Tom Morris of St Andrews, page 3
It is not immediately clear why Dr Buist christened John Morris’s children, for records show that he was not a frequent preacher in that pulpit, which is just as well because it was said that his sermons were ‘very tedious’.2 But the fact that Buist himself was a golfer of some considerable repute, both in St Andrews and on the Inch of his native Perth, may have had something to do with it.
Tom’s father was certainly well known to both Buist and Principal Haldane, enjoying many a match with them on the Links. It is not unlikely, therefore, that through the golfing bond of their friendship, Buist performed Tom’s christening, with Haldane present. Attending and indeed performing the christening of John Morris’s son may not only have been a gesture of friendship and respect, but also an enjoyable experience for both. It was the custom, and still is, to ‘wet the baby’s head’ after the christening, and a dram in John Morris’s cottage with all his golfing cronies was something both would have enjoyed.
Principal Haldane was also a golfer and a character on the Links. Although a long way from being a great player, he was an enthusiast who was written about by his contemporaries with much affection and respect. It is said that the problems which the Principal had circumnavigating the great bunker that stands sentinel to this day in the middle of the sixteenth fairway on the Old Course is acknowledged in its name, ‘The Principal’s Nose’. If that is so, it is a lasting monument to a middling player and his dominant facial feature and an irony that the Principal’s name endures on the Links while that of Buist, the better golfer, does not.
In 1826, when Tom was five years old, he would have joined his sister Margaret and brother George in the daily grind of the school. Attendance at school was not mandatory. The cost was one penny a week, although special rates were available for families with two or more scholars. Margaret, aged ten, was about to conclude her schooling while John, fifteen years old, was apprenticed to his father and worked the second loom in the house. Janet, at seventeen, was at home with her mother, serving the looms and helping out with the three-year-old baby, Jean.
St Andrews, with the Grammar and English Schools as the public educational establishments in 1821, was relatively enlightened in the provision of education, as one might expect of a university town. Many towns of comparable size at the time were dependent upon the Church or a wealthy benefactor for the provision of education for working-class children. That there was a demand from all classes of the townspeople of St Andrews is reflected in the fact that twelve schools were registered in the Town in 1779. As in most townships throughout Scotland, the majority of these schools were Dame Schools, ‘ane-widow-woman-schools’, where the sum total of the schoolmistress’ learning was exceeded only by her ignorance.
The Grammar School stood where the lawn of the Madras College now extends to the ruins of the Blackfriars Chapel. The English School was sited in the building that is now the Public Library; it is almost certain that John Morris’s family attended this school, set behind the Town Kirk, because this was where the children of tradesmen and the less affluent were educated.3 Coming from a respectable craft family whose male members had long served as office-holders in the Weavers Guild, Tom would have received at least an elementary education which included reading and writing.
With no Burgh education records surviving, nothing is known of Tom’s educational attainment. We do know, however, that he was no scholar, as he himself insisted, and there is the locally-held view passed down through families, even his own, that he was not altogether proficient with book or pen.
The Kirk played a central role in the life of the Morris family and, for Tom, it would continue to do so for the rest of his life. He would be introduced early to its ways and routines, particularly on Sundays, which was the day of rest for all but the Minister. John and Jean Morris probably had a long ‘lie-in’, with the bairns being pleaded with to stay in bed awhile. The fire would be lit but the loom dormant on a Sunday. The Town remained as silent as the grave until nearly eight o’clock when the church parade began.
From every door families emerged dressed in their Sunday best. Preceded by Helen and John, then Margaret fussing close behind with George and Tom, Jean and John Morris would take their brood in stately procession up North Street past the row of weavers’ cottages. John’s old Uncle William, as well as Robert Morris and his family a few doors further up the street, doubtless joined them. From all along North Street, from the Northgait at the west end to the Cathedral burial ground and beyond in the east, the parishioners of St Leonards would gather, summoned by the sonorous tolling of St Salvator’s bell. Admonished and warned about their behaviour as they entered the Kirk, with perhaps a nudge to remind them as they made their way to their pew, the children would be cautioned again as they surreptitiously waved to friends already seated. There, for the next two hours while the children fidgeted through the minister’s sermon and they all followed the precentor in singing the psalms, the townspeople were at one with the world and with each other. There may have been one or two who felt that, on a morning that was just too good to miss, a few holes of golf were worth the wrath of the Elders. But there would not be many and those few would be well discussed, much condemned and certainly decried from the pulpit the following Sunday. The Kirk-going habit that Tom acquired as a child would remain with him for the rest of his life.
The homeward parade was no doubt more leisurely, although the children would scamper like dogs let off the leash. John and Jean would walk home arm in arm, ‘oxter’n-in’, together with neighbours and friends who might ‘stop by’ for a cup of tea before making their way home to Sunday lunch, the best of the week. Grandparents or elderly single relatives, like John’s eighty-year-old Uncle William, still at his loom two doors away, perhaps came in, or the children were sent round with a plate of something and doubtless the hope of a sweet, or farthing reward, for their effort. By the age of ten, Thomas Mitchell Morris’s routine would be as regular as a clock wound up with the health and vigour of youth and ordered by the rigours of a Scots Presbyterian household.
In later life, Tom recorded little about his early childhood years, but the weaver’s cottage in which he was brought up must have been a stimulating environment. As well as the to-and-fro of his father’s cronies and friends of his older brothers and sisters, his grandfather also lived in the house and still took his turn at the loom. Old John would doubtless have many an entertaining tale of the Links, the crack players, the gambling set and the Rabbit Wars. An era came to an end with the death of Old John in 1830. Another one began a year later with the end of Tom’s schooldays.
When Tom left school and later started his apprenticeship with Allan Robertson, his brother John, sisters Margaret and Jean, and both parents, were all still living in the weaver’s cottage in which he was born. How they were all accommodated in the box beds in two rooms defies the modern imagination.
Tom’s exposure to ‘reading, writing and the arithmetic’ may have been interrupted, like so many others in St Andrews born before and after him, through his easy access to the Links. As he himself related of his early years: ‘I began to play when I was six or seven, maybe younger. A’ St Andrews bairns are born wi’ web feet an’ wi’ a gowf club in their hands. I wad be driving the chuckie stanne wi’ a bit stick about as sune’s I could walk.’
Golf became the central part of Tom’s early life, as it did of every other boy of his generation in the Town, whether proficient or otherwise. Carrying a gentleman’s clubs was an easy income for any able-bodied lad who made himself available on the bank in front of the Union Parlour at the top of the Links. If you were known – and John Morris’s boy would certainly have been – you could be called upon to run messages and get a penny for the going and maybe another one when you got there.
There is no doubt that the Morris brothers’ lives revolved around golf. When George, Tom’s elder brother, left school, it was not to become apprenticed to a tradesman like the rest of his friends, but to a place in the household of Robert Chambers, a keen golfer and partner with his brother in the respected firm of W. & R. Chambers of Edinburgh, already then renowned as authors and publishers. With a family of six daughters, a son and a wife in poor health, Robert Chambers moved to St Andrews purportedly for family reasons and for respite from the stress of work.4
George Morris rose to the position of butler, the most senior of the servants, and maintained this post in St Andrews as well as in Edinburgh when the Chambers family returned there. When Mr Chambers moved to London, George was retained in the household of his son Robert who gained golfing immortality by winning the first Grand National Tournament at St Andrews in 1858.
George’s service extended beyond the duties of butler, however, for he was also the family’s caddy and partnered each of them in foursomes matches on the Links. Mr Chambers exercised his business acumen well when he employed George in the first instance. Not only did he get a diligent and presentable butler, but his family also acquired an outstanding golfer, through whom they could enjoy the vicarious excitement of the tournaments of the day, when George would pit his prowess against the best.
There is no information available about Tom’s life between him leaving school around 1831 and becoming an apprentice ball-maker with Allan Robertson sometime in the second half of the 1830s. While word has come down through the generations in St Andrews that he was first apprenticed as a joiner or carpenter, there is no evidence of this and there are other possibilities. One is that he would learn the family craft of hand-loom linen weaving, like his eldest brother John. In a commentary on his life, published in 1907 under his signature, he stated, ‘My father was a weaver to his trade, and I am pretty sure I was intended to be a weaver too, but that never came off.’
His father and brother were both listed as hand-loom weavers in the 1841 census, but by the mid-1830s it must have been obvious that the trade was in terminal decline and there would be no long-term future in it for Tom. The free and easy independent lifestyle of the hand-loom weaver was not an option for Tom or anyone else of his generation in St Andrews and there is some evidence that around 1836/7 a change of career was being sought for him.
H.S.C. Everard wrote in 1890 that ‘. . . his career was marked out for him, and arrangements all but completed, under which he was to have been apprenticed to a carpenter; but a casual question of old Sandy Herd, as to why he did not get apprenticed to Allan Robertson as a club-maker, put the idea into his head. Allan considered the matter, the upshot of which was that he agreed to take Tom, who served under him four years as apprentice and five as journeyman, and from that period began his golfing life.’
In support of this, Sandy Herd, writing in his autobiography, My Golfing Life, published in 1923, said, ‘By the way, it was my grandfather who started Tom Morris in the club-making business by advising him to turn his attention to golf when Tom was looking in all directions for work’. There is conflicting evidence about when Tom entered the employment of Allan and the exact time is not known, but it appears it was between 1836 and 1839. The arrangements for him to become an apprentice carpenter clearly were made immediately before he joined Allan. That still leaves a gap of several years between him leaving school and joining Allan, of which we have no knowledge at all.
There is one difficulty about the above statement by Mr Everard. He refers to Allan as ‘a club-maker’. He was renowned as a feather ball-maker, the most celebrated of his day. Apart from this reference, he has never been referred to as a ‘club-maker’. There are no known clubs in existence today that were made by him but it is quite possible that, as an adjunct to his main business of ball-making, he did repair wooden-headed golf clubs. He was, like his father before him, agent in St Andrews for the renowned McEwan club-making firm of Edinburgh and would have been called upon to attend to McEwan clubs purchased from him that required repairs. Further evidence of Allan’s ability to fashion club-heads is provided by J. G. McPherson, writing in 1891, ‘Old Philp had polished at an apple-tree head for a whole afternoon, when modern makers would have considered it quite finished; and this Allan seized, reduced its weight to suit the thin handle, until it looked like a toy’. Additionally, Tom is quoted as saying in 1905, ‘I went to work at making clubs and balls, principally the latter, with Allan Robertson’. Could it be that it was during his years working with Allan that Tom learned how to repair clubs, even though it is unlikely that this included making the complete article?
The 1841 Census confirms that at that date Tom’s occupation was a ‘Golf Ball Maker App.’ and the conclusion must be, from the available evidence, that Tom Morris joined Allan Robertson as an apprentice sometime in the late 1830s where he principally learned the art of making feather balls. There can be no doubt, however, that it was Tom’s association with Allan Robertson at this time that launched his career in golf.
The first notice we have of Tom enjoying a cash income from golf was recorded in the Fifeshire Journal in October 1841 when, at the age of 20, he won the ‘Put-ins’ (also known as the ‘In-puts’). This was a caddies’ competition played after the Autumn Meeting of The Royal and Ancient. The term derives from the fact that gentlemen players of the Club were required to ‘put-in’ or ‘in-put’ a sum of cash to a kitty for which the caddies would compete over one round of the Course. The ‘put-ins’ must have amounted to quite a substantial sum, for it was sufficient to raise controversy among the ranks of caddies. While Allan Robertson is recorded by the Fifeshire Journal of October 1839 as having won the ‘In-puts’ that year, which was the first mention of him in a newspaper, in 1841 a protest was made by the rank-and-file about him playing in the event because of the near inevitability of his winning. Their protest gained some support from the membership of The Royal and Ancient and Allan was excluded from the competition. It may be because of Allan’s apparent invincibility that we have this earliest record of Tom’s golfing success.5
Tom won this 1841 event with a round of 92 strokes, which was the lowest score recorded to date. He was named as Thomas Morris Junior, because in second place came Thomas Morris Senior. This has caused much confusion through the years. The two were, of course, distantly related, but it is doubtful if either of them would have been particularly knowledgeable about the relationship. Thomas Morris Senior was some ten years older than Tom and was the son of Thomas Morris, a friend and Weavers Guild brother of Tom’s father. This Thomas Morris Senior was a spirit dealer, which meant that he ran a public house. This was sited at the west end of North Street where he and his wife Jean supplied the fisher folk and impoverished students with their tipple. His presence in the lists of the ‘Put-ins’ testifies to the extent to which golf supplemented incomes across the work spectrum of the townspeople. It is noteworthy, but not altogether surprising, that the list does not include tradesmen other than weavers or ball makers. Other employers would not readily release their journeymen and apprentices for the Autumn Meeting.
The Fifeshire Journal had hitherto only occasionally mentioned the ‘Put-ins’ event, without naming all the participants or giving the full results. When Tom won again in 1842, however, the complete list of entrants was published together with the leading scores. The best score until then was in 1838 when it was reported that Mr Geddes from Musselburgh won the ‘In-puts’, taking 93 strokes with ‘very fine playing and the other scores were decidedly professional’. Could it be that the 1842 event was more fully reported because Tom Morris, a local St Andrean born and bred, had not only won but had also returned the best score to date for the second year running?
What we can be sure of is that the 21-year-old Tom must have aspired to make a life for himself in golf and that these wins would have boosted his ambition. The sum of money he pocketed would have been greater than he had ever handled before, and although there may be satisfaction in glory, cash would have been the great driving force. There is no doubt that Tom would have received every help and encouragement from Allan Robertson, his employer and mentor. Tom’s golfing talent, however, must have been apparent to Allan before this time, otherwise he would surely not have encouraged him to start out in a golf ball-making apprenticeship, a move that was to prove defining for the game of golf.
St Andrews, albeit belatedly, found itself at the start of a building boom in the third decade of the nineteenth century, although why it took so long in reaching this stage is puzzling. Lassitude and the self-satisfaction of the townspeople and its merchant classes, coupled with an indifferent and uninterested university where professorships were retained within families, may be the reason. But with a Town Council deeply in debt and with land and property prices a fraction of what they were in even small townships as nearby as Cupar and Anstruther, it is difficult to see why St Andrews took so long to launch itself into the booming Scottish economy. Cupar, as the county town and rural marketplace, and Anstruther as the focal centre of the rapidly developing fishing industry, had obvious advantages, but St Andrews, for its part, seems to have made no effort whatsoever.
With the coming of the railways in the 1830s, Victorian tourism was gradually becoming established and St Andrews emerged as a resort of some importance. The Town’s almost complete escape from the devastating measles, typhus and whooping cough epidemic of 1818 was widely known and, when it completely avoided the first great outbreak of cholera that killed 10,000 people in Scotland, the healthiness and longevity of its citizens was much discussed. In addition, good schools, an ample supply of reliable domestic servants and doubtless the Links with its golf conspired to make St Andrews a desirable place to reside.
4 ‘A Kind of King Amongst Them’
In 1815, Europe entered a new age with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and in that same year golf entered a new era with the birth of Allan Robertson. His influence on the early development of golf cannot be overstated. He was indisputably the finest player of his day and commanded the respect of everyone who played the game in the mid-nineteenth century. In retrospect, he can well be considered the first true golf professional; he was certainly the first golfer of renown.
