Fifty Years of Golf

by Horace G. Hutchinson

Arnaud Massy.

But the result of these matches mattered little. What did matter was the admirable fun we had out of them, the going and coming, to and from Pau and Biarritz, the entertaining, the mutual compliments, the eating and drinking. All the amenities of the match were so pleasant; for, with the foursome for the cup, was played, at the same time, a team match, of sides representing the two places. Some humorous incidents nearly always occurred to make us all happy. After I married, my wife, walking in the gallery, would often hear delightful comments on my play and other qualities, and one or two of the most pleasant of these were culled in these Pau and Biarritz matches. On one occasion I had Roller, the old Surrey cricketer, as my partner. He was not playing with very great confidence, and my wife overheard one man in the gallery say to another: "Old Roller seems a bit nervous, doesn't he?" To which the other replied, "Well, you'd be nervous, too, if you were playing with Horace Hutchinson." "Why?" asked the first man, innocently. "Because he's got such a devil of a temper" was the reply. That is the sort of comment which it is most unfortunate that a wife should overhear.

A failing common in our family is that of going white-haired at a comparatively early age. I began to put on that "crown of a virtuous life" when I was no more than sixteen. Partly on that account I have usually had the credit of being some years older than I am, and the golfing reporter, with the usual unconscious humour of his kind, began to write of me as "the veteran" at the age of thirty-five. One of the most constant habitués of Biarritz was the fine old sportsman Mr. Corrance, in his day the best shot in Norfolk, and, besides, a fine fisherman, billiard player and expert at all sports and pastimes demanding quick harmony of hand and eye. In the course of one of these Pau and Biarritz matches, when I was playing for the seaside place and we were not going very strongly, Mr. Corrance found himself walking beside my wife. He knew her quite well, but for the moment had forgotten her name, and at once began to discuss with her the chances of the match. "The mistake is, you know," he said, "playing Horace Hutchinson. He was a good player once, a very good player; but he's too old now"—I think I was thirty-eight at the time—"they ought to have put in a young man."

One of the attractions of returning year by year to Biarritz was to note the constantly increasing skill and power of Massy. Just off the green at Biarritz the course was very loose and gritty. The accurate approach was most difficult to play. Massy, of his own genius, had developed the playing of the stroke very perfectly, and very curiously. He used to swing the mashie very far back, in proportion to the distance that the ball had to go, and to let it come back to the ball very slowly, with very loose wrist. It is a stroke quite of his own invention, so far as I know, and I never saw anyone else play it quite in the same way nor as accurately. And out of the ranks of the Biarritz caddies came other good and great players, such as Gassiat and that Daugé of whom Braid declares that he can drive a ball to carry as far as his (Braid's) ball will go with run and all. It seems a large order, but no doubt this Frenchman is a wonder.

On the way home from Biarritz we used sometimes to take a rest at other French golfing places, and most delightful was Dinard, where the course goes out beside a sparkling sea. It was good golf and beautiful. And on one occasion we took the Channel Islands on our way, and there my wife had yet another chance of hearing pleasant things said of me. Stuart Anderson was at Jersey. He was son of the English clergyman whom we have all known at North Berwick. A match was arranged—I think with some little money on it, though I had none—that I should play him thirty-six holes; and coming out in the train from St. Heliers to Gorey, where the links are, my wife heard some one say to another, discussing the match, "I hope Anderson beats that fellow Hutchinson; he swaggers so." However, on that occasion, I escaped the salutary chastisement. I played fairly steadily, and after a while Stuart Anderson broke up a little and let me win pretty easily. The course at Jersey is a worthy school for those great golfers, the Vardons, Ray and so on that it has sent out since; but at that time the one who gave most promise was Renouf. He was not more than a boy, but he was a demon putter.

I had for caddie at Jersey a very small and very stolid little boy. Most of the Jersey folk are bi-lingual, speaking English and French indifferently, but this little boy seemed to have no tongue at all; I could not get a word out of him. But towards the end of the round there is, or there was, a hole which was just to be reached by an extra long drive from the tee. I made a very fine drive to this green, and the ball, as we came up, proved to be stone dead, just six inches to the right of the hole. And then this astonishing little boy did open his mouth, and, still with the solemnity of a cod-fish on his face, ejaculated this comment on what was perhaps the very finest stroke I ever played in my life—"Too much to the roight!"

It was perfectly just criticism. The shot was "too much to the roight"—by six inches, at the end of a very long drive. Had it not been so, the ball would have been in the hole. I do not know to this day whether that little boy was a humourist of the very finest and dryest—really of the extra sec—quality, or whether he was just the very stupidest thing ever made in the Channel Islands.

From there we went to Guernsey, where the caddies were certainly anything but stupid. They were little girls, bare-legged and bare-headed, but wonderfully keen and wonderfully pious, for they would make the sign of the cross over the line of the opponent's putt to prevent the ball going into the hole. And really it is extraordinary how difficult it is to putt straight along a line that has been thus crossed. Guernsey has a course which is finer in some of its natural qualities than that of Jersey, yet it does not seem to have grown a single great golfer, whereas the Jersey soil seems to bring them up like weeds. It is rather curious. But the great days of the Jersey professors had not yet dawned. Harry Vardon was still working in a garden not far from the Gorey links, with dreams, perhaps, of future glory, but no present achievement. Massy was picking the ball up with his marvellous nicety from the loose rubble of the stuff just off the Biarritz greens, but had not yet gone in the train of Sir Everard Hambro, my own most kindly host at Biarritz, to North Berwick. The Scottish golfers had received the first shock to their national pride, in seeing the open championship of their own game won by an Englishman. It had not yet entered into their astonished heads that it was to be won by invaders from outside the British Islands.