Tom Morris of St Andrews, page 25
The conversion of the upper storey was completed in April 1882 and consisted of five rooms, including a large living room, with two rooms adjoining it overlooking the Links. Access was by an outside stair from the garden at the back, where there was a lavatory that the workshop men also used. The front of the shop was remodelled in stone from Nydie’s quarry and the extended gable to the east was formed in concrete, a then novel material, in its first application in the Town.1
The property above the shop is today called ‘Tom Morris House’, a name going back to at least 1935 and possibly to about 1900. It was built with the express purpose of providing independent accommodation for Tom’s sons, Jof and John. Up to this time they had lived at 6 Pilmour Links with Lizzie and her children in increasingly cramped conditions, as Agnes, now five, and Bruce, aged three, grew up. Accommodating John’s difficulties in moving about and Jof’s increasingly troublesome rheumatism in a house with two children and a baby, as well as Tom, could never have been easy. If James Hunter was to have any place for his work, and space to enjoy family life with his children, Jof and John would have to be relocated. They moved into their new accommodation and Tom, when he realised that he could keep a virtually round-the-clock vigil on the Home Green from the window, soon moved in as well.
James Hunter came back home every year to spend time with his wife Lizzie and the children. From St Andrews he could enjoy his golf and the social life, as well as expand his business contacts in the United Kingdom.
James was a golfer of no mean ability and, despite his long absences, was a popular figure in St Andrews. He played regularly and competitively in a broad spectrum of company, twice entering the Open Championship lists. In 1883 he was the inaugural winner of the Hall Blyth medal at Hoylake where he was a member. He had much golf during his stay in St Andrews where he and Major Bethune enjoyed many matches against Tom and Colonel Boothby. James also captained a Thistle Golf Club side against a University team and was a regular competitor in both the Thistle and Rose Clubs’ medals. Entering fully into the golfing scene, he donated prizes of club shafts to the St Andrews Club.2
James had registered his will in Cupar, Fife, in September 1877. In the event of his death, Tom, together with Charlie Hunter of Prestwick and James Glover Denham, his neighbour at Pilmour Links, were nominated as his trustees. Mr Denham resided in St Andrews for many years after a business career in London; he was a golfing enthusiast who did much to further the professional game and improve the lot of the caddies. He and Major Bethune had formed the nucleus of the committee that organised the Cathedral graveyard memorial to Tommy, to whom they were particularly close. The other trustee, Charlie Hunter, was James’s cousin and four years his senior. Charlie Hunter had inherited Tom’s mantle at Prestwick Golf Club and had carried Tom’s clubs throughout his encounters on the Prestwick links against Willie Park.
At the end of October 1885, only three months after Gray’s first birthday and with Lizzie again pregnant, James Hunter returned to America, where he announced his intention of becoming a citizen of the United States.
By the time of James’s departure for the United States, the pregnant Lizzie and her family were living in some style at 6 Pilmour Links. The house had been developed both internally and externally. The attic room in which Tommy had died was gone. A second storey had been added with the classical Georgian proportions popular at the time. A fine doorway was built and the old cottage windows re-designed to match the new larger ones on the first floor. An extension had been added at the rear to accommodate an inside-flushing water closet. The whole house was topped off with a fine balustrade giving it the appearance of a small country house, unique in the Town. It was the finest house on Pilmour Links and much admired. At the rear, unseen from either the Links end or Pilmour Links, the garden was similarly treated. Although the path was retained for John to propel his trolley between the house and the workshop, the garden was redesigned with flower beds and box hedges. A little summerhouse was placed to catch as much of the sun as the enclosed garden would allow. Finally, a fine wicker fence was set behind the workshop to demarcate and limit the spread of workshop debris. Lizzie had a very fine house and garden, a fine young family and a successful, widely admired and much respected husband. With her father and brothers about her and a broad spectrum of friends in the Town, she must have been contented enough. She took regular holidays in America with her husband and would appear to have been blissfully happy. Her happiness, however, was not to last.
On 31 January 1886 James Hunter died in Mobile, Alabama. His pregnant wife Lizzie received the news by telegram two days later. His death was reported in the Ayrshire and Fifeshire newspapers as well as the national press in Britain. The state newspapers of Georgia and Alabama recorded his passing as ‘a major loss of a central business figure, an entrepreneur and a man of great foresight and vision.’ James had died, the St Andrews Citizen reported, ‘as the result of an accident in the course of conducting his business as a timber merchant’. His body was dispatched from Mobile to St Andrews and it was accompanied by his youngest brother, Andrew. It reached home on Friday, 18 February 1886.
The burial of James Hunter took place the next day. He was interred beside Tommy Morris, who had been his lifelong friend as well as his brother-in-law, his sister-in-law Margaret Morris, and his mother-in-law Agnes Morris, who had known him since his childhood in Prestwick.
A large number of his business associates and friends from Prestwick attended the funeral. His son, William Bruce Hunter, aged seven, with his grandfather Tom Morris, led the cortege, followed by Jof and James’s brother, Andrew. There followed relatives and friends from Prestwick, led by his cousin and trustee, Charlie Hunter, and business associates from Glasgow and Liverpool. Many townspeople attended, including his other trustee, James Denham, Major Bethune, Mr Keiller-Bruce, Colonel Boothby and Mr Everard, together with Mr Stonehouse, Mr Aikman and other businessmen of the Town with whom he had played golf.
After leaving St Andrews some three months earlier for what was to be the last time, James Hunter had travelled to Mobile, stopping only briefly at Darien, Georgia on the way. But for his perspicacity and business acumen, he might never have been in Mobile. James had foreseen the decline of Darien as the eastern seaboard’s premier timber port. Georgia was running out of its pines. Continuous felling meant that less accessible land had to be purchased, and hauling the logs to the rafts on the Altamaha River to be floated down to Darien was becoming uneconomical. James saw the sugar pines of Alabama as the next area of opportunity.
James Hunter had already purchased land in the Alabama counties of Washington, Monroe, Mobile and Choctaw and also off the coast on Farmers Island, Blakely Island and Pitts Island. James owned more than 100,000 acres of land in Alabama alone, where he contracted 20 sawmills and employed over 500 men. The location of one of these mills in Washington County he named ‘Prestwick’, a township and name that survives today. James moved to Alabama, leaving Robert to manage the business in Darien. He also left Robert and his family in the house that he had built for Lizzie, a house that stands to this day and is referred to locally as the Hunter House. When Robert subsequently moved to Mobile, the Manson family would come to live in it until recent times.
The life that James Hunter led in Alabama was altogether different from that of the family man in St Andrews. James owned a fine house on Government Street in Mobile which Robert and his family would come to occupy but, throughout his years in Mobile, James rented a suite of rooms in the Battle House, the premier hotel and watering hole in the heart of the rapidly developing township.
James Hunter was not only the largest timber shipper in Mobile, he was also, at the age of 37, considered to be one of the leading businessmen in the State. Profiles of him appeared in the American press as he acquired land and built sawmills and wharves up the Alabama River and along the creeks of Mobile Bay. He was reported to have over 200 ships in service at any one time plying the timber trade from his wharves in Mobile, Pascagoola, Darien and St Simon’s Island.
But James’s life in Mobile was far from all work and no play. If he was a leading player at the heart of business in the town, he was also a leading light at the core of its social scene. The ground floor of the Battle House Hotel was, as the saying goes, ‘where the action was’, in Mobile. The parlour was the businessmen’s bar and its gaming rooms attracted ‘high rollers’ from all along the Mexican Gulf Coast and beyond. It was proudly held to maintain and convey the energy and spirit of the South and, in Mobile, to be the spiritual home of Southern charm and hospitality.
The Battle House was also the meeting place of the Athelstane, the Manassus and the Infant Mystics Societies and James was a member of them all. These secret societies derived from the time soon after the Civil War and were made up of those who ‘reluctantly accepted the Union’ and were considered part of the white South’s recovery – their way of saying that they still had power. Whether this was the case or not, they outwardly appeared to have been concerned mainly with organising charitable and social events; the Infant Mystics in particular played the leading role in organising Mardi Gras and running masked balls. ‘Rich bachelors at play’, would sum up some of the activities, and in Mobile, James Hunter would appear to have worked as hard and played as hard as any of them. He certainly enjoyed an entirely different lifestyle to that with his wife and children thousands of miles away in St Andrews.
The manner and circumstances of his death very much reflected the way he lived in Mobile. At 5 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, 31 January 1886, James persuaded two of his Battle House friends, Dr Rhett Goode and Mr John Motley, to accompany him on a social visit to the Norwegian barque Martin Luther. The ship was being loaded with James’s timber two miles up the Alabama River at his wharf towards Three Mile Creek. The skipper, Captain Arensen, was a friend of long standing and a man whose company James clearly enjoyed. Despite the fact that James had promised John Motley that he would have him back in Mobile by six o’clock, they were still enjoying Norwegian hospitality at nine o’clock. Rhett Goode actually asked Captain Arensen if he could have them put ashore, but James would have none of it and kept them there until long after darkness had fallen, so that they required lanterns to see their way into James’s rowing boat.
Dr Goode related how he had entered the small boat first and taken his seat in the stem. Mr Motley had followed to take his seat in the stern. The newspaper reported that James ‘came down the rope and started to take a seat in the middle of the boat, but fell into the water’. Dr Goode related, ‘I thought at first it was a practical joke and that we would all have a good laugh at Hunter because of his ducking,’ adding, ‘He was an expert swimmer I knew.’
But James did not surface and an oar thrown into the water where he fell simply drifted away. Captain Arensen and two of his sailors rowed downstream and within six minutes saw his foot and hand above the water. They had him on the wharf quickly and applied artificial resuscitation until Dr Goode arrived to declare him dead.
James’s body was wrapped in the ship’s flag and by half-past ten it was in the mortuary of Alba and Carmelich, the undertakers. Dr Goode was present throughout the embalming and took the opportunity to carry out something of an autopsy when he recorded fatty degeneration of the heart with an enlarged ventricle. He concluded that James had died of ‘heart disease’, although neither he as his doctor, nor Robert Hunter his brother, had any inkling of such a condition. Dr Goode was reported to have found ‘his condition such that he was liable to die at any moment. The situation at the time had nothing to do with his death. He would have died just the same if he had been in the Battle House parlour or anywhere else at the time.’
James Hunter’s body was laid out in his Battle House suite where a funeral service was held at four o’clock on Monday afternoon. There was a large attendance, with many making the journey from Pascagoola in Mississippi, as well as a profusion of floral tributes. Those from the Athelstane, Manassus and Infant Mystics Societies were spectacular and would be preserved to accompany Andrew Hunter and James’s body to St Andrews. There were also wreaths from all of the leading business lights in Mobile, as well as a large floral anchor from Rhett Goode, a pillow with the initial ‘J.H.’ worked in ‘immertalles’ from Mrs St John; Mrs Quigley sent a basket of flowers and Mrs Gaylord and Mrs Waller sent bouquets.
Dr Burgett conducted the service, which closed with words of sympathy ‘for the sorrowing widow and children on the other side of the Atlantic,’ and a prayer. At half-past six, after all had paid their last respects, ten pall-bearers, all business associates and residents of the Battle House apart from one African-American stevedore from the wharves of Pascagoola, bore the body to the undertakers. At a quarter past eight, Andrew accompanied the body and a selection of floral tributes to the depot of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, where they were placed on the midnight train to New York and thence onward by ship to St Andrews.
The story has been passed down in St Andrews that James’s body arrived in a cask of brandy, giving rise to the enduring black humour in the question of what happened to the brandy. There is some evidence for this, disguised in the Mobile Probate Court records of the settlement of his estate. Among the first items on the list of expenditures immediately following his death is ten dollars for ‘duty on ginger ale’; a sum that would have purchased enough ginger ale to float a timber ship at the time. However, the fact that the body was embalmed makes this story doubtful. Interestingly, in the sale of his Battle House effects, his collection of wines sold for $56 and his spirits for $50, while his clothing and the rest of his personal effects raised only $45. Either James maintained a very fine cellar or he was not sartorially inclined.
James’ body was interred in the Cathedral Graveyard the day after its arrival in St Andrews and the spectacular floral tribute from the Infant Mystics Society in Mobile was placed upon his grave. Sadly, only those who attended the interment ceremony saw the flowers, for they were stolen from the grave that night. Some months later, a small chinaware wreath inside a glass vase bearing the words ‘In Loving Memory’ was also stolen, prompting Jof Morris to write to the local newspaper complaining about desecration in the burial ground. The consequences of James Hunter’s death would reverberate in the family for many years to come.
22 Family Affairs
Resolving the estate of his son-in-law was not a simple undertaking for Tom Morris and he needed all the friends he had. Doubtless he, James Denham and Charlie Hunter, put their heads together after the funeral in St Andrews and came to the conclusion that they could not handle this alone. As trustees they had the right to appoint whomsoever they thought might best serve the interests of the estate.
On 7 March 1886, less than a month after the funeral, Tom and Mr Denham met in Edinburgh. Then on 29 March, armed with the legal documents required in order to appoint two new trustees who had the business experience that the Trust needed, Tom met Charlie Hunter in Prestwick. The men they chose had been friends of James Hunter in St Andrews: Robert Bethune of Nydie was a Major on the retired list of the British Army and was Laird of the lands of Nydie and the owner of Nydie Quarry, the quarry from which had come the grey sandstone to form the fabric for much of the Town developments. Bethune was a golfer with whom James had played in St Andrews and a member of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club. Alexander Keiller-Bruce was the second appointment.1 He was from Dundee where his mother was of the Keiller family, the eminent jam makers of that city, who produced the world’s first commercial marmalade in 1797. His father had died early and his mother remarried Mr Govan of Smith & Govan, Chemists in St Andrews. Keiller-Bruce inherited the business and became a leading figure in the Town as Dean of Guild on the Town Council. He had been well known to James, his wife and daughter being Lizzie’s friends. Keiller-Bruce, however, would pose a problem for Tom in years to come.
On 11 June 1887 in Mobile, Robert Hunter petitioned Judge Price Williams Jnr of the Probate Court of Mobile County, to take out Letters of Administration for his brother’s estate in America. His petition was granted and the Mobile County Court formally informed the trustees in St Andrews of the arrangement.
And everything was indeed satisfactory. Robert sent cheques to the Trust between September 1890 and May 1892 totalling £12,752, equivalent today of more than £1 million.2 This was a fabulous sum of money, which can be placed in perspective only when one considers that the wage of a manual worker at the time was no more than £25 per year.
Robert Hunter himself had prospered in the meantime. Based in Mobile, he changed the name of the company to Robert Hunter and Company, Timber Merchants. Shortly afterwards, in 1887, he joined Arthur Shirley Benn, James’s English friend from his days in both Canada and Georgia and together they formed Hunter, Benn and Company, after buying out Lizzie Morris, James’s widow in St Andrews. Robert Hunter brought Robert and John Manson of Prestwick over to the United States in 1886. They were made directors of Hunter, Benn & Company and were responsible for running the Darien end of the business. They were enthusiastic golfers and by the 1890s had established the Darien Golf Club on the swampy land on the Altamaha Delta of the Georgia Tidewater: no mean achievement at that time. William and Andrew Hunter, who were siblings of James and Robert, had also emigrated, taking up positions in the Hunter business. All of the Hunter brothers were golfers and all played leading roles in establishing golf in Mobile.
Tom Morris could never have expected to be involved in the handling of such vast sums of money as those which resulted from James’s estate. His situation would have been widely talked about in the Town for nothing can remain secret in any small township, least of all St Andrews, where one caddy might overhear a confidential exchange on the Links which would become common knowledge throughout the Town before the round was completed.
