporter, with the usual unconscious humour of his kind, began
to write of me as "the veteran" at the age of thirty-five. One of the
most constant habitues of Biarritz was the fine old sportsman Mr.
Corrance, in his day the best shot in Norfolk, and, besides, a fine
fisherman, billiard player and expert at all sports and pastimes
demanding quick harmony of hand and eye. In the course of one of these
Pau and Biarritz matches, when I was playing for the seaside place and
we were not going very strongly, Mr. Corrance found himself walking
beside my wife. He knew her quite well, but for the moment had forgotten
her name, and at once began to discuss with her the chances of the
match. "The mistake is, you know," he said, "playing Horace Hutchinson.
He was a good player once, a very good player; but he's too old now"--I
think I was thirty-eight at the time--"they ought to have put in a young
man."
One of the attractions of returning year by year to Biarritz was to note
the constantly increasing skill and power of Massy. Just off the green
at Biarritz the course was very loose and gritty. The accurate approach
was most difficult to play. Massy, of his own genius, had developed the
playing of the stroke very perfectly, and very curiously. He used to
swing the mashie very far back, in proportion to the distance that the
ball had to go, and to let it come back to the ball very slowly, with
very loose wrist. It is a stroke quite of his own invention, so far as I
know, and I never saw anyone else play it quite in the same way nor as
accurately. And out of the ranks of the Biarritz caddies came other good
and great players, such as Gassiat and that Dauge of whom Braid declares
that he can drive a ball to carry as far as his (Braid's) ball will go
with run and all. It seems a large order, but no doubt this Frenchman is
a wonder.
On the way home from Biarritz we used sometimes to take a rest at other
French golfing places, and most delightful was Dinard, where the course
goes out beside a sparkling sea. It was good golf and beautiful. And on
one occasion we took the Channel Islands on our way, and there my wife
had yet another chance of hearing pleasant things said of me. Stuart
Anderson was at Jersey. He was son of the English clergyman whom we have
all known at North Berwick. A match was arranged--I think with some
little money on it, though I had none--that I should play him thirty-six
holes; and coming out in the train from St. Heliers to Gorey, where the
links are, my wife heard some one say to another, discussing the match,
"I hope Anderson beats that fellow Hutchinson; he swaggers so." However,
on that occasion, I escaped the salutary chastisement. I played fairly
steadily, and after a while Stuart Anderson broke up a little and let me
win pretty easily. The course at Jersey is a worthy school for those
great golfers, the Vardons, Ray and so on that it has sent out since;
but at that time the one who gave most promise was Renouf. He was not
more than a boy, but he was a demon putter.
I had for caddie at Jersey a very small and very stolid little boy. Most
of the Jersey folk are bi-lingual, speaking English and French
indifferently, but this little boy seemed to have no tongue at all; I
could not get a word out of him. But towards the end of the round there
is, or there was, a hole which was just to be reached by an extra long
drive from the tee. I made a very fine drive to this green, and the
ball, as we came up, proved to be stone dead, just six inches to the
right of the hole. And then this astonishing little boy did open his
mouth, and, still with the solemnity of a cod-fish on his face,
ejaculated this comment on what was perhaps the very finest stroke I
ever played in my life--"Too much to the roight!"
It was perfectly just criticism. The shot was "too much to the
roight"--by six inches, at the end of a very long drive. Had it not been
so, the ball would have been in the hole. I do not know to this day
whether that little boy was a humourist of the very finest and
dryest--really of the _extra sec_--quality, or whether he was just the
very stupidest thing ever made in the Channel Islands.
From there we went to Guernsey, where the caddies were certainly
anything but stupid. They were little girls, bare-legged and
bare-headed, but wonderfully keen and wonderfully pious, for they would
make the sign of the cross over the line of the opponent's putt to
prevent the ball going into the hole. And really it is extraordinary how
difficult it is to putt straight along a line that has been thus
crossed. Guernsey has a course which is finer in some of its natural
qualities than that of Jersey, yet it does not seem to have grown a
single great golfer, whereas the Jersey soil seems to bring them up like
weeds. It is rather curious. But the great days of the Jersey professors
had not yet dawned. Harry Vardon was still working in a garden not far
from the Gorey links, with dreams, perhaps, of future glory, but no
present achievement. Massy was picking the ball up with his marvellous
nicety from the loose rubble of the stuff just off the Biarritz greens,
but had not yet gone in the train of Sir Everard Hambro, my own most
kindly host at Biarritz, to North Berwick. The Scottish golfers had
received the first shock to their national pride, in seeing the open
championship of their own game won by an Englishman. It had not yet
entered into their astonished heads that it was to be won by invaders
from outside the British Islands.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: I have been since assured, by Eric (now Sir Eric) Hambro,
that we won on the last green.--H.G.H.]