Continuing our journey of discovery in a southerly direction, we next took the train to Nottingham, and thence some few miles out to Hollinwell, passing on the way Bulwell Forest, formerly the home of the Notts Golf Club, but now converted into a very popular municipal course. Though Hollinwell is some miles out of Nottingham, the factory chimneys are not so far away, but that the ball, which starts its career on the first tee a snowy white soon passes through a series of varying greys till it is coal black, unless its complexion is renewed by the use of the sponge. The southern caddie’s simple and natural method of cleaning a ball is not here to be recommended.
Hollinwell is a wonderfully sandy course, and when there is a strong wind one may see great clouds of sand blowing down the course after the most approved seaside fashion. The course is rather curiously shaped, since nearly all the holes lie in a long, wide valley. Sometimes we play down the valley, and sometimes we play across it, tacking this way and that, so that we are never hitting monotonously either with or against the wind. Sometimes also we scale the side of the valley and play along the top of the slope, and herein lies a certain weakness of the course, for these upland holes are not quite worthy of the rest. They are of the downland order, with blind shots, big perplexing slopes, and greens cut out of the sides of hills. Luckily there are but few of them, for they are but poor golf, whereas most of the holes in the valley are very good indeed.
I never saw a course that began with fairer promise, for the first hole looks and is delightful—a good long hole of well over 400 yards in length. To the right stretches a line of bracken, while on the left is a small clump of firs, just near enough to the line to induce a slice into the ferns. This first hole is so good that the other holes have a high standard to live up to, and in one important respect they perhaps do not quite succeed. That wilderness of bracken to the right holds out a promise which is not quite fulfilled, because that which Hollinwell lacks is rough ground severe enough to punish the erratic driver. I have no doubt that I was lucky, but I remember several of the most perfect lies for a brassey which were meted out to me, when in common justice I should have been plying my niblick. The rough’s bark is much worse than its bite, and one may often hit very crooked and not be one penny the worse. More bunkers—many more bunkers—at the sides of the course, and perhaps not quite so many in the middle would be no bad prescription for Hollinwell.
If, however, the course has some faults, it also has many merits, and the most attractive, because the most characteristic holes, are those in which the peculiar character of the ground comes into play. Thus at both the seventh and ninth we play across the breadth of the valley into little gullies that run some way in between the spurs of the hill. If we are perfectly straight, the gully receives us with open arms, but to be at all seriously crooked is to be perched on a hillside among thick grass and red sandstone. These are both holes of a fine length, and though with hitting an arrow-like straightness we may hope for fours, we need not make undue lamentations over fives. The eleventh, again, is a charming hole, where the way to the hole follows the contour of a subsidiary valley that wanders away from the main valley on some little expedition of its own; nor, to retrace our steps, must the second be left out, with its pretty background of trees and water.
After the eleventh the golf degenerates for a while, when we leave the lowlands for the highlands; but, just as we are feeling a little sad, comes a marked improvement at the fifteenth, and we end with two really good holes, one short and one long. To justify its existence as a seventeenth hole, a short hole must needs be a very good short hole, and this is an excellent one, save that the inordinately long approach with the wooden putter should be prevented by a bunker on the left. The eighteenth, except that it is a good deal longer, is almost the converse of the first, and the clump of firs that made us slice at the first tee will certainly trap us if we pull our second shot. This last hole lives in my memory from the fact that it gave to my companion a temporarily undeserved reputation among the golfers of Nottingham. Having played a round of almost unbroken sixes, he placed the ball close to the hole with a long iron shot for his third, and holed the putt before an awestruck assembly in the club-house window with an air and manner suggesting that four was the highest rather than the lowest score that he had accomplished during the round. What is more, he only just failed to do the same thing in the afternoon, although the hole is 555 yards long. Such is the inveterate habit that some people have of playing to the gallery.
From Nottingham our way lay to Birmingham, where we were to play at Sandwell Park. A train journey to a melancholy and mysterious place called Spon Lane, followed by “a penny to the left and a penny to the right” (as we were advised) in a tramcar brought us to West Bromwich. West Bromwich is a name calculated to thrill the football devotee with glorious memories of West Bromwich Albion, but it is not in itself a particularly attractive spot. Yet Sandwell Park must once have been a beautiful place before the houses began to crowd round its gates and the colliery chimneys to pour black volumes of smoke across it. It is a fine park still, if one can only blind oneself to the houses and the chimneys; but that, save in one or two secluded corners, is a difficult task—Birmingham is too all-pervading to permit of many illusions.
We did not see Sandwell under very favourable conditions as regards weather. There was every now and again a flurry of snow, and a most piercingly cold wind blew across the course, rendering useless any number of waistcoats and mittens, and robbing the fingers of all power of gripping the club. It is very difficult under such circumstances to judge of the length of any particular hole, for the wind laughs at yard measures, and reduces a good length hole to a drive and a pitch, and converts a drive and a pitch into a three-shot hole.
Perhaps it was the effect of first going out to face the icy blast, but I thought the first few holes at Sandwell rather poor, being of a hybrid length and not particularly exciting. The golf improves wonderfully, however, as it goes on, and from the seventh onward is infinitely more interesting. The eighth needs a very straight drive, followed by a very delicate second shot—a tricky shot in whatever way we start to play it. If we pitch up the hill, we must pitch just up and no further; while if we run the shot, the hill is just steep enough to induce a lively fear that the ball will refuse to climb it. Moreover, when I played it, the hole was cut with fiendish cunning very close to the top of the hill, so that the very nicest judgment was necessary in order to avoid a long, sloping and curly putt. The ninth consists of an absolutely blind pitch with a small crater, reminding one of a very old but not very highly esteemed friend, the ‘Crater’ hole at Aberdovey. Then comes a hole that is really good, and it seemed to me the best on the course—two honest shots along a narrow neck of turf, which tapers perceptibly as it nears the green.