A little while afterwards he went on a golfing holiday to the south coast, and playing one day at the course of the United Service Club at Alverstoke in Hampshire, he informed his hosts that he had brought with him a friend who was a very modest, quiet fellow and a steady golfer, who played a uniformly good but never a brilliant game. He prayed that he might be permitted to introduce him to the United Service Club as an honorary member, and accordingly, in the continuance of his little pleasantry, he presented him, in the way of an explanation of the “bogey man game,” to the late Captain Seely Vidal, R.E., who was honorary secretary of the club, and to Dr. Walter Reid, R.N.
“Capital!” they said; they would certainly have the bogey man as a golfer, and after working out a score for him for that course they went out to play with him.
“Stay!” said Captain Vidal at the moment of starting. “We must proceed in a proper service way. Every member of this club has a proper service rank. Our new invisible member, who never makes a mistake, surely ought to be a commanding officer. He must be a colonel.” And then saluting, he added, “Colonel Bogey! We are delighted to find you on the links, sir. I couldn’t well say see you.”
After that, wherever Dr. Browne went in the course of his golfing pilgrimages, he introduced “his friend” in the name of Colonel Bogey. Several bogey matches were played at the United Service Club, and they were reported in the papers, with some explanation of the new system. So the Coventry, Great Yarmouth, and United Service Clubs had all a hand in the establishment of the idea, and Dr. Browne, Major Charles Wellman, and Captain Seely Vidal were Bogey’s godfathers in his baptism. Is is quite likely that the golfers of Elie worked out a bogey of their own independently.
V
“Ever let the Fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home.”
So Keats did sing. And, alas! there are even strange golfers who are sighing always for newfanglements, feeling that the things they cannot or must not have, are much better than the things they are blessed with. Yet are the things that are in golf better than the things that might be if out-and-out Progressives had their way, and in this matter we shall sing a hymn of praise to the old school and its famous traditions, being something of a brake on these Progressives. Consider what were otherwise the possibilities of the game if it fell into the hands of innovators.
Lately a story was printed and spread all about, that in some secret fields a great champion was practising with a new ball of extraordinary manufacture, with which he was constantly getting at least fifty yards farther with his drive than he could with the ordinary rubber-cored affair, that is to say, he was regularly driving from 250 to 300 yards! Now, some of us have heard of that ball before, but shall believe in it only when we see it, and shall then cry aloud for its extinction, even if that dreaded Golf Union has to be established for the purpose, as probably it would need to be. But some people ask why it is wrong to sigh for more and more length in the drive; why should not our old men drive all the long holes in two, and our young men do them with a drive and a pitch, and play the short holes with their putters? They say there is enormous pleasure in length, and that the rubber-core has given increased enjoyment to scores of thousands of players. Which is true, the last. But the more length you get the less golf there is in your play. If length is all that is wanted, why not go shooting instead of golfing? You can shoot a bullet a whole mile, and are not bothered to trudge after it. Fatal points against the 300-yard ball are, that a large proportion of golfers would lose sight of it before it came to rest—and where would be their pleasure then?—and that it would upset the construction of all our courses, since all the bunkers would be in the wrong places, and the links would all be too short. More land and huge sums of money would be needed by every club. The clubs had one experience of this when the rubber-core came in; depend on it they will not have another. By all means improve our present sort of balls, which is what makers are doing, and incidentally they are making them go a little farther, which is excusable. But no more revolutions. As it happened, the story of the professional and the new ball was untrue.
The news of something that took place recently in golfing India came over the sea, and the committees and members of very small clubs were fired with a new idea. They are rather whimsical with their golf in our colonies and dependencies at times, and it has been said facetiously that the ships that come home from there ought to be put in quarantine near St. Andrews for a while, to make certain that there are none of these ideas on board. The Royal Bombay Club, thinking possibly that bunkers in the same places always are monotonous, and moreover that, being in the same place, they upset one’s calculations so much when the wind changes, went in, according to report, for movable bunkers! They made them from hurdles, and they could move them about the course according to the weather and the committee’s fancy.