game between players who challenged each other to man-to-man contests (singles) or two-man battles (foursomes). In match play, you can take ten swings in a bunker or even pick up your ball and surrender; you lose only that one hole. Whoever wins the most holes wins the match.
‘Challenge matches are the life of golf,’ Andra Kirkaldy of St Andrews would write, looking back on the game as it was played in his youth. ‘Man against man, pocket against pocket, in deadly earnest is the thing.’
Stroke play might win you the honour of a club medal once or twice a year, but the rest of the calendar was for match play. That meant bets and more bets. Many wagers were for a few shillings, but there were plenty of five- and ten-pound matches. Some gentlemen thought nothing of playing for fifty pounds – more than enough to buy a fine pony like the one Sir John Low rode around the links, dismounting when it was his turn to hit. Fifty pounds was more than most men earned in a year. In Scotland in 1820 the average annual income was less than fifteen pounds, a sum Sir John might bet on one putt.
Some matches were for territorial pride as well as cash. In 1681 a pair of English noblemen told the Duke of York that golf began in England. Any Scot who claimed otherwise, they said, was a liar! The duke, a Scotsman who would be king of both countries, agreed to a challenge match to settle the matter. For his partner he chose John Patersone, a cobbler who was said to be the best golfer in Edinburgh. The shoemaker arrived with his clubs tucked under his arm, trembling to be in such exalted company. After the other men hit their tee shots, he steeled himself, swung from the heels and belted a drive that dropped their jaws. With Patersone leading the way, the Scots routed the English pair. The duke was so pleased he split his winnings with Patersone, who used the money to build a house on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a fine stone house with the old golf motto etched above the front door: Far and Sure.
By the 1800s, with seven golf societies scattered through Scotland and England, the game was respectable enough to seek royal patronage. In 1833, the officers of the upstart Perth Golfing Society irked golfers in Edinburgh and St Andrews by jumping the queue, securing the sponsorship of King William IV. The Perth club became Royal Perth, despite being only nine years old while Edinburgh’s Honourable Company was eighty-nine years old and the Society of St Andrews Golfers seventy-nine. Royal Perth! The sound of it soured all the claret in St Andrews. In 1834 a politically connected R&A member, Colonel John Murray Belshes, wrote to the king urging him to restore the old town’s prestige. When the monarch ignored his plea, Belshes reminded King William that among his many titles was one that warmed the hearts of St Andreans, for His Majesty was also the Duke of St Andrews. How fallible he would appear if he forgot the town that was part of his birthright!
With the speed of the latest laboratory fluid, electricity, the king gave his patronage to the Society of St Andrews Golfers, which got a new name, including two words to remind Royal Perth of its youth: the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews. Three summers later, King William sent the club ‘a Gold Medal, with Green Ribband … which His Majesty wishes should be challenged and played for annually’. The Royal & Ancient had taken a step towards its destiny as ruling body of a game that would be played not only on rough town greens but all over the world, and not only for crowns and shillings and the occasional fifty pounds, but for millions.
For the moment, though, golf still belonged to three or four hundred men in hunting jackets. Like the hunt, golf was a pursuit for prosperous fellows who wanted to stretch their muscles a bit before they fell into overstuffed chairs in chandeliered rooms to eat duck, pheasant, mutton and beef and drink claret and gin while they smoked and told stories. As some writers had already noted, the game was an abstract form of the primordial hunt: a pack of men journeys into perilous land, avoiding dangers, tracking first one target and then another, getting home safely by nightfall to gather by the fire.
Golf also shared something important with cockfighting and bare-knuckle boxing: it was easy to bet on. Every morning but Sunday the gentleman golfers of St Andrews would meet near the first teeing-ground to arrange their singles and foursomes matches, haggling over odds and strokes given. Starting in the hour before noon they slapped their first shots towards the railway station and marched after them, their caddies following a few respectful steps behind. The caddies were a threadbare lot, boys as young as seven jostling for work beside toothless men of eighty. They called the golfer ‘Mister’ unless he held a still-more-exalted title such as Captain or Major. The occasional golfer of high rank, like the sports-mad Earl of Eglinton, was called ‘M’lord’. Caddies were addressed by their first names, befitting their low rank. They were lucky to get a shilling per round, and lucky if their gentlemen didn’t smack them as well as the ball. A golfer who got bad advice from his caddie, or who detected laziness or cheek in him, was within his rights to backhand the caddie full in the face, or to take a club and whip him with it. Like the vast and growing empire some of them had served in India, Africa or the Holy Land, the men of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club held firm to the belief that they ruled by right with God’s approval. Never mind that revolt was in the air from teeming India to bloody Europe to distant America, or that the land these country gentlemen ruled was literally being turned upside-down, with farmland torn into quarries and mines as the Industrial Revolution gained steam by the hour. Scotland’s gentleman golfers could escape the cities’ sooty air, blast furnaces and hungry rabble by spending the day on the links. If the rest of the world was hurtling forward at breakneck speed, they told themselves, at least the old game was safe from revolution.
They were wrong.
Here is the Royal & Ancient golfer in 1830: dressed in a tan golfing frock, matching breeches, silk-lined waistcoat and red jacket, with a high collar and a black top hat, he crosses muddy North Street on his way to the links. His pink nose, with ruby veins hinting at rivers of claret and gin, wrinkles at the scent of piss and dung. The gutter steams with the emptyings of chanty-pots. Pigs snuffle weeds in the rutted, unpaved street. The golfer dodges horses pulling coaches, donkeys pulling carts, ducks, chickens. Now a cork comes flying through the air, just missing him. The cork, punctured with short nails to give it weight, lands with a plunk. He turns to see who hit it – a boy of eight or nine, trying to hide a cut-down golf club behind his back.
‘Sillybodkins,’ the golfer says. He smiles. He’d played that game himself on this very street, long ago.
Sillybodkins was the pretend golf of boys who cadged broken or discarded clubs and knocked corks up and down St Andrews’ streets, aiming for targets of opportunity: lampposts, doorways, sleeping dogs. Real golf balls were impossibly expensive, but claret and champagne corks were plentiful; a properly weighted cork might carry a hundred yards. It might go further than that if struck by nine-year-old Tom Morris, the sillybodkins king of North Street.
Tom Morris was born in 1821, the year a member of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club bought the town’s links. Ordinary men like John Morris, Tom’s father, were allowed on the course when the R&A men weren’t playing. John got in an occasional round with a second-hand ball, but he had little time for golf. He worked six days a week as a hand-loom weaver, doubling as a postman when the weaving trade went slack. He spent Sundays reading the Bible and shepherding his wife and seven children to morning and afternoon services at the town’s church.
Tom was the family’s second-youngest child. Born in a time when disease killed one in five children by the age of three, he had a life expectancy of forty-one. He ran the streets barefoot but didn’t go hungry. He got enough schooling to read, sign his name and do simple sums, but what he loved was golf and, to his everlasting delight, golf’s holy land was two clouts of a cork from North Street.
In its medieval heyday, St Andrews had been the centre of Scottish Catholicism. The legendary bones of St Andrew, housed in St Andrews Cathedral according to the old story, brought Catholic pilgrims from all over Europe. But after Scotland became a Protestant country in 1560, the town began a long decline. St Andrews’ population fell from a high of about 14,000 in the early 1500s to 2,854 in 1793. In Tom’s youth there were no
