"Old Tom.""Old Tom."
Douglas RollandDouglas Rolland and Archie Simpson (driving.)(Archie was younger brother of the Jack Simpson mentioned in this chapter.)
I have always had, and always shall retain, a very lively and grateful recollection of the kindness with which all the local members of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club and others at St. Andrews received me when I first went up there, a Sassenach among the Scots. I was very fortunate in my host, Logan White, and found there also others that I had known in the South, Harry Everard, most keen of golfers and best of all judges of the game, Victor Brooke, most eager, most charming and most Irish of Irishmen, and many others who had been old friends of my boyhood at Westward Ho! Besides, there were many who retained a memory and an affection for my Uncle Fred, whose locker, with his name upon it, was still in the big room. I took possession of it as a heritage, though he still had many good years of life left in him at that date. I well remember, too, that at one of the first dinner parties I went to at St. Andrews, at the most hospitable house of Captain "Dan" Stewart, Mr. Wolfe-Murray greeted me warmly, saying that he had known my grandfather who, as he affirmed, was in the habit of declaring that he had "the best left leg in Bond Street, and," added Mr. Wolfe-Murray, "I think my left leg is better than my right." He was gloriouslyarrayed in the dining dress of the Queen's Archers, which permitted a display of legs; but this story of a day when legs were so draped as to be critically admired in Bond Street took the mind's eye back a long way. The point of my grandfather's claim, however, as to the beauty of his left leg, was that the symmetry of the right had been somewhat spoilt by a French musket ball.
And the kindliness that I met with, from many who had not any of these special links, was not to be forgotten—Mr. Gilbert Mitchell Innes, Mr. Balfour, the father of Leslie—now Balfour-Melville—Mr. Whyte-Melville, to whose surname the former succeeded, and very many more. Gilbert Innes was still, I think, the best golfer of all those named, and David Lamb and Jim Blackwell were about the best of the actual residents. Leslie Balfour came over from Edinburgh and I had many good matches with him. But on my first arrival there I found that a match had already been made for me by Victor Brooke, that I should play Tom Kidd, at that moment thought to be playing the best game of all the professionals at St. Andrews, receiving the odds of a third from him. Tom Kidd had been champion some ten years before, but, champion or no, I had no idea at that time of day of being beaten by anybody, professional or otherwise, at odds of a third. Besides, I had come rather fresh from a small triumph at Westward Ho! Somebody had made up a little purse for the three Allan brothers to play for, and in order to make an even number I had been asked to play with one of them. The prize was for the lowest score, and I was a proud man when I came in with the best score of the four. We had no formal definition of an amateur in those days,but in any case I should not have wished to take the prize, which, indeed, I do not suppose would have been given me. But this small victory put me into fairly good conceit with myself in respect of this match against poor Tom Kidd, who was certainly not as good a golfer as Jamie Allan; but the truth is that the Scots were rather sceptical in those days about the golfing ability of any Southerner. It was not very long before that young Tommy had given Arthur Molesworth a third and a beating, as recorded in a previous chapter. How that could have come about I could not, nor can now, conceive; but at any rate Tom Kidd was not Tommy Morris. I remember that I went out the first nine holes in 42. It does not sound very grand nowadays, but it was respectable then, and sufficiently good to work up Tom Kidd into elaborate explanations as to how impossible it was to give a third to a score of that kind. When a man gets into that explanatory mood it is generally all over with him; and of course it was not to be thought, if I could play anything of a game at all, that he could give such odds. I won an easy and inglorious victory, which would not be worth mentioning except to show the estimate likely to be made at St. Andrews at that time of the probable form of an English amateur in comparison with that of one of the native professionals.
Just about that time, that is to say 1883, Old Tom, who had been playing for him very poorly, began to enjoy a delightful Indian summer of his golf, which gave the old man and all the many who were fond of him immense delight. I do not mean to say that I suppose him to have played anything like the game of his best days. I could generally beat him, buthe would always play me level and liked to gamble heavily. Generally there was a dozen of balls on the match, and a dozen on the score, for we used to keep the scores too, and often a dozen that I didn't, and another dozen that he didn't, go round in some set figure—say 87. A dozen balls meant only a dozen shillings, in those days, but the number he was owing me soon arrived at huge figures. However, I used to knock the debt off his playing fee, and he was perfectly happy, and so was I, in the arrangement. He was very methodical, invariably half-filling the bowl of a short-stemmed and ancient clay pipe as he hit off to the Short Hole Going Out, and knocking out its ashes as we came to the Short Hole Coming In: and that was all the smoke he ever took till the match was over.
On the occasion of this, my first visit to St. Andrews, I was not a member of the Club, but they did me the honour to elect me by next spring, and three of us tied for the first medal at the not very clever score of 91. Mr. Willie Wilson was one, I forget the other; and Wilson won on the play off. I remember that all went well with me till the sixth hole in the tie, where I got into a small bunker from the tee, took two to get out and left some of my temper behind in it. I had to take second honour then, but I won the first medal in the autumn, though I think it was rather that the rest played worse than that I played very well.
And then, immediately after the medal, came a message from Elie and Earlsferry—"Would any pair at St. Andrews give a match in a foursome to a couple of stonemasons from Elie?" Leslie Balfour asked me if I would play with him against them.I knew I was not in good form, and I do not think that he was, either, but still we said we would play them. They came over and seemed very nice young fellows indeed. The name of one was Douglas Rolland, and that of the other Jack Simpson. We had never heard of them before. We continued to think them very nice young fellows until the ninth hole, at which point we were two up. The truth is the masons had not got their hammers going at all. But we did not know that. On the way home we began to doubt whether they were as nice as we had thought. Rolland began hitting the ball to places where we had never seen it hit before, and Simpson so followed up that they were reaching with a drive and an iron holes that it was at that date scarcely decent to approach in this metallic way. They were "gutty" balls, mind, which did not fly away off the irons like the rubber-cores. They finished that round to the good of us, and in the afternoon made us look very foolish indeed. I do not think that Leslie or I ever got over that match till we read the result of the open championship, played very shortly afterwards at Prestwick. It went "Jack Simpson first, Douglas Rolland second." After that we could make a better reply when we had to listen to the very kind and pointed enquiries of friends as to "What sort of golfers are the stonemasons of Elie? Are they any good?"
I think, but am not sure, that it must have been in the interim between that match of ours and the championship, that there was a great home and home match, with something of a Scotch and English flavour about it, got up between Douglas Rolland and Johnny Ball. Captain Willy Burn wrote me an account of the first part of the match at Elie, whichhe went over from St. Andrews to see, and one of the phrases in it I remember now: "Both men drove like clockwork." It seems that Rolland, for all his great hitting, had nothing the better of Johnny—who was a very fine driver in his youth—in that respect, but hole after hole went from Johnny on the putting green. He came to Hoylake, for the second half of the match, no less than nine holes to the bad. The local people said that he would pick it all up on his own green. But he did not: on the contrary he lost more holes. Then, on the following day a second match was arranged—of thirty-six holes, all to be played on his own Hoylake. Of course he must have started with the moral effect of his previous hammering still deeply impressed upon him, but his friends still had all confidence in him. And he seemed to justify it grandly, playing such a fine game that he was five up and six to play and the match was virtually, as probably Rolland himself deemed, over, when suddenly he struck a very bad streak, lost hole after hole until all the lead was gone, and Rolland, winning the last hole too, actually won this extraordinary match. It was a very sad day for Hoylake, and that is the aspect of the match which seems to have impressed everybody. But, after all, there is another aspect—perhaps well realized at Elie—what a first-class fighting man that Rolland was! Johnny Ball had in fact to go through a very long baptism of fire before he was able to bring his wonderful powers and skill to their full use at the moment they were most needed.
Golf had jogged along very comfortably up to this time with its one championship, open to amateurs as to professionals, but never as yet won by an amateur. Then, in the winter of 1884-5 it occurred to some original genius of the Club at Hoylake—"why not a championship to be restricted to the amateurs?" I do not know whose great brain first flashed out the idea, but they wrote and explained it to me, asked me to serve on a Committee for the purpose, and gradually the scheme was licked into something more or less like shape. It was decided to hold, under the auspices of the Royal Liverpool Club, a tournament, under match play rules, open to all amateurs. The Club gave a handsome prize, or, rather, two prizes. I went up to Hoylake a little while before the affair came off, and there found the Committee in charge in something of a difficulty. Douglas Rolland had sent in his entry and they did not know how to deal with it. You see, at that date we had no definition of a professional, nor of an amateur, and had to decide on the analogy of other sports. I was all for accepting Rolland's entry then, and Iam of the same opinion now—that it ought to have been received.
His offence was that, having come in second to Jack Simpson in the previous year for the open championship, he had accepted the second prize money, thereby violating the law common to several sports and pastimes forbidding an amateur to receive a money prize when in competition with professionals. That would have been all plain sailing but for the unfortunate fact that it was discovered that Johnny Ball, some years before, and while still quite a boy, had played himself into the prize list at an open championship and had been offered, and without a thought about the matter had accepted, a sum that I think amounted to no less than ten shillings. It was, of course, unthinkable that Johnny should be deprived of his birthright as an amateur for such a boyish error as this. There never was the faintest suspicion of professionalism about any act of Johnny Ball's extraordinary golfing life, but technically, at that date, his case and Rolland's were very much on all fours. I saw that the Committee, or a majority of them, were resolved to reject Rolland's entry. I did not care to be a member of a Committee which rejected, for a cause I could not quite approve, the entry of one who would certainly be a very formidable competitor for a tournament which I had a distant hope that I might possibly win. I therefore asked leave to resign from the Committee, before the vote was taken on the point, and did so, with perfectly amiable sentiments all round. I have been rather long-winded perhaps in this explanation, but I wanted to make clear to those who are not informed about it the reason why the present amateur definition is drafted just as it is, with a time limitbeyond which—that is to say before sixteen years of age—a man shall be held guiltless of having done any action to spoil his amateur status in playing for a money prize in competition with professionals.
So that was settled, and Rolland's entry disallowed. It passed off with less trouble than I had expected, perhaps just because Rolland was such a thoroughly good fellow, whether he were professional or amateur, and not at all of that small spirit which is apt to take offence where none is meant.
We set to work to play our tournament. It was considered best not to entitle it a championship, seeing that it was the installation of a single club only, and had no official recognition. Funny things began to happen from the start. It gave much delight to the men of Hoylake that I should have drawn, as my first foe, my old enemy at Westward Ho! Arthur Molesworth. Him I managed to beat with tolerable ease. I think he had even then begun to lose the sting of his game. After that I rather forget my fortunes until the semi-final heat, when I came up against Johnny Ball. In a previous heat, by the way, he had committed the crime of parricide, knocking out his own father, who put up a stout fight against him, nevertheless. Johnny and I had a great contest, and I thought he was going to beat me, for he was two up at the turn; but I began to play rather well from there onwards and beat him by two upon the last green.
In that tournament we had not the arrangement which was made as soon as the amateur championship was put on an official footing—that is to say, in the very next year—of all byes being played off in the first round. The effect of that was that AlanMacfie, the other semi-finalist, had a bye in the morning. The final was decided in a single round to be played in the afternoon. I had been wound up to high concert pitch by that morning round with Johnny and could not play a bit in the afternoon. Macfie, on the other hand, putted like a demon and never made a mistake, so very likely the result would have been just the same if I too had been idle all the morning. He beat me, I think, by eight holes.
So that was the conclusion of it, and really it was most unfortunate for Macfie that he had not official right to place his name at the head of the list of amateur champions, for this was in all respects, except the title, equivalent to a championship. Leslie Balfour was not there, but Johnny Laidlay was. It was the first time that I made his acquaintance, though I did not have to play him. He was knocked out at an early period of the campaign. In fact I am pretty sure that he was not playing as fine a game then as he developed later. His putting, in particular, improved greatly, and so did the direction of his driving. His iron play was always, from the first, unsurpassed. I think that according to the arrangements of that tournament all ties must have gone on into the next round, for I well remember that Walter de Zoete tied twice with Macfie and was beaten by him on their third time of meeting, when Macfie, amongst other atrocities, did the short hole (the Rush Hole) in one. De Zoete went very strongly in the tournament. One of his victims was Mure Ferguson, whom he beat by eight and seven. There must, of course, have been something wrong here: I am not sure that gout would not come into the diagnosis.
And somewhere or other, among the crowd of lookers on at that tournament, with a heart very black with rage against me at my presumption in daring to beat the local hero, Johnny Ball, would have been a little boy of the name of Harold Hilton: a name to be heard of in later years.
John Ball.John Ball.(From a water-colour drawing by the late T. Hodge.)
A.F. Macfie.A.F. Macfie.(From a water colour drawing by the late T. Hodge.)
That was the beginning, the preface, the preliminary canter, of the amateur championship, and it is to the initiative and enterprise of the men of Hoylake in getting up that tournament and conducting it to success, that we owe all the fun and all the tears we have had out of that championship since. No doubt it, or something like it, would have come sooner or later, whether or no, but it was due to the Hoylake Club that it came just as soon as it did. In the later course of that year it was taken properly in hand: the chief Clubs in the Kingdom gave it their sanction and subscribed to buy a challenge cup for it; rules were drawn up; the definition of an amateur was framed, and the first amateur championship meeting on these lines was put on the programme to be held at St. Andrews the following year.
Now, seeing that this veracious and highly egotistic record aims at being a serious contribution to the golfing history of modern times, as well as a sketch of my little personal share in it, it might be worth while just to note the names of the Clubs which subscribed for that amateur championship cup. For the subscribers were all the principal Clubs of Great Britain at that time, and anyone who has not looked over the list lately may very well feel something of the same surprise that the little boy experienced when he found himself in Heaven—surprise both at some of those who were there and also at some of those who were not there. All the more notable of the great inland golf Clubs,for instance, are conspicuous by their absence; and for the perfectly sound reason that they had not yet come into being, nor indeed had inland golf yet begun to be deemed at all worthy of consideration. There are, to be sure, the Royal Blackheath and the Royal Wimbledon. These are great in respect and veneration, but they no longer lead. St. George's at Sandwich was admitted to the sacred number of contributing Clubs many years later, when it came into existence and when its merits were proved well to warrant the inclusion of its course among the championship greens. And during all the first years of the amateur championship's existence it was my duty, acting on instructions from the Royal North Devon Club, to point out how very worthy was Westward Ho! to be the scene for that encounter, and also (but this was ever received with a bland smile in which, after a course of years, I began to join) how very central was its situation and how easy of approach from all directions. It has taken a lapse of many years and a more moving eloquence than mine to convince the management of the championship on these so obvious points; but now that they are convinced they accord the links of the West all their due recognition. The original subscribing Clubs then, who gave the weight of their authority to the new championship, were the following:—Royal and Ancient; Royal Liverpool; Royal Albert, Montrose; Royal North Devon; Royal Aberdeen; Royal Blackheath; Royal Wimbledon; Alnmouth; North Berwick, New Club; Panmure, Dundee; Prestwick Club; Bruntsfield Links, Edinburgh; Dalhousie Club; Edinburgh Burghers; Formby; Gullane; Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers; Innerleven; King James VIth, Perth; Kilspindie; Tantallon; Troon; West Lancashire. Is it not the case, that there are surprises in this list, both in the form of those who are in it and those who are not?
In the year 1886 I perpetrated a book on golf. The only excuse to be made for it is that which was offered in another famous instance, that "it was a very little one." It was a much more notorious thing in those days to write a book about golf than it is now, for who is there now who has not done so? But in that golden age the whole bibliography of the game was comprised, I think, in four volumes—Golf, a Royal and Ancient Game, by that gallant old warrior at the game, Mr. Robert Clark; Stewart'sGolfiana Miscellanea; and two small didactic treatises, the one by Chambers and the other by Forgan. I had a great many compliments paid me on my little book,Hints on Golf, when it first came out. I sent the manuscript to Mr. "Bill" Blackwood, and he eagerly consented to publish it, "for," he wrote, "I am sure there must be something in that book. Ever since I read it I have been trying to play according to its advice, and the result is that I've entirely lost any little idea of the game I ever had." That was gratifying praise, and an edition or two was soon sold out. Then it occurred to me to illustrate its wisdom with figures in single lines. A little later I was dancing with a young lady I had just been introduced to in London and asked her whether she playedgolf and she replied, "Oh, yes, we all play, and we learn out of a most idiotic little book we've got." "Ah, yes," I said, "is it a little book with single line figures illustrating it?" "Yes, yes," she said eagerly. "That's it. Do you know it?" "A little," I replied.
One remark in the book took the popular fancy—that "Golf is not agriculture." It was made to point the moral that the golfer should replace his divots. But the only passage that seems to me at all worth quoting at length, although I did write the whole book myself, is one which illustrates the temporary and historical importance of a controversy which is entirely forgotten now. The passage is Number I. of "The Miseries of Golf," and runs thus:—
"Discovering, as you walk down to the tee, to start a foursome, that your partner has never in his life played a round with a 'putty' (eclipse) ball, while you yourself know that you cannot play within one half of your game with a 'gutty' (gutta-percha) ball."
All through the early eighties a good deal of experimenting had been going on with the view of discovering a substitute for gutta-percha for the golf ball. When I first went to St. Andrews, Commander Stewart was there, having just produced his "Stewart Patent" balls. They were of some composition, and were filled with steel filings. They had some merits, but were very heavy. All golf balls used to be numbered then: 27 and 28 were the usual sizes, supposed to signify the weight in drachms, and I remember Logan White telling Commander Stewart, "We tried weighing your balls yesterday. We put a 27 of yours in one side of the balance and we had to put a 28gutty and the coal-scuttle in the other, to make it level." Slight exaggeration, but pointing towards a truth!
It was the fault of these balls that they were too heavy. Then some firm in Edinburgh produced a ball called the Eclipse, and after several modifications they put out a ball that had distinct qualities of its own, in some points superior to gutta-percha balls. They would not carry so well—they were dead, and with wonderfully little resilience when dropped on a stone—soft, so that a finger and thumb squeeze could compress them sensibly, but the compression came out again. That was one of the merits of this ball, which inevitably—its qualities being such as they were—received the nickname of "putty," to rhyme pleasantly with "gutty": it would come out again, resuming its spherical shape without any disturbance of contour, even after the most desperate hammering on the head with an iron. It was indestructible. Then it was a wonderful ball for keeping its line on the putting green—far the best putting ball that ever has come into being during the half-century or so of golf that I have known. But the quality, which perhaps was its highest virtue, was that it did not go off the line nearly as much as the gutty when pulled or sliced. I used to play with a "putty," as a rule, when I played against Old Tom. The old man hated the ball, as indeed did most of the professionals. Trade reasons weighed heavily with many of them, but I do not think that the old man was commercial-minded enough for these to have the slightest effect with him. He might have made a large fortune had he possessed but a little more of this spirit, but it was in his utter freedom from itthat much of his charm consisted. Still he cordially hated "the potty," as he called it. Of course it was possible to pull or slice the putty, if you played badly enough, though it did not take the cut nearly as freely as the gutty, and whenever I pulled or sliced one of them to perdition the old man's delight knew no bounds. The fun would come twinkling out of his eyes under their shaggy brows and he would say, "Eh, they potties—I thocht they potties never gaed aff the line."
Willie Fernie was the only one of the professionals who ever condescended much to them, and I have been playing with him when he used a putty going out at St. Andrews, in the teeth of the wind, and then took a gutty coming home down wind. But he did not make much of it. The two balls required such a very different touch for the short game that it was very difficult to go from one to the other—it is in that that the point lies of the above quotation from my "idiotic little book." But Willie Fernie was a man of infinite ingenuity. The ball, evidently from what I have said of it, was a fine ball against the wind—it kept so low and so straight. On hard ground it would make up in its run for its loss in carry, and therefore it was a better ball on the flatter than on the more mountainous links. But in this account of its qualities, I have also indicated its defects. Running as it did when it pitched, it was an impossible ball to stop on the green off a lofted shot; and just as it would not take much cut, so as to go far to right or left when heeled or toed, so it would not take a cut when one purposely tried to put a cut on to stop it.
On the whole I liked the ball. It was very economical, because it would last for ever and because its soft substance did not inflict such damage on the clubs as the hard "gutty." I won both the first two amateur championships with a putty ball. I do not mean that I used the same ball in each. But Andy Stuart had a putty ball with which—the same identical ball—he won three St. Andrews' medals. The great argument against them was the difficulty aforesaid of stopping them off the pitch. That, and their lack of carry, were their weak points: their straight travel, especially off the putter, was their strong point. And then, all at once, the manufacturers began to make them less good. Just what happened I never knew. I think that they changed the mixture in order to get them harder, and, so, more like the "gutties"; but whatever the reason, the effect was that they lost much of their merits and never overcame their defects. Result—exit the putty ball towards the end of the eighties, and the gutty holding the market until the Americans sent us what at first were called Haskells; which is another and more modern story.
I had written, at the commencement of my little book, that I had seen a recent advertisement of an outfitting firm, "The Game of Golf Complete, in a Box." It suggested amultum in parvo. I went on to say, "if anyone would only write us 'The Art of Golf, complete, in a Book'—why, what more could be left to wish for?" But I added, "I am afraid no one will ever be quite bold enough to attempt that." And hardly were those words published before out came Sir Walter Simpson, greatly daring, with a book actually calledThe Art of Golf. He did not add "complete, in a Book"; but no doubt that ishow he meant it. And an admirably witty and humorous book it was, and is. Its wit and humour abide with us. Just what value it ever had as an education in the art I hardly know. Walter Simpson, poor fellow (he died while comparatively a young man), never was a first-class golfer, though he was a first-class companion for a round. We who were pleased to rate ourselves the best of the amateurs could give him about a third, and there were many strokes in the game of which he had no idea, but his book, like himself, is excellent company. Quite a modern book, having the same title (which is rather a pity), has come out lately, by Joshua Taylor, the champion's brother. I will refrain from comparisons. But I suppose that at the date I am writing of, the world, for the time being, had enough of golf literature, for I cannot think of any work in book form on the great subject until the Badminton Golf Volume, in 1890; and I remember an article of Professor Tait's written in the late eighties in which he speaks of "the magnificent Clark, the voluminous Simpson and the sardonic Hutchinson," with the suggestion that these three virtually comprised the whole of the bibliography of golf as generally known to the public. How far pens have travelled over how many of the reams of the paper so appropriately termed foolscap in the quarter of a century or so since, we may consider with much amazement—and here am I still piling up the leagues!
The first amateur championship, as by law established, was played at St. Andrews, and started for me, as I suppose did most things at that time of life, on the note of comedy. It must be understood that this institution meant a great gathering of clans and of clansmen not very well known to each other. I dare say some of us had our own ideas that no one was likely to be unearthed from the dark places able to upset reputations more or less established; but everything was possible. I had, carrying for me, one of the numerous family of Greig at St. Andrews; I presume some connection of the fine golfer of that name and of his brother, the lion-voiced starter. Of course, the prospects of the championship were the great subject of discussion, and during my first match of the tournament—I think things must have been going fairly easily, and that I had my opponent pretty well in hand—he said to me, "There's a mon Fogie, frae Earlsferry, and they say he's gaein' tae win the chompionship. He's a terrible fine player an' he daes na' mind the gallery a dom." This was terrific news to me. By "the mon Fogie" I understood him to mean a Mr. Foggo of Earlsferry, whose name I had noticed on the list of the draw, and had noticed further thatthis Mr. Foggo would be my own fate in the second round of the tournament. That is, of course, always on the assumption that he and I both survived; and of his survival, after Greig's remarks, I had no doubt. When I came in I heard to my surprise, as well, I may say, as to my relief, that this terror of Earlsferry had actually been defeated and knocked out on the last green by Dr. McCuaig. Of Dr. McCuaig I did not know very much; and then, on the evening of that day, it was reported to me that he had said, "I shall beat Horace Hutchinson to-morrow. I believe he is a good player, but he is a young player. You'll see; I shall beat him." This was retailed to me, and whether it were a true saying of the doctor's or whether the retailer had merely invented it to see how I should take it, and to raise my ire, I do not know to this day; but I do know that it did raise my ire, and that I went out in the morning with a very grim determination to play my hardest. I had no idea of any amateur starting out with the expectation that he was going to beat me, unless, indeed, it were Johnny Ball. I played steadily; the doctor was not at all at his best, and I won—I think it was the first seven holes. At all events, it was such a number as made the match a very comfortable one. The doctor took his beating in the best of spirits, and bore no ill-feeling whatever.
Altogether that was a comfortable championship. After the first thrill of the terror inspired by the reputation of "the mon Fogie," it went on oiled wheels. Mure Ferguson, I remember, whom I met in a later heat, was a hole up going to the eleventh, and I was a little anxious, but he let me win in the end, though only by a hole, and then it looked verymuch as if I should have to play Johnny Ball in the final—which was never to be regarded as a holiday. But the unexpected happened. In the semi-final he had to meet Henry Lamb. Henry Lamb was a beautiful golfer. It was he who invented the "bulger," that club with its convex face, off which the ball flew with a straightness that was a revelation. You see, before the bulger was invented, the faces of our wooden clubs, by the perpetual contact and hammering of the hard "gutty" balls, always got worn away, so that instead of being flat, they were very decidedly concave. And you may understand what the effect of that gradient of face would be—to emphasize and aggravate every sin of heeling or toeing to which golfing flesh is heir. Therefore, the good influence of the bulger was not really so much in introducing the first convexity, though that in itself helped the ball to go straight off it, but it also corrected that fatal concavity which all clubs soon assumed of which the faces were flat to start with. Instead of being concave, after much battering, the face of the bulger became merely flat.
So it was a blessed invention; and as to its inventor, he was not only a player of a very fine and graceful game of golf, but he was also the most delightful fellow to play with that could be imagined. He had a temper which in its perfect serenity was a most valuable golfing asset to himself, and also most valuable in the charm of the companionship which it brought into a round of golf with him. His mode of addressing the ball was remarkable, for he stood as if he were going to drive at an angle of at least forty-five degrees to the right of the hole. I remember, at some inland course in the South, where his strange method wasnot known, a caddie calling out to him as he was on the point of driving from the first tee: "Stop, stop, you're playing to the wrong hole." Henry Lamb gave the boy one of his sweetest and most lamb-like smiles, and proceeded to drive the ball two hundred yards straight down the middle of the course—to square leg. He used to swing round so far as he came down that really it was to the cricketer's square leg that he drove; and yet his style was a singularly graceful one, which seems as if it could not be. It was a singularly effective one no less, and he was a medallist on most of the courses then known to the golfer. Still, he was not a Johnny Ball. On that day, however, he proved himself a greater than Johnny Ball, who was far from being at his best, and when I came in from my own semi-final effort I learned, with a breath of even deeper relief than I had given to the shade of the defunct "mon Fogie," that Henry Lamb and not Johnny was my man for the final. Neither of us started well in that final round—it was only of eighteen holes in those days; but I began to get going after the fourth hole, and Henry Lamb was, I think, a little done after his match with Johnny. At all events, he let the holes slip away very quickly, and I had an easy win, on which he was the first to offer his congratulations—a very courteous gentleman!
The intelligent student of golfing history up to this period might very well note, and with some surprise, that whenever reference is made to Johnny Ball it always seems to be as of one disappointing expectation. And that, in truth, was very much the case. Men of Hoylake used to come to me almost with tears in their eyes, because they knew that theyhad my full sympathy and understanding. They knew that I knew what a terror Johnny Ball really was on his own course and when playing his right game. But what afflicted them almost to hysterics was that he never seemed able to produce this wonderful best of his when he went away to play anywhere else than at home; and the consequence of that was that the other folk, the Scotsmen, laughed at them, saying: "This local idol of yours has feet of very poor clay"—or gibes to that effect. They took it very badly. It is hardly to be believed now, when we know what a brilliant lot of victories in all fields Johnny has to his credit, that he had to wait a very weary while, and to suffer a number of disappointments, before he began to come to his due. When he did come, he was not to hold nor to bind.
Johnny Laidlay did nothing effective in this first championship. He, too, had to "bide a wee" before he did all that was expected of him; but I made his much better acquaintance about this time and acquired the greatest respect for his game, especially for the accuracy and delicacy of his approaches with the mashie. It was a new club to me, and something of a revelation in its possibilities. For it would, of itself and without any special effort of the player, do all to the ball that might be done with our old irons only after a deal of cut had been carefully put on. I do not at all regret that labour; it was an excellent education; but there is no doubt that the mashie simplified the approaching problems. It made an easier game of it. I have been looking up the details of this championship, and find one of its "points" to have been the meeting of Johnny Ball and Johnny Laidlay, the first of very many encounters of itskind, resulting in the English Johnny's win by three and two. So that was the fate of the Scot; he fell by no unworthy hand. There is always consolation in this reflection. Henry Lamb, as I read on the same record, had fought his way to the final over the corpses of some stout foes. The first round gave him a bye; but then he had to meet Mr. Charles Anderson, forgotten by golfers of to-day, but a stalwart in his time. Next, Harry Everard fell to him; and then he had a bigger man than either, especially at St. Andrews, in Leslie Balfour. He beat Leslie at the last hole. Then, in the semi-final, he beat Johnny Ball by no less than seven and six to play, and it was by the same sufficient margin that I defeated him. What Johnny can have been doing I hardly know. That he must have been playing some game widely different from his real one is very certain.
It is not on first sight very obvious how the appointment of a statesman to the Chief Secretaryship for Ireland can have an intimate bearing on the history of the game of golf. Nevertheless that appointment, in the year 1886, of Mr. Arthur Balfour had, in my humble judgment, an important influence and bearing on the game. It so happened that about this time an eminent weekly journal had propounded the statement that none but stupid people played golf, and even that the successful playing of golf demanded, as an essential condition, that the player should be stupid and destitute of all imagination and of all intellectual interests. It was rather an extravagant statement. At the same time also the office of the Irish Secretary was invested with a peculiar importance in the public eye. It was not long after the tragic affair in the Phoenix Park. Ireland was seething with murderous discontent. The man who accepted the secretaryship took his life in his hand with that acceptance, and this risk Mr. Balfour took with all his characteristic coolness and courage. He became at once, both on this account and because of his record as a still rather untried statesman, as a "philosophic doubter" and as a distinguished figure in a certain set of Societyto which the name of "Souls" had been rather foolishly given, perhaps the most popular figure in politics. The public eye was upon him and it was known that this man of so many and so varied gifts was an enthusiastic golfer. He went round the links as an object lesson to contradict the unfortunate pronouncement of the aforesaid respectable paper about the stupidity essential to the man who would confess himself a golfer.
He also went round the links accompanied at a decent interval by two detectives. I used to play a good deal with him at North Berwick at that time, and it was rather curious to know that we were being stalked every step of the way by these guardians skirmishing among the sandhills and the fringes of the course. It did not in the least interfere with Arthur Balfour's equanimity and concentration on the game. Of course he was not a great golfer, though he brought to the game that faculty which was so invaluable to him in politics of rising to an occasion. You were in good hands if he were your partner and you left him with a putt of just the doubtful distance to win the match at the last hole. But though he was not a great golfer, he was a very great figure in golf; and just because it is very human to be influenced by an example, the effect of his example was to make many a man play golf, on the principle that "there must be something in a game if a fellow like Arthur Balfour plays it." He had been a fine tennis player at Cambridge, and was an extraordinarily good shot at a stag. I used to stalk on the splendid forest of Strathconan which he sold to Mr. Combe, the father of Christian Combe, the present owner, and the stalkers there have spokento me with bated breath of his deadliness of aim with those old-fashioned rifles which tossed the bullet along in a high curve, and with black powder that made all nature invisible for a minute after the shot. Twenty-six stags without a miss, was his record, as reported to me by one of these stalkers, for one season, and it is a wonderful record in the conditions, especially as he was short-sighted. But then he had, by compensation, not only an accurate vision, but a coolness of nerve which made any idea of "stag-fever" an impossibility to conceive in connection with him. And "putt-fever" at golf was equally far from him.
I am very far indeed from saying that if golf had not been at this moment just ready for a "boom" the example of Arthur Balfour would have set the boom going, but as a matter of fact it was just ready. Courses were being made and Clubs founded all over the country, the amateur championship was both a cause and an effect of the new impulse, and then came the beat of the Balfour drum and the note of "Ca ira" came from it triumphantly. I date from that year, and principally as arising from the sources indicated, that "boom" which has never ceased to march and which is marching still. So much for what the incentive of one man's example may be in a race still generously capable of hero-worship.
For a while at North Berwick Arthur Balfour's chief henchman was Crawford, Big Crawford, as he was most appropriately called, about whom many a legend clings in North Berwick tradition. The big Crawford was also the caddie of little Sayers in any of the important matches played by that great little man. The Crawford legend might run to far lengths, farther than I care to spin it now, but ofall the instances of his wit and repartee the best I think is that which he produced, perfectly impromptu, so far as I know, when there arose a great discussion as to the precise nature of a toad-stool in course of a match which Sayers, his little man, played against Andrew Kirkaldy at St. Andrews. It was lifted, the lifter saying that it was a dead and loose-lying toad-stool, the objector that it had been rooted in the ground and therefore was not legally liftable. The discussion instantly raised numerous side-issues, as to one of which Crawford, having delivered his opinion, heavily, of course, in favour of the view of the case that would assist Ben Sayers—pronounced, finally, "Weel, het's the rule o' the game, an'——" at this point he paused an instant and lifted an enormous fist, "an'," he repeated, indicating this leg of mutton bunch of knuckles, "there's the referee!" It is not the first time, nor the seventh time, that I have told this story; nor do I care if I repeat it seventy times seven. It is good enough to bear it.
At the conclusion of an historic home and home foursome in which Sayers and Davie Grant defeated Andrew and Hugh Kirkaldy, Crawford would demand of any whom he could get to listen who it was, in their opinion, that had won the match, and when they professed a doubt, he would draw himself up with enormous dignity to his immense height, and striking himself dramatically on the chest, would exclaim with conviction, if not with grammar—"Me!" and really it was not altogether too large a claim. His overmastering size and the fearsome aggressiveness of his manner might very well give pause to any tactics of an aggressive nature on the other side.He was a tower of moral (or immoral) support to little Sayers, and his presence at the hole when a hostile putter was attempting to approach it had all the effect of a black cloud overshadowing the atmosphere. But beneath all his dourness, and his sardonic air, he had a kindly nature, and of his loyalty to him whom he regarded as his chief, and incidentally the greatest man that ever lived, Arthur Balfour, there is not the slightest question.
With his rugged independence, he might stand as the type of the old Scottish caddie, now practically extinct. In later years he set up a booth at the far end of the North Berwick links where he would dispense ginger-beer and the like innocent refreshment, though it was said that to the initiate few a more generous and cordial liquid might be proffered. I do not know. What I do know is that when we went out, of a morning, and came to Crawford at his booth, he would often ask us, "Is Ar-rthur oot the day?" rolling the "r's" upon his tongue as if he loved to prolong the sound of his hero's name. It is thus that he would put the question—for all his worship, making use of the familiar first name. And then, if we were able to comfort his soul by the assurance that the great man would soon appear, he would hoist a little flag on the booth's peak, for honour's sake. And one day it happened that the Grand Duke Michael of Russia, coming to the tent and seeing the flag, inquired of Crawford in whose honour it was flying. I do not know whether the Grand Duke had been put up to making the inquiry, and asked it humorously, to see what Crawford would say. At all events he had his satisfaction, for in answer to the query, "Whom is yon flag flying for?" the uncompromising reply was given, "A better mon than you." No doubt loyalty here leaped over the bounds of courtesy, but there is sign of a better quality than mere rudeness in the reply. Very well must Crawford have known that if he had chosen to reply to the foreign prince that it was in his honour that the bunting waved, it might have meant a piece of gold transferred from the princely pocket to Crawford's, but he did not hesitate. Partly perhaps the native disdain of the foreigner rang in the reply, but chiefly I think a very rugged honesty, which, in spite of the lamentably rude form of the speech, has its dignity.