Tom Morris of St Andrews, page 15
But 1870 was also the year when Tom had given of his best against Willie Park and had nothing to show for it, despite weeks of training and preparation. He had even set aside his pipe to get himself into perfect fitness. In the spring, the gambling men had persuaded him to take on Willie in another marathon match over four links and one hundred and forty four holes of golf. They had raised £100 a side for it, just as they had done in 1856 and 1858 when Willie won, and again in 1868 when Tom took the honours. He had never expected it to happen again, indeed he had vowed that it would not, but on Thursday 14 April, he walked out of his shop at ten o’clock in the morning to greet Willie Park. The newspaper reported that the crowd was so large that a rope was needed to keep them back and Colonel Dougall, the referee, had to appeal for order before they even played away from the 1st tee. It was a close run thing at St Andrews, but it ended with Willie one up on the day with 108 holes left to play.
The crowd at Prestwick on the next Thursday was just as large but thankfully more orderly. Tom took a 5-hole lead in the first round, but Willie pulled it back through the other two rounds, leaving Tom only one up at the end of play. At North Berwick on the following Tuesday they left the course with Tom holding a 1-hole lead. There were only 36 holes left at Musselburgh on Friday, when Tom and Willie met to resolve the match, together with a crowd of some six to seven thousand people and young Mr Robert Chambers, the referee.
From the start the crowd was out of control and Mr Chambers threatened to abandon the match after only three holes if order was not restored. With Tom being jeered and jostled, they somehow got round the course twice, although the very partisan crowd made it near impossible to move, far less swing a club.
In an article appearing some twenty years later in the magazine Golf, A.H. Doleman related that,
At Mrs Foreman’s, Tom missed a short putt which gave Willie the hole and made him two up and six to play on the match. The excitement was intense, and Park’s supporters cheered lustily. Tom went into Mrs Foreman’s, as Willie thought, merely for a refreshment, but never returned to play. After waiting nearly half an hour, Willie played out the remaining six holes, and claimed the match. The conduct of the referee on this occasion was much blamed at the time . . .
Willie was up in the match when Mr Chambers called a halt and they apparently retired to, or, more accurately, sought refuge in, Mrs Foreman’s pub. The referee felt that they should try again the next day, but Willie would have none of it and played on by himself, claiming the match and the purse. The Golf article drew responses from others who had witnessed the match and they proved as partisan then as they had twenty years earlier. Doleman, a Musselburgh man, considered the allegation of undue partisanship to be exaggerated. Others, particularly from St Andrews, took an entirely different view. The entire proceedings at Musselburgh were farcical and made even more so when the betting men brought in an arbitrator who took six months to settle the issue as ‘game null and void’. Life was never dull at the golf with Willie Park.
18 Renovations in Making the Play
In the 1860s when Tom took up his tenure on the Links, The Royal and Ancient Golf Club had improvements in mind, as did the Town Council. The Council had introduced bathing coaches to the West Sands in 1864; tree planting was being extended in South Street and general improvements made to the Cathedral and Castle accesses. The Royal and Ancient Clubhouse was in the process of having a striking bay window added to the frontage which was completed in September 1866. A veranda with outdoor seating would be added to complement it.
The 1850s and 1860s were an age of improvement in society in general but in agriculture the rate of change was spectacular. Growing flax and linseed had given way in Fife to cereal production and, with the introduction of mechanisation such as McCormick’s reaper from America and Shank’s newly developed grass mower, there was an excess of local land labourers. In 1855 Allan Robertson made the six-hole course for the Cupar Golf Club, and although it is not known to what extent he re-shaped this agricultural land, it is hard to imagine that the fast-growing summer grasses were controlled without the use of the horse-drawn cutting blade or the mower for the greens. This course, on the meadowland at Tailabout on the banks of the river Eden, was probably the first proper inland course to be built on good agricultural land. Doubtless the Fife lairds in The Royal and Ancient made every piece of mechanical machinery available to Tom for what followed.
Almost immediately on his arrival in St Andrews, Tom was engaged in overseeing the construction of a road across the 1st and 18th fairways. Today it is whimsically called ‘Granny Clark’s Wynd’, and was opened in May 1866 to facilitate the movement of holidaymakers to and from the West Sands. At the same time, he completed the ‘redding-up’ and reseeding of the rough ground to the west, between this road and the Burn, the area of land where Halket’s Bunker was once situated. The St Andrews Gazette agreed that ‘the area is no longer the mess that it was’.
The road across the Links was constructed after an event that must have distressed golfers at the time but greatly pleased the agricultural community. In October 1865, high surging seas deposited a huge amount of wrack (seaweed) on the West Sands. This material was the only source of fertiliser for fields, other than farmyard manure, and was a bonanza to the local farmers who immediately set about recovering it before it could be lost to the next tide. Expediently, the farmers carted the wrack only a few yards to security on to the 1st fairway. The prodigious amount of material was built into great middens that took up most of the right hand side between the Burn and The Royal and Ancient Clubhouse.
In the weeks that followed, the farmers transferred the wrack midden to the fields and in the process wrought terrible damage on the course, paying little heed to the established roadway across the fairway. The ruts made by the narrow-wheeled carts were widespread and as well as re- establishing the road to make sure that such damage could not be caused again, re-turfing of the whole area was also begun and lasted for the next three years. This was the first major improvement on the Links. It led to the complete banking and control of the Burn and made what is now the 1st green possible, and ultimately the right hand side of the Old Course as we know it today.
In retrospect it becomes clear that a general plan of improvement for the Course and its surrounds was under way. It is equally clear that it was not Tom’s plan alone. The first significant change had been made in 1857 when Allan Robertson had supervised the extension of the greens on all but the 9th and 18th to accommodate two holes. The scale of the changes that Tom oversaw between 1866 and 1879, however, was such that it required not only the financial muscle of the Club and the support of the Town Council, but also the co-operation of the Strathtyrum estate and the Cheape family. It also required the compliance of the house builders in the Town.
When Tom first put up his sign over the shop door, the Sandyhill area at the top of the Links in front of the old Union Parlour was rough and undulating. The strip of the 1st and 18th fairways all the way down to the Burn was similar with scatterings of sparse grassy patches that had long suffered from the intrusions of the sea. The Home, or 18th green, was situated some 30–40 yards in front of where the green is today and was reported to be ‘on broken ground in a hollow, with the ground sloping down both sides’.
Above this, a trough or gully ran across the Links from opposite Tom’s shop door, passing in front of the Clubhouse to the beach. The sole remnant of this today is ‘The Valley of Sin’, at the approach to the 18th green. The area above this gully up to the bank in front of the Clubhouse was used as a small putting green; the teeing ground for the 1st hole was on the other side of the gully from the Clubhouse towards the road. All of this, the rough Sandyhill and the hollow across the course, would be banked, levelled and smoothed during the winters of 1867 and 1868, leaving it roughly what it is today.1
At the Spring Meeting of The Royal and Ancient in May 1869, the new Home green came into play to general acclaim but it would take another twenty years for the 18th green to expand to what it is today. In 1869 it was less than half its present size with the hole sited, as it is now for every major championship, above ‘The Valley of Sin’. It would be interesting to know whose idea it was to leave that treacherous little hollow when the gully was filled in and the whole levelled. Was it ever a bunker? Was it intended to be a bunker? Perhaps we will never know, but ever since its fateful founding in 1869, it has been the most telling place for a ball to come to rest, on an otherwise benign hole.
Tom’s attentions were not confined to the top of the Links. In 1866, at the same time as the St Andrews Gazette was reporting that the first teeing ground was being set by the road (Granny Clark’s Wynd) across the Links and that ‘a notice was posted within the first hole that the last was shut up for repairs’, the paper was also announcing that there were now ‘fewer feezers’ or ‘cupped lies’ on the Links. Tom had started directing the filling of divots and some roughly pitted areas with sand in January 1866. A year later, the newspaper was remarking upon the ‘heaps of sand everywhere on the Links’. Tom was coating the Links with sand, contract-carted from the beach and deposited at strategic points about the Course. It was to be a recurring winter treatment, initially regarded with derision but eventually with general acclaim.
The building up and levelling of the land on which the present day first hole green is sited was completed in 1870 when the Swilken Burn was enclosed and its course to the sea fixed with stone-sided banking. The ground on which the green is formed is the product of infilling the Burn’s banking with spoil from the Town’s construction sites, as is the level land on the approaches to the Burn.
The Burn, which snakes its way across the 1st and 18th fairways, had long been a problem on the Links. Flooding at high spring tides and during heavy rain was a recurring event that Provost Playfair had done much to alleviate with the construction of breakwaters in the 1830s. The Burn, however, remained a muddy morass in places and its course was not helped with the banking up of the upper reaches when the Station Road Bridge was built in 1850 to carry the road behind the 17th green to the railway station. With copious amounts of good soil available from the Town’s building sites, banking the Burn and levelling the land along its length became possible. This was an extensive task and although there is little note of it in the Club’s minutes it must have been ongoing for several years, for the bottom of the Burn is today some three to four feet vertically below the level of the 1st green.2 Fixing of the Burn’s course generated today’s 1st green, but it did more than that, for what followed would eventually transform the golf course.
Although the work of raising the level of the land is clear to see in the stonework along the length of the Burn, it is hard to reconcile the siting and structure of the Swilken Bridge with this event. The bridge has become a landmark in golf and its great antiquity is undoubted. On early maps it is labelled the ‘Golfers Bridge’, and its purpose was surely as a passage for golfers over the morass of the Burn. It can be seen as a feature in a circa 1740 oil painting of the Links. It is also shown in many early photographs where, as in the painting, it can be seen as a more extensive structure than it is today. It is clear that when the Burn was banked much of the bridge was buried.
Today’s 1st green came into play in the autumn of 1872, but the completion of it did not in itself make anti-clockwise play on the course possible. For that to happen much more extensive work on the golfing ground was needed.
In October 1870 the most telling, and in the long term, most significant event occurred. After the Autumn Meeting that year, the local press warned that extensive whin burning was about to be undertaken on the Links. The paper also gave due notice, under the headline ‘Links Improvements’, that big changes were about to take place. The piece reads:
The extension of the golf course, which has been spoken of for some time past, seems about to be carried into effect. The course is already staked off [sic] and we learn that operations are to be carried out immediately to have it cleared of whins and bent. That it will eventually prove a boon to golfers is undoubted, but we fear that a considerable time must elapse before it becomes popular, as the roughness and spongy nature of the ground will make play more difficult. But while our golfers are to enjoy a greater liberty, we fear that those of our citizens who are in the habit of making a promenade of that portion of the links will be inclined to complain a little at the curtailment of their pleasure ground.
In the event, there were no complaints. Despite the awful sight of the burning and uprooting of the whins, no letters to the editor appeared. It comes as a surprise that in a council chamber divided bitterly over almost every issue and in a township with a vociferous conservative minority, no one appears to have voiced an objection to the changes.
The area that was burned and from which the whin roots and bent were removed, extended from today’s 2nd tee to the intersection of the 7th and 11th fairways, almost the entire length of the northern side of the course. This clearance considerably increased the width of the course, laying bare land that would require very extensive work to make it fit for golf. It would lay the basis for the further extension of the greens and for the outgoing fairways on the modern-day anti-clockwise course. Much manpower and expense would however be needed. This is reflected in the minute books of The Royal and Ancient Club where the annual expenditure for upkeep of the Links, which had long averaged less than £50 a year, more than doubled abruptly in 1876-77 and persisted at this level throughout the next decade.
Links land fit for golf may have been readily won from the whins with effort and manpower, but protecting it from wind and waves at the High Hole, where the course runs into the Eden Estuary, was another matter. It was the area of the Course that caused Tom and his predecessors the greatest anguish and it took knowledge and guile to stabilise it.
It is clear, from a report of a conversation with his friend David Louden in 1907, that Tom’s greatest difficulty with maintenance of the Course was caused by the green and its surrounds of the High Hole, the 7th and 11th. Tom is quoted as saying that the High Hole:
has gi’en me mair bother than a’ the rest o’ them put together. The Hole was a great deal nearer the Eden in oor young day than it is noo; an’ the neighbourhood o’ the hole was aye changin’ an’ the hole itsel sometimes filled up efter a heavy storm at sea. The saund drifted up wi’ the gale an’ the puttin’ green was often little better than a bunker. As ane o’ my auld cronies ance said to me: “It’s whiles ae thing, an’ whiles anither an’ whiles a’ thing mixed thegither.” There was naething to kep the saund. But, aboot the ’ear 1847 – the last year o’ the “featheries” – Charlie Howie, the nurseyman at Law Park, took it in his head to saw [sow] what he ca’d Sea-Lyme Gress, which, he said, throve fine at Kinkell Cave an’ the Dennis Wark. He sent to Holland for aboot half a stane o’ seed, an’ sawed it along the bank o’ the Eden, an’ it throve fine there awa’. It keppit the saund round aboot its wiry roots, an’ in time reclaimed a guide lump o’ grund. At the present time it is aboot eighteen yairds ayont the auld edge which used to be proppit up wi’ planks, ye mind. A new green has been made at a lower level on the grund reclaimed by the Lyme Grass. The High Hole was also the first on the Links that had a sheet-iron case put in to keep it in proper shape. I fell on that plan efter a gude deal o’ study, an’ it suited to a tee. Then, when ither holes got raggit roond their edges, I had them dune up i’ the same wye, an’ that was the beginnin’ o’ the modern style o’ the hole tin.’
Although the major changes that Tom oversaw on the Links were carried out between 1865 and 1872, he continued to develop and improve the course throughout the 1870s and 1880s. With the completion of what is today the 1st green and with the extensive clearance of the whins all along the north or sea side, an altogether new course emerged. As the greens were extended it became possible to play both clockwise and anti-clockwise. We will never know if this was part of a grand plan because it is unrecorded. It is clear, however, that what may have been a novelty at the time quickly became an expedient solution to the problems of wear and tear for, by the late 1870s, Tom was switching the direction of play regularly. It was in 1876 that the modern-day layout had its first tournament play with the Open Championship of that year.
Tom’s amiability, diplomacy and tact may have played some part in carrying out these extensive changes without objections. He was clearly clever in eliciting support and astute in keeping the public informed. The changes on the Links between 1866 and 1880 would probably have met with furious objection had they have been perceived to have come from The Royal and Ancient Club alone. Tom, through his network of caddies and townsmen golfers, almost certainly paved the way for a smooth passage, not only through the local golfing community, but also through the council chamber. Although he may have crucially won the townspeople’s support, an altogether higher authority must have had a hand in dealing with Mr Cheape of Strathtyrum, the owner of the Links.
