KENT AND SUSSEX.
There is always something stirring in a roll of illustrious names, and
for the mere sensual pleasure of writing them I set them down in order
at the beginning of the chapter--Sandwich, Deal, Prince's, Littlestone,
and Rye, in the counties of Kent and Sussex. Each of the five has
devoted adherents who will maintain its merits against the world in
heated argument, but there can be little doubt which has the right to
come first. It would be showing a sad disrespect to golfing history,
very recent history though it be, to begin otherwise than with the
links of the Royal St. George's Golf Club at Sandwich.
[Illustration: SANDWICH (1)
_The 'Sahara'_]
For a course that is still comparatively young--the club was instituted
in 1887--=Sandwich= has had more than its share of ups and downs. It
was heralded with much blowing of trumpets and without undergoing
any period of probation, burst full-fledged into fame. For some time
it would have ranked only a degree below blasphemy to have hinted at
any imperfection. Then came a time when impious wretches, who had the
temerity to think for themselves, began to whisper that there were
faults at Sandwich, that it was nothing but a driver's course, that the
whole art of golf did not consist of hitting a ball over a sandhill and
then running up to the top to see what had happened on the other side.
Gradually the multitude caught up the cry of the few, till nobody, who
wished to put forward a claim to a critical faculty, had a good word
to say for the course. Then the club began to set its house in order,
lengthening here and bunkering there, not without a somewhat bitter
controversy between the moderates and the progressives, until the
pendulum has begun to swing back, and poor Sandwich is coming to its
own again.
Throughout all this controversial warfare one fact has remained
unchanged, namely, that, whatever they may think of its precise merits
as a test of golf, most golfers unite in liking to play there. The
humbler player frankly enjoys hitting over his sandhill largely because
of the frequency with which he hits into it: the superior person may
despise the sandhill and may be utterly bored with it anywhere else,
but he retains a sneaking affection for it at Sandwich. It attracts him
in spite of himself and his, as some people think them, tedious views.
Sandwich has a charm that belongs to itself, and I frankly own myself
under the spell. The long strip of turf on the way to the seventh
hole, that stretches between the sandhills and the sea; a fine spring
day, with the larks singing as they seem to sing nowhere else; the
sun shining on the waters of Pegwell Bay and lighting up the white
cliffs in the distance; this is as nearly my idea of Heaven as is
to be attained on any earthly links. "Confound their politics,"
one feels disposed to cry, "frustrate their knavish tricks! Why do
they want to alter this adorable place? I know they are perfectly
right, and I have even agreed with them that this is a blind shot
and that an indefensibly bad hole, but what does it all matter? This
is perfect bliss." Of course Sandwich is capable of improvement, and
will doubtless be improved; whatever happens, the larks will continue
to twitter, the sun will still be shining on Pegwell Bay: the charm
can never be gone. It is at any rate very delightful now, and so let
us go and play the first hole and enjoy ourselves without being too
desperately critical.
One great characteristic--I think it is a beauty--of Sandwich is the
extraordinary solitude that surrounds the individual player. We wind
about in the dells and hollows among the great hills, alone in the
midst of a multitude, and hardly ever realize that there are others
playing on the links until we meet them at luncheon. Thus, on the first
tee, we may catch a glimpse of somebody playing the last hole, and
another couple disappearing over the brow to the second, and that is
all; the rest is sandhills and solitude.
[Illustration: SANDWICH (2)
_Playing on to the green from 'Hades'_]
And now we must positively cease from our reflections and get off
that first tee, with a fine raking shot that shall carry us over the
insidious and fatal little hollow called the 'kitchen.' If we are clear
of it, another good shot will take us home over a deep cross-bunker
on to the green, big, smooth, and beautiful, as are all the greens at
Sandwich. At the second we have a bunker to carry from the tee--it
was sometimes a terrible carry for a gutty--and then a pitch on to a
plateau green, the sides whereof slope down steeply into hollows on
either side. This shot was once a great bone of contention, and in
truth success was formerly somewhat a matter of luck, for the ball
pitched on a hog's back and kicked sometimes straight on to the hole
and sometimes to the right or left. Now, however, the hog's back has
been smoothed and flattened, and if we play the proper shot we shall
get a four to hearten us up for the drive over the Sahara.
When a name clings to a hole we may be sure that there is something in
that hole to stir the pulse, and in fact there are few more absolute
joys than a perfectly hit shot that carries the heaving waste of sand
which confronts us on the third tee. The shot is a blind one, and we
have not the supreme felicity of seeing the ball pitch and run down
into the valley to nestle by the flag. We see it for a long time,
however, soaring and swooping over the desert, and, when it finally
disappears, we have a shrewd notion as to its fate. If the wind be
fresh against us, we must play away to the right for safety, and the
glorious enjoyment of the hole is gone, but even so a good shot will
be repaid, and every yard that we can go to the left may make the
difference between a difficult and an easy second.
On the very next tee another bunker of terrible aspect lies before us,
this time a towering mountain of sand, and the ball is soon out of
sight. However, at the second shot we get a good view of the green,
away in the distance perched up on a plateau hard up against a fence.
There is rough to the right and a bunker almost in the line to the
left, but a good shot will carry it, and, after the ball has vanished
for a moment, it will reappear, trickling gently along the plateau to
the hole side; it is really a grand two-shot hole.
At the fifth the sandhills begin to close in upon us, but a fair
straight drive should land the ball safely in the valley; this hole is
now in the melting pot, and is being transformed from a three into a
four. We will, therefore, avoid a painful controversy and tee our ball
before the famous 'Maiden.' Few bunkers have a more infamous reputation
than this Maiden, but the new-comer to the Sandwich of to-day will
think that she has done little to deserve it. There stands the Maiden,
steep, sandy, and terrible, with her face scarred and seamed with
black timbers, but alas! we have no longer to drive over her crown: we
hardly do more than skirt the fringe of her garment. In old days the
tee was right beneath the highest pinnacle, and sheer terror made the
shot formidable, but the tee-shots to the fifth endangered the lives
of those driving to the sixth, and the tee had to be put far away to
the right. The present Maiden is but a shadow of its old self, and the
splendour of it has in a great measure departed.
My pen has run away with me over the first six holes, as I knew it
would, and there still remain twelve more holes to play. 'Hades' will,
no doubt, deserve its name if we top our tee-shot, though otherwise
it is a reasonably easy three, but the ninth is in reality a far more
formidable affair. The hole will doubtless be called the 'Corsets'
for ever, but the second of these two famous bunkers now plays but an
inconsiderable part, for the reformers have moved the green far on and
away to the left and, it must be admitted, have made a good hole out of
a very bad one.
We may still drive into the first Corset, however, and if we do, Heaven
help us! We shall be playing a nightmare game of racquets against its
unflinching sides, and the other man will win the hole.
With the turn at Sandwich the nature of the course begins to alter,
and in place of doing threes--or perchance sevens--among the hills,
we shall be travelling over the flatter ground in a series of steady
fives, with, let us hope, an occasional four. There are plenty of good
holes--better, perhaps, than some on the way out--but they do not make
the same appeal to the imagination, nor are they so characteristic.
One, at least, deserves a special word of mention, the fourteenth, or
'Suez Canal,' where many and many a second shot has found a watery
grave. Those who love the hopes and fears of a lucky-bag will enjoy the
seventeenth, where the hole lies in a deep dell with sharply sloping
sides. Man can direct the ball into the dell, but only Providence can
decide its subsequent fate, and whether it will lie stone dead or a
round dozen of yards away is a matter of chance. There is no chance
about the last hole, where we must hit two good, long, straight shots;
it is a fine finish, and will leave us with happy recollections as we
take our way to one or other of the neighbouring courses. We are in
the midst of a perfect tangle of courses, since within easy reach are
Deal, Prince's, Kingsdown, and St. Augustine's, at Ebbsfleet.
The =Deal= course is little more than a stone's throw away from
Sandwich. It is the same kind of country, the same, or very nearly the
same, kind of turf, and yet the general impression produced by it is
quite different.
There is this difference to begin with, that it is less remote and
solitary. The club-house stands on a high road and the outskirts of
the town come creeping out to the edge of the links. Men, women and
children, butchers' and bakers' carts pass and re-pass along the road:
there are live creatures to be seen engaged in other avocations than
golfing, and, altogether, as compared with Sandwich, the scene is one
of business and bustle. The links themselves are more open: one might
almost say more bleak of aspect; there are not so many little secret
hollows and valleys between the hills; Deal is altogether less snug (I
can think of no better word) than Sandwich.
To say this is to make no comparison of the merits of the two courses,
which is an unnecessary and invidious thing to do. It is quite enough
to say that the golf at Deal is very good indeed--fine, straight-ahead,
long-hitting golf, wherein the fives are likely to be many and the
fours few. There are those that contend that it is almost superhumanly
difficult, but unless there be a high wind, I think that they
exaggerate a little. The difficulty lies in hitting far enough, and not
so much in the intrinsic terrors of the holes. If we can hit far enough
to carry the hummocky country and attain the region of good lies: if,
in short, we are long drivers, we need fear no particularly subtle
devilry, but the driving has to be something more than merely decent.
[Illustration: DEAL
_Playing the 'Sandy Parlour'_]
It seems a topsy-turvy procedure, but a description of the Deal course
ought to begin with the last four holes, for they are its particular
joy and pride, and have attained a fame equal to that of the last
four holes--the 'loop'-at Prestwick. Certainly they make a spirited
and exciting finish to a round, for they need good play and--this
with bated breath--good luck. The difficulty of the fifteenth lies in
the second shot, which must be played with a measure of accuracy and
fortune on to the crest of a ridge, from which it will totter slowly
down a sloping green to the hole. Play the shot the least bit too
gingerly and the ball will refuse to climb the ridge; too hard and
it will inevitably race across the green into rough grass, while the
chances of recovering from a faulty second with a little pitching shot
from off the green are not great. Certainly it is a difficult hole,
and so is the next; indeed, with the wind in the right quarter, this
sixteenth hole is one of the finest imaginable. We see the flag away
there in the far distance, waving upon a small plateau. Immediately
below the plateau to the left lies a little valley of inglorious
security, but away to the right and beyond the green are ruts and long
grass, and the second shot has to be as accurate as it is long. That
is supposing that we can get there in two at all, but alas! that is
often impossible, and therein, to my thinking, lies a certain weakness
of the hole. A particularly elastic tee or series of tees seems to be
needed so that the hole can be made a two-shot hole, even when the
wind is adverse. At present the longest driver must often be content
to reach the green with a pitch for his third, and is denied the
crowning triumph of a critical second shot successfully accomplished. A
wind against us at the sixteenth diminishes sensibly the sum total of
enjoyment of the round, for that second shot is such an inspiring one.
The green stands there waiting to be won, defying us to reach it, and
to abandon the attempt without a struggle is sad work.
Of the seventeenth I feel bound to say, with all just respect, that
it appears to be one of the very luckiest holes--in the matter of
approaching--that ever was made, but the eighteenth is a noble hole,
with that little narrow plateau green that will yield to no mere rule
of thumb approaching. If we pitch the ball on the face of the slope,
nothing will induce it to go further, while if we pitch on the green we
are almost inevitably too far. He reaps a rich reward who can play a
low, skimming shot which shall pitch on the flat and then run on full
of life and clamber up the hill. It is _the_ hole _par excellence_ for
the man who learned to approach at St. Andrews.
There are many holes at Deal which are in every respect as good as the
last four, if indeed they are not better. What could be finer than the
second, where we travel almost from tee to green along a ridge that
kicks away to right or left anything but the perfect shot--what, too,
of the sixth, where, with a great shot and a big wind at our backs,
we may hope for a three, but where far more often we must play the
cunningest of pitches on to the most slippery of table-lands in order
to get a four? What a jolly view there is from that green with the sea
close beneath us and perhaps a glimpse of a big liner in the distance!
The fourth hole, 'The Sandy Parlour,' had for some years a great name,
but, like some other blind short holes, has come gradually to live on
its reputation. The shot is a blind one over a big sandy bluff, and we
shall now have a far more difficult shot at the reformed fourteenth,
wherein we can see from the tee exactly where we have to go in order
to avoid a very great deal of trouble. When all is said, however, the
short holes at Deal are not its strong point, and it is those long,
raking holes which we ought to have done in fours that leave the
pleasantest memories.
Close to the links of Sandwich, so close that in trying to carry the
Suez Canal we may slice to within its precincts, lies another very
fine golf course, =Prince's= to wit, the newest among the select band
of really first-class seaside courses. Here is a course upon which as
much care and thought and affection have been spent as on any in the
world, and they have certainly not been spent in vain. It was laid out
with the very highest of ideals; it was to be the good player's course,
and was to trap and test and worry that self-satisfied person till he
became doubtful whether he was a good player at all. A first glance at
the course shows that strict attention to business is meant. Here are
no fascinating mountains, no spacious water-jumps: but there is fine
golfing country, broken and undulating, with smooth strips of fairway
showing here and there amid the rough grass and the myriad pot-bunkers.
Those who laid out the course at Prince's kept one aim very steadily
in view, that of compelling the player to place his tee-shot. "It is
not enough," they said in effect, "for him to keep out of the rough;
not only must he be on the course, but he must place his ball sometimes
to the right-hand side of the course, sometimes to the left. He must,
if he desire to play the holes as well as they can be played, often
greatly dare, but his great daring shall have its due reward." Now the
best plan, in order to give a practical shape to this high ideal, is to
make the hole, to use a familiar expression, 'dog-legged,' that is to
say, the player does not drive his first ball straight at the hole, but
has to turn at an angle to play his second shot. A hole so devised can
give a great advantage to the long and daring driver who is likewise
straight. The bunkering can be so arranged that he who takes great
risks and hugs the rough more closely shall have an easy and an open
approach, while the man who either from over-caution or insufficient
accuracy has merely gone straight down the middle of the course is
confronted by a more difficult second shot over a formidable array of
bunkers. For this reason we find at Prince's the apotheosis of the
'dog-legged' or 'round-the-corner' holes, and some, nay nearly all of
them, are about as good as they can be.
[Illustration: PRINCE'S
_The drive from the eleventh tee_]
There is something of the dog-leg about the very first hole, where we
drive at an angle over a ridge covered with bents. The third needs two
fine shots, and the pot-bunkers rage furiously together in innumerable
quantities. Then at the sixth we have one of the most charming two-shot
holes to be seen anywhere, with just a suspicion of a bend in the
narrow strip of fairway, a wilderness of sandhills on the right, and
rough to the left. At the eighth we need not place the shot with quite
such dreadful accuracy, but instead we must hit prodigiously hard and
far, for after we have hit the tee-shot a steep hill rears its sandy
face between us and the hole, and a really fine carrying brassey shot
is needed if we are to be on the green. It is more like a Sandwich hole
than a Prince's hole, and might perhaps feel more at home on the other
side of the boundary fence, but after all variety is a pleasant thing,
and this eighth brings back memories of the mighty Alps at Prestwick,
and has a splendour and a dash about it which makes an instantaneous
appeal. The eleventh is another good hole, where, if we push our drive
far enough out to the right over the big hills, we may hope to put our
second on the green, where it nestles amid a guard of hummocks. Nor
must we omit some mention of the short holes, all excellent in their
different ways and all fiercely guarded, where a shot has got to be
something more than decently straight, since--and this applies to the
approaching in general--the ball does not run to the hole unless it is
hit there, and the ground falls away towards the edges of the greens.
Now after this very exacting golf we may turn to something rather
easier and more straightforward and take our tickets for New Romney in
order to play at Littlestone.
New Romney is a pleasant, quiet, sleepy spot with a fine old church,
once a thriving seaport, now left high and dry a mile or more inland.
=Littlestone= consists of a long and somewhat unprepossessing terrace
of grey lodging-houses, arranged with mathematical precision along
one side of a straight, flat road. On the other side of the road is
the sea, and this is the saving clause at Littlestone. It is not
beautiful--very far from it--but we are right on the edge of the sea;
we snuff it fresh and salt in our nostrils, and can almost believe that
one wave, just a little larger than the others, could overwhelm the
road and the terrace and the very links themselves.
Yet, though we are so near the sea, and there is as much sea and sand
as anyone could wish, the course itself has just the suspicion of an
inland look. The fairway is so beautifully flat and shaven and runs so
straight and so precisely between two lines of thick tufty grass, which
might at certain seasons be irreverently called hay. The soil itself at
the first two and last two holes is not altogether above the accusation
of being clay; it can be rather muddy in winter and terribly hard in
summer. No; I cannot get it out of my head that Littlestone does look
like one of the trimmest and smoothest of inland courses picked up by
some benevolent magician and dumped down again by the sea.
[Illustration: LITTLESTONE
_The carry from the seventeenth tee_]
However, we have all been taught that we ought not to judge by
appearances, and that people cannot help their looks. Bearing this
in mind, we shall find that the appearance of Littlestone does not
do it justice, and that there is in fact very good golf to be played
there. Moreover, it is much better golf than it used to be, since with
Braid, as the villain-in-chief, and Mr. F. W. Maude, as second
conspirator, a vast number of pot-bunkers have been scattered about
the course, and Littlestone is no longer the paradise it once was for
the erratic slogger. If the course has a weakness now it is no longer
a lack of bunkers; rather is it something, that no human ingenuity can
alter, a uniform flatness of stances and lies. Shot after shot has to
be played from a perfectly smooth, flat plain; there are none of the
little hills and hummocks that add so much to the fascination and the
difficulty of Deal and Rye.
Still if there are no little hills, there are, at any rate, some
alarmingly big ones, and the holes that we remember best are those that
are mountainous and more than a little blind. At the second, after
driving down a shaven avenue, we have an imposing second shot to play
over a big hill, which is made the more terrifying by two bunkers in
its face. The sixteenth is another fine slashing hole, where we have
to make a momentous decision, whether to try heroically for a four or
ingloriously for a five. In old days it was really a case of Hobson's
choice. It was hopeless to attempt to carry over that cavernous bunker
cut in the face of the hill, and there was nothing for it but to play
a dull, safe second, and hop over with the third shot. Now, however, a
short cut, a kind of north-west passage, has been cut through the rough
ground to the left, and two shots, perfectly steered and perfectly
struck, will see the ball disappear over the hill-top to lie in safety
on the big, flat green beyond.
These two are of the more flamboyant order of hole, but there are
others less imposing, but quite as good. At the eleventh there is one
of those uncomfortable tee-shots, which are so excellent. There is a
canal, a nasty, insidious serpentine beast of a canal, which winds its
way along the left-hand side of the course, and it is our duty, in
order to gain distance, to hug it as close as we dare; yet if we show
ourselves the least bit too affectionate towards it, this ungrateful
canal will assuredly engulf our ball to our utter destruction. To
push the ball too far out to the right is to make our second shot
unpleasantly long, and it is a hard shot, one that we desire to make
as short as possible. Bunkers guard the corners of the green, and the
putting is billowy and difficult; in fact, a four is far more likely to
win the hole than to halve it. There are plenty more good holes: the
ninth, a short hole, which demands the most accurate of iron shots, and
the fourth, with its green on a sloping, narrow neck among the hills.
The lies at Littlestone are flat and easy, but they will not be a bit
too easy for some of the shots we shall have to play from them.
"Kent, sir--everybody knows Kent--apples, cherries, hops and women,"
observed Mr. Jingle, and to-day he might properly add "and golf
courses"; but now we must leave Kent and cross the Sussex border to
get to =Rye=--and there are surely few pleasanter places to get to.
It looks singularly charming as the train comes sliding in on a long
curve, with the sullen flat marshes on the left and the tall cliff
on the right, while straight in front are the red roofs of the town
huddled round the old church. We have only a few yards to walk along
a narrow little street; then we twist round to the right up a
steep little hill and under the Land Gate and we are at the Dormy
House, old and red and overgrown with creepers. Rye is such a friendly,
quiet spot; never in a hurry, and never with the least appearance of
being full, save, perhaps, for a short time in the summer, when it is
infested with artists. It is the ideal place for the golfer who is
wearied out with a fortnight's fruitless balloting at St. Andrews,
which has resulted in his once drawing a time, and that at 12.30.
[Illustration: RYE
_The fifteenth green_]
At Rye we just loaf down, without the least anxiety, to the little
steam tram which is to carry us--with a prodigious deal of panting
and snorting--out to the links at Camber. This, indeed, is the one
disadvantage of Rye, that the golf is not at our front door-step. Rye
still stands upon a cliff, but it is a cliff that the waters have long
ceased to trouble, and Camber, where the links are, is two miles away.
However, when we do get there, the golf is as good, or very nearly as
good, as is to be found anywhere.
The two great features of golf at Rye are the uniformly fiendish
behaviour of the wind and the fascinating variety of the stances. The
wind presumably blows no harder than it does anywhere else, but the
holes are so contrived that the prevailing wind, which comes off the
sea, is always blowing across us. With a typical Rye wind blowing, it
may be said that there is but one hole where it blows straight in our
teeth, and one--and that a short one--where it is straight behind us.
At the other sixteen holes the enemy persists in making a flanking
attack upon us, and we never have a perfectly straightforward shot
to play. For the few who are artists in using the wind, Rye is a
paradise; for the majority who are not, it is a place of trial and
disillusionment.
Disillusioned too will be they who imagine that they know all that
there is to be known about wooden clubs, because they have attained
to some certainty in hitting a ball that lies teed on a smooth, level
plain. At Rye they must be prepared to hit brassey shots--and long,
straight brassey shots, too--with one foot on a hummock and the other
in a pit. If they cannot do it, they must be content to take five far
more often than they like.
For these two reasons it is a fine course on which to give strokes, and
an ideal battle-ground for golfing giants, from a spectator's point of
view, since it is scarcely possible, even with the most perfect golf,
to avoid two or three shots in the course of a round which shall be
difficult enough and unusual enough to be intensely interesting.
The subtlety of the short holes is the thing that will probably
impress the advanced student, while the more elementary will retain
vivid recollections of the knotted horrors of the Sea hole and the
utter hopelessness of the eighteenth bunker. Certainly that eighteenth
bunker--we never ought to get in it--is a pit of desolation; its
sides are so steep and so smooth that wherever the ball may pitch
down it will roll to the bottom, ultimately to repose in a footmark.
To the man who has a good medal score in prospect, it looms vast and
uncarryable--a thing against which it is useless to struggle. So
appalling is it that at one time some tender-hearted people thought
that it was refined cruelty to keep such a horror till the last; so
they shuffled the course round and turned the eighteenth hole into the
ninth, in order that, if a man was fated to ruin his score, he should
be put more quickly out of his agony. This was rightly considered,
however, to be mistaken kindness, and the big bunker is still kept as a
crowning joy or misery. The three short holes are certainly things of
beauty and of the three the best and the most paralyzing is the eighth.
To see Mr. de Montmorency play this hole against a wind with a hateful
little club which he calls his 'push-cleek' is to see iron play at its
highest; to attempt to play it ourselves is to realize how far we fall
short of that standard and to what a state of impotency and terror it
is possible to be reduced by the surrounding scenery. The appearance of
the hole is so frightening that the ball is as good as missed before we
address it. The distance on a still day can be compassed with a nice,
firm shot with the iron, but the green looks so small and the sides of
the plateau on which it stands so steep and unpleasant; the angle at
which we approach it is so awkward and the wind blows so persistently
on our backs that something is almost sure to go, and does go, wrong.
The fourteenth is another good and difficult short hole, built in
pious imitation of the eleventh at St. Andrews, as is also the fourth
hole at Worplesdon, and the imitation is carried so far that it is not
uncommon, after the tee-shots have been struck, to hear the agonized
cry go up to Heaven, "I'm in the Eden!" This is, unfortunately, the
one hole where the wind does not do its best for Rye, since it blows
for days together straight behind the player and makes the stopping of
the ball upon the green too much a matter of luck.
There are so many other good holes that it seems invidious to
distinguish between them. There is the first, with its narrow, curly
tee-shot between a stream and a road and its little square box of a
green protected on every side; there are the fifth and sixth, good
holes both, and one cannot leave out the third, commonly called the
'Dog-leg.' Then, coming home, what could be better than the eleventh,
with its uncompromisingly small green, guarded night and day by a deep
bunker and most magnetic cabbage-garden; or the sixteenth, with its
long hog-back? Surely there can nowhere be anything appreciably better
than the golf to be had at this truly divine spot.
[Illustration: EASTBOURNE
'_Paradise_']
Leaving Rye we may glance at two other Sussex courses of quite a
different kind--Eastbourne and Ashdown Forest. =Eastbourne= is, like
Brighton and Seaford, to name two other Sussex courses, a seaside
course only in name. It is one of the fairly numerous clan of down
courses, of which the main features, as a rule, consist of chalk,
thistles, steep hills, and perplexing putting greens. It may be because
I played on it at an early and impressionable age, but I think that
the old nine-hole course was better golf than the present full-sized
round. The best holes now to be found at Eastbourne were all among
the original nine, and the newer holes exaggerate the vices of the
old ones, while lacking some of their virtues. There was an old
Eastbourne golfing saying which Mr. Hutchinson has quoted, that "the
ball will always come back from Beachy Head," which, being interpreted,
means that there are certain slopes at Eastbourne so long and steep
that it is impossible to play the ball too much to the left or right,
as the case may be. No matter how crooked the shot, down will come the
ball, trickling, trickling, till it lies close to the hole. Now that
is not a very skilful or amusing or in any way good sort of golf, and
there is a good deal of it in some of the newer holes. The old ones are
not perhaps wholly free from the taint, and the putting is infinitely
deceitful, but still there is less of the deplorable use of the
side-wall.
Perhaps the two chief features of the course are Paradise and the
Chalk Pit, and with an unfortunate prodigality nature has so disposed
of them, that we have to encounter them at one and the same hole.
Paradise is a pretty wood, traversed by a public road and adorned by
one of those sham Greek temples which were beloved of our ancestors.
The chalk pit explains itself, and it is only necessary to add that
it is an extremely deep one. We drive over the pit, and a good drive
will go bounding down a hill a prodigious distance, leaving us with an
iron shot to play over Paradise wood on to a horse-shoe shaped green
in the neighbourhood of the temple. How it may be with rubber-cored
balls I do not know; probably everyone pitches jauntily and easily
enough over Paradise, but it was something of a feat to carry the wood
in the consulship of Plancus, and many a reasonably stout-hearted
golfer would sneak round the corner and, giving the timber a wide
berth, make reasonably sure of his five. One of the very finest shots I
ever saw was played at this hole by Mr. Hutchinson with a horrid, hard
little ball called the 'Maponite,' long since consigned to a deserved
oblivion. His ball lay upon the road, whence he hit it with a full shot
against the wind right over the wood on to the green.
The other hole at Eastbourne which leaves a vivid impression on the
mind is the seventeenth--a long hole that is skirted closely on the
right throughout its whole length by the grounds of Compton Place, a
house that belongs to the Duke of Devonshire. The tee-shot gives a
great opportunity for the ambitious driver who can carry just as many
trees as he has a mind for, and thus make the hole a good deal shorter
and easier; but the second is never a very easy one, with a spinney on
the left and a sunk fence on the right guarding closely the side of the
green.
To putt at Eastbourne is an art of itself. It is not that the greens
are not good, for they are often excellent, but the hidden slopes
in them are like Mr. Weller's knowledge of London, "extensive and
peculiar." For the stranger, the safest rule is that he should take
a great deal of trouble in determining where to aim, and then aim
somewhere else. To add to the piquancy of the situation, the course is
visited by a persistent and violent wind, rendering the golf eminently
healthy, but almost exasperatingly difficult.
[Illustration: FOREST ROW
_The fifteenth green_]
The =Ashdown Forest= course lies in that most delightful but alas!
most rapidly built-over country near Forest Row and East Grinstead,
and not very far from Crowborough, where is another very charming
course. Like Eastbourne, it can boast of some very curly and puzzling
putting greens, but there the resemblance ceases. It lies not upon the
downs, but upon the forest, which means among the heather, and alone
of all the heathery clan, indeed almost alone among golf courses, it
is as nearly as may be perfectly natural. The greens, I take it, are,
some of them, in a measure artificial, but there is no such thing as
an artificial hazard to be seen. Nature has been kind in supplying a
variety of pits and streams to carry, and so we certainly do not notice
any lack of trouble or incident. It is only at the end of the round
that we realize with a pleasurable shock that there is not a single
hideous rampart on the course, or so much even as a pot-bunker.
Nature is really a wonderfully good architect, when she is in a
painstaking mood, and she has made few better two-shot holes than the
second at Ashdown. First comes a sufficiently frightening tee-shot over
a big pit, and then a really long second on to a small green, guarded
in front by a stream and on either side by small grips or ditches,
beyond which again is the heather. The short and humble player, or
the long driver who has perforce to be humbler because of a misplaced
tee-shot, can play short in two, and so home in three, but that is
but poor fun; we must go for that second if we are to extract a full
measure of joy from the round.
A fine slashing hole again is the sixteenth, where the green is guarded
by a grass ground ditch and a low wall of earth, which one would take
to be an artificial bunker that has fallen into disuse, except that it
dispels the illusion by looking infinitely less ugly and more artistic.
When the wind is not too strongly against us, here is a grand chance
of hitting out with the brassey and reaping a due reward. Then again,
for sheer terrifying splendour of appearance, what could be better than
the tee-shots at the thirteenth, commonly called 'Apollyon,' and the
home hole? In both cases we drive from one hillside to another, and in
both cases there flows at the bottom of the valley a stream that shall
engulf the feebly struck ball, to say nothing of heather and bracken
and other things.
Probably, however, the best-known hole at Ashdown is the 'Island' hole,
although it must be admitted that the recent alteration--and vast
improvement--of the fifth hole has robbed the Island of some of its
terrors. The green, which is divided into two terraces, is surrounded
on all sides by streams that have clayey and precipitous banks. It
can be reached from the tee with a pitch of a very modest character,
and, as the hole is played now, so long as the ball is hit reasonably
straight there is no such pressing need for nicety of judgment in
strength. It was a different matter from the old tee, when the angle
from which one played was such that the green was fairly broad but
alarmingly short. A measure of crookedness went unpunished, and a
certain pusillanimous shortness was not always fatal, but many a fine
bold straight shot overpitched by the merest fraction of a yard found
a watery grave. Moreover, it was fatally easy to lift under a penalty
from one ditch only to plump into another, and so on for ever and
ever. This hole has the further unique distinction of being the only
endowed hole in the United Kingdom. Some time ago a member of the club
settled a sum of £5 upon this hole, and the accumulated interest is to
go to anyone who shall do the hole in one at the Easter, Whitsuntide,
or Autumn meetings. So far the feat has been too much for the skill
of the members, and the bait has apparently not grown great enough to
tempt them from the paths of truth, for the interest on the £5 is still
without a claimant.
No account of Ashdown would be complete without some mention of the
great golfing family of Mitchell. It is very curious how artisan golf
will make great strides upon one course and be non-existent at another,
with no apparent reason to account for the difference. There seems no
particular reason why it should flourish so greatly at Ashdown Forest,
and yet the Cantelupe Club, which is the local workmans' club, can
put an extraordinarily strong team in the field, and in their annual
match with them regularly give the Ashdown Forest Club to the dogs and
vultures. Of this team some seven or eight are usually Mitchells. One
or two of them have become professionals, but the amateur members of
the family, who stay at home and work at their ordinary avocations, are
also redoubtable players, and successfully to beard the Mitchells in
their own den, on the tricky, sloping Ashdown greens, would want a very
good side indeed.