the Edinburgh side, while St Andrews was the game’s cradle, and Robertson its saviour. With grit, clutch putting and a trick or two, Allan edged Dunn over twenty rounds while dozens of bettors, newspaper reporters and other spectators walked along with the players.
It was in this heady time that Tom won his first match against Allan. They played for a short-waisted red jacket offered as a prize by an R&A member. There were no spectators or reporters that day, but Tom felt like shouting when he sank the winning putt. Allan shrugged and said he hadn’t been trying because he didn’t like the jacket: ‘The wee coatie would fit Tom better,’ he said. But Tom knew something had changed that day. He had stepped up a rung.
Over the next year Allan began giving him a small share of his golf-ball sales and a growing share of the bets they won as foursomes partners. Before that, the boss had put up their portion of the stakes when he and Tom played a money match. Allan covered any losses and, fittingly, kept almost all of what they won. If Tom played well, the boss might give him ten percent; if not, a token penny told him what losers were worth. But now they were sharing risk and reward, with Allan haggling over odds and strokes at the first tee and Tom surprising rivals with his maturing game. And here was the answer to the question Tom had turned over in his head since he was fourteen: why had the great Robertson chosen Tom Morris as his apprentice? Because he had seen him swing. The game’s keenest eye had watched a boy knocking spoon shots down an open fairway, sometimes with a cracked feathery, sometimes with a cork. That eye had spotted Tom’s talent. Allan, who did nothing without a reason that served Allan, had needed a reliable foursomes partner. Now he had one.
Lying on his cot late at night, with the cold wind on his face, Tom may have wondered what God thought of all this. Here he was, still a journeyman, earning more money than his father ever had, most of it in wagers. Of course his luck could vanish in a breath – a broken leg, a plague of cholera, a new golfer who could beat him and Allan both. But for now he had every reason to be cautiously happy. If not yet prosperous, he was settled enough to think about settling down. If not fully respectable, he was close enough to smell the roast beef in Captain Broughton’s house.
Captain Broughton, one of the R&A’s leading players, lived in a columned mansion at 91 North Street. The beef in the captain’s kitchen was clean and bloody, not tinged with pepper, ginger and charcoal like the rank meat in alehouses and inns and Allan’s kitchen. Tom shut his eyes and breathed its scent into his nostrils. A working man like him could not set foot anywhere but in the kitchen of such a house, nor would he want to. In the hush of the parlour, with its grand piano, gold-framed mirror and leather-trimmed chairs around a table so perfectly polished that it shone like the mirror, he would have felt like a thief, a trespasser. It was better to stay in the kitchen, picking a scrap of fat off a platter of beef carried by Nancy Bayne, the maid.
Five years older than Tom, Nancy was one of four servants in the captain’s house. Along with another maid and a housekeeper who outranked the maids, she scrubbed, polished, dusted and cooked from six in the morning till after dark – all under the stern eye of the captain’s governess. Nancy was no beauty but rather a strong, sensible girl, a ‘pattern girl’ in the popular phrase. She knew her role in society’s pattern and played it with vigour and good humour. She already had a suitor, but when Tom Morris entered the picture the other fellow had no chance. Tom was a favourite of Captain Broughton. He caddied for the captain and sometimes partnered him in foursomes matches. Tom was Nancy’s favourite, too. He had a pleasing enough face, with neatly trimmed whiskers. His boots were almost new, and he took care to kick the dirt off them before he came into the captain’s kitchen. Tom had a jacket with no frays at the sleeve or elbow, and a pocket-watch with a silver chain. He had a kind eye and a bit of a spark to him, asking about Nancy’s day, offering a handshake when he took his leave. She was pleased to note that his hands were more callused than hers.
For Tom, even courtship was affected by golf. One day on the High Hole, he and Captain Broughton were playing a crown-and-shillings game – a crown on the match, a shilling per hole – when Tom found his ball buried in a bunker. He swung twice with no luck.
‘Pick it up,’ the captain said.
Tom said, ‘No, I might hole it.’
‘Ha! If you do, I’ll give you fifty pounds.’
‘Done.’
Tom’s biographer W.W. Tulloch told the story sixty years later. According to Tulloch, Tom ‘had another shot at it, eye on ball and perhaps on the fair Nancy. By some million-to-one chance the ball did actually go into the hole. “That will make a nice nest-egg for me to put in the bank,” said the young fellow.’ But the next day, when the captain brought the money, Tom surprised him by turning it down. There was no debt, he said – he had been joking.
Tom Morris married Nancy Bayne on 21 June 1844. The vows were read by the Reverend Principal Haldane of Holy Trinity church, who had christened baby Tom twenty-three years before. After the vows Captain Broughton, who had given the bride and groom a wedding gift of fifty pounds, led toasts to his favourite caddie and his former maid, who would do her scrubbing, dusting and cooking for Tom Morris from that day on.
Life was moving faster. In a year Nancy was pregnant, though no one in that time and place would use such an indelicate word. People said she was in ‘a family way’, or ‘no longer unwell’, meaning that her monthly flow of blood had ceased.
In the summer of 1846 Nancy reached the last stage of being no longer unwell – her confinement, when her husband was banished to a far room while women from both their families and then at last a midwife clustered around Nancy as she howled in her labour. Soon the midwife showed Tom the glad result: a healthy son. He and Nancy named the baby Thomas Morris Junior and called him Wee Tom.
If the child was meant to be a golfer, he was born at a good time. After Allan Robertson’s grand battle with Willie Dunn, other professionals began making their names in the game. Dunn and his brother Jamie were Musselburgh’s champions. Bob Andrew was Perth’s. Amateur competitions at the R&A and other clubs were still the main events on golf’s calendar, but people had now seen enough of the ‘cracks’, as crack-shot caddies were called, to know that amateur medalists were not in their league. Golf talk revolved around the cracks: who was the best of them? Could Dunn win a rematch against Robertson? Which town could field the best foursomes duo? By the middle of the century bettors from various clubs were risking weighty sums to find out. To their surprise, hundreds and even thousands of ordinary citizens were also excited about this new craze, the professional golf match. Soon a great foursomes match was arranged: a duel between the Dunns of Musselburgh and those two noted sticks from St Andrews, Allan Robertson and Tom Morris.
Sportsmen on both sides of the Forth pooled their cash. Each side came up with £200, which meant that the cracks would play for the staggering sum of £400. It wasn’t the players’ money; they would perform for the benefit of the bettors who put up the stakes. Still, news of the record-setting stakes catalyzed a reaction that fed on itself – more crucial than the prize money was its power to keep people talking about it, to keep the small but growing world of golf abuzz for weeks before the match. This was hype Victorian style. News may have travelled at a walking pace, in weekly newspapers and by word of mouth, but as the match approached it seemed half of Scotland knew about it. The players made bets of their own (they would get a piece of the £400 – ten percent was customary – if they won), and polished their clubs as the first day of play dawned clear and cool. The format was two out of three, with three matches of thirty-six holes each, to be played first at Musselburgh, then at St Andrews and finally on the supposedly neutral links at North Berwick, near Edinburgh. Everyone expected Allan Robertson and Willie Dunn to play stellar golf. Everyone knew that Jamie Dunn, Willie’s identical twin, was nearly his brother’s equal. The question mark was young Morris, who had never played in front of spectators and reporters.
Allan
