knew the course’s tricks would have an edge. The approach to the Alps Hole, for instance, called for a shot from a hollow called Purgatory. The shot had to clear towering dunes. Those dunes were so steep that caddies sometimes lost their footing and tumbled backwards on the way up. But clearing the dunes was not enough. A ball that summited the Alps could fall into a vast, deep, putting-green-sized bunker called Sahara. Only by clearing both the Alps and the Sahara Bunker could the golfer reach a green that sat in a grassy bowl, welcoming shots that were strong enough to find it. ‘The course went dodging in and out among lofty sand-hills,’ wrote the amateur champion and golf historian Horace Hutchison half a century later. ‘The holes were, for the most part, out of sight when one took the iron in hand for the approach, for they lay in deep dells among those sand-hills, and you lofted over the intervening mountain of sand, and there was all the fascinating excitement, as you climbed to the top of it, of seeing how near to the hole your ball may have happened to roll.’
With so little acreage to work with, Tom had no choice but to let holes crisscross. That was a minor defect at a time when a dozen rounds might complete a day’s play. Still, it could be unnerving to stroke a putt on the fifth green while someone’s second shot on the first hole zipped under your chin.
While working on the course Tom played it every day but the Sabbath. He was dead-set on knowing every inch, every shot his course could ruin or create. Often he played with his patron, Colonel Fairlie, who was as near to being Tom’s friend as a gentleman could be to a hireling. The gruff, clever Fairlie was forty-two, twelve years older than Tom, with a high forehead and a high, starched collar. Sporting a black, bristly moustache that curved down to meet his side-whiskers over a clean-shaven chin, he had the look of a sea-captain, scanning the horizon with squinted eyes, seeking his next challenge.
Colonel James Ogilvie Fairlie came by his title by serving the Queen as an officer of the Ayrshire Yeomanry Cavalry, a reserve unit that marched in formation on the village green on holidays, striking fear into any seals or hungry Irishmen intent on attacking the coast. But while he was no warrior the colonel was an accomplished sportsman, a cricketer who had played for the home side in Scotland – England matches and who now purchased racehorses as casually as Tom bought hiking boots. Fairlie had taken up golf late in life but had made the most of his frequent trips to St Andrews from his home near Prestwick. With Tom’s help he became one of the best of the R&A’s gentleman players. He had never taken to the cocksure Allan Robertson, preferring Tom’s calm competence, and after bringing Tom west he was determined to see him succeed. Fairlie and Tom would sit on the grass near the twelfth green, watching golfers finish their rounds while Fairlie smoked a cigar. Soon Tom had a new gift from his benefactor: a lifelong habit. ‘The colonel would often give me a cigar. Then one day, I well remember, he gave me a pipe,’ Tom recalled decades later, ‘and after that I was a smoker for life. I had never smoked at all when I was a boy, and I would not now advise boys to smoke, young boys at least. But if I did not smoke until I was well on in life, I think I have made up for it.’
Fairlie had a short, graceless swing, but he was strong enough to rise on his toes and hit the ball as far as Tom did. The two of them played crown-and-shilling matches, with the colonel getting strokes. Fairlie marched ahead with Tom following, carrying the clubs. After a morning round the colonel sometimes hurried to Prestwick’s railway station for a trip to Ayr or Glasgow, returning in time for another round before dark. As he liked to say, the world was running faster these days, running on steam.
The rails were changing everything from golf (a fellow could play at Prestwick and Musselburgh in the same day) to food (fresh beef from Aberdeen!) to time itself. Until the 1840s every town and village had kept its own time, but railway schedules required them to synchronize their clocks. By 1855 all of England, Scotland and Wales followed Greenwich Mean Time, or ‘railway time’, transmitted by telegraph in periodic updates from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Still there were some things the machine age could not change, like a nobleman’s power to stop a train with his bare hands. To Fairlie’s great amusement, his friend the Earl of Eglinton, who owned half the region, had the right to flag down any train that passed through his lands. The earl would walk out from Eglinton Castle to the railway, lift his hand and create an unscheduled stop on the Ayr-Glasgow line. He rode free of charge and named his destination by saying, ‘Stop here.’ Sometimes he hopped off within hailing distance of a Prestwick caddie or, better yet, his man Fairlie and the new greenkeeper.
Fairlie would wave and shout hello to the man he called ‘Lord E!’ Tom would turn and see a man in spotless white breeches and a cape, dark hair spilling to his shoulders. Archibald Montgomerie, thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, was western Scotland’s leading sportsman. His stable of racehorses featured Flying Dutchman, winner of the 1849 Derby at Epsom. Eglinton raced greyhounds and sponsored archery, curling and lawn-bowling clubs. Tall and almost pretty with his heroic hair parted in the middle, he could have played Sir Lancelot in a pageant – or tested the knight in a joust.
‘Hullo, Jof,’ said Eglinton, using J.O. Fairlie’s nickname, ‘And Tom Morris!’
‘M’lord,’ said Tom, doffing his cap.
The smiling earl was always full of questions about the course. How good would it be? When could they hold a first-rate event on it? Fairlie explained Tom’s latest plans to build a prodigious first hole, to trick the eye at the second, to move a green or two or three and possibly shoot several hundred sheep. Tom was happy to let Fairlie do the talking. He was not certain how to speak or even stand in the presence of this Eton-educated noble who lived in a castle. Would it be improper to turn his back on the earl? Should he keep his shadow off Eglinton’s boots? Fairlie wasn’t shy around Eglinton, thumping the earl’s noble shoulder and speaking of horses and hounds, club dues, prospective members – Mister this and Sir that – and the upcoming season. Eglinton nodded enthusiastically. ‘Jolly good! Well done, well done.’
Fairlie said Prestwick’s links would give the earl more honour than ‘the Mudbath of ’39’. Mention of the Mudbath made them both laugh. One day Fairlie told Tom the story:
In 1839 the world went mad for medieval nostalgia. There were pageants, parades and minstrel shows in every corner of the empire, but the Camelot craze found its greatest proponent in Eglinton Castle. There the earl, who could trace his lineage twenty-four generations back to the wellsprings of chivalry, decided to stage an event that would make history live again, and on 29 August 1839, nearly 5,000 spectators came from all over Scotland and England to witness the chivalric spectacle of the century. Thirteen armoured knights on armoured steeds paraded from the castle to a newly built arena to re-enact the jousts of old. One of the knights was Napoleon III, prince of France. Another was James Ogilvie Fairlie, bedecked in a suit of armour that had cost him £400. The parade of knights and their retinues stretched for half a mile. As it neared the arena, the skies opened. A downpour turned the castle grounds to fast-flowing mud. Spectators tumbled under skidding, kicking horses; squires ran for dear life; knights dropped their lances, tumbled into the mud and lay there like turtles, weighed down by their armour. The great medieval tournament was a debacle that cost Eglinton £40,000.
‘Forty thousand pounds!’ said Fairlie, waving his cigar. Such a fortune would pay Tom’s salary for a thousand years. At least Fairlie got some good out of it. He won the rescheduled joust as well as the favour of the tournament’s Queen of Beauty, who went on to become Mrs James Ogilvie Fairlie.
Tom, ever the agreeable partner, would nod and smile while the earl and colonel laughed. Then it was back to business. ‘Carry on, Tom,’ said Eglinton.
Tom Morris was born to carry on. Determined to spend the club’s money wisely, he would pioneer a handful of greenkeeping techniques, including several that were widely imitated and one that became universal.
Many of Prestwick’s bunkers had walls that were crumbling, falling inward. Tom could have shored them up with sod, but that would have been expensive. Railway ties, however, cost nothing.
