the members’ handicaps and refereed their disputes. He supervised the caddies and slipped the poorest ones a shilling when they went hungry. He set up a small shop where he made gutta-percha balls, cooking the rubber and moulding it into a ball while the rubber was still hot – a simpler task than stuffing featheries. He kept up his old habit of sleeping by a window and leaving it open several inches, even in winter, a habit that drove Nancy to take little Tommy to another bed near the fire.
He watched his family grow. Each birth was a terror to Nancy, borne down as she was by thoughts of fever and death. Her birth pains grew worse. She was sure she would die, but out came Elizabeth in 1852, as strong and healthy as Tommy. By the time Nancy entered her next confinement four years later, a numbing substance called chloroform had spared Queen Victoria the pain of her most recent labour. Yet many doctors were reluctant to tell women about the chloroform, country doctors most of all. Their reservations were religious, not medical. Had not the Lord cursed Eve, saying, ‘In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children’? Should medicine nullify Genesis? The doctors thought not, so women went on suffering the old way and most had a glad result, as Nancy did in 1856 with the birth of her fourth child and second surviving son, James Ogilvie Fairlie Morris, named after the colonel.
With three healthy children and a husband to fret about, Nancy was as content as she would ever be. She greeted neighbours, sang out in church. She smiled most of all on Tommy, her first answered prayer, a bold, happy boy who chased dogs and birds on the links and played soldier by parading behind the Ayrshire Yeomanry Cavalry. Townspeople noticed the Morrises’ eldest child. Tommy seemed to have some spark that was not like Tom or Nancy or some mix of the two of them but something of his own, some force that made the boy think he could outrun a greyhound or leap and pull a gull out of the sky.
Tommy was waist-high to his father when he took his first swings at Prestwick, whacking old gutties with a cut-down club. Tom taught the boy how to grip the club in the palms of his hands and pull it back, keeping his right elbow high, until the shaft was almost flat against the back of his neck – the old St Andrews swing. Tommy showed no great talent at first, but he had heart. Teeing up an old gutty on the beach, he would aim seaward, knock his ball into the surf, wait for it to wash back up and smack it again, trying to drive it across twenty miles of water to the Isle of Arran.
Tommy turned eight years old in the spring of 1859. Nancy often dressed him in a sailor’s togs and cap, the boys’ fashion of the time. That autumn he noticed that his mother moved more heavily as she dressed him. She was pregnant again, plump, flush and happy. But soon there was unsettling news from St Andrews.
‘Allan Robertson is dead,’ Tom said. ‘Dead of jaundice.’ Allan had been forty-four, only six years older than Tom.
Golfers mourned the great Robertson. He was remembered as ‘a giant, a titan … pleasant, fearless, just, gentle and invincible’. Tom could have disputed ‘invincible’ and Willie Park ‘fearless’. Both could have quibbled with ‘just’. But, of course, they held their tongues. Tom never uttered a word against the man who had hired and fired him, though he may have allowed himself a smile when one eulogist invoked Allan’s ‘great grit’ by telling how ‘the little giant would roll up his shirt-sleeves before playing an important drive’. Tom knew the shirt-sleeves tactic wasn’t grit. It was a trick. Before a crucial shot, Allan would pause and hand his jacket to his caddie. He would pace the teeing-ground, roll up his sleeves and spit in his hands – not to bolster himself but to unnerve his opponent, to slow the crucial moment, giving the other fellow time to lose his nerve.
Allan Robertson was buried in the cathedral cemetery at St Andrews, a hundred paces from Wee Tom’s grave, in the warm September of 1859. Three weeks later Nancy Morris gave birth to another son, John, in the cottage at Prestwick. They would call the baby Jack, and would soon find there was something wrong with his legs.
Tom began 1860 the way he began every day. On New Year’s Day he woke, pulled on his bathing longjohns and took a dip in the bone-chilling Firth of Clyde. Afterwards, shivering as he climbed the beach to the links and his cottage beyond, he felt strong, washed clean.
His wife hoped the new year would take them home to St Andrews. With Allan gone, the way was clear for Tom. Nancy and Tom both had family there. Family mattered most in troubled times. Nancy was worried about baby Jack, who grew but who did not kick or crawl. Tom, though, was in no hurry to flit back to Fife. He wanted no one saying he had rushed to fill Allan’s place. He said it was better to bide in Prestwick for now, and if baby Jack would not walk just yet, Tom was glad to carry him around the house.
Tom and Colonel Fairlie saw the new decade as a time for Prestwick to rise in the golf world. Fairlie and Lord Eglinton had already run a Grand National Interclub tournament for amateurs in 1857. Eglinton provided the trophy for that event, just as he had given a silver Eglinton Jug to Ayrshire’s curling champions, another jug to its lawn bowlers and a golden belt for Irvine’s archers to shoot for. Now he proposed to outdo himself with a Championship Belt for the world’s best professional golfer. Fairlie tried to persuade other clubs to share sponsorship duties and expenses, and got a collective yawn for his trouble, so now he and Eglinton agreed to go it alone. They reasoned that a tournament for the cracks could promote Prestwick as a golf hub and establish Tom Morris as the new King of Clubs. The earl would preside over the event, smiling and waving, weakening the knees of women of all classes, while Fairlie handled the details.
Fairlie and Lord Colville, another officer of the Prestwick Club, dashed off letters to eleven of the thirty-five golf clubs then in existence – those that were large and important enough to have likely contenders for a professional championship. Knowing that many of the cracks were uncouth, Prestwick’s officers took precautions. ‘I have just been talking to Lord Eglinton in regard to the entry of players,’ Fairlie noted, writing to club secretaries from Eglinton Castle, ‘and to avoid having any objectionable characters we think that the plan is to write to the secretaries of all golfing societies requesting them to name and send their two best professional players – depending on them for their characters.’ Having the clubs vouch for their entrants, he believed, would make the contest ‘quite safe’.
The Prestwick officers made up invitations, written in blue ink on pale blue paper, and posted them to St Andrews, Musselburgh, Perth, Aberdeen and six other Scottish towns, plus Blackheath in England. But not all the blue notes were well received. Didn’t Eglinton and Fairlie know what sort of crowd they were inviting? Prestwick’s own professional might be an upstanding fellow, but the common crack was, in Hutchison’s words, ‘a feckless, reckless creature … His sole loves are golf and whisky.’ These glorified caddies might embarrass everyone with their drinking and cursing. They might cheat. What right-minded gentleman would vouch for them?
In the end only eight professionals turned up for what would become the first Open Championship, the world’s oldest and greatest golf tournament. Even so the one-day event threatened to overshadow the autumn meeting of the Prestwick Club that followed a day later. One newspaper writer came up with a more dignified name for the cracks: they were ‘golfing celebrities’. Still they kept their hosts improvising to the last minute. During practice rounds in the days before the tournament the professionals offended club members and their wives with ragged dress and worse manners. One was said to have spent a night in the town’s drunk tank. Fairlie found a way to improve the players’ dress if not their morals: he gave each golfer a lumberman’s jacket to play in. The jackets were heavy black-and-green tartans, the kind worn by labourers on Eglinton’s estates. Seen from a distance, the players in their chequered jackets resembled a lost team of woodsmen, searching in vain for a tree to cut down.
The Championship Belt they would vie for was made by Edinburgh silversmiths James & Walter Marshall for the news-making sum of twenty-five pounds. Fashioned of Morocco leather festooned with silver plates showing golf scenes and the Burgh of Prestwick’s coat of arms, it featured a wide gleaming buckle, minutely filigreed, that showed a golfer teeing off. Bizarrely, the
