And in that pageant of London golf that we suggested there are many other picturesque and significant scenes. If we cannot be sure of the places where the holes were cut, nor of the situation of the teeing grounds, it is still certain, from documentary evidence, that a golf course that was made at Molesey Hurst was only second, in point of seniority, in England, to Blackheath itself, and it was very high up in the list of the golf clubs of the world. Manchester came next in 1818. There are concerned in the only existing record two people of no less credit and renown than David Garrick, the actor, and the eminent Dr. Alexander Carlyle, of Inveresk, who witnessed the Porteous riots, saw the fight at Prestonpans, and amid these many excitements cultivated his game to a fine point, was one of the keenest golfers of the eighteenth century, and won the Musselburgh medal in 1775. Carlyle was like many others of the Scottish parsons of those good times and the present, who would take their golf clubs with them wherever they might wander, on the chance of opportunity presenting itself. He came to London, and knowing of Blackheath, the clubs came with him. Garrick at that time had a house at Hampton which in recent days was occupied by the late Sir Clifton Robinson, the organiser of the London electric tramway system. Garrick asked John Home and a number of friends, including Carlyle, to dine with him at Hampton and bring their golf clubs and balls with them that they might play on the course at Molesey Hurst. When the six of them, who were in a landau, passed through Kensington, the Coldstreams, who were changing guard, observed their clubs, and gave them three cheers "in honour of a diversion peculiar to Scotland."
There might be a railway train in the pageant of London golf, one of the early trains with engines of the Stephensonian style. The period would be just after the accession of Queen Victoria, and there would be two gentlemen travelling together from London to Aldershot, one of them being Sir Hope Grant, a keen golfer, a member of the Royal and Ancient Club, who held a military appointment at Aldershot, while the other would be the Duke of Cambridge. It has been recorded that in matter of companionship this journey was a very dull affair, for Sir Hope Grant was moody, and failed to respond to the well-meant attempts of the Duke to open conversation. He seemed troubled. But suddenly after long silence he jumped up from his seat, rushed to the window of the compartment and opened it. At this stage the Duke of Cambridge felt that things could not be well with his companion, and jumping up after him, grabbed him by the tails of his coat. A moment later they both sat down, and looked at each other. "Well," said Sir Hope Grant, in the manner of a man recovering from a great surprise, "that is a thing that you seldom see near London; there were two men playing golf in a field out there."
And then in the pageant there would be represented the starting of golf at Wimbledon in 1865, with the Blackheath emissaries all on fire with the zeal of their enterprise. Wimbledon with its Royal Wimbledon and its London Scottish, its famous holes and its windmill, and all the rest of it, has played no small part in golfing history. At the beginning seven holes were made as they had them at Blackheath, and did you ever hear that at Wimbledon once there was a round that consisted of nineteen holes, the longest round in number of holes in the world? Tom Dunn, who was responsible for the extension of the course about 1870, told the story, and so far as I am aware he only told it in America. We may repeat it here in the words he used. The committee had asked him whether he thought they might make a full-sized course on their land, and, coming to the conclusion that they might, he was told to go on with the work, and eventually was satisfied that he had made a good job of it. The secretary of the period is said to have been somewhat imperfectly acquainted with the game in general just then, and went to Dunn with the inquiry as to how many holes they had on the old course at St. Andrews, and was told. "The secretary thought a moment," said Tom, "scratched his head and began to look wise. Then he approached very closely, and nodding his head for me to bend my ear, he whispered in a hoarse voice, 'Tom, let us have one more!' 'Oh, that is impossible,' I replied. 'It cannot be, for eighteen is the orthodox number.' 'I care not for that,' replied the secretary, who was accustomed to have his own way, 'we will have one more!' I was very young at the time and I would do anything rather than offend the gentleman, for he had much influence, and I wanted his goodwill; so I reluctantly submitted to the demand. The committee met the next day, and I was asked if I had succeeded in making an eighteen-holes course. I replied, with some hesitation, that I had made a nineteen-holes course, and explained why I had done so. Well, you never in your life saw a more excited lot of men. There was an uproar in a moment, and all made a dive for the poor secretary, who never heard the last of it."
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Within sight of Wimbledon now there is Coombe Hill, one of the best and most recent achievements in the new metropolitan golf. Here is a contrast indeed! One may sometimes wonder how those ill-tempered people who grumble that golfers in these days take their game, and all about it, too richly, and that fine club-houses do not make plus players—such complainers still being eager for all the most modern comforts themselves—would like to live their golfing lives for a season after the early Wimbledon manner in all its great simplicity. The first club-house those golfers ever had, if you would call it by the name, was the old iron "shooting house," and it measured only eight yards by six. It served the purposes of club-room, clothes-room and others. If its floor space was small, its roof was high, and the members' clothes were hung up on hooks, to the very top; and were lifted up to their proper places, and reached down again by a pole. Most of the numerous members had their private hooks, and a boy who worked the pole had a most marvellous memory for the garments and their proper owners, so that when a member, coming in suddenly, called for his jacket and his stockings, up went the pole, and down came the goods without a moment's delay, and all correct. This remarkable young person has his proper and highly-developed successor in Gibbon, the house-steward at the present Mid-Surrey club at Richmond, who, though he has nearly a thousand members to consider, knows so well the particularities and possessions of them all. Tom Dunn had his workshop in this iron shooting house, and here he kept a fair stock of clubs and balls, and did his own repairs. Presently some of the members suggested to him that it would be agreeable if he stored some eatables and drinkables in his shop for their sustenance and comfort, before and after rounds; and so he laid in a stock of wines and spirits, sandwiches and eggs, and so forth, which had of necessity to be laid out on his bench where there were varnish, shavings, sawdust and pitch as well. Behold here the early London golfer! It is an interesting historical fact, that when a few years after its establishment, and just before the Tom Dunn era, the club first thought of engaging a professional, the committee set it on record that "they took a very favourable view of young Tom Morris's application for the post."
The people who accuse the moderns of being over fond of prizes in competitions—and a nasty name they call them!—might be told the tale of the old golfing baronet of Wimbledon, now dead, who once won five shillings, being his half share of the third prize in the sweepstakes attached to the monthly medal competition there. It was the first prize that this keen but unfortunate golfer had ever won, and he begged the permission of the committee to be allowed to add more money for a richer keepsake. The consent of the authorities was graciously given, whereupon the prize-winner purchased for himself a golden-eagle writing stand for which he gave a hundred sovereigns, adding ninety-nine pounds fifteen shillings to the prize-money. Friends, not being golfers, who called upon him had the prize exhibited to them, and they said, "Goodness, what a fine player you must be!" He felt he was, and that the prize was worth the money.
When the 'nineties of the last century were reached golf began to spread in London, and such clubs as Northwood with its "Death or Glory" Hole, Tooting Bec, and Mid-Surrey laid the foundation for the great London golf that was soon to come. This Mid-Surrey club with its thousand members, its financial turnover of thirty thousand pounds a year, its hundred thousand rounds that are played on that excellent course in twelve months without its showing hardly the wear of a blade of grass, the twenty thousand lunches that are eaten by their members, the four thousand pounds that were spent in one year lately on the improvement of the course, is, I believe, the busiest golfing institution in the world. It is well said that there is nearly always a couple driving off from that first teeing ground near the rails in the Old Deer Park. And one might add that as a place where golf is played in a plain but excellent spirit, without any fancy trappings, the club here is one of the best organised and managed in the world, and is a vast credit to the secretary, Mr. J. H. Montgomerie, while the course, whose putting greens are a match for any in existence, is a fine testimonial to that prince of greenkeepers, Peter Lees, who was lately captured by the Americans for a great new course on Long Island. Lees has been a great influence in the development of modern golf in England, and I know that he will make a great difference to American courses. And there is champion J. H. Taylor as the club's professional. In a special way Mid-Surrey stands for London golf.
It has come to this, that we no longer fear to speak and write of the great excellence of the London golf courses. Sunningdale at the beginning of the present century opened up a new era not only in London golf but in golf in general—the period of the inland courses of a far higher class, better and more interesting in every respect than anything that had ever been dreamt of before. Sunningdale was followed by Huntercombe and Walton Heath, of which Sir George Riddell has assisted to make such a magnificent success. There have come after them Worplesdon, Burhill, Bramshot, Stoke Poges, Sandy Lodge, Coombe Hill, St. George's Hill, and many others all belonging to the same class. Many of us hold to the fancy that Sunningdale, the mother of the new sort of courses, is still the best and most charming of them all. She is the Berkshire jewel; magnificent. But comparisons are not easily made, for, most remarkably and happily, these new modern inland courses that are setting an example to the world and which the world is following wherever it can afford it, vary enormously in character, in appearance, in the precise sort of golf that they present and offer, whereas at the beginning of inland golf we had the fancy, and the fancy truly led to fact, that in the main all inland courses must be the same—plain, flat, one cross bunker here, another there, and then the green. Not only the architecture, but, far more than that in its beneficial effects, the greenkeeping has been improved, soils are understood, they are fortified and seeds are adapted to them, and results are achieved which not ten years ago would have been regarded as impossible. The result is that we have fairways and putting greens on some of our best inland courses near London which are rarely excelled at the seaside, although nothing can ever give to inland turf that firm springiness—a term slightly paradoxical but one easily appreciated—which is the characteristic of good seaside links. No longer is good inland golf to be despised. It has charms all its own, and it has the distinction that golf as we know it to-day would never have existed if it were not for the inland courses. There are fewer hedges on them now than once there were, and no more ditches than there should be.
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To a section of old conservatives it may seem a dreadful thing to say, but it is the truth that one of the reasons why we love our golf of London, praise it and rejoice in it, is because of its glorious trees. We know courses on the coast where there is never a tree or a bush to be seen, and never one to be avoided in the playing. The golfers who live and play and die in those parts know nothing of the splendour of trees and the leaves that come and go, and knowing nothing they will even sometimes wrongfully say that no golf course ever should have a tree about it. Golf is a game of Nature; allow it then all the best effects that Nature can supply. Permit it the trees that the townsmen otherwise so seldom see; cutting them down, hewing them away will not bring the ocean nearer nor liken the course more to seaside golf. Trees belong to the inland game as much as sandhills to the other, and when a question of removal arises, let constructors and committees reflect that a golfer can be made in a season and he perishes some time later, that a new hole can be made in a week and may be altered the week after, that some shots which are thought of might be hindered by the tree but that only one shot in a dozen is likely to be of the kind that is considered—and that the tree has taken ages to grow, and will live ages on, being more of eternity than many generations of golfers.