they did their opponents and spectators a favour by wearing different ties, Willie’s blue and Jamie’s grey. They went on to play identically well, out-driving the St Andrews duo, alternating shots with dead aim. To the cheers of their home-course supporters, the twins routed Allan and Tom. The day’s scheduled thirty-six holes ended after only twenty-four, the Dunns leading by thirteen holes with twelve to play. It was a bitter defeat for the St Andreans. Matters worsened a week later at St Andrews, where the ballyhooed showdown looked to be a mismatch. Allan kept missing putts – ‘funking’, it was called, meaning choking. Then, late in the day, the twins faltered. Tom led a rally over the last nine holes and he and Allan squeaked by with a victory on the Home Hole. Now the sides were dead even. Had the contest been scored by holes rather than courses, Tom and Allan would have been behind, needing a miracle on the last day. As it was, all they needed was one good afternoon.
On the morning of the final thirty-six holes, a special train carted crowds of so-called ‘golf-fanatics’ to the quirky little North Berwick links below Berwick Law, a dead volcano. At its foot, crowds gathered near the first teeing-ground at the edge of a red sandstone town that had never seen anything like this.
Rain fell in sheets that morning, sluicing into the weedy old quarry beside the first fairway. The torrent peaked just as dozens of Allan and Tom’s supporters were crossing the Forth on the Burntisland Ferry. By the time they reached the course they were clammy and miserable and outnumbered ten to one by the Dunns’ supporters. The rain moved offshore, leaving clean sky and a breeze that blew several spectators’ hats down the fairway. Allan and Tom had the honour, which meant that Allan did. Before teeing off he took a moment to look around at the huge, still-growing crowd around him, a throng that stretched along the fairway almost to the green. There were more than a thousand people watching. So many faces, all silent for one long moment before he sent the ball on its way.
Allan’s drive was straight, but short. Willie Dunn’s drive flew past it. Willie held his driver high at the end of his swing, waving it forward as if to chase the ball farther. The Dunns’ backers cheered and shook their fists. ‘I never saw a match where such vehement party spirit was displayed,’ Tom Peter wrote in his memoir, Reminiscences of Golf. ‘So great was the keenness and anxiety to see whose ball had the best lie, that no sooner were the shots played than off the whole crowd ran, helter-skelter.’
The Dunn twins’ power impressed Peter: ‘They went sweeping over hazards which the St Andrews men had to play short of.’ With twenty-six holes played and eight to go, the Dunns were four holes ahead. Gamblers in the crowd raised their hands and shouted offers: ‘Fifteen to one against Robertson and Morris.’ ‘Twenty to one!’
Allan had been useless all day, hitting crooked drives and funking putts. Tom Peter heard a catcall from the crowd: ‘That wee body in the red jacket canno’ play golf!’ That yell may have been the spur the proud Robertson needed. A minute later he sank his first putt of consequence in more than a week. He and Tom took that hole and the next one, too. They halved the one after that and won two of the following three in what one report would call ‘a most extraordinary run of surprises’. Suddenly the match was even with two holes to play. Two holes for £400. The Dunns wore identical frowns. The crowd pushed close enough to hear the whisk of Allan’s swing as he drove his and Tom’s ball into one of the worst spots in sight, a patch of shin-high grass 130 yards out. The ball hopped once and disappeared.
Tom slashed it out, but two shots later he and Allan lay four in a greenside bunker. The Dunns lay two only twenty yards away. But their ball had come to rest against a paving stone bordering a path near the green. ‘They wished the stone removed, and called for someone to go for a spade,’ Tom Peter recalled, ‘but Sir David Baird would not sanction its removal, because it was off the course and a fixture.’ The match referee was the same Baird who’d given Allan the eponymous club he was using. Musselburgh fanatics hissed at him, but the ruling was correct. The Dunns slapped at their ball three times before it popped loose, costing them their two-shot advantage and one more. Peter watched them unravel: ‘Both men had by this time lost all judgement and nerve, and played most recklessly.’ The most pivotal hole of the century’s first half went to Robertson and Morris, who took the final hole as well. Their backers were delirious, and £400 richer. Tom and Allan got a beggar’s cut of that, plus their end of several side bets, and for weeks after returning to St Andrews they enjoyed free meals and free pints. Tom was his hometown’s particular hero – hadn’t he downed the Dunns almost in spite of Allan? Following ‘the Famous Foursome’, Tom Morris’ health was toasted so often that it seemed he would surely live to be 100 years old.
Almost before the cheers died down, his luck went south. The coming months would test Tom’s courage and even his faith.
It began with a new ball. In the late 1840s, a few golfers in England began using balls made of rubber. The stuff was called ‘gutta percha’. Made from the sap of a Malaysian rubber tree, it was easy to mould into a ball and was more durable than leather and feathers. It was cheaper, too. A gutta-percha ball resisted rain better than a feathery, which tended to split at the seams in wet weather, and the ‘gutty’ cost less than half as much – a mere shilling versus half a crown for a feathery ball. When Gourlay, the Musselburgh feathery-maker, got his hands on one of the first gutties, he saw the future coming.
Allan Robertson was frantic. He had always said that nothing good ever came from the south. Now here came a threat to his livelihood in the form of a grey orb bouncing from England via Musselburgh to the St Andrews links his father and grandfather had stocked with featheries. Allan could not even bring himself to pronounce ‘gutta percha’. He called the new balls ‘the filth’. Playing with them was ‘no’ golf. He paid boys pennies to hunt down gutties and bring them to his house, where they watched Allan burn the balls in the kitchen fire. These public burnings filled the room with acrid blue-black smoke. Tom and Lang Willie, stuffing and sewing featheries in a fog that made their eyes itch, had to swear they would never play golf with the filth.
The Famous Foursome had lifted Tom’s standing with the gentleman golfers of the R&A, who now insisted on getting him as a caddie or partner. One morning Tom went out for a friendly match with a prominent club member, the preeningly handsome Mr John Campbell, a man another member described as ‘magnificent and pompous’. On the inward nine, Tom ran out of golf balls. Campbell gave him one of his own gutties to finish the round. Tom thought nothing of it; he couldn’t leave Mr Campbell out there alone. Over a hole or two he found the rubber ball nothing special – easier to putt than a feathery, since it was seamless and a little heavier, but shorter off the tee. They were nearing the Home Hole when Allan, playing the outward nine, came storming towards them, shouting. His own Tom, playing that filth! Despite his vow! Tom tried to defend himself, but Allan was beyond reason. As Tom would recall half a century later, ‘Allan in such a temper cried out to me never to show face again.’
Just like that. After more than ten years of working side by side, ten years and some 25,000 golf balls made of leather and feathers and sweat, Tom was fired. When he tried again to explain, Allan turned his back. But Tom also had his pride. He would not beg. He would take up the loom first. He would take his wife and child and leave his hometown before he begged.
Just like that a life changes forever. Heading home, Tom may have looked back towards the links, dark green in late-day sun, to see golfers gathered at the first teeing-ground. He did not want to leave home and surely did not relish the thought of giving his wife the news. He might believe, might know that God closes no door without opening another, but Nancy was prone to gloomy spells. She had fretted and wept over Wee Tom’s latest illness, though the doctor said it was nothing. How much would she fret over a jobless husband? Tom steeled himself as he kicked his boots clean at their door.
The child was sicker. The doctor called it baby fever, though Wee Tom was four years old, no baby. Four-year-olds were thought to be safe from the thousand things that pulled babies underground. But the boy wheezed and grew hotter. The doctor said they should
