Even among the heathery courses, which are nearly all good to look upon, Queen’s Park takes a very high place for beauty, and it is a joy to find anything so pretty and peaceful on the very edge of a big town. Every prospect pleases, and only the old colonel, who is in front of us and plays fifteen more with his niblick, is entirely vile.
The reader must now make in imagination the short and generally innocuous crossing to the Isle of Wight, in order to see one of the most charming of nine-hole courses at Bembridge. The Royal Isle of Wight Golf Club can boast of a comparatively hoary antiquity, since it was founded in 1882, and Bembridge was perhaps rather more famous when there were fewer links in existence. It is still, however, very good golf, and has many faithful and affectionate friends. The nine holes dodge in and out after the manner of a cat’s cradle, so that Bembridge has earned a reputation for being one of the most dangerous courses in the world, and it used to be said that all the local players expected to be hit once at least in the course of a year. To cry a brisk ‘fore’ is to absolve oneself from responsibility, and one may then let fly at any impeding player with a clear conscience. There is one particularly perilous spot, where the ball is apt to lie after a straight drive of moderate length on the way to the first hole. Here the player is in the midst of a veritable ring of death, since a hot fire may be opened upon him simultaneously from the seventh, eighth, and ninth tees, to say nothing of the first tee to his immediate rear. It is perhaps owing to this exciting characteristic of the course that that pleasant anachronism, the red coat, is still occasionally to be seen at Bembridge.
The course lies upon a spur of land between Bembridge harbour and the Solent, and one is rowed over to it from the hotel in a boat. Small things remain absurdly graven on the memory, and I remember nothing at Bembridge more clearly than the nautical gentleman who used to row us over a great many years ago, and his expression when Mr. John Low genially hailed him as “You licensed brigand.” Once the stranger arrives on the course he will be struck, possibly by a ball, and certainly by the ubiquitous character of a road which winds about the course like a snake, and is an almost ever-present menace throughout the round; indeed, it has some say in the matter at every one of the holes, save only the third and the fifth. Some of its glory—or its horror, according to the light in which we view the matter—has, however, departed, for whereas it was once uniformly sandy and soft and full of the direst ruts, it is now metalled in many places, and so is naturally much less terrible. Another feature of the course, which is now less pronounced than it used to be, is the luxuriant growth of whins. These have become sadly thinner, and one who knows and loves his Bembridge well tells me that this is in a measure due to the havoc wrought among them in the early days of the rubber-cored ball, when a Haskell was infinitely precious and was not to be given up for lost till the entire neighbourhood had been laid waste with the niblick.
A loop of the ‘cat’s cradle’
