Tom Morris of St Andrews, page 8
The golfing fraternity of gentlemen players in the west of Scotland was not large but it was dedicated and at its core was a devotee with vigour and drive who had a clear vision for Prestwick. This man was Lieutenant Colonel James Ogilvy Fairlie of Coodham by Prestwick, Tom’s benefactor and foursomes partner on the Links of St Andrews.
Fairlie was born in Calcutta in 1809, the son of William Fairlie, a merchant and banker of Calcutta and London, and his wife Agnes, the daughter of Mungo Mire of Bruntwood. William Fairlie died before he had the chance to develop his new estate of Cowdam, about three miles inland from Prestwick. His wife did develop the estate in 1831 and upon it she spent £20,000 building a mansion house which she called Williamsfield in memory of her late husband. The original name stuck in the local consciousness, however, and it was not long before the family estate reverted to it, spelled in Scots phonetic vernacular, Coodham. The widowed Agnes Fairlie settled there with her daughter and two sons, John and James.
John Fairlie and his younger brother James became regular army officers. James served in India with Major Playfair with whom he formed a close friendship that brought him to St Andrews in 1840 and his introduction to golf. He had already acquired a sporting reputation as a steeplechaser riding to hounds in Leicestershire, as well as with the Duke of Beaufort and the Earl of Eglinton. He was also an outstanding billiards player and a successful curler. He kept racehorses at Coodham and amongst many local and North of England successes, took second place in the St Leger at Doncaster. Shooting and fishing were his principal distractions until he fell upon the golf at which he quickly excelled.
In Howie Smith’s The Golfer’s Yearbook for 1866, the Earl of Dalhousie acclaimed James Ogilvy Fairlie as the ‘Champion Amateur of Scotland’, for he was in one season the holder of the medals of The Royal and Ancient, North Berwick and Prestwick, the ‘Grand Slam’ of the time.
James Ogilvy Fairlie’s athletic talents appear to have been boundless. When his close friend and sporting associate, the Earl of Eglinton, attempted to resurrect medieval jousting by staging a Grand Tournament at Eglinton Castle in 1839, Fairlie was first in the lists. He commissioned a set of armour to be made and had a lance fashioned to suit. Kerr, in his book on Kilwinning, relates how Fairlie went through the field, finally ending up against Sir Francis Hopkins in the final joust. In weather conditions that would have kept even the most foolhardy golfer indoors, the two splashed their steeds through heavy mud at one another in three passes. Although Fairlie broke his lance at the second pass, Hopkins was unseated and Fairlie declared the winner.
Two of the fair maids at this incredible event were the sisters Anne-Eliza and Jane, the daughters of the MacLeod of MacLeod. In 1840, Fairlie married Anne-Eliza while Campbell of Saddel, whose residence was the Priory, St Andrews, married Jane.
At Coodham, Anne-Eliza produced two sons before her untimely death in 1844. In 1845 Fairlie married again, this time to Elizabeth Constantina, the only daughter of William Houison Craufurd of Craufurdland and Borehead. Elizabeth bore Fairlie a further four sons, one of whom was the distinguished architect, Reginald Fairlie.
All of the Fairlie boys were taught to play golf on the links of Prestwick and in the parks of Coodham by Tom Morris. All of them distinguished themselves at the game. The eldest, named after his father, was Chamberlain to His Holiness Pope Leo XII and became Captain of Prestwick as well as The Royal and Ancient in St Andrews.
Clearly James Ogilvy Fairlie was an able and energetic all-round sportsman but he was also a tireless organiser and innovator. In Tom Morris he had the perfect servant and supporter, playing partner and friend.
That Tom and Fairlie had a close friendship, as well as a master and servant relationship, is revealed through Tom’s own expressions about Fairlie, as well as the Fairlie sons’ closeness to Tom long after their father’s death in 1870. Shortly after his father died, James, the eldest son, sold the Coodham estate to Sir William Houldsworth, an industrialist and enthusiastic golfer, before purchasing Myres Castle near Auchtermuchty in Fife, some eighteen miles from St Andrews.
Tom Morris and James Ogilvy Fairlie would trigger the events that were to change the face of golf and set the game off on a course that would spread it throughout the world and make it the richest and most widely played of all games.
9 A New Beginning as an Era Ends
With Nancy and young Tommy installed in their new house, Tom’s next task would be to take stock of the links and the position in which he found himself. In the 1850s the links of Prestwick would have appeared to stretch forever. The three miles of the bay-shore south to Ayr and the same distance north to Troon were a sea of whins and sand dunes on a scale that dwarfed St Andrews’ Links peninsula. Tom must have looked at it and despaired. In St Andrews there was hardly a minute in the day when you would fail to see somebody about on the Links and many of them at their golf. In Prestwick there would be very few people to be seen and barely a soul playing the game.
Tom himself said some fourteen years later that when he first came to the village he was ‘dull enough, for there was very little play’, and he thought he had made a mistake in accepting his position at Prestwick. But if Tom was downhearted, he certainly did not show it, and the enthusiasm he had for the game quickly infected his new friends. As he himself said: ‘But by and by one after another of my neighbours was tempted to try his hand. Gentlemen came out from Ayr and they, with the visitors at Eglinton Castle and Coodham, gave the game a good start and kept me pretty busy.’
Making clubs and balls, as well as teaching and encouraging all who came to ‘try their hand’ at the golf, would have kept him busy enough, but he was also building a golf course. There were whins to be cleared and grass to be scythed to make greens on the soft, springy turf. The links lands of the west coast are different in character from those of the east. Prestwick links are geologically older than those of St Andrews, with a higher content of organic matter which retains more water and supports a lusher growth of grass. The west coast has a higher average rainfall than the east and is altogether milder, generating a thicker sward with greater texture. Tom would have felt the turf in the places where the rabbits had kept the grasses grazed tight and marvelled at it. Indeed, he must have been inspired by it to produce what he did in the years that followed.
Place and vista are contributing factors in the pleasure of golf. Prestwick’s great dunes induce both a sense of wonder and isolation. The vistas of Arran and Lady Isle, the Carrick Hills and the Bay of Ayr present wonderful backdrops to holes that vary as much, if not more, than on any of the other famous links courses.
Tom clearly had an eye not only for the hole that would test the best golfer but also for beauty. His twelve holes were being lauded and applauded back in St Andrews in the columns of the Fifeshire Journal as well as the national press, within a year of his arrival in Prestwick.1 Golf, from the Badminton Library series, later described the course:
For years Prestwick was celebrated as a twelve-hole course. It went dodging in and out among lofty sand hills. The holes were, for the most part, out of sight when one took the iron in hand for the approach; for they lay in deep dells among these sand hills, and you lofted over the intervening mountain of sand, and there was all the fascinating excitement, as you climbed to the top of it of seeing how near to the hole your ball might have happened to roll.
Just how much of a hand Colonel Fairlie had in laying out the course will never be known, for there are no records. It is likely that Tom would discuss and consult with him at length when they played together on their new course. Fairlie, as a soldier and Victorian ‘man of parts’, would bring considerable expertise to the exercise, and the scale of the work was such, as the records of the Prestwick Club show, that Tom was required to hire additional labour for some of his undertakings. Throughout his entire tenure at Prestwick, the work of improving the course was continuous and progressive. After the layout of the holes was completed and the gorse cleared for play, greens were expanded and improved, bunkers formed and the Pow Burn banked and controlled. The lessons he learned and the experience he gained developing the Prestwick green would stand him in good stead and place him in demand for the laying out of many new golf courses for the rest of his life.
His social experiences were also crucial to the emergence of the game in Prestwick. Although the Prestwick Club eventually came to own its land, the links were there for anyone and everyone who wanted to take up a club and a ball. The breadth of the social spectrum of the early players on Prestwick links was such that Tom might find himself partnering the Earl of Eglinton in foursome play one day and encouraging the local grocer the next.
Competition is the driving force of all games and none more so than in golf. Competitions require planning, organization, knowledge and understanding, as well as application. Tom had the knowledge and understanding in abundance and the men of Prestwick proved eager to apply themselves to the game.
The Earl of Eglinton was the first Captain of the Prestwick Club in 1851 and would become Captain of The Royal and Ancient in 1853. The Earl, with a party of friends, had, prior to Tom’s arrival, been accustomed to having a few holes cut on the links while they took a train from Eglinton Castle to Prestwick. The railway had been opened in 1843 and his lordship had the privilege of stopping any train he wanted. Colonel Gillan of Walhouse, Colonel Hamilton of Cairnhill and, of course, Colonel Fairlie of Coodham, were also accustomed to playing at Prestwick. They, together with Mr Cuthbert and Mr Kirkland of Ayr and Dr Pollock of Kingston Parish Church in Glasgow, formed the nucleus of the Prestwick Club.
Mr Hutchison, the grocer and Tom’s neighbour, was also a player of long standing. He had played for some time with Dr Pollock and his son who made sojourns, sometimes for days at a time, to golf on the links at Prestwick. It is interesting that Dr Pollock was a minister of the church who had left the Free Presbyterian Church for the Established Church when the movement in the opposite direction was more common. Mr Hutchison had done just that. Together with the Reverend Thomas Burns, the son of Gilbert, the celebrated poet Robert Burns’s elder brother, he had left the Established Church to serve for fifty-three years as an elder in the Prestwick Free Church. Needless to say, Mr Hutchison was popularly known as ‘the elder’, and was a driving force in the Mechanics Club.
Tom would have been glad to see the Prestwick Mechanics Golf Club founded for the local men in November 1851. His income, aside from his regular wage from keeping the links, would depend on it. The locals would play at all times and require a constant supply of gutta balls and clubs. For every golfer, a new club is the panacea for all ills – or if not all, then certainly for the current problem of getting away from the tee or placing the approach shot into the green just right. To an uncertain player, a new putter is often the promise of greater things to come. Tom learned well from Allan Robertson: he would be encouraging and supportive but he would also be quick to make up a club and sell it.
The gentlemen of the senior club would need balls, too, but they were more likely to covet a McEwan or a Philp club. Their play would be irregular, with the calls of the regiment, business or social engagements taking precedence. Their social calendars would contain notice of the season’s meetings, but outside of these, play would mostly be intermittent.
It is not surprising, then, that Tom Morris’s name should head the list of the members of the Mechanics Club, followed by that of Mr Manson. Manson, a brother-in law of William Hunter of the Red Lion Inn, was a writer’s clerk in a law office in Ayr, and just the man for the job of secretary and treasurer. William Hunter himself was the next to be recruited. Every Club needs a watering hole and the Red Lion was virtually adjacent to the links. Then there were William’s cousin, Dean of Guild Hunter from Ayr, a local man of affairs, and Robert Howie Smith, the editor of the Ayr Express, who would faithfully report on the embryonic club’s activities, so keeping it in the public eye. Howie Smith was to produce the first golf annual or yearbook in 1867, entitled The Golfer’s Year Book for 1866.2 If Tom could have hand-picked his founder members, he could not have made a better job. It comes as no surprise that the membership doubled within a year and pressure was brought to bear on the members by the senior club to limit their numbers.
The Hunter clan figured prominently in the early years of the Prestwick Mechanics Golf Club. William Hunter of the Red Lion, one of three golfing brothers, together with his wife’s cousin, John Gray, and his nephew Charlie Hunter, were leading lights of the young club.3 Charlie was amongst the first of Tom’s converts to golf in Prestwick: he was the ablest and the most devoted to the game and would become Custodian of the Links and professional to Prestwick Golf Club for over fifty years.
The house that Tom and Nancy moved into on the High Street was known as the Golf House and referred to by this name in all official records. It acted as both a meeting place for the members of Prestwick Golf Club as well as a storage place for their clubs. It was the penultimate dwelling in the street before the Wrack Road turned down towards the railway station and onto the links. Families with children surrounded them. The Wisemans, with a grown-up son and three daughters under the age of twelve, occupied the last house, No. 39, in the High Street. On the other side, at No. 41, the Hutchisons had two young daughters, Mary, thirteen and Janis, ten. Next door to the Hutchisons was an old lady, Mary Patrick, a silk stocking weaver, aged seventy-nine, who lived with her granddaughter, Margaret Tennant, a farm servant. Conveniently sited next door to old Mary was the Burgh School. Young Tommy would have had nursemaids enough and not far to go when his time for schooling came.
Across the road at the Red Lion, William and Elizabeth Hunter had a fair brood of children when Tom and Nancy arrived. John was thirteen, Mary eight, Jane five and James aged two. Robert was born within two months of the Morris’s settling in so it is hardly surprising that Nancy Morris and Elizabeth Hunter should become close friends and remain so as their families grew up together. Elizabeth would have a further two sons, William born in 1853 and Andrew born in 1858.
On the twentieth of June 1853, Nancy gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. Her christening in Monkton Parish Church was witnessed by William and Elizabeth Hunter and the fact that Tom and Nancy should name their daughter after the latter testifies to the closeness of the friendship that, even after only two years, had been forged between the Morris and Hunter families. It was a friendship that would become closer as the years passed, with the children growing up together, and which would ultimately become sealed through marriage.
Four years elapsed before Nancy gave birth to another son on 8 January 1856. He was named James and his birth was registered the next day. He was registered again on the 10th when he was named James Ogilvy Fairlie Morris, doubtless after Tom had seen Colonel Fairlie and sought permission to name his son after him. Family and friends would, for the rest of his life, refer to James as ‘Jof’.
Just a month after the first momentous discovery of oil in Pennsylvania had given the world an important new source of energy, the Morris family was completed with the birth of John on 25 September 1859. It must have been a day of gladness and sadness, for it was clear from the day of his birth that he had a hip deformity. John would never be able to walk.
John’s condition would have been a terrible blow to Tom and Nancy. Only a week earlier, Tom had returned from St Andrews where he had attended the funeral of his old friend, mentor and playing partner, Allan Robertson. Allan had died as a result of jaundice that had debilitated him for many months. Tom had been with him in the spring when he was still fit to play but already afflicted with the sickness, although Allan had played so well with Mr Bethune of Blebo in September of the previous year that the seventy-nine strokes he recorded was considered to be the best round ever played on the St Andrews Links. They had met again in the summer when Tom found Allan all but confined to his bed. Allan’s death would nevertheless have come as a shock when it was announced in the Herald and the Scotsman on 2 September 1859. The Scotsman carried an article on Allan’s death which read:
Death of Allan Robertson the Golfer – Yesterday afternoon, Allan Robertson the celebrated golfer, expired at his residence in St Andrews. For five or six months Allan had suffered from a severe attack of jaundice, and under that disease it was obvious for some time that he was sinking. His performances as a golfer were, it is admitted, without parallel; and being a man of the most amiable and obliging disposition, he was highly esteemed by every frequenter of the Links. Allan was, we believe, 45 years of age and only this year played his best round with Mr Bethune of Blebo.
Allan’s funeral was held on Monday 5 September and, as the Fifeshire Journal reported, ‘was attended by more than 400 mourners, among them Noblemen and Gentlemen from all parts of the Country.’
The esteem in which Allan was held is best summarised in a remark from Robert Clark who wrote: ‘after laying poor Allan in his grave, we walked down the Scores to the Club, with a late dear friend, Mr Sutherland, who suddenly broke from his reverie by exclaiming: “they may toll the bells and shut up their shops in St Andrews for their greatest is gone”.’
For Tom, an era ended with the passing of Allan Robertson. Whether or not Tom recognised Allan’s supremacy as a golfer, the rest of the golfing world had done so with little reservation. And if Tom did not feel that he was the natural successor to Allan’s mantle, most of the golfing world did. Those who had their reservations were concerned with the much-discussed great Musselburgh pretender, the renowned Willie Park.
10 The ‘Honest Toun’ Park
Willie Park burst onto the golfing scene in October 1854 and for the next 30 years was Tom’s greatest rival. He was from Musselburgh, locally known as the ‘Honest Toun’, that had spawned some great golfers and had long been an irritant to St Andrews’ claim of golfing supremacy. Willie was undoubtedly the greatest of all the Musselburgh players, stamping his authority on the game by winning the first Open Championship in 1860. However, it was his audacious challenges for very high stakes that captured the public’s imagination and brought thousands to the links to witness his confrontations with Tom Morris.
