Tom Morris of St Andrews, page 24
31 Characterising the Game
Tom Morris stamped his character on golf throughout the course of the 1880s. He was the most popular figure in the game and his name was virtually synonymous with it. Tommy, with his flair and flamboyance, possibly contributed more in bringing the game to a broader public but it was Tom who was respected and, indeed, revered at all levels in Victorian society. The national press had made much of the manner and margin of his win in the 1882 marathon match with Willie Park but the changes wrought on the Links of St Andrews were also widely reported. Tom became the oracle and beginners emulated his calm acceptance of good or bad fortune in play. His innate characteristics of conviviality and congeniality, coupled with his pawky good humour, irrevocably came to be associated with golf at all levels.
In 1880 there were about sixty golf clubs in the British Isles, fourteen of which were already well established in England. By the end of the decade, the total numbers had increased to nearly three hundred with around a hundred clubs in England and Ireland, as the popularity of the game spread outside Scotland. Wherever a golf course was contemplated in Scotland, Tom Morris was consulted and his travels were extensive and frequent. Since his first English journey to Westward Ho! in 1860, he had returned to England to build, extend or renovate courses at Alnmouth, Manchester, Newcastle, Northampton, Watford and many other places; some associated with spas such as Harrogate or smart seaside hotels like Great Yarmouth and Scarborough. The impression that Tom made on his travels was important, but of equal import was the fact that wherever Tom went, a St Andrews professional golfer was likely to follow.
When he had laid out a new course, or perhaps revised or advised on an existing local attempt at creating a few holes, he would often be asked if he knew of a good man who might take charge of it. Winning a club championship in St Andrews became a passport to professional status at a golf club for which Tom Morris was looking for a man. Some would leave to become great names in the game, while others would merely settle into their new home to make their living, tending the golf course and attending, as Tom had well instructed them, to the members’ needs. Peter Fernie, for instance, served with success at Wimbledon and Oxford without aspiring to more than two attempts at the Open, while his brother Willie, would make his name and put the newly founded course at Dumfries on the golfing map by winning the Open Championship at Musselburgh in 1883.
In England, golf began and developed in an altogether different way from Scotland. Wealthy converts to the game often built courses on their private estates or gave permission for others to do so. To such men, money was of little consequence; they demanded and got the best and the best in golf was clearly Tom Morris of St Andrews. He was much sought after, not just for designing and laying out courses, but also for altering existing ones as the game attained ever-higher standards. His fee was always the same, £1 per day plus expenses. He was not financially exploiting his position but rather carrying out the work because of his love of the game and making life easier for fledgling clubs to become established. His efforts as a golf course architect spanned 54 years, starting with Prestwick in 1851 and ending in Kirkcaldy and the Glasgow Club at Killermont in 1904. In that time he had worked on over a hundred courses.
Tom’s work as a golf course architect, or more properly designer, was crude and rudimentary by comparison with today’s sophisticated high technology. His job was to produce as interesting and reasonable a test of golf as possible with the resources at his disposal. That he was in such demand throughout the length and breadth of the land stands testament to him being the best exponent of this craft in his day. In many cases Tom would simply walk over a piece of ground and recommend, there and then, where tees and greens might be placed and, according to taste and budget, where bunkers might be dug and natural hazards brought into play. On other occasions he would spend days designing the course and would often return months later to see how it was developing. He had a great eye for where greens should be placed to best use the natural attributes of the land and he appears to have particularly favoured sloping plateau greens and those placed in hollows. To make the best use of the ground available, fairways often crossed each other and greens shared two holes. If he recommended a treatment for the land, it was based upon his own experiences from tending and developing the links at Prestwick and St Andrews and would no doubt have involved the liberal application of sand. He must have been good at what he did, otherwise he would not have been recalled, as at Aberlady on the Hope Estate, for the construction and reconstruction of Luffness, or invited to places as distant as Lahinch on the west coast of Ireland that required three days travel. Possibly his most significant recognition other than Prestwick and St Andrews, however, was his work in planning and staking out the holes for the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers’ new course at Muirfield in East Lothian in 1891.
The Honourable Company originally played over the Leith Links before moving to Musselburgh in 1836, where it remained for over fifty years. When it finally moved to Muirfield, it is recorded in the Rev. John Kerr’s The Golf Book of East Lothian that David Plenderleith put into effect the design staked out by Tom Morris for sixteen holes. These holes were opened for play on 3 May 1891, when Tom enjoyed the honour of teeing the ball of Sir Alexander Kinloch who played the first stroke. Within a few months an additional two holes were brought into play in time for the 1892 Open Championship, and although it received complimentary reports in the newspapers of the day, Andra’ Kirkaldy dismissed it as little more than ‘an old water meadow’. The course was extensively altered before the 1901 Open, but it was not until 1919 that the present day Muirfield started to take its final form. Like most of the courses in which Tom had had a hand, the Muirfield of today bears no resemblance to that which he had originally laid out in 1892.
During the boom period of golf from the 1880s one can only guess at Tom’s total contribution. Individual clubs’ records are not very informative, but they certainly make clear the reverence in which he was held by all classes of society and by the landed gentry in particular. ‘The Colonel’, writing in Kerr’s book, observed about the making of the Muirfield course, ‘Old Tom is a veritable makkar – his is “the vision and the faculty divine” for making golf-greens; how I felt that as I walked beside him, he glancing “from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven”, taking in the situation at every point!’ Plenderleith, who had the responsibility of putting Tom’s design into effect, is quoted as saying, ‘It has been cunningly laid oot – ay, cunningly laid oot’.
There are numerous examples of his input in the construction of private courses, but his most unlikely creation must be that on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. There he built a course for Sir Reginald and Lady Cathcart on the wonderful ten-mile strip of ‘machair’ or links land facing the Atlantic Ocean.
While Tom Dunn, and particularly young Willie Park, were also busy altering and laying out courses, there was clearly a certain cachet in having Tom associated with a newly established course. As the newspapers of the day reveal, his presence at an opening not only attracted public attention but also added a certain dignity. Having an outstanding Scottish professional in charge of the green was also a prerequisite for the leading clubs in England.
A glance through the Open records shows how widespread the game became in the course of the 1880s. From the Championship’s narrow base of mainly St Andrews and East Lothian players, the spread and popularity of golf meant that not only was the number of contestants starting to increase, but unknowns were emerging from places where the game was still a novelty. In the 1882 Championship at St Andrews, players were drawn from Dumfries, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Leven in Scotland and from Wimbledon and Hoylake in England. Also, the formidable Simpson brothers and Douglas Rolland had emerged from Earlsferry, a fishing village on the south coast of Fife, to stamp their name and their birthplace on the game. By 1891, the numbers of professional contestants had doubled, with players from all over England, many of whom, like Tom Vardon, a Channel Islander, had no Scottish connections whatsoever.
Tom Morris, nevertheless, remained at the core of the Open Championship and it was through him that entries to the event were made. With increasing numbers, however, this informal system of entry clearly could not continue, and in 1891 The Royal and Ancient stipulated that entries would close three days before the event. With notice of the Championship posted only in the Scottish press and The Field in England, not everyone was made aware of the change, and some ten contestants found themselves only permitted to play ‘under protest’ of late entry. They had merely informed Tom that they would be playing and the matter had slipped his mind.
Tom had long been the conduit for professional contestants wishing to enter the Championship, as well as finding employment in the game, but golf was rapidly outgrowing him. Young men for whom he had found employment a decade earlier were themselves designing and constructing golf courses and their own protégés were emerging as great players. He knew them all from his travels or being introduced at his shop door and each, in their writings, were quick to express their regard and in many cases, their indebtedness to him.
Tom clearly found a special pleasure in the young and able on the links. Spirited young people appealed to him and he, with his wit, wisdom and vigour, had a special attraction for them. Horace Hutchinson, John Ball, Freddie Tait and James Robb, all had the ultimate compliment paid to them by Tom that he saw ‘something of Tommy’ in them. But it was Douglas Rolland from Elie who was Tom’s special favourite, and he took a keen interest in Dougie’s movements and activities on and off the links: he was always ready to relate the latest ‘Dougie Rolland story’. James Braid was Douglas Rolland’s nephew, and Braid was subjected to Tom’s gleeful reminiscences and fulsome praise of Dougie on every occasion they met.
Douglas Rolland was notorious for his exploits both on and off the links, epitomising the Scots word ‘gallus’ to perfection. He was a loveable rogue who recognised neither limit nor restraint. Doubtless Tom would have seen in Dougie Rolland much of the vitality, charm and flair on the links that had been absent from his life since the passing of Tommy.
Rolland first contested the Open Championship in 1882 at St Andrews while working as a stonemason in the Town. He was in the field at Musselburgh in 1883 and was runner-up to his Elie compatriot, Jack Simpson, then of Carnoustie, in 1884. After a widely reported home-and-home challenge match with John Ball at Hoylake, Rolland failed to appear at Cupar Sheriff Court to face a paternity suit. Sadly, with a charge of contempt of court hanging over him, the golfing press reported that he was not then able to return to Scotland and was therefore unable to contest the Open until it was played in England in 1894.1 He had taken second place in 1884 and ten years later, at his fourth time of entry, he was again runner-up, this time to J.H. Taylor at Sandwich in Kent. At the Open Championship prize-giving ceremony in 1885, when the Kirkaldy brothers, Park Jnr, the Fernies, the Simpsons and all the leading players of the day were assembled, Tom is reported to have remarked wistfully, ‘they should all thank the Lord that Dougie Rolland is holed-out in England’.
Douglas Rolland held down appointments at several clubs in England, among them Rye, Malvern, Limpsfield and Bexhill and from time to time he would return to his trade as a stonemason. Tom Morris was always ready to endorse him in his appointments, despite his wayward ways, and Douglas Rolland left every club he served with mutual expressions of regret and a legacy of enduring stories.
In complete contrast to the statuesque figure of Rolland, the diminutive Ben Sayers was Tom’s other great favourite. Ben did not compare with Douglas as a player but his enthusiasm and interest in every aspect of the game was what Tom clearly enjoyed. Ben’s manners, moderation and modesty, were said in St Andrews to be ‘uncommon in a Musselburgh man’. He had been a circus acrobat, became a club-maker and was a much-loved figure in North Berwick, where he established the enduring club-making business that still bears his name. He was a frequent visitor to the shop in St Andrews and he and Tom were regular playing partners in exhibition events that were held to inaugurate a golf course or celebrate the opening of a new hotel. They were present at the opening of the Dunblane Hydropathic Hotel, at Highland Hotels in Crieff, Strathpeffer and Pitlochry and Marine Hotels at North Berwick and Elie.
Tom’s travels, however, were not confined to consulting on course design and construction or to exhibition play. Through his sixties and seventies he continued playing competitive golf with the enthusiasm of his youth, albeit with diminished vigour and waning success. Times were changing, and with the emergence of Vardon, Taylor and Braid, Tom was becoming less the oracle than the oddity. He must have felt increasingly isolated, because all of his contemporaries and friends had either retired or were dead.
In January 1884, Tom Kidd died at his home in Rose Lane, St Andrews. He was from an old Town family of weavers that, like the Morrises, had turned to caddying when it was no longer possible to make a living with the handloom. Although Kidd had never been a principal player, he had participated in professional matches and was the surprise winner of the first Open played at St Andrews in 1873, when the weather reduced the event to a lottery. He defended his title unsuccessfully at Musselburgh, but after that he never ventured further afield than Elie and Leven, where he competed successfully, and in St Andrews, where he played in his last Open in 1882. He and Tom enjoyed many successes in foursome matches in St Andrews and, most famously, in Burntisland when, in August 1879, they beat Bob Ferguson and Willie Park by two holes. Earlier that year he beat Bob Ferguson over his home links at Musselburgh. Tom Kidd died of heart disease after suffering ill health for over a year.
In 1886, young Bob Kirk, after months of debilitation, died in his sleep at 4 Pilmour Links. Although Bob’s death could not have come as a shock, his absence from Tom’s shop and life on the Links must have left a void. He was a neighbour and friend of the Morris family as well as a sometime employee. He had taken up the appointment of professional at Blackheath, which had initially been offered to Tommy Morris, and, because of his travels, he was familiar with all of the great players in the game. During his Blackheath stay, he played frequently in competition with Jamie Allan and Jack Morris at Westward Ho! and Hoylake. Undoubtedly, Bob and Jamie Allan’s greatest hour came in August 1879 when they played for a £200 stake over the four greens of Westward Ho!, Hoylake, Prestwick and St Andrews. Jamie won at all four venues. Although Bob was only 41 years old when he died, he was one of Tom’s old guard, always ready for the challenge and prepared to travel anywhere to compete. He never won an Open, although he threatened often enough.
In October 1888, George Morris, Tom’s elder brother, died in Edinburgh after a prolonged illness. Suddenly Tom was aware of his own age and mortality.
32 Death in Alabama
In Darien, Georgia, James Hunter’s business had prospered. He made further acquisitions of timberland after his return to America in 1879 and added extensions to his wharves and mills in 1880 and 1881. In 1880 James brought his younger brother Robert to Darien to act as his clerk and book-keeper; two years later, two other brothers from Prestwick were to follow. Robert was already highly experienced, having run the Scottish end of the Hunter business and the full measure of his skill would emerge in the years to come when Tom and his family would reap the benefits of his business experience.
Robert Hunter married Marian Shannon of Newry, Ireland in 1875. When they moved to Darien with their family, they lived in James’s house on Second Street when he moved to Mobile, Alabama, in 1882. Robert and Marian retained the services of July Tog and Catherine Gignihat, the African-American servants who had attended to James since the house was built.
Shortly afterwards, James and Robert enlisted the help of two nephews in Prestwick, James and Andrew Manson, to work in the business in Darien. Their father, Thomas, was a founding member of the Prestwick St Nicholas Golf Club and both the Manson brothers were stalwarts of it. Other members of the Manson family would ultimately make their home in Darien and later Mobile. They, together with James and Robert Hunter and their families, became prominent citizens within their communities and would become the driving force in establishing golf in the southern states of America. Robert is remembered as the ‘Father of Mobile golf’.
James came back home to St Andrews from Mobile at the end of June 1883 and, perhaps not surprisingly, Lizzie became pregnant again. In July 1884, she gave birth to Elizabeth Gray Hunter, named after James’s recently deceased mother from Prestwick, after whom Lizzie herself had been called. James was not at home in St Andrews when Gray, as she became known, was born and again Tom registered this, his fourth grandchild’s birth.
Preparation for James Hunter’s return to St Andrews had been made well in advance. He had made a further £200 bond available to Tom in 1882 to finance the renovation of the workshop, and more importantly, to convert the attic floor above the workshop into good living accommodation. Tom’s total indebtedness to James, as registered in the Fife Sasines, now exceeded £800.
Before 1882, Tom’s shop had changed very little since he acquired it in March 1866. Indeed, little had changed since Hugh Philp had died and his nephew Robert Forgan had taken over the premises in 1856. George Daniel Brown, who had occupied the building since Forgan moved his business next door, had made living accommodation above the shop, renovating the roof and adding his name in large white letters on the gable end. Prior to these alterations, the cart shed that Thomas Fairful had originally built on the site would still have been recognisable to anyone of Tom’s age. The changes that were made in 1882 were, however, substantial, and apart from various additions to the shop and house, the property has remained much the same to the present day.
