The Happy Golfer Part 15

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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.a.l.l.s, 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 compet.i.tions--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 s.h.i.+llings, being his half share of the third prize in the sweepstakes attached to the monthly medal compet.i.tion 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 gra.s.s, 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 inst.i.tution 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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.sisted 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 cla.s.s. 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 Berks.h.i.+re 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.

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.

They may not always be conscious of the fact, but the people who live in towns and are cooped in them constantly, abiding in flats, working in gloomy chambers and travelling in underground railways, derive more than half their golfing enjoyment from the vision of Nature, less adorned than in the public parks, with which they become a.s.sociated in their golf--gra.s.s to tread upon, surrounding trees through which soft breezes croon, and timid clouds creeping slowly underneath the blue. There is nothing so good as the golf of the true seaside links; there could not be. In this, the real thing, we have land formations that are impossible on inland flatness; there are the wildness of dunes and bent that cannot be reproduced artificially away from the coast; we have the perfect turf that is ideal for the game and which has never yet been completely imitated away from sh.o.r.e, and above all, through the rich variety of situation and possibility, we have the course springing surprises on us all the time. This is golf in the highest, the stern, cold, enthralling game. London golf is a gentler thing, a little softer, but it has charms that are all its own, and they are the charms of green Nature and the delights of changing seasons. By the sea it is warm or it is cold, and there is little difference else from the beginning of the year to the end. But in London the golfer notices the seasons as he does nowhere else, and they are everything to him and his happiness. And the trees best tell him of the seasons, and it is then that he might exclaim, as Ruskin did, "What a great thought of G.o.d was that when He thought a tree!"

In this way the two most beautiful seasons of the year, spring and autumn, touching nearest the heart, creating inspirations and causing reflection, the germinal and the fall, are the most splendid times for golf in London, and at other inland places, and they are surely the best seasons of all for the enjoyment and happiness of the game. But particularly they are London's seasons. In the spring there is the time for preparation, when all golfers are keen in a new life. Then the leaves of the trees are opened, and are there prettier scenes on any course than on some of those near London then? There is hardly to be fancied a better day than could be had at St. George's Hill or on the New Zealand course at Byfleet when the golden gorse is in bloom and gives out its rich perfume, while the trees that line the fairway all about are full to life again. Think, when May is come, of the glory of Sudbrooke Park, Ca.s.siobury, of Sunningdale, even of Neasden, Northwood, and a hundred more. Then there comes the holiday time, and the seaside links, and the golf of London rests until the autumn, and then it is alive again; and let the faults of London golf be whatever they may, the players are few who are not happy to return to the old courses of home.

Be they ever so poor they are their very own.

This of all others is the most delightful golfing season. The white sun of summer has been toned to gold, and the air is sweet and cool; the turf is moist again. It is soothing; but there is a pathos in it all that the golfer, sensitive and sympathetic observer as he has become, must always feel. One may tramp a country lane and notice little, but the men of this game have been trained to notice. Here present is the season of the fall, the rest after achievement, when Nature closes in upon herself and lapses to her sleep. She has done her season's work, done it wisely, ever well. So the fires of heaven burn low again. Green of the world turns russet and bronze, with flashes of scarlet and gold.

A smell of earth that is moist with autumn dew rises in the morning air.

When the round begins the sun warmth is not enough to dry away the little globules of the dew, tears of the sobbing night, and the course has a glittering sheen upon it. From drooping branches of beeches and sycamores that half surround a putting green in a corner of the course, crackling leaves are falling and some must be moved before the intruding ball can be putted to its appointed place. As the little golfing company moves along to the adjoining tee more of these spent leaves come fluttering sadly down. But, a little sad as this may be, the golfer of the towns, with summer memories of mountains and hills and deep lanes still lingering in his mind, hearing the crooning of the summer seas and the lapping of waves near northern putting greens, has his consolations.

He is grateful for the coppery leaves and the early dew, though they may hinder play a trifle. They are as echoes from the north and east and west. We see no dew in Piccadilly, and there are no mountains in the Strand.

THE END